Hawksworx

Just in time for the 2008 NBA playoffs, and heavily influenced by Robbie Clutton’s marvelous UK football scores service, I have created NBA Results

This simple service monitors results published as RSS feeds from TotallyScores and then sends updates to twitter. By following NBA Results on Twitter, you can get alerts of all NBA match results. Only interested in updates for your team? That’s fine, you can choose instead to follow your team. There are currently accounts for:

twitter.com/celtics_results

twitter.com/cavs_results

twitter.com/hornets_results

twitter.com/jazz_results

twitter.com/lakers_results

twitter.com/magic_results

twitter.com/pistons_results

twitter.com/spurs_results

I’ll be adding more teams ready for next season, but if you want to make sure that you can get updates on Twitter of your team’s results, feel free to email me (phawksworth [at] gmail [dot] com) and push your team to the top of my todo list.

I’m also readying MLB Results to provide Major League Baseball results. MLB Results will be active very soon. As with the NBA teams, please poke me if you want to get updates for your team and I’ll be sure to create their account.

The code which drives this, is my first outing into the world of Python. You can find the code here. Feel free to take it and use it as you wish. I also welcome feedback and suggestions on the code, please be gentle though, as I said, this is my first time playing with Python.

Many thanks to the nice folks at Carsonified for permission to use their site’s background image on NBA Results. Thanks also to Balakov who published the image used for each NBA team twitter account icon under a Creative Commons license on flickr.

Over the last couple of days I have got to meet some members of the BT SDK team. I’m likely to be working quite closely with some of these guys over the coming months in my role at Osmosoft and so it was great to get to meet them and see how they work.

There is a great feeling of energy and enthusiasm in the team, which I found infectious. I personally am rather excited about getting the chance to play with some of the cool features of the BT SDK to build some funky web apps. As a newcomer to the telecoms sector, I find that the functionality being exposed through the SDK are inspiring me to build all kinds of gizmos, widgets, gadget, and do-hickies. I’ll be shouting about some of those here soon, no doubt.

..but I find myself wondering, what would you build?

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Last night the newly assembled Osmosoft crew attended WikiWednesday - a regular meeting of technologists and business folk who share an interest in matters of all things wiki. These monthly sessions are an opportunity for people to discuss the use of wikis and any issues that surround them, from techie issues to business cases and adoption patterns.

We were lucky enough to be given the opening slot to demonstrate our latest toy - an implementation of TiddlyWiki which leveraged BT’s SDK to initiate phone calls. UnaMesa’s Martin Budden and our own Paul Downey demonstrated what we dubbed ‘Speed Geeking’, a little mashup which interpreted a set of contact details gathered from the WikiWednesday attendees as hCards and then randomly paired up the contacts so that a phone call could be created between each pair. It isn’t typical to hear a speaker at such an event remind the audience to “please keep your phones turned on!”, but that was how this session began. It ended with a room full of people coupled via phone calls, waving at each other across the room as they identified which stranger they had been connected to. Ring-tone chaos!

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