Hackday: not even God could kill it

Wet hackers! Photograph: Chrys on Flickr

This past weekend a couple of great events took place in London that I managed to drag myself along too. The first was Interesting 2007, a smorgasbord of ideas that I've written about on my own blog because it's not really techy. The other was Hackday, sponsored by Yahoo! and the BBC and held at Alexandra Palace. That certainly was (techy, I mean).

On Saturday the palace was struck by lightning - twice, so I hear - and the roof suddenly opened, which left the poor hackers caught in a downpour (Simon Willison thought it was a result of new product "Google Smite").

But the concept was simple: get a bunch of geeks in a room, give them goodies and assistance from some of the people behind the Yahoo Developer Network and BBC Backstage, and let them build what they like.

By the time I arrived on Sunday, there were many tired bodies around - but lots of hacking had taken place. A real mixed bag of fun, usefulness and silly ideas (remote control blimps, USB missile launchers and virtual submarines all made a showing) with the eventual winner turning out to be a phone-web synchronisation system.

I'll try and put my thoughts together in a more cogent way shortly.