First up will be Elliot Jay Stocks, designer and writer for .net. He’ll be taking a look at the state of typography on the web, exploring the issues surrounding font embedding, the arguments about progressive enhancement, and the problematic question of text replacement, and asking: far have we (or not) come in recent years and where on earth is web typography heading?

We also have Sylwia Presley of 1000heads discussing the notion of Twitter ethics: how individuals and organizations can and should appreciate the mores and morals of social media. She’ll be focussing on Twitter as one of the more popular social-media venues, but it will be interesting generally to see how outsiders can best chart and explore these online social landscapes.

Along with that, we’ve got a stack of great microslots on all manner of subjects, including a recognized British Standard for accessibility, scaling web applications, dynamic-demand power technologies, and website design which utilizes transparencies. And, of course, our usual sponsorship from Torchbox and Google make it a free event (along with the seemingly indestructible Moo cards).

Hope to see you all there: put Wednesday 21 January in your diaries!

On Wednesday 22 October, over a hundred geeks attended the ninth Oxford Geek Night, upstairs at the Jericho Tavern. After the musical theme of the previous OGN, this one had a distinct flavour of online publishing.

Jeremy Ruston of BT Osmosoft demonstrated TiddlyWiki (an open-source wiki application that works offline) and revealed its offshoot Project Cecily, a prototype ZUI (Zooming User Interface). Adrian Hon of Six to Start then explained the ideas and tech behind We Tell Stories, a complex Django-based site of interactive fiction, built for publishers Penguin UK.

Continuing the Django-ish theme, Rami Chowdhury discussed WSGI—the server/application web standard—in one of the more technical microslot talks (five minutes each, from local volunteers). In another, David Sheldon took us through the steps required to hack a CurrentCost electricity meter, to get at the regular XML packets it emits from a serial port.

In the microslot sessions we also covered moving your business mail to Google Mail, protection—or otherwise—against socially engineered virus vectors, and how to use an interlocking stack of Python, Ruby on Rails and Java to crawl the web for comparisons of mobile-phone tariffs. We also had a short talk from the Oxfordshire branch of the British Computing Society about their forthcoming IT-industry events.

As usual, the evening was rounded off by a book raffle, this time courtesy of Pearson Education. Many of the night’s talks—especially the keynotes and the microslot on antivirus protection—had generated heated debate among the geeks in the room, and this carried on for some time after proceedings had officially finished.

The Oxford Geek Nights are free events, thanks to Torchbox and the Google open-source team. But even the generosity of our sponsors couldn’t prevent the upstairs bar staff from tapping their watches, as we all headed downstairs into the main room of the pub to continue arguing.

As far as the keynotes are concerned, Jeremy Ruston of BT Osmosoft will be talking about the magic self-replicating offline/online publishing system TiddlyWiki, an open-source Javascript project. Adrian Hon of Six to Start will then be discussing Penguin’s recent online story/mashup experiment, We Tell Stories. Together they constitue a sort of online-publishing-themed OGN, but after the exhaustion that followed the musically themed OGN8 I’m not going to push it….

But, yeah, we’re a microslotter down. Interested in performing to your peers? Want to share ideas with an audience, but scared they might intimidate you? Well, the OGN crowd is as amiable as they get, with a cheery and (to some extent) indulgent atmosphere. Submit a proposal for a microslot talk and we’ll stick you on the bill!

Comic Relief’s offices weren’t quite what you’d expect—a smart floor in a posh block, right by a certain security service’s s3krit headquarters—but definitely very Comic Relief, as you can see from the distinctly nose-coloured cast in the photos of the event. Rob managed to keep breaking the ice all evening, with such ruses as encouraging a group photo of everyone with angry faces.

The two main talks were as informative as ever, although there was definitely a different feel to them. Whereas previous “big-hitter” NGO projects showed Drupal in an “enterprise” environment (make of the words in quotes what you will), the slightly more close-ended projects, presented by the majority of the development team involved in them, warmed the group as a whole up more: there was more discussion in the round and sharing of—or at least hinting at—solutions to common problems. Oliver MacColl, Brett and Ben Dodd presented the inmyname.com / White Band Action, and Francesco Moretto discussed the implementation of CiviCRM and Drupal that lay behind the recent online relaunch of UNIMI’s alumnus society, ALGIUSMI.

You can’t get the likes of Amnesty International or Greenpeace to talk at every meeting, so it was nice to see the event’s structure capable of embracing projects that were no less impressive by not having a big name behind them. It bodes well for the future, too, as smaller-scale Drupalers should feel emboldened to come forwards and share their experiences with everyone else.

If you weren’t there, there’s now an IRC channel devoted to the UK Drupal scene, where a fair few of the D4NGOs crowd hang out: do pop in and say hi.

The venue was also great—if a bit too big for getting from room to room in a hurry—and the security and catering staff were some of the nicest I’ve ever encountered. Apparently we weren’t allowed to mention the name of the enormous sports stadium west of London that we all attended, but if I say it rhymes with Bembley and looked like it still had the builders in and scaffolding up then you’ll know where we were.

As at any conference the talks were a mixed bag, although all the ones I went to were definitely worth listening to. Mano Marks covered developer optimizations for Google App Engine with aplomb and a cheeky grin; Dion Almaer provided what might have been a “will-this-do” overview of the “state of AJAX”, which actually became a more interesting discussion of the state of browsers in general, and how they might move towards full support of RIAs; Nimrod Talmon’s discussion of Google Visualization, on the other hand, suffered from being immediately after lunch. I could’ve managed that level of tech details after a nap to sleep off my sugar slump, but I think he should really have been in the pre-lunch slot. We were all jamming on simple carbohydrates anyway, so it’s not as though we would have been itching for butties. The content of his talk was still intriguing, though, and it’s good to know you can at least consider handing this sort of thing over to a third-party engine if the client wants it but the poor webserver doesn’t.

The lightning talks at the end of the day were as shambolic as these things tend to be. Liz said that a lot of people had expressed an interest before the event, but if that was the case then they were all being very optimistic about what they’d actually be able to accomplish before the day, as we only had maybe half a dozen in what sounded from Nick like the most popular slot of the day. Anyway, it was fun to break out a bit, but my laptop wouldn’t detect the projector, and then the gist—the actual, pivotal slide—was lost in conversion to whatever it was it was converted to on a Mac. I may do it at a later Geek Night, if I can stomach abusing my position as organiser.

Google very much held off on any go-team antics, hoping that their products would speak for themselves. That was slightly marred by them making it quite clear to everyone, that they did indeed hope that their products would speak for themselves, but at least there were no overt recruitment drives, and rubbishing of the competition was limited to the pretty much warranted chastisement of over-prompting your user and making them numb to modal dialogues, behaviour of which XP is particularly guilty.

Within the reasonably frank and open exploration of their services, however, were occasional notes of discord. Whenever any kind of business case was mentioned things would go quiet, and quite clearly those things weren’t up for discussion, which I think is a shame. Google doesn’t need to pretend that it’s everyone’s best friend to have our respect: it’s public knowledge that it has shareholders, and I think developers the world over can admire it in that context if we know where we are with it.

Transparency engenders trust, and I’d take comfort from someone replying to a query about the bottom line by saying “well, I asked my boss, and he said that we give this stuff for free because it positions us as an influential brand when it comes to advertising revenue, trusted partnerships, GSAs, Google Minis….” Hell, if I’d been fed on those ciabatta rolls and caramel shortbread slices beforehand then I’d probably be asleep by that point, so it wouldn’t matter what they admitted after the fold.

Those occasional moments aside I had a grand day out. I’m itching to start working on App Engine now, and putting into place some of the weirder code patterns Mano mentioned. I’ve also already had a play with Gears following Dion’s talk, and it seems to turn Google Docs into something close to OpenOffice. But before any serious coding, I have to wait for the blood blister on my finger to go downfirst, which came from playing Guitar Hero at the end of the evening. How rock and roll, eh? The young Googler I played against trounced, me: as you’d expect: deep down I think Google’s just as cool as it wants to appear to be on the surface.

The musical keynotes and Q&A with Rhodri and Ian went down really well: Rhodri’s laconic discussion of a musician’s experience of the new web complemented Ian’s more in-depth discussion of the way tech might solve the industry’s worsening financial problems—even if by the end of the session we still couldn’t decide whether or not they were going to solve the very difficulties experienced by musicians like Rhodri.

Having Ben lead them in with the genius of his twelve-second song about 12seconds.tv and of course You’re No-one if You’re Not on Twitter was also great to watch. Last time Ben played an OGN it was to the few appreciative people at the front who could hear him (such are the vagaries of PA): I think pretty much everyone listened in last night.

All the microslots were brilliant too, of course, but I’m going to quietly elide them right now in favour of getting an early night. We’ll be putting videos and slides up soon, and I’ll probably point at them then as there are one or two things that really resonated.

In the same way that Ben was surprised by the sudden interest in his Twitter song, we’ve had a brief mention on Metafilter and a heads-up from Tom on the Yahoo! developer blog. I hope to get writeups together for the Google OS Code Blog and the Torchbox blog after a weekend of barbecues and sleep.

An Oxford Django sprint had been mooted for this weekend. I didn’t hear much more about it, but to be honest I had the great opportunity to actually have my own sprint—against 1.0b1—in work this week, working on a fast-turnaround project. I definitely felt performance improvements, especially when running unit tests. It was also lovely to work on my first internationalized/localized site and to find that it was just a question of dropping in certain bits of middleware to make it work across six languages. We didn’t have any translations in place, but I clicked on “Polszczyzna” expecting bugger-all to happen and then suddenly realised that the English-language link read “Anglieski.” It’s characteristic of Python’s (and Django’s) refreshingly plastic and just-works behaviour. Magic.

We did encounter one bug, involving model inheritance. I struggled for a while with registering with the project trac to report it. It’s my first mediocre experience with Django: I waited a day or so for the arrival of an account-confirmation email, but eventually gave up without adding what would have admittedly been a me-too to an existing bug report. But then, email finally in my inbox, I chased it up just now, to find that it’s been fixed. Today.

Probably much like Django itself, the project’s interface with the user/consumer requires some past experience with its foibles, but the actual endeavour itself is fast, well-factored and puts most closed-source equivalents to shame.

Rhodri Marsden, who will cringe when I call him a guru, writes the Cyberclinic for the Independent, plays keyboards in Scritti Politti, and has long and varied experience with the music industry: he’ll be discussing how recorded media alone will no longer support an up-and-coming band. And Ian Hogarth, who is CEO and co-founder of Songkick, will explain how recordings can channel users into , where arguably the real money is these days.

If you want to be successful in the modern music industry, and you’ve read Steve Albini’s essay on the subject, then you could do worse than sticking round for the post-keynote questions and answers slot, where we’ll invite these gurus—sorry again, Rhodri—to take questions from the floor. No asking either of them to buy your album, though.

After the Q&A session, we’ll move into more traditional OGN variety fare, with talks about online payment, the open web, cloud computing and the long-awaited release of Django 1.0. If I can get it together, we should also have a book raffle. And thanks to Torchbox and Google for their sponsorship, entrance is still FREE. How can you bear to stay at home?

The session I compèred went reasonably well: I can’t say my elegant prose exactly sparkled, and I occasionally found myself getting into the subjects being discussed so much that I forgot to flash the “X minutes left” warning signs. With that in mind, thanks are due to speakers Ben, Steven, Roo and Nick for both their talks and their patience. Hopefully there’ll be some area for speakers to upload their slides etc. soon, so I can link their names through to it when that happens.