Graceful Exits » discussion

Activism and alumnivism at the third Drupal for NGOs

jps — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 20:05:47 +0000

The considerably more hirsute than previously Rob Purdie put together yet another great Drupal for NGOs meet-up yesterday in London. Bryan and I hared over from Oxfordshire, getting there only fifteen minutes late, but people were still making their way through the beer and nibbles very thoughtfully provided by our hosts.

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.

Live blogging from Google Developer Day

jps — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 11:15:55 +0000

Currently live blogging from the Google Developer Day, London 2008. Fittingly the live blog is a Google Doc.

Like a moron, I left my mobile phone at home, and then ended up separated from everyone I know; so have a look at what I’m liveblogging and find me, if you care.

Edit 2008-09-18: notes now below.

The End

Lightning talks 16.25-17.35, SF2

Google App Engine
web conference - headconference.com
Old days;
An app would be built, load-tested get discovered, and die.
Now:
You test with ONE person, it gets discovered, and GREAT!

Construction phase
    More complex
    Tools more limited
      Both of these have their reasons

1,000 files
Django source > 1000
Solution: Guido van Rossum: http://icanhaz.com/zipimport ; rietveld on Google OS

1MB limit on ALL data structures
You will run up against this EVERYWHERE
Can’t combine files on server
Solution: Amazon S3 - infinitebits.info gives FTP access

No long–running processes
Solution: hack it with HTTP refresh!
Web-based cron! webbasedcron.com

Short-term quotas
    24-hour quota
    Uncatchable
    Bad advert!

Backup and restore
GAE Backup And Restore (uh-huh)
Open-sourcing it

Django
Google are not into developing application frameworks
So basically use Django, dudes.

http://opencountrycodes.appspot.com/
http://isvat.appspot.com/

Android work, Kevin O’ Sullivan, Sita

Airports still run on 60s technology!
Looking at mobile technologies
Predictive analytics from ACARS data - archived and ignored

Passenger mobility
Smartphones, context-awareness

Application
GPS
Mashup, overlay with airports

Click on airport and get Arr/Dep info, querying a backend system

RDF, Tom Morris
RDF as an open-knowledge enabler
URIs in the data
Links to other documents
URIs that define something e.g. wikipedia:Cities:London

Mashups
    PITA - be a developer
    Or have the data link itself together
      “Let’s all use the same names”

    dbpedia, bbc.co.uk/programmes
    libris.kb.se - Swedish Nat lib
      every book has a URI

SPARQL
A bit like SQL

sindice.com - search existing linked data (DERI - digital something research inst)

Libraries + making easier for JS/AJax devs

Green Maps

Green maps - Anna approached for Glasgow Green Map
    Open project for local community?
    … Get them to do the work
    Also existing reuse groups - the Electron Group

Put out leaflets everywhere around Glasgow
    “Enthusiastic developers!” “Enthusiastic designers!”
    … bugger all
    But presented at arts school and got lots of volunteers

Dear Green Place
website deargreenplace.org

Visualize your data: Google Visualization API, Nimrod Talmon, ->16.10, Atari

Types
Generic
Specific
“Hard”

Examples - iGoogle gadgets
Wrapped in Javascript, exposed to the iGoogle framework via an API

Problem:
    Potentially many data sources
    Potentially many visualization sinks
    Many APIs - hard to find “the right one”

Google Visualization
Seems to be a generalization of Google Charts

Google Finance - generic stock charts, embedded into GF

70 lines of JS code for a simple-ish 10-20 point graph with widgets

Why?
Google does the visualization, so fast & scalable
API built with devs in mind

Premise of visualizing
    Abstract a visualization
       Data
       Appearance
    Model objects from Google’s API
       google.visualization.TypeOfVisualization() … chart.draw()

(Nothing should ever make it easier to build pie charts. Especially three-dimensional pie charts, the anti-visualization for people who won’t get numbers anyway. Tufte FTW!)

(A bit hard work - data.setCell(x, y, ‘Label’) is a bit like . JSON methods?)

Q; data going to Google?
A: Javascript call to get API, but here generation is in client. Others in Flash wrapped in JS.

Q: other formats e.g. JPG?
A: ?

Events & actions
Own event model
Visualisations listening to events and communicating between each other via closures addListener(fred, ’select’, function() { barney.method(); })

Data views
    Dynamic re-slicing off the data you’re using for one vis, potentially for reuse in another
    Not a new data set - change the data, change the view
    Like SQL views

Q: aggregate functions?
A: wait 10 mins

Why develop for Google Visualization?
Reach - de facto standard
Viable business model? Panorama, Eureka

(Note to self: ESC :w does not work in a Google doc)

Extend API with new visualizations
Declare draw() method on prototype

… slightly dry but interesting demos… they shouldn’t have these things just after lunch….

SQL-like syntax querying Google Spreadsheets… Pretty cool, but count the number of browsers that will deal with this scalably: I make it two.
Ah, this might only be happening server-side. Phew. I wonder if I still have that Bobby Tables spreadsheet lying around anywhere.

Visualizations laid out on the webpage, about as well as MS Word does it in a document, only you can dive in and work out why everything keeps turning bold, dammit.

Q: Accessibility?
A: Don’t have generic solution for this - write your own vis and you can do it

(Don’t see how that’s possible, as the data will still be in .setCell() calls… how about microformats on a plain-HTML table, with the table appearing for accessibility-impaired? A method to convert HTML or JSON to a data source would be tidier anyway.)

Lunch

A deeper look at Google App Engine, Mano Marks

Overview of App Engine
Quick walkthrough
Best practices

Standard problems of setting up a webapp
Startup, scalability, upgrades, maintenance etc.

GAE easy to start, easy to scale
5M pageviews / month for typical app
    Payment for additional cap. BY END OF YEAR
Python only
    More languages soon
    Mano can’t tell us which, but he won’t tell us why he can’t tell us - we don’t need to know
Offline processing
    No cron, but… soon.

SLA
    None
    Cloudstatus, partner org, monitoring tool
Lock-in
    (You can’t download your code, so get svn warmed up)

cite: Hackathon slides and other useful info - http://code.google.com/p/google-app-engine-codelab/downloads/list

Tutorial
    app.yaml
    WSGI application
      methods as per HTTP verbs
    Models on top of BigTable
      schemaless - “what happens if you add a column to a table in a relational database? EVERY ROW in that table gets that new column”

Q: What about data security?
A: Google do not trawl through your data. It’s your data. We don’t touch it.
Q: There’s an SLA?

Q: Do we put ads on your applications?
A: No. Your visitors will never know this is a GAE app

Entities
    Most properties indexed and efficient to query (not including BLOBs and CLOBs/text)
    Keys - limitations (only one ID per entity, cannot change ID or key_name later) but Get() by Key is VERY fast
    No revision storage - you have to do this yourself

Transactions
    ACID
    No queries in transactions - Get() and Put()
    So assemble your data first with .gql() to inform your transaction, then perform

Counters
    BigTale doesn’t count by design. So must Model.count() scan every entity row
    class Counter(db.Model)
    Sharded counter - in an entity GROUP (see docs)
      Counters count a few entities on reads, and whenever necessary you could the counters

(I thought Mano was going to break into a rendition of “That’s Amore” to the camera just then. I think you had to be there.)

Cache reads and counters
memcached
cacheing for n seconds, where n is OK for your purposes.

Q: 1MB limit - can we gzip and reassemble?
A: We don’t give you access to files and Python - I think - needs that. But you have a 1MB cap on out-of-the door. And we don’t give you the underlying C libraries
Q: So C won’t be the next language on App Engine?
A: I didn’t say that (laughs)

Q: SLA…
A: UNOFFICIALLY, I’d like people to say “I want to spend this amount of money”. Currently you have a quota but it’s divided up so you don’t use it all up in one spike.

Q: URL fetch - buy more time? (limit 4s)
A: at this point no way round that. Can’t comment on future.

Q: Django 0.96 - 1.0 roadmap?
A: We haven’t released one. You can upload 1.0 yourself. But things like GeoJSON rely on C libraries, so there are issues there.
People are always going to ask “Are we going to support multiple versions?” (which wasn’t really the question - 0.96 was pre-release, 1.0 wasn’t. A good reason to just support one version, and that be 1.0. It’s not as though there’s an SLA in the way.)

Q: memcache - shouldn’t GAE handle that/
A: we don’t want to pre-empt the developer too much, taking control out of their hands. Maybe a 20% proj will handle that if it goes in as a feature request…!

State of AJAX, Dion Almaer

Dion runs Ajaxian

1. Desktop-y world
2. Cloud services
3. Browsers
4. libraries and frameworks
5. Gears and monkeys

Take a step back
What does AJAX mean now we’re where we are

Took a designer to see the potential
“The latency will get you, the web’s not good enough”
Needed proving through e.g. auto-suggest

Maps - eyecandy of draggable maps itself isn’t really AJAX
just different ways of thinking about the static HTML page

Car ads
Show the dashboard (UI)
Not the engine schematics, although they’re important to get right

Jared Leto as a UI overhaul
Vista as a UI and not much else

cite: Jef Raskin, The Humane Interface. I want Raskin’s head-mounted Borg interface.
“… if the interaction between one human and one system is not polite and friendly it will poison the user experience…”

Visual design and interaction design
Two separate worlds
But they’re both right

The whole web used to look like MySpace
Now, Apple Store - no Flash, but it zooms and swoops
Expectations change: Bridge On The River Kwai vs. Spiderman 3
Script.aculo.us, Dojo, jQuery follow expectations. You just have to use them nowadays or the absence is noticeable.

cite: Jakob Nielsen
1-second reaction time of your app is about the limit for keeping the user’s flow
0.1-1, people notice, but they don’t mind too much

The library dartboard!
Gradually collapsing down to jQ, Dojo, P+s.a.u, and… GWT

1. lightweight - Prototype
2. hate Javascript, love that hot lava Java? - GWT
3. functional, DOM-like - jQuery
4. rich soup-to-nuts - Dojo

I don’t like the sound of soup to nuts. I’ve been in that sort of restaurant.

P, jQ and Dojo all have thin core + plugin community + visual effect plugins, so “pick one”

Examples of other libraries
Mobile Me (SproutCore)
280 Slides (Objective-j)

Dojo realtime charting - GFX package, Dojo grid, Processing.js (Canvas)

The 0.1second limit
Event queue, browser, processing - browser’s switching system (JS? style?) a bottleneck
Firefox logo used for the browser, I see

    No such thing as threads in JS.
cite:Brendan Eich, “Threads suck.”
      In comes Google Gears, neeow
      WorkerPool process outside the browser

Jef Raskin again. “The typed ‘Y’ becomes a learned gesture” - warning dialogues just get clicked on, unheeded
So undo instead
But how do you do that on the web?

Form history
Slider bar changes between revisions - don’t ever actually have to give someone the undo

cite: Jonathan Schwartz. Every RIA has a RIBackend

Talking to desktop
Notification APIs

1. Fluid - Mac only, but integrates tightly using Greasemonkey-like scripts
2. Gears - more about giving the browser access to existing APIs
3. Mozilla Prism - cross-platform
4. Adobe AIR - using Flash / CSS skills to build desktop apps

Back to the dartboard…
Wii remote, directing a dart, in an Ajax application.
You’ve won a rubber bully!

Wii -> bluetooth -> WinXX -> wiiuse -> wiiusej -> Java plugin WiiTracker -> browser

Java PLUGINS?
    In Chrome,
      Works out of process (doesn’t kill browser, totally independent)
      Deployment with JNLP - download components only once
      Micro-kernel

Modern Web Development
cite: Alan Foreman, poisonedminds.com

Mozilla’s monkeys
Getting other languages into the browser with VMs

Plugins only get you so far
HTML5
Gears is trying to follow this (and presumably to some extent lead it)

70% of sites have a div called “footer” - so why not

Belated and potentially unreliable discussion of Google Chrome

jps — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 12:21:22 +0000

I’m typing this from Google Chrome. Since it was released almost two weeks ago I’ve wanted to blog about it, but have been mostly hampered by no easy access to Vista or XP. I’ve temporarily rediscovered my XP partition, though, and as mountains of Windows security updates download in the background I now feel frankly safer in Chrome than in IE7 (or the cranky old FF2.x I’m about to update while I’m here).

Why this might be a plug, although it probably isn’t

I’ve also been waiting to categorically declare a very minor conflict of interest, which I can now do: yesterday a lovely paper copy of the Google Chrome comic arrived in my letterbox. So if you think I’m blogging because of that, you can navigate elsewhere now.

Certainly a product’s incompatibility with X/Linux would normally make me avoid it, so perhaps I have being persuaded by the marketing. But a large part of Chrome is marketing, and what makes it most interesting is what it reveals about Google’s marketing internals and about whether or not they matter; but more about that later.

How Google Chrome feels and acts

The ever-lucid Jon Hicks has already posted some thoughts, so my delay in writing has saved me time on that score. I don’t have a great eye for design, but I feel like Chrome’s appearance is interesting if less revolutionary than the promotional material might suggest. Tabs sit in a blue surrounding background, making them look like a half-hearted IE7 reskin. Menus have, as in IE7, been relegated to two weird buttons on the right of the address bar. Full-screen mode is nice, though, as the tabs sit over the top window bar, combining Windows chrome and Chrome chrome—does that make sense?—to increase the window size.

Browsers are browsers and, as with word processors and spreadsheet software, they should really be free and open-source by now, leaving proper software companies with time to develop the next generation of applications. So in a sense most of what Google Chrome does, it does well: unobtrusively and unremarkably, and that’s how it should be; but quite hard to comment on. What’s most noticeable is the speed: it’s faster than any browser I’ve used on XP, ever. Opening new tabs and windows—although in Chrome there’s very little difference under the hood, as they’re all processes—is nippy, despite the extra overhead that Google have decided is essential to Chrome’s distributed stability. Pulling a tab out of one window; letting it drop as a new window, or dropping it into a different window; maximizing windows and general rendering of content: these are all sharp and impressive. But again, they shouldn’t be as obvious as they are, and it merely reflects on other browsers that Chrome feels so fast.

There’s a kind of Firebug-like inspector in Chrome, and it’s nice enough, although it ought to be extracted as a plugin before long, otherwise my guess is it will end up neglected. And popup blocking—represented in the promotional bumf as the window swallowing the popup, and you the user pulling it out in a reactive way—is just a case of a popup window appearing in the main tab so that only its bar is visible. There’s no obvious feeling of resistance as you pull the hidden window up to be visible. Maybe that’s the point, but after the reaction of tab dragging and dropping you feel like you’re moving popups around using an entirely different UI. Also, as I’ve just discovered, text search doesn’t look in form textareas, which makes proofreading your blogposts difficult.

Generally, though, Chrome has at least run rings around anything that Microsoft can produce in the browser market, and then Google managed to completely open-source the code which, like some old John McCain company, Microsoft can neither do nor understand why it should. It’s astonishing to see one huge company outmanoeuvre another like this, and suggests interesting times still ahead

What packaging Chrome has been wrapped in

As regards the marketing, Google has also managed to completely confound the other big player Microsoft is intent on gradually rebranding itself as something in between the silver-and-blueblack chunky mens’ toiletries packaging that make it acceptable to possess both moisturisers and Y chromosomes, and transparent, flashy interfaces of the sort that IE6 always fucks up and means web developers have to work around. Google, on the other hand, has essentially presented itself through Chrome as a kind of retro-yet-futuristic 1950s take on a science-fiction OSX, all meals-in-a-tablet and egg-shaped seats.

Much of this has been down to the artistic skills of Scott McCloud. I never know what to think about him. On the one hand he’s got this unique, flowing, clean style that’s something like a scrubbed Daniel Clowes; on the other, his drawings can sometimes feel washed out, pretentious and affected. On the one hand, he’s tried to revolutionize the way that people think about comics, often by exposing what good comics have been doing for years; on the other, very few people have got rich on the micropayment model he espouses, and if it isn’t working for musicians it’s unlikely to work for graphic novelists.

Where that backlash came from

By portraying itself as different from other industry behemoths—which, to be fair, it is in some ways—Google has left itself in a bind. It still has shareholders, and on one level legally has to conduct itself as a responsible company, however much it wants to be treated like, or possibly with, Ubuntu. Fronting what’s essentially a business exercise with a divisive figure like McCloud leaves you ripe to parody, and The Register has tried to step in with Google Chrome comic funnies. They fly in the face of the no-alteration Creative Commons licence that Google/McCloud released the work under, but that’s fine because the uniquely American concept of fair use lets them do that if it’s satire.

Except they don’t work as satire, because they’re not funny. And yet at the same time the font they’ve used makes it look eerily reminiscent of the shockingly explicit Jerk City, which hints at a far better way of parodying the style: the 4chan/yayhooray parodies are in a way more honest and hence funnier: probably because they’re more anarchic and less interested in squeezing out another humourless Googlebashing.

No product launch is smooth, and there’ve been bumps in the otherwise smooth journey that Chrome has made to mass testing (if not mass acceptance). The end-user licence turned out to contain mad MyPlace-like terms of use which was sort of an accident, although it’s drawn attention to the fact that they still exist in other Google products. Whoops. The original beta—or, given that everything from Google is a beta, maybe we should just call it an alpha and be done—was susceptible to Safari-like carpetbombing, and The Register criticized the rather flaky bugfix and its rollout procedure.

I love el Reg and its journalistic instincts. It’s more than happy to puncture someone’s silly bubble, and it displays a dogged tenacity in pursuing the “real” story: although they’re basically wrong about climate change, in the way that Private Eye turned out to be wrong about MMR; and their grammar and sub-editing is atrocious for an outlet that considers itself to be conducting serious journalism.

But I think they’re being unfair on Google: what other open-source product would launch to such scrutiny? What other product has had seamless security procedure baked into it from its alpha, and why should that matter? Google are big, but they can only cover so many bases: there’s so much infrastructure glossed over by McCloud’s comic, and maybe a FOSS-like boring list of features and a changeset would have led people to underestimate less the sheer amount of stress testing, and the sheer amount of work that can only now be stress-tested, now there’s a user base and the animosity of the press to contend with.

Google did after all still manage a big reveal—only two weeks before London’s own Google Developer Day—in their usual manner. But I do wonder about the timing. Was there a danger in letting crowds into Google UK while Chrome was still secret? Did someone want Chrome to be out—prematurely, if need be—for the coup of having people drool over it at a GDD? Was the news about to leak anyway, and did damage limitation dictate the software’s release? If that’s the case, though… does it matter? Google gets its theatre; the world gets an interesting FOSS project; early adopters get an unstable pre-release: everyone’s happy. Ish.

Which hand is on Google’s tiller

Pessimistic journalists—and in my honest-to-goodness opinion there’s no better sort—always point to Google’s lack of revenue from its non-core offerings and suggest that it’d be far better for Google to concentrate on the products that directly earn it money. But they forget that Google’s profitless products exist as a perpetual rebranding and repositioning of Google: indirectly, they maintain Google’s status as a company that other companies, developers and end users actively want to be associated with, and actively trust. While they’ll never entirely remove the patina and dust collecting on their “don’t be evil” statement, they can at least act like a company that trusts open source, and whom open-source communities trust in turn.

Google can keep on pushing things like Chrome out, and its launch cycle can be dictated by something other than the developers’ whims, because: its main rival has nothing like Chrome, or GMail, or Google Docs; and successful FOSS projects like Django or Ubuntu have hardly suffered from bleeding-edge alphas or crotchety betas, as long as community, or honesty, or image, has been there to prop them up.

Who the hell am I to be telling you this anyway

I quite like Chrome. But I completely accept that receiving personalized communication from the company taints my status as a reliable blogger. So don’t take my opinion on Chrome at face value.

I certainly won’t: I’m about to reboot into a proper operating system, and I’ll lose Chrome as I do so. It’s a nice addition to the existing ranks of browsers, but not that nice.

OpenTech 2008 this weekend

jps — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 11:02:40 +0000

I’m going to OpenTech 2008. If you haven’t already registered, you might just squeak in, but you’d better hurry: last thing I heard they were nearly 90% full. Give it a whirl, though.

Entrance is only a fiver and the schedule looks great. Like its predecessors (OT2005 and NotCon2004) OT2008 is “informal, low-cost”, but the slant is more towards using technology to promote and enable low-carbon and sustainable living.

I’ve also been roped into compèring one of the sessions. It’ll probably be one I know nothing about (just from looking at the running order), but the beauty about compèring as opposed to actually chairing is that you can be completely ignorant of the subject matter and nobody might ever realise. Should discussion begin to flag, I may do a little dance. That’ll be worth the entrance fee alone.

Oxford Geek Night #3

jps — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 09:24:04 +0000

Oxford Geek Nights #3 has been somewhat firmed up since I last posted. It’s in six days time (Wed 25) at the usual place, The Jericho Tavern.

Keynotes are confirmed—Andy Budd of Clearleft and Matt Biddulph of Dopplr—and we even have a (deep breaths) geek troubadour introducing the whole evening.

I’m getting more involved with the organising of it this time, having had a huddled conversation with Andy of Oxford PA Hire about how to set up the sound system a couple of days ago. It’s good fun, although I don’t have Natalie’s gift of always being able to smile at people. Too much of it makes my face ache.

Team Drupal FTW!

jps — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 11:39:54 +0000

Coming to the end of the Drupal project on which I’m currently working, I spotted someone else’s brand new site on drupal.org: TeamSugar.

The hallmark of a good frameworked site is that it’s not easy to guess which framework was used, and TeamSugar manages that admirably. While I can’t really comment on the design—I find most networking sites pretty busy, and this is no exception—it certainly feels like a lot of hard work is distancing the user experience from the limitations of the framework, and that’s admirable from a usability perspective. The fewer visitors jumping through hoops to indulge the whims of your CMS the better.

There are a couple of interesting observations in that thread, mostly because they’re guarded criticism coming from an otherwise happy user of the framework:

… We have four app servers now, I believe, and a dedicated database server. We have also extensively edited the code. The architecture of drupal, unfortunately, lends itself to doing things like issuing one query per module per node on a page. For our 8 content sites this isn’t too bad because they’re easily cached and don’t make use of many modules. For TeamSugar it’s much worse because each feature generally requires at least one module. We cache where we can and refactor code elsewhere…. [link to 1971521]

… When you’re creating web applications you’re typically going for one of three things: speed/scalability, flexibility, or maintainability. Drupal is high on flexibility, average on maintainability, and poor on speed, in my opinion. If your priority is maintainability then I’d go for one of the RAD environments like Rails or CakePHP. If speed is your priority then I’d write your own lightweight framework, or whatever, and do it yourself…. [link to 198497]

Geeknight #1: collect the whole series!

jps — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 19:40:55 +0000

Further to my earlier post, the first Oxford Geeknight was splendid. It all ran very smoothly, and though Simon Willison, Tom Dyson and I each had a small hand in setting up the tech, really all the praise has to rain down on the head of Natbat, who organised everything down to the minutest detail, but left us all with plenty of time to natter and mingle.

I’ve never known the first in (hopefully) a series of events go so well. Clearly from the reaction of the crowd this night fills a hole in the Oxford geek community’s calendar. I can’t comment on my own talk, of course, but there was some interesting stuff there: without doubt the two keynotes from Simon W (OpenID) and Olly Willans (Photoshop CS3), but also Tom’s peastat, James Wheare’s scraping of bus timetables LiveBus.org, and the Drupal and Mapnik introductions.

My talk went as well I could expect: I hope to put some slides and screenshots up here shortly. Unfortunately it touches on work that I’m trying to make live by the end of this week—the new version of my short story site—so I’m snowed under with that right now. Gosh, it’s all go, isn’t it?

(Note: I work with, for, by or under several people mentioned in this post. Take it as fawning sycophancy if you like.)

Oxford Geeknights

jps — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 17:34:52 +0000

No, not the knights who say “Gee!”

The fragrant Natbat, my co-worker and fellow cheese-eater, is organising an Oxford(-shire)-based geek evening:

Oxford GeekNights #1
Wednesday, February 7, 2007 @ 8.00pm
Jericho Tavern, Jericho, Oxford

Two or three 15-minute keynote talks, followed by some microslot talks on the night for any speakers from the floor with something to share. And for the Upcoming users among you, here is the event to watch.