night

Since the dawn of time, Oxford Geek Nights have used Amazon S3 for delivering its video files. Videos were tidied and encoded into MP4 files, then uploaded to AWS and made available to everyone. On one level this has worked just fine: the cost of S3 per gigabytes of storage and monthly bandwidth is pretty low, and using Amazon's resource delivery framework makes a lot of sense.

But the user experience has been pretty poor: problems with a friend's machine recently really highlighted this, when codecs first of all refused to install, then ruined audio synching in the browser. The workaround of always remembering to click and download is all very well, but not particularly convenient.

With that in mind Wes West, co-worker at Torchbox and performer of that microslot, recently took it upon himself to set up an Oxford Geek Nights channel on Vimeo. If serving files from S3 makes sense, serving video from Vimeo makes even more sense. Vimeo channels are neat and look great, and their servers can deliver video in HTML5 and at a pretty high quality (although embedding still seems to try to force Flash.) Although Vimeo is free for non-commercial use, we did end up getting a Pro account, given the length of keynoter videos, but it's probably worth it in the long run.

Wes has written a bit more about Vimeo and Oxford Geek Nights on the Torchbox blog, but if you're so inclined then you should probably just sit down and watch perhaps our best keynote so far, by Russell Davies, served up by Vimeo. Welcome to the Oxford Geek Night future, maybe.

Last night's Oxford Geek Night was completely mental. As I spent all yesterday going to London and back I'm still recovering from the organizing and the late night.

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.

Two or three days ago whenever anyone mentioned the 7th Oxford Geeks Night to me, I winced. By then it was less than two weeks from Wednesday June 25; we only had four microslots out of six; I’d just started filling in existing speakers on the drill; and I was looking at spending a weekend writing a talk on server-side on-the-fly web-to-document creation with OpenOffice.

Now, suddenly, it looks like being the best night so far in 2008. We’re starting with two great keynote speakers: Charlton Barreto of OASIS, W3C and Adobe, talking about the takehomes from Web 2.0; Tom Taylor of Headshift talking about the beauty of pointless mashups (such as his Twitter feeds @lowflyingrocks and @towerbridge).

There’s then a full roster of microslot talks covering a crazy range of technologies. My colleagues Matthew and Tom have answered two of the requests that the Oxford geek community themselves put out, and are doing talks on the new technologies of Comet and Google App Engine respectively; Andrew Godwin will be showing off his beautiful if computationally… trying… graphing code for Last.fm; Drew McLellan continues his simultaneous journeys through good web practice and late-70s/early-80s children’s TV shows; Simon Whitaker does some anyone-can-try-it hacking of the OSX address book; and Duncan Parkes discusses the mySociety application PlanningAlerts.

The evening will finish with a book raffle, courtesy of Friends of Ed. So if you stay for the full three hours then you’re in with a good chance of going home one book richer. Disclaimer: the venue seats 140 people and we won’t have a book for everyone.

If you’ve not stuck it in your diary yet then do so: Wednesday June 25; doors open 7.30, entrance free thanks to Torchbox and Google. I’ll be the one panicking, and hotswapping laptop monitor cables.

My rather cheesy write-up of OGN6 is now available on the Google Open Source blog. I’d like to say it was cut to ribbons and all the worst bits are editorial additions, but I think they put it up verbatim.

Cheers, all: see you at OGN7, June 25th.

The next OGN next Tuesday has developed broad themes without us really trying. Generally it’s best to have a mixture of talks, because of the eclectic mix of interests represented by our audience, but two clear topics have arisen, with some overlap in between.

Gobion Rowlands leads our e-learning procession, with a keynote on “turning hard data into fun.” Red Redemption, Gobion’s company, has recently won an award for its online Flash game about climate change. His keynote neatly segues into microslot (5-minute) talks on e-Learning and technology in archaeology.

Meanwhile, Charlton Barreto will be discussing in his keynote what we can learn from Web 2.0. Charlton has worked with OASIS, W3C and the IEEE on related topics. But his keynote sets the ground for talks about mashups, custom CRM systems, and a possible standard for portable social-network information.

And neatly bridging the two camps of educational outreach and web-2.0 hackery is the Oxford Barcamp microslot. And although I’ll be a bag of nerves on the day, I can’t wait.

In the wake of the most recent geek night, we’ve just added Upcoming entries for Oxford Geek Night #6 and Oxford Geek Night #7. Maybe when we reach some milestone like #10 we can think of better names for the events.

We should have something on the “official” website soon, although that currently takes a bit longer as it’s not exactly powered by a CMS. Unless you count vim as a CMS.

Now that the shine is off my memories of OGN5—not least by a leak of an upcoming post elsewhere on this blog owing to a keyfumble—I can nonetheless look back on a success. From the point of view of all the guests it was one sort of a success: the speakers were wonderfully engaging; contributions from our sponsors (especially Torchbox and Google) oiled the night’s machinery to the point where people barely felt it move under them; and even as I left some huddles of geeks were still chatting. I’d like to think they were still there the next morning, huddled round mugs of coffee and talking about some new usability study.

From my point of view it was a different sort of success: nothing went completely wrong. I managed to be nice to our resolutely amiable and upbeat keynoters, who delivered their respective talks with aplomb; we not only set up our own network but managed to fix both the pub’s wireless and upstairs electrics which were blown by a dodgy washing machine; the PA pumped out sound and people didn’t chat as much during the microslots anyway.

At the time I rated everything that happened in a negative sense—the absence of anything going wrong was the only measure I was happy with—which made it hard to appreciate that frequently I just had to let things become a little bit anarchic. Let’s be honest: nobody notices all but the worst of gaffes, and the sort of control that absolutely guarantees nothing will go wrong is generally tight enough to squeeze the fun out of an event at the same time as the risk.

If I could have the evening again I’d probably have given Daniel more attention in advance, so I’d have known what he’d prepared to discuss Barcamp Oxford. They’ve got some great stuff planned, and it’s a shame that a mismatch of expectations detracted from that. When I’m able to focus better I’ll post to the mailing list and get some stuff out there about Barcamp.

I’m completely exhausted, and have spent the whole day playing catchup as I worked. Nw I just want to sleep, possibly until OGN6. Wake me in the spring, chaps.

I don’t know how well this reflects on me.

As I was wondering idly when the delivery would arrive containing OGN5’s book lottery giveaways (thanks again, Friends of ED!) I started making a note of calendar dates for different bits of OGN organisation. I was working with Trac milestones at the time, so they were all in the format MM/DD/YY.

“Let’s see,” I thought, “today is 01/30/08; so the books should arrive hopefully on—let’s say—02/02/08. That means I’ve got the weekend plus a couple of days before OGN5, which is on….”

02/06/08. I stared at this date longer than I probably ought to, and noticed something about it. Can you spot what it might have been?

If so; if you’re like me and you read a date like “02/06/08″ and shortly afterwards think “2 plus 6 is 8″—just as an aid to memory, you understand; then you probably ought to join us at OGN5. We will understand.

The fifth Oxford Geek Night is shaping up to be a really great night. Following on from our keynote confirmations, we’ve now got a full house of microslotters.

Not only that, but we’ve also sorted our extra sponsorship. Joining the ever-indulgent, ever-understanding Torchbox are Google and Friends of ED. In return for sponsoring us, Google have asked us to contribute a post-OGN article for the Google Code Blog, a request which would have been churlish to refuse. Friends of ED will be providing us with another book raffle, which is basically meant to keep people hanging around till the bitter end in the hope of free stuff. We’re of course always open to new sponsorship opportunities, so feel free to get in touch (me, of all things, at jpstacey.info) if you’ve got any ideas.

If you’re interested in coming along, you can let us know on our Upcoming listing, as that lets us keep track of interest. Either way, tell your friends; blog about the geek nights; most importantly, come along!

The fifth Oxford Geek Night is on February 6, 2008. We’ve got sponsorship from Torchbox and Google—thanks for that, chaps—and two really interesting keynote speakers booked: Rufus Pollock and Denise Wilton.

• Rufus is an executive director of the Open Knowledge Foundation and economics research fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He’ll be talking about promoting the opening of knowledge silos and removing technical and legal restrictions to knowledge for all. He’ll be accompanied by his lovely assistant Nate Olson on vibes.
• Denise, on the other hand, is a design buff and creative director at Moo, co-designer of the Nathan Barley site, and partly responsible for anarchic online forum b3ta. She’ll tell us all how to design a web application with character!

But! we still need microslot talks. That’s where you come in. If you can spend around five minutes blathering about your ideas, work, experiences or opinions on the future of the web and how we’ll all be ruled by benevolent wifi routers by 2075… we want you. The atmosphere is friendly and unintimidating, so if you’ve got a thought and half a dozen pertinent slides then submit your microslot details.