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Thursday, March 29, 2007
Brighton Bloggers
I've just posted a request for comments over at Brighton Bloggers - a site I've been looking after for the past 4 or so years, and which is mainly hand coded HTML without an admin site (which when there are now 268 blogs makes it pretty time intensive). Feel free to add your feedback and comments on how I should improve the site - especially with regards to categorisation etc when I embark on writing an admin site.
Thanks!
Thanks!
Labels: Brighton Bloggers, rfc, sussexdigital
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
£5 App Evening
Last night we went to the first £5 App evening. Held at the Regency Town House, this was an evening of 2 presentations describing "£5 Apps". In this context, a £5 App is an idea which may or may not work, but which costs little financially to try, the main investment being time. John and Ian, our organisers, had thoughtfully provided beers and soft drinks which obviously helped proceedings, and Shardcore had brought along some geek artwork which was on display.
John kicked off proceedings with his presentation about chrss - a correspondence chess service where the moves are delivered by an rss feed - and on what makes a £5 App (simple, quick to get a core running, cheap to run). This was a good talk, giving me information on what chrss is, as well as why John wanted to do it, and where he wants to take it.
After a beer break, Ian then talked both about ShowMeDo and about the lessons that he and Kyran have learnt from 15 months of running a £5 App. He also gave a good introduction to ShowMeDo, and marketed it as a service very well.
Lots of discussion was generated, and both speakers had plenty of questions to answer - they both did well and neither seemed particularly stumped by any of them.
The next £5 App is scheduled to have 2 speakers discussing social networking applications, so again that should be an interesting evening.
John kicked off proceedings with his presentation about chrss - a correspondence chess service where the moves are delivered by an rss feed - and on what makes a £5 App (simple, quick to get a core running, cheap to run). This was a good talk, giving me information on what chrss is, as well as why John wanted to do it, and where he wants to take it.
After a beer break, Ian then talked both about ShowMeDo and about the lessons that he and Kyran have learnt from 15 months of running a £5 App. He also gave a good introduction to ShowMeDo, and marketed it as a service very well.
Lots of discussion was generated, and both speakers had plenty of questions to answer - they both did well and neither seemed particularly stumped by any of them.
The next £5 App is scheduled to have 2 speakers discussing social networking applications, so again that should be an interesting evening.
Labels: Brighton, event, sussexdigital, £5 app
// posted by Jane @ 9:06 PM 
Comments:
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
2nd Brighton Girl Geek Dinner
I had another excellent evening last night at the Brighton Girl Geek Dinner. This time, Niqui Merret spoke about usability and accessibility with Flash. I know very little about flash, and so found this a really interesting insight into ways that flash can be used for accessibility, a topic Niqui obviously is very knowledgable about. She had a set of example sites that illustrated various points, and I also had my first ever experience of a screen reader.
The food was excellent again, the Eagle certainly know how to put on a buffet. It is a great venue, and the atmosphere of this geek dinner was relaxed and friendly. As usual there were lots of interesting people to chat to, from all sorts of backgrounds .
The Girl Geek Dinners are excellent, and I hope that Rosie, Devi, Joh and Ribot (in no particular order) managed to enjoy the evening in between their excellent organisation.
The food was excellent again, the Eagle certainly know how to put on a buffet. It is a great venue, and the atmosphere of this geek dinner was relaxed and friendly. As usual there were lots of interesting people to chat to, from all sorts of backgrounds .
The Girl Geek Dinners are excellent, and I hope that Rosie, Devi, Joh and Ribot (in no particular order) managed to enjoy the evening in between their excellent organisation.
Labels: Brighton, Geek Dinner, sussexdigital
Sunday, March 04, 2007
Life stream
After reading Jeremy's blog post on life streaming in November I've been thinking of doing a similar thing. I experimented using SuprGlu but found the results slow and unreliable - it seems to take quite a while for various posts to get added to the history. So now, with the help of Jeremy's more recent post, and Grant's post I've managed to aggregate my Jane's technical stuff posts, my Jane's photographic stuff posts, my posts to Jane and Richard's yak and natter, Brighton Bloggers posts, Twitter, del.icio.us and flickr. Initially I had a few problems with getting the Twitter feed to work, until I remembered that I'd restricted updates. Once I'd removed that restriction, it all fed together nicely and I have a nice RSS feed of my posts across the various mediums.
Labels: Aggregation, RSS
Friday, March 02, 2007
SSIS Exception : Interface not registered (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80040155)
I've got some handover documents to write, and as I'm working from home on Monday I thought I'd set the laptop up to enable me to do this. One of the things I need to document is the SSIS export I wrote last year. I started up the laptop, and tried to open up the project and got a "Interface not registered (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80040155)" message. Not helpful. A quick search on google pointed me at a seemingly unrelated post on a TechNet forum, but at the very bottom is the solution from James McAuliffe. The solution, for me, was:
Navigate to the following folders:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VSA\8.0\common\
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VSA\8.0\vsa
In each of those folders run this command to re-register everything in there.:
for %i in (*.dll) do RegSvr32 -s %i
The project opens now, but leaves me with a "Creating an instance of the COM component with CLSID {E80FE1DB-D1AA-4D6B-BA7E-040D424A925C} from the IClassFactory failed due to the following error: c001f011." Bah!
Navigate to the following folders:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VSA\8.0\common\
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\VSA\8.0\vsa
In each of those folders run this command to re-register everything in there.:
for %i in (*.dll) do RegSvr32 -s %i
The project opens now, but leaves me with a "Creating an instance of the COM component with CLSID {E80FE1DB-D1AA-4D6B-BA7E-040D424A925C} from the IClassFactory failed due to the following error: c001f011." Bah!
Labels: SSIS
Thursday, March 01, 2007
Sussex Geek Dinner
Last night was another Sussex Geek Dinner. Again held at the Black Horse, this evening featured a presentation by Geoff Adams on Expression Engine, a CMS that I'd never heard of before. The talk took the format of a tutorial (presented on a flip chart as the Black Horse isn't the most technically equipped pub in the world), and certainly gave an indication of how flexible and powerful Expression Engine is. Jez has also used this CMS and so had some additional comments to make during question time. John and Ian stood up and talked about their $5 app idea, and Danny mentioned the Think what you would do if only you had the money then figure out how you can do it anyway meeting today. Shortly before the end of the main talk, I heard someone say "Christmas Trees" in an incredibly loud voice, I did think I was going mad, but Joh heard it too.
My conversations of the evening ranged from photography with Ribot and Danny, Hong Kong Phooey and Doctor Who with Ian, childrens tv and rock climbing with Steve, podcasts and screencasts about other podcasts and screencasts with Andy, wine and geeks with Danny and Richard, Kendal mint cake with Steve, Ribot and Dom and the Brighton Girl Geek Dinners with Joh and Jen.
Another great evening, and I'm looking forward to the next one as I couldn't get into Glenn Jones's session about Microformats at WebDD recently and so am really glad to get another opportunity.
My conversations of the evening ranged from photography with Ribot and Danny, Hong Kong Phooey and Doctor Who with Ian, childrens tv and rock climbing with Steve, podcasts and screencasts about other podcasts and screencasts with Andy, wine and geeks with Danny and Richard, Kendal mint cake with Steve, Ribot and Dom and the Brighton Girl Geek Dinners with Joh and Jen.
Another great evening, and I'm looking forward to the next one as I couldn't get into Glenn Jones's session about Microformats at WebDD recently and so am really glad to get another opportunity.
Labels: Brighton, Geek Dinner, sussexdigital
