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Saturday, December 01, 2007
Silverlight
On Monday evening I headed down to the Eagle to attend Josh's Silverlight Night. It wasn't really a presentation so much as a set of demos, around which a lot of questions and answers went on - especially from the Flash Brighton crowd. This was the first time I'd really spent any time learning about Silverlight, and I found the session really informative. I appreciate it isn't as mature a product as flash but I also don't really think it is targeting the same audience at this time - probably being best suited to video players and kiosk style applications. I really believe that the integration with other Microsoft toolsets, like the .NET languages, Visual Studio, Expression Blend, can only be a good thing allowing developers and designers to work together with a greater amount of ease. This is long overdue in my opinion.
It's great to get more Microsoft speakers down to Brighton - following on from Daniel Moth's attendance at VBUG a few weeks previously - and having spoken with Pete during the event I'm hopeful that he can help get more evenings like this arranged.
A few days after the presentation, I received an email from Microsoft informing me that the Mix:UK 07 videos were available. I'd heard great things about the conference and so followed the link and discovered that they'd all been encoded using Silverlight - so I guess I'll be installing it pretty soon. Amongst the sessions are a couple of interest re Silverlight - "Designing immersive experiences with Expression Blend, WPF and Silverlight" and "Building Silverlight Applications using .NET (Parts 1 and 2)" which I'm hoping to find time to follow up on in the next month or so.
It's great to get more Microsoft speakers down to Brighton - following on from Daniel Moth's attendance at VBUG a few weeks previously - and having spoken with Pete during the event I'm hopeful that he can help get more evenings like this arranged.
A few days after the presentation, I received an email from Microsoft informing me that the Mix:UK 07 videos were available. I'd heard great things about the conference and so followed the link and discovered that they'd all been encoded using Silverlight - so I guess I'll be installing it pretty soon. Amongst the sessions are a couple of interest re Silverlight - "Designing immersive experiences with Expression Blend, WPF and Silverlight" and "Building Silverlight Applications using .NET (Parts 1 and 2)" which I'm hoping to find time to follow up on in the next month or so.
Labels: .NET, Brighton, event, silverlight, sussexdigital
// posted by Jane @ 7:21 PM 
Comments:
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
VBUG Brighton - Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5
This evening Madgex hosted the first of what I hope will be many VBUG events. After a really informative session in August on LINQ I had high hopes for this evening, and wasn't dissapointed. Daniel Moth gave a rapid, but informative, tour of Visual Studio 2008 and some of the new features of .Net framework 3.5
As with the last event the format was a talk for about an hour, then a break for pizza and beer before heading back for another half an hour or so.
Looking at my notes, again there is a jumble of keywords to go and find out more about. The multi targeting element of Visual Studio 2008 looks great with the ability to swap which framework you're working against simply by selecting from a list. In fact, it seems like the only downside to upgrading to VS2008 is that it will have to be an all or nothing approach for any project with more than one developer - the .sln file has a different format and is the only bit which won't be compatible with VS2005. The inclusion of the Expression Web seems sensible - I remember being impressed by that when I saw a demo earlier this year at WebDD - and I'm particularly keen to see the CSS and javascript intellisense. I'm also hoping the manage styles window will help me get to grips with the precedences of element vs IDs vs classes in CSS as well!
Some of the new language features seem like they're included to be time savers (like var and anonymus typing), which at the moment at least I can't see being of help to the developer coming along later to maintain the code. I can also imagine the lambda expressions taking a while to get used to.
All in all, another excellent evening, and again a pleasure to see our office space being used for another community event.
As with the last event the format was a talk for about an hour, then a break for pizza and beer before heading back for another half an hour or so.
Looking at my notes, again there is a jumble of keywords to go and find out more about. The multi targeting element of Visual Studio 2008 looks great with the ability to swap which framework you're working against simply by selecting from a list. In fact, it seems like the only downside to upgrading to VS2008 is that it will have to be an all or nothing approach for any project with more than one developer - the .sln file has a different format and is the only bit which won't be compatible with VS2005. The inclusion of the Expression Web seems sensible - I remember being impressed by that when I saw a demo earlier this year at WebDD - and I'm particularly keen to see the CSS and javascript intellisense. I'm also hoping the manage styles window will help me get to grips with the precedences of element vs IDs vs classes in CSS as well!
Some of the new language features seem like they're included to be time savers (like var and anonymus typing), which at the moment at least I can't see being of help to the developer coming along later to maintain the code. I can also imagine the lambda expressions taking a while to get used to.
All in all, another excellent evening, and again a pleasure to see our office space being used for another community event.
Labels: Brighton, event, sussexdigital, vbug
// posted by Jane @ 10:28 PM
Comments:
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Brighton and Hove Web Awards - Brighton Bloggers is shortlisted
Web Awards Nomination
This is vaguely amusing as it because of my involvement with the Web Awards in 2003 that Brighton Bloggers was born out of a list produced by Joh. It was originally intended to last for the length of the festival, but I felt this was a waste and decided to create Brighton Bloggers with help, support and encouragement at the time from Pete and Jeremy.
Time has moved on, and the site now lists 267 bloggers who either work or live in Brighton and another successful meetup happened just last week.
Please consider supporting Brighton Bloggers by submitting your vote
Labels: Brighton Bloggers, nomination, sussexdigital, web awards
// posted by Jane @ 7:21 PM
Comments:
Thursday, November 01, 2007
A week of skillswaps
Booking is now underway for the week of Skillswap events which are being run during the Brighton Digital Festival. These events are "Informal training by the local community for the local community" and I've been to a couple before. The events are:
- Monday 19th November - Photography 101 with Jane Dallaway
- Tuesday 20th November - Master Screencasting with Ian Ozsvald
- Wednesday 21st November - Agile: Iterating the Reasons with Joh Hunt & Tom Hume
- Thursday 22nd November - The Art of Storytelling with Charlie Davies
- Friday 23rd November - Software Testing with Rosie Sherry
Labels: Brighton, event, skillswap, sussexdigital
// posted by Jane @ 7:29 PM
Comments:
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
A busy Tuesday in Brighton
Last night was a busy night in Brighton, with an overlap between Flash Brighton - Jeremy Keith - Ajax : Flash Killer and £5 App Meet.
Richard and I managed to see some of Jeremy's presentation (which was excellent) before heading off to the £5 app to hear Tom Hume talk about the history of Future Platforms.
Jeremy presented on Ajax and how it relates to Flash, and effectively how there is space for both of them - Ajax is good for pages, flash is good for applications. We were shown a set of different sites and asked "Are they Ajax or not?" - Jeremy pointed to the ratings section on Amazon as a great Ajax example - small, discreet and works really well. Then we had to grab a cab and move on - any chance of seeing the rest of the slides sometime Jeremy?
Tom gave an excellent presentation about "The gritty reality of founding a software company", discussing the history of FP, the highs and lows, the lessons learnt - check for mobile coverage before renting an office when you're a mobile application provider - and of course the Pith!
Two excellent events, with excellent local speakers.
Richard and I managed to see some of Jeremy's presentation (which was excellent) before heading off to the £5 app to hear Tom Hume talk about the history of Future Platforms.
Jeremy presented on Ajax and how it relates to Flash, and effectively how there is space for both of them - Ajax is good for pages, flash is good for applications. We were shown a set of different sites and asked "Are they Ajax or not?" - Jeremy pointed to the ratings section on Amazon as a great Ajax example - small, discreet and works really well. Then we had to grab a cab and move on - any chance of seeing the rest of the slides sometime Jeremy?
Tom gave an excellent presentation about "The gritty reality of founding a software company", discussing the history of FP, the highs and lows, the lessons learnt - check for mobile coverage before renting an office when you're a mobile application provider - and of course the Pith!
Two excellent events, with excellent local speakers.
Labels: Brighton, event, flash, sussexdigital, £5 app
// posted by Jane @ 8:18 PM
Comments:
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Brighton Girl Geek Dinner #5
Last Thursday I had the pleasure of attending the latest Brighton Girl Geek Dinner. Denise Wilton presented on "Designing a web application with character" and whilst it was more fluffy and designy than I am, I still learnt and gained from the experience.
A lot of the talk was about defining the character of your application, and sticking to it. So, are you designing a social site where exclamation marks and less formal language is acceptable - if there is an error message is an "oops" page acceptable - or are you designing a banking site in which case a fuller explanation indicating which part of your transaction did or didn't happen rather than leaving you wondering what just happened. This got me thinking, every time I've worked on a web site, I, as the developer, have always written the error messages. Generally this is the only copy I ever write for a website, and yet in some instances it is the most important. Something for me to work on in the future.
As usual, the food at the Eagle was great, and there was a really good bunch of people there including some new faces. Richard won a copy of Jeremy's Dom Scripting as well.
A lot of the talk was about defining the character of your application, and sticking to it. So, are you designing a social site where exclamation marks and less formal language is acceptable - if there is an error message is an "oops" page acceptable - or are you designing a banking site in which case a fuller explanation indicating which part of your transaction did or didn't happen rather than leaving you wondering what just happened. This got me thinking, every time I've worked on a web site, I, as the developer, have always written the error messages. Generally this is the only copy I ever write for a website, and yet in some instances it is the most important. Something for me to work on in the future.
As usual, the food at the Eagle was great, and there was a really good bunch of people there including some new faces. Richard won a copy of Jeremy's Dom Scripting as well.
Labels: Brighton, event, Geek Dinner, girl geeks, photos, sussexdigital
// posted by Jane @ 8:09 PM
Comments:
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
£5 App - November 2007
Last night was the 4th £5 app evening and the first one concentrating on a hardware project.
Lincoln Smith did an interesting presentation on how a hardware project can be built for a relatively small financial outlay - although not compared to the more usual £5 apps which have been minimum finance but lots of time expenditure. It was really useful to hear the history behind the project - how it came about, and also where he hopes it will go.
After a quick break, with chance to eat more of the lovely ginger cake, it was on with the pitches.
The first was Ian doing a reverse pitch - he wants a skills board - so when he needs to find a designer, or a python developer he knows exactly where to go.
The second was Ben and Danny talking about artmeddler (a working title) which sounded like quite a cool concept - basically a web site enabling an artist to upload their artwork in several different formats - so from the sketch, through to the finished work. The original aim is to enable feedback on when a piece of artwork is finished, so preventing the artist from over working it.
Then onto a few quick plugs - one from Vicky mentioning the jobs we've got going at Madgex, one from Danny for the Geek Wine Thing and the last for the Open Coffee at the University on Thursday (and then regularly afterwards)
Lincoln Smith did an interesting presentation on how a hardware project can be built for a relatively small financial outlay - although not compared to the more usual £5 apps which have been minimum finance but lots of time expenditure. It was really useful to hear the history behind the project - how it came about, and also where he hopes it will go.
After a quick break, with chance to eat more of the lovely ginger cake, it was on with the pitches.
The first was Ian doing a reverse pitch - he wants a skills board - so when he needs to find a designer, or a python developer he knows exactly where to go.
The second was Ben and Danny talking about artmeddler (a working title) which sounded like quite a cool concept - basically a web site enabling an artist to upload their artwork in several different formats - so from the sketch, through to the finished work. The original aim is to enable feedback on when a piece of artwork is finished, so preventing the artist from over working it.
Then onto a few quick plugs - one from Vicky mentioning the jobs we've got going at Madgex, one from Danny for the Geek Wine Thing and the last for the Open Coffee at the University on Thursday (and then regularly afterwards)
Labels: Brighton, event, photos, sussexdigital, £5 app
// posted by Jane @ 10:05 PM
Comments:
dConstruct 07
Richard attended the first dConstruct, we were out of the country for last years (although I was an avid podcast listener) and I'm really pleased to have a ticket for this years event. It was impressive to see the speed with which the tickets sold yesterday - I think it was in the region of 6 hours. That's pretty impressive and goes to show that the ClearLeft guys have really hit a sweet spot in the conference market.
Labels: Brighton, dConstruct, event, sussexdigital
// posted by Jane @ 7:02 PM
Comments:
Monday, July 09, 2007
Brighton Bloggers Meetup
As mentioned the other day I put together a collage of blog screen shots for 279 of the sites listed at Brighton Bloggers. If you look really closely, there are some which are just directory listings, even a couple of blank pages. Anyway, this was produced on A3 and A2 paper thanks to Kirsty and James at Brightenup and taken along to the meetup. It was met with interest although a magnifying glass might have helped :-)
Labels: Brighton Bloggers, event, photos, sussexdigital
// posted by Jane @ 7:24 PM
Comments:
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Sussex Digital
Josh and Dave, the guys behind Dash Labs recently introduced Sussex Digital, a service to let the people in Sussex know what is going on around and about. They are introducing a new section every week, and so far have given us twitter reminders of events and other notifications of interest, events list and information about the local networking opportunities and groups. What they've done is effectively aggregated a lot of feeds with relevant information into one hub. A great idea.
Yesterday they also launched their buttons so in the interest of community I've added one to the bottom of this page, and thought I'd add one here as well so here we go:
Yesterday they also launched their buttons so in the interest of community I've added one to the bottom of this page, and thought I'd add one here as well so here we go:
Labels: sussexdigital
// posted by Jane @ 8:03 AM
Comments:
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Flash Brighton - Aral Balkan - SWX - Rediscovering Fun!
Last night I put aside my (very old) flash prejudice and headed over to Aral's beautiful flat for his presentation to Flash Brighton on SWX. One of my reasons is because when Aral was first working on SWX, when it was still "the tangent" I bumped into Aral quite often and got snapshots of the development process - but that is all I got. I listened in to some of his OSFlash SWX presentation last week, but then got distracted by beer at the Victory and haven't had a change to listen to the rest. The other reason was to see the Nabaztag bunny that Aral gained at Hack Day - you can send the bunny a message from Aral's website.
Aral put on a really good presentation, explaining in words that non-flash developers could understand. His demo's mostly worked ;-) and the whole interface and method of working looked good and seemed to just make sense. Great job Aral!
I spoke to quite a few Flash developers and designers and they didn't seem too upset to have a .NET developer in their midst (although at least one of them needs to get out more as I had a comment that they'd never met a female developer before).
My only experience of flash, other than as a user, was many years ago, 2000 or 2001 and I wasn't impressed - I didn't work with it, I just observed others and the work they produced. It looked pretty but that was about it.
Having seen some flash yesterday and listened to Aral's talk I must admit to having seen flash in a new light. I don't think I'm going to be giving up my back end development preference any time soon, but neither am I going to run away from flash either. To be honest, I think my acceptance of flash has been progressing in the background for a while - Niqui gave a good presentation at the Girl Geek Dinners on accessibility.
So, a great evening, slightly outside of my comfort zone, but big thanks to Flash Brighton for putting on such a good session, and to everyone for being so accepting of a non-flash person.
Aral put on a really good presentation, explaining in words that non-flash developers could understand. His demo's mostly worked ;-) and the whole interface and method of working looked good and seemed to just make sense. Great job Aral!
I spoke to quite a few Flash developers and designers and they didn't seem too upset to have a .NET developer in their midst (although at least one of them needs to get out more as I had a comment that they'd never met a female developer before).
My only experience of flash, other than as a user, was many years ago, 2000 or 2001 and I wasn't impressed - I didn't work with it, I just observed others and the work they produced. It looked pretty but that was about it.
Having seen some flash yesterday and listened to Aral's talk I must admit to having seen flash in a new light. I don't think I'm going to be giving up my back end development preference any time soon, but neither am I going to run away from flash either. To be honest, I think my acceptance of flash has been progressing in the background for a while - Niqui gave a good presentation at the Girl Geek Dinners on accessibility.
So, a great evening, slightly outside of my comfort zone, but big thanks to Flash Brighton for putting on such a good session, and to everyone for being so accepting of a non-flash person.
Labels: Brighton, event, flash, sussexdigital
// posted by Jane @ 8:12 PM
Comments:
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
£5 App Evening - June 2007
Another enjoyable £5 App evening last night at the Regency Town House. The format of this evening was slightly different to the previous 2 with a presentation from Dan Glegg on Tails in the first half, and then after our refreshment break 3 pitches from Neil, Stuart and Danny.
Dan did a good presentation about his bug tracking software, explaining what his focus was and what lessons he'd learnt on the way. He released the application as a beta to a few people, and ended up with 100 or so users using it and providing valuable feedback (which was tracked in tails itelf). Some of the beta users came up with some non software uses for tails such as recipes and text reviews which just goes to show how inventive people can be. It sounds like the project was built to meet his own needs, and so the use cases etc are all well thought out, after all, bug tracking is obviously a process that most developers have a need for. Some interesting questions were asked of Dan, including who is his competition and what will he do if it succeeds - questions which are relevant to all of the £5 app presentations I've seen to date. Yesterday Dan announced that tails is ready to ship, with pricing packages all ready to implement. Good Luck Dan!
After a quick break (during which time Dan demo'd tails to anyone who wished to see and whilst ginger cake was munched) it was time for the pitches.
First up was Neil talking about art-hole. This is his idea of a community/social network site targetted towards the large number of artists that live and work in Brighton. The open house website doesn't represent artist's work as well as he'd like - only allowing one image per house, not even one image per artist, and so he's interested in using as many existing sites and APIs to produce a useful community to showcase art.
Next up was Stuart talking about a media finding tool which would run across the internet allowing photographers/videographers to search for their own work which had been copied and was being used without consent. This sounded like an immense amount of work to me but maybe I missed something obvious.
The final pitch was Danny's retro-pitch. Danny came up with an idea a few weeks ago, and has implemented in that time. It is basically a service which strips the comments and whitespace out of CSS files thus reducing bandwidth required. Andy pointed out that there were others offering this service as well with some added functionality. As Danny pointed out this has been released as open source and so if people want to use and change it they can do.
After a successful evening, a lot of us headed down to the Farm for a pint and a chance to do more chatting. Another great evening Ian and John. Thanks!
Dan did a good presentation about his bug tracking software, explaining what his focus was and what lessons he'd learnt on the way. He released the application as a beta to a few people, and ended up with 100 or so users using it and providing valuable feedback (which was tracked in tails itelf). Some of the beta users came up with some non software uses for tails such as recipes and text reviews which just goes to show how inventive people can be. It sounds like the project was built to meet his own needs, and so the use cases etc are all well thought out, after all, bug tracking is obviously a process that most developers have a need for. Some interesting questions were asked of Dan, including who is his competition and what will he do if it succeeds - questions which are relevant to all of the £5 app presentations I've seen to date. Yesterday Dan announced that tails is ready to ship, with pricing packages all ready to implement. Good Luck Dan!
After a quick break (during which time Dan demo'd tails to anyone who wished to see and whilst ginger cake was munched) it was time for the pitches.
First up was Neil talking about art-hole. This is his idea of a community/social network site targetted towards the large number of artists that live and work in Brighton. The open house website doesn't represent artist's work as well as he'd like - only allowing one image per house, not even one image per artist, and so he's interested in using as many existing sites and APIs to produce a useful community to showcase art.
Next up was Stuart talking about a media finding tool which would run across the internet allowing photographers/videographers to search for their own work which had been copied and was being used without consent. This sounded like an immense amount of work to me but maybe I missed something obvious.
The final pitch was Danny's retro-pitch. Danny came up with an idea a few weeks ago, and has implemented in that time. It is basically a service which strips the comments and whitespace out of CSS files thus reducing bandwidth required. Andy pointed out that there were others offering this service as well with some added functionality. As Danny pointed out this has been released as open source and so if people want to use and change it they can do.
After a successful evening, a lot of us headed down to the Farm for a pint and a chance to do more chatting. Another great evening Ian and John. Thanks!
Labels: Brighton, event, sussexdigital, £5 app
// posted by Jane @ 6:48 PM
Comments:
Thursday, June 07, 2007
Sussex Geek Dinner - Dan Glegg
The secret army of Ninja coders you didn't know you had
Jun 6, 2007 by Jane Dallaway
Last night I headed off to the Black Horse to hear Dan Glegg talk about "The secret army of Ninja coders you didn't know you had", or alternatively the concept of using easy to develop frameworks which come with easy to use, easy to write and easy to distribute plugins to speed up delivery times allowing small development companies to produce decent sized products.
A good turn out again, and some new people to meet, resulting in a really enjoyable evening.
This hReview brought to you by the hReview Creator.
As usual more photos available at flickr.
Labels: Brighton, event, Geek Dinner, sussexdigital
// posted by Jane @ 8:53 PM
Comments:
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Brighton Bloggers aggregated RSS
I've just added a new section to Brighton Bloggers to take the last 30 or so blogs from the aggregated RSS feed and display them on the site. Hopefully, for those who don't want to read all the posts via RSS they can still get a flavour of what is on offer from participants.
It is written in PHP and is a customised version of the PHP RSS Reader originally written by Richard James Kendall. The script was really easy to customise and I'm really pleased with how it looks. I could do with a better word than Aggregated though, so if anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.
It is written in PHP and is a customised version of the PHP RSS Reader originally written by Richard James Kendall. The script was really easy to customise and I'm really pleased with how it looks. I could do with a better word than Aggregated though, so if anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.
Labels: Aggregation, Brighton Bloggers, php, RSS, sussexdigital
// posted by Jane @ 8:17 PM
Comments:
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Brighton Girl Geek Dinner - Fishbowl
A change in format for this month's Girl Geek Dinner - a fishbowl format discussion on what is a girl geek.
I was a little aprehensive about this event, and wasn't sure what to expect but I have to say it was immensely enjoyable and worked really well. I'm not sure we got an answer to the question but we went on some interesting journeys touching on whether we even like the phrase "girl geek", what is a geek (someone who bites the head of chickens), why more women aren't going into IT, what stops women going to conferences etc
I also won a prize, a copy of Web Standards Creativity: Innovations in Web Design with XHTML, CSS, and DOM Scripting with an introduction by Brighton's own Andy Budd. It looks like a good collection of topics by some knowledgable people.
All in all another great Girl Geek Dinner.
I was a little aprehensive about this event, and wasn't sure what to expect but I have to say it was immensely enjoyable and worked really well. I'm not sure we got an answer to the question but we went on some interesting journeys touching on whether we even like the phrase "girl geek", what is a geek (someone who bites the head of chickens), why more women aren't going into IT, what stops women going to conferences etc
I also won a prize, a copy of Web Standards Creativity: Innovations in Web Design with XHTML, CSS, and DOM Scripting with an introduction by Brighton's own Andy Budd. It looks like a good collection of topics by some knowledgable people.
All in all another great Girl Geek Dinner.
Labels: Brighton, event, Geek Dinner, sussexdigital
// posted by Jane @ 9:56 PM
Comments:
Friday, May 11, 2007
2nd £5 App meeting
I attended another interesting £5 App Meet on Tuesday. This time concentrating on social start-ups.
As with last time there was free beer...
and this time there was cake too...
First up was Alan Newman speaking about effeffelle an fantasy football management game. It gave an interesting history into how this came about, where it is now, and what the plans are for its future.
Next up was Raj Anand talking about kwiqq, a social network builder. Lots more talk about networking (both in person and by frequent posts to BNM).
The jobs board was also launched and filled up with things people can do to help, or requests for help.
I acted as photographer again, this time using my new camera and it behaved well producing a decent record of the evening.
As with last time there was free beer...
and this time there was cake too...
First up was Alan Newman speaking about effeffelle an fantasy football management game. It gave an interesting history into how this came about, where it is now, and what the plans are for its future.
Next up was Raj Anand talking about kwiqq, a social network builder. Lots more talk about networking (both in person and by frequent posts to BNM).
The jobs board was also launched and filled up with things people can do to help, or requests for help.
I acted as photographer again, this time using my new camera and it behaved well producing a decent record of the evening.
Labels: Brighton, event, sussexdigital, £5 app
// posted by Jane @ 4:15 PM
Comments:
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Brighton Girl Geek Dinner - Aleks Krotoski
Another excellent Geek Girl Dinner last night. Aleks Krotoski presented enthusiastically and engagingly on The Social Life of Virtual Worlds.
I wasn't sure what to expect prior to attending this talk, I'm not a virtual world user, I've never used Second Life, World of Warcraft or any of the others. I think part of the reason for this is just not knowing what to expect, and a concern that I would end up spending yet more time staring at a computer screen!
Aleks's presentation was very good, explaining the social aspects to virtual games, how relationships work, and most importantly how important it is to be consistent with your behaviour to result in trust. She describes herself as "I am a PhD student examining the relationship between communication patterns and group processes in information diffusion through an online community." and so this talk covers the results of quite a bit of her research.
The rest of the evening was as good as the last two events, with prizes, wonderful food and of course great girl geeks to chat to.
I wasn't sure what to expect prior to attending this talk, I'm not a virtual world user, I've never used Second Life, World of Warcraft or any of the others. I think part of the reason for this is just not knowing what to expect, and a concern that I would end up spending yet more time staring at a computer screen!
Aleks's presentation was very good, explaining the social aspects to virtual games, how relationships work, and most importantly how important it is to be consistent with your behaviour to result in trust. She describes herself as "I am a PhD student examining the relationship between communication patterns and group processes in information diffusion through an online community." and so this talk covers the results of quite a bit of her research.
The rest of the evening was as good as the last two events, with prizes, wonderful food and of course great girl geeks to chat to.
Labels: Brighton, event, Geek Dinner, sussexdigital
// posted by Jane @ 8:02 PM
Comments:
Friday, April 06, 2007
SkillSwap - Introduction to Rails
Almost 4 years since I attended my last (and first) SkillSwap I had the good fortune to grab a space at last night's Introduction to Rails presented by Dominic Mitchell. This was held at Lighthouse in one of the studios and was a really great venue - although we did have to fight our way through the Day of the Figurines launch party to get downstairs.
The evening started off with a 30 to 40 minute talk on Rails and Ruby, what is good, what is less good, what it does best and of course the history. We then had some hands-on practical tasks, and so we split into groups and worked in groups of 2 or 3 to follow Dom's easy-to-follow instruction sheets.
Stage One: Creation of a model
Stage Two: Creation of a database table
Stage Three: Get rails to create the database
Stage Four: Create the scaffold to get the "quick and dirty" interface working
This followed on really well for me from the excellent Ruby on Rails for .Net developers I attended at WebDD as it covered a similar introduction, but with play time too.
All in all an excellent evening, and again leaving me with the intention to devote some playtime to Ruby and Rails. It would be great to be able to have a follow up event to this one (or I guess I could keep an eye out for Brighton Ruby meetings), as I know that Dom didn't get through all of his slides and examples - I'd love to know what else he had in store for us...
The evening started off with a 30 to 40 minute talk on Rails and Ruby, what is good, what is less good, what it does best and of course the history. We then had some hands-on practical tasks, and so we split into groups and worked in groups of 2 or 3 to follow Dom's easy-to-follow instruction sheets.
Stage One: Creation of a model
Stage Two: Creation of a database table
Stage Three: Get rails to create the database
Stage Four: Create the scaffold to get the "quick and dirty" interface working
This followed on really well for me from the excellent Ruby on Rails for .Net developers I attended at WebDD as it covered a similar introduction, but with play time too.
All in all an excellent evening, and again leaving me with the intention to devote some playtime to Ruby and Rails. It would be great to be able to have a follow up event to this one (or I guess I could keep an eye out for Brighton Ruby meetings), as I know that Dom didn't get through all of his slides and examples - I'd love to know what else he had in store for us...
Labels: Brighton, event, skillswap, sussexdigital
// posted by Jane @ 8:52 AM
Comments:
Thursday, April 05, 2007
Sussex Geek Dinner - Glenn Jones
Last night, Glenn Jones spoke about Microformats at the latest Sussex Geek Dinner. This was a talk I'd been interested in hearing at the WebDD event in February, but failed due to the popularity of the session. It was really interesting, and inspiring, and has added another lot of "to do"s for this site, the jane and richard site and brighton bloggers to make the most of microformats. I'm just heading off to install the firefox addin Operator now to see what pages have got microformats embedded into them.
I spent quite a bit of the rest of the evening getting opinions on my request for comments on Brighton Bloggers the other day. Joh, Danny and Rosie had some great feedback and I look forward to following up with one of Joh's ideas shortly.
I spent quite a bit of the rest of the evening getting opinions on my request for comments on Brighton Bloggers the other day. Joh, Danny and Rosie had some great feedback and I look forward to following up with one of Joh's ideas shortly.
Labels: Brighton, event, Geek Dinner, photos, sussexdigital
// posted by Jane @ 9:26 AM
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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
// posted by Jane @ 9:03 AM
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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
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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
// posted by Jane @ 9:09 PM
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Thursday, March 01, 2007
Sussex Geek Dinner - Geoff Adams
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
// posted by Jane @ 7:11 PM
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Monday, February 26, 2007
Brighton in the news
Via Will McInnes an FT article about the Brighton Digital community - Brighton cluster at new media cutting edge. Always good to see Brighton's New Media community in the press
Labels: article, Brighton, sussexdigital
// posted by Jane @ 12:26 PM
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Monday, February 05, 2007
Brighton Technical Community
Sometimes I forget how fortunate I am to live in a city which is so full of technical and new media focussed people. We have a vibrant community of technologists, both in the real world and in the online world.
Mainly online with occasional meetups:
Mainly meetups:
Hopefully SkillSwap will return as well in the near future to the benefit of all again.
I'm sure that this isn't a conclusive list, but it does go to show how much of a technical community there is down here. What a great place to live and geek :-)
Mainly online with occasional meetups:
- Brighton Bloggers - obviously top of the list as I maintain it :-) It is A site listing all the bloggers in Brighton (that I know of) - currently running at 268 entries.
- Brighton New Media - mailing list offering on topic and off topic conversations, covering topics from development, design through to tradesman recommendations. Be warned, its pretty busy!
Mainly meetups:
- Sussex Geek Dinner - Simon organises the Geek Dinner for Sussex, and the last 3 or 4 have been based down in Brighton, offering speakers as well as conversation.
- Brighton Girl Geek Dinner - In its infancy, but if the 1st event is anything to go by this could be a really successful venture.
- Brighton Ruby - user group for Brighton Ruby developers
- Brighton Farm - a networking group for web designers, developers and people with related new media skills who live in Brighton and the surrounding areas
- Coding Dojo - in the two hour session, up to twelve developers take turns solving a programming problem
Hopefully SkillSwap will return as well in the near future to the benefit of all again.
I'm sure that this isn't a conclusive list, but it does go to show how much of a technical community there is down here. What a great place to live and geek :-)
Labels: Brighton, Development, sussexdigital
// posted by Jane @ 11:57 AM
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Thursday, January 18, 2007
Sussex Geek Dinner - Mikel Maron
Last night was another Sussex Geek Dinner at the Black Horse in Brighton. Mikel Maron gave a very interesting and informative talk about OpenStreetMap. He covered the history, his involvement and, of course, Brighton's coverage. This is all of particular interest to me at the moment as I've just done my first snowboarding trip armed with a gps solution (although one with issues).
Our gps solution is a mobile phone application paired via bluetooth with a Globalsat BT338 x-trac bluetooth GPS receiver. This works reasonably well, but we've had issues with a) the client software only working on one of four available mobile phones and b) the web solution maps not working very well on a mac. All that said, it does allow export to google earth and looking at our snowboard runs overlaid on satellite imagery is quite satisfying.
Labels: Brighton, Development, Geek Dinner, sussexdigital
// posted by Jane @ 9:50 AM
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Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Brighton Girl Geek Dinner - Rose Luckin
Last night was the first Brighton Girl Geek Dinner and most enjoyable it was as well. Great turnout, excellent organisation (name stickers, information sheet, guest book) and an interesting talk by Rose Luckin on Learner Centred Design, covering completed projects on homework and augmented reality, and touching on a new project vesel.
I had some interesting conversations ranging from photography, through process management, training needs, print versus web and the benefits of both and finally what kind of wings would be on Sophie's wellies.
Future Platforms hosted a text voting mechanism to vote for subjects we'd like to hear talked about at future events - everything got at least one vote, and the winners seemed to be in the game and social area as well as the future of technology.
Congratulations to Devi, Joh and Rosie (in alphabetic order) for a great night. I'm looking forward to the next one.
Simon, you're going to have to raise your game for this evening's Sussex Geek Dinner - I'm expecting great things now...
L