Personal

LUG Radio Live and Ask Later

Simon Willison — 2006-08-01T23:28:23-00:00

I attended two grassroots technology events in the past two weeks: LUG Radio Live 2006 and London Ask Later (previously known as Techa Kucha night, name changed after some emails from the holders of the UK Pecha Kucha trademark). Both were excellent events in their own right, and great examples of event organisation done on a small to non-existent budget.

LUG Radio Live

LUG Radio Live was held in Wolverhampton for the second year running, this time hosted by the Student Union. The event was twice the size of last year and will probably have to move to Birmingham in the future as Wolverhampton is running out of large enough venues.

This year there were around 400 attendees and the event was stretched out over two days. The venue was almost ideal: a good main stage, two separate rooms for "lightning talk" tracks (probably the wrong name for sessions that were generally half an hour long) and of course a well-stocked bar.

The event had a great speaker line-up, with keynotes from Mark Shuttleworth and Simon Phipps and talks from a varied assortment of free software hackers and tech enthusiasts. My personal highlights included Matthew Somerville's MySociety talk, which combined an overview of the team's projects (such as TheyWorkForYou and PledgeBank) with some behind-the-scene's anecdotes, and the Hour of Power which featured a sequence of cool lightning-talk style demos.

I gave a talk about Django, trying to concentrate on the open source community aspects as opposed to diving deep in to the code. I fluffed the timing a bit, but the talk seemed to go over well. A number of people I talked to were using Django for real-world projects, some of which should be showing up on DjangoPoweredSites in the near future.

The event cost just five pounds for both days, but despite the small budget nothing that mattered had been missed - the AV worked brilliantly and the talks ran almost precisely to schedule. The low-tech wiki (a hand-constructed blackboard) certainly brought out the creativity in the crowd. Definitely the best value conference with the most grassroots atmosphere that I've ever been to. I can't wait for next year.

Ask Later

Ask Later was a very different sort of event. It took place on a Tuesday evening at the New Cavendish campus of the University of Westminster (also the venue for the London Web Frameworks and JavaScript evenings) and consisted of a series of 6 minute 40 second presentations, each prepared in advance with 20 slides and 20 seconds for each slide. The slides were on automatic, so the presenters had to be able to time their talk precisely to match up with their slides.

Tom Carden has a list of the talks that were presented. The biggest crowd-pleaser was Matt Westcott, who described his attempt at writing a Sudoku solver in Ruby to tackle the Times' online competition. The solver itself was pretty straight foward; the hand-rolled OCR routine to deal with the Times' dodgy scanned JPEG a little less so. All of Matt's work ended up in vane when the Times stopped publishing the puzzle online just after his system started working.

Tom Armitage's talk was about how software should help people tell stories. It reminded me very much of Tabblo, the Django-powered photo sharing application that Ned Batchelder has been working on.

There was also a talk about levels of indirection from Jon Crowcroft, a lecturer at Cambridge. He mentioned in passing that two of his PHd students have written a full SSH implementation in OCaml, which is smaller and faster than the standard C version and is also provably correct. OCaml is a pure functional programming language with type inference, an object system and a strong collection of libraries. Another thing to keep an eye on.

The other talks covered a wide range of topics, and the standard was uniformly high. My own talk attempted to explain functional programming (including closures) in JavaScript. It went OK, but I really should have spent more time getting the slides right. Joel Spolksy's Can Your Programming Language Do This? is more of the kind of thing I was aiming for.

The only disappointment was the size of the audience. The talks really deserved to be seen by more people; if you weren't there you missed out on a treat. I imagine the main problem was the heat - sitting in a stuffy lecture theatre on a night like Tuesday's wasn't a hugely attractive proposition, but the talks were more than worth it.

The organisers have promised to run more events in the future, and hopefully positive word-of-mouth plus cooler weather will improve attendance for next time. You'd be crazy to miss it.

Speaking gigs

Simon Willison — 2006-05-01T23:23:21-00:00

I've been doing a fair amount of public speaking recently, based on the principle that the only way to get good at it is to get a lot of practise. My last two talks were a session on Django and Web Application Frameworks at the ACCU 2006 conference and a talk on the Yahoo! Developer Network for NMK's Beers and Innovation series.

I've got a bunch more coming up. Here's my calendar for the next few months:

XTech 2006, May 16th-19th in Amsterdam

I'm chairing the Ajax Developers' Day, during which I'll also be giving a talk about the Yahoo! UI Library. The line-up for the day is pretty impressive, including representatives from a number of high-profile Ajax projects and a keynote by Alex Russell. I'm also giving a talk on Django later in the conference.

London JavaScript Night, May 25th, London

This is a night of talks that are in someway related to the JavaScript language. I'm giving an overview of the most important JavaScript libraries, how they compare and the general problems that they are trying to solve. The organisers are still looking for speakers, so drop them a line if you have something to share.

@media 2006, June 15th-16th, London

I'm on a panel with Cameron Adams, Peter-Paul Koch, Stuart Langridge and Dan Webb talking about the benefits (and drawbacks) of JavaScript libraries.

I'm also hoping to speak at LUG Radio Live in July and d.Construct 2006 in September, topics undecided.

Finally, I'm heading to a couple of geeky social events this week: Pub Standards on Tuesday and London 2.0 RC 5 (the monthly Django/Python/Rails/Everything-else meetup) on Wednesday. Both events are fun, friendly and open to all.

Notes from the summit

Simon Willison — 2006-02-08T17:55:46-00:00

I'm at the Carson Workshops Future of Web Apps Summit today. It's been a great set of talks, and some frantic SubEthaEdit action to capture the salient points. Here are the notes I've gathered over the course of the day (with help from various contributors; credits at the bottom of each file).

Happy New Year!

Simon Willison — 2006-01-01T00:21:02-00:00

It's just gone midnight here in England (I'm in Exeter for the new year), so Happy New Year to all. Top weblog-related priority for 2006: upgrade this aging heap of badly written object-oriented PHP to something better. I'll try and get some good content flowing more regularly as well.

Best wishes and good luck for 2006!

Working for Yahoo!

Simon Willison — 2005-09-21T01:39:05-00:00

I guess it's about time I blogged this: Monday was my first official day working for Yahoo! I've joined the new Technology Development group, first mentioned by Jeremy Zawodny a couple of months ago. My first assignment is with the Flickr team, where I will be working on some Cool New Stuff. How exciting is that?

I'm in California this week, but I'll be working from the London offices for the next year.

Change of e-mail address

Simon Willison — 2005-09-08T19:16:01-00:00

If you send e-mail to my old cs1spw@bath.ac.uk address I won't get it - that account has been closed now that I've graduated from University. You can get my current e-mail address by clicking the big "Reveal my Address" button on my contact page.

Poland, Dvorak and Broadband woes

Simon Willison — 2005-09-07T19:49:07-00:00

My recent silence can be attributed to a number of things. I've been having a terrible time trying to get a 'net connection sorted out in my new flat - I can't get cable, and it seems the local exchange can't handle ADSL yet either. Curses. I also just got back from a fantastic ten day holiday in Gdansk, Poland with Natalie, and I'm typing this with a Dvorak keyboard (well, a PowerBook covered in post-it note fragments).

I'm experimenting with Dvorak mainly because I heard that learning it requires living through several weeks of painfully slow typing. Having just finished University and not yet started work the last few weeks have been something of a golden opportunity in that regard. I'm not yet back up to my old typing speed but I'm no longer frustratingly slow, and the promises of a more logical layout are holding up. Having all of the vowels on the home row under my left hand is certainly more intuitive than QWERTY.

Poland is a wonderful place to visit. It's very cheap (compared to England at least) but has great food, beautiful sights and a very welcoming culture. The phrase book proved essential as there were no guarantees that anyone would speak English.

We stayed in Gdansk, which was celebrating 25 years of the Solidarity trade union movement, which resulted in the collapse of communism in Poland. We went to a Jean Michel Jarre concert in the ship yard where the movement began (pictures on Flickr). We also made day trips to Hel, Slowinski National Park, Torun, Malbork, Sopot, and Gdynia. That's a whole lot more photos still to go up!

Finally, I attended the Django and Rails meetup on Monday evening in London. There were about 20 people there from all sorts of backgrounds and it was great seeing how much interest there was in the two frameworks. Sam is already planning the next one for October 10th. I'm looking forward to it.

London

Simon Willison — 2005-07-08T08:59:21-00:00

My heart goes out to all those affected by yesterday's terrible attack on London. I think it's safe to say that here in Britain we are shaken but not stirred - the response here from both the emergency services and the Great British Public has been inspiring. To my knowledge, my friends and relatives are all safe. Thanks to all who asked after me.

For good overall coverage of major news events, you still can't do better than Wikipedia.

LUG Radio Live

Simon Willison — 2005-06-26T18:33:17-00:00

I've been very busy for the last three days. My last two exams (HCI and Marketing) were on Thursday evening and Friday morning respectively, followed by a celebratory barbecue. I was up at 7am on Saturday to get up to Wolverhampton for LUG Radio Live, then back to Bath again by 5.30pm for our graduation summer ball. Finally, I'm heading off to Denmark in the early hours of Monday morning for a week and a bit of camping and Roskilde Let's hope it's a bit drier than Glastonbury was.

LUG Radio Live was a huge success. I have no idea how many people showed up, but it was at least several hundred. I did a lightning talk on Greasemonkey (slides here) which seemed to go pretty well, and ended in a lively Q&A session. I've posted some of my photos from the event up on Flickr.

Mark Shuttleworth seamlessly combined a talk on Ubuntu, the importance of open source, collaborative development tools and what it's like to go in to space. He's a great speaker, and I thoroughly recommend seeing him talk if you ever get a chance. He also mentioned that he would be interesting in sponsoring a bounty towards the development of an open-source SubEthaEdit clone.

The LUG Radio team interviewed Ian Bell, the author of the original Elite. The most interesting revelation was that fitting the compiled Elite game in to 32K was actually easier than getting the uncompiled source code small enough to fit on the hosting architecture (they had to strip out all of the comments).

I met a bunch of interesting people and had a great time, even though I had to leave early to get back in time for the ball. Congratulations to all involved, and I look forward to going again next year.

Staying social

Simon Willison — 2005-06-03T13:56:33-00:00

June is finals month, but the call of @media 2005 is hard to resist. I won't be attending the actual conference (sadly my student budget doesn't stretch that far) but I'll be in London on Saturday the 11th to ride on the coat-tails of the conference.

PPK (yes, that PPK) is hosting a JavaScript get-together in the afternoon at a Thames-side pub; confirmed attendees so far are PPK, myself, Stuart Langridge, Dean Edwards and Jeremy Keith but anyone else who wants to set the JavaScript world to rights is more than welcome to attend.

Planning a little further ahead, I'll be in and around San Francisco from the 11th to the 16th of July. My diary is more or less open at the moment, so if there's anything fun going on I'd love to hear about it.

Update: I almost forgot, I'm also attending the London Geek Dinner on the 7th of June. If you're interested, there are still 12 places left (out of 200).

Eurovision scores

Simon Willison — 2005-05-21T22:06:50-00:00

Aah sweet Eurovision. This time last year I was in Kansas, no one had even heard of it and I was forced to watch it over RealPlayer as it wasn't being carried by any of the TV channels. This year, we've had a Eurovision party. Here are our scores:

   Country                  Simon   Nat     Tony    Andy    Average
===================================================================
1  Hungary                  7       8       8       7       7.5
2  UK                       3       10      4       3       5.0
3  Malta                    6       8       6       8       7.0
4  Romania                  7       4       9       6       6.5
5  Norway                   9       10      5       8       8.0
6  Turkey                   7       7       8       7       7.25
7  Moldova                  10      8       10      5       8.25
8  Albania                  6       4       4       4       4.5
9  Cyprus                   3       5       3       4       3.75
10 Spain                    4       6       6       5       5.25
11 Israel                   6       6       6       6       6.0
12 Serbia & Montenegro      5       9       6       6       6.5
13 Denmark                  5       7       6       6       6.0
14 Sweden                   7       9       8       6       7.5
15 F.Y.R. Macedonia         3       4       4       3       3.5
16 Ukraine                  6       7       8       6       6.75
17 Germany                  7       8       6       8       7.25
18 Croatia                  5       7       4       6       5.5
19 Greece                   8       7       8       6       7.25
20 Russia                   6       7       9       6       7.0
21 Bosnia & Herzegovina     9       9       10      8       9.0
22 Switzerland              5       4       6       7       5.5
23 Latvia                   4       4       4       6       4.5
24 France                   3       4       5       4       4.0
   Averages                 5.875   6.75    6.375   5.875   6.21875

I'm sure the official results will be up on Wikipedia within minutes of their announcement.

Choice SxSW quotes

Simon Willison — 2005-03-18T01:59:17-00:00

My American adventure is ongoing; I'm still in Austin at the moment, but I'll be off to Washington D.C. in a few days and there's a small chance I'll get there via Dallas. This doesn't leave much opportunity for online shenanigans, but there were a few things from SxSW that really needed a mention. The conference, as ever, was awesome - if not for the panels then certainly for the socialising. If anything I stretched myself too thin this year trying to keep up with the Brit Pack, the WaSP crew, some ex-colleagues from Lawrence and the people I met in San Francisco back in May.

I met a lot of new people this year as well. Since David Nunez had pointed out that "what do you do?" was a bit of a dull opening question (not to mention a conversation killer for people who dislike their job) I stuck with "So what are you excited about?" instead. It worked pretty well - I got a whole bunch of great answers, with the most random probably coming from the guy who was excited about mopeds (it turned out he runs the world's number one moped site).

The most entertaining panel by far was the Home Star Runner one, in which the Brothers Chaps finally revealed the secret to their animation success: motion capture! I'll have to post a few pictures once I get back on a high speed 'net connection; suffice to say the constant laughter from the room was heard throughout the convention center.

Anyway, on to the quotes. The first two are from Jacob Kaplan-Moss:

PHP is like a beautiful woman... with syphilis

Maintaining badly written code is like trying to solve a crossword puzzle set by someone who can't spell

I also like this one from Jeremy Dunck, who was justifying sharing your ideas with people at the conference despite the risk of other people implementing them first:

It's like the lazyweb in meatspace

The credit for the last one goes (I think) to Yvonne Adams, who made the sage observation that:

South by South West is spring break for web geeks

It certainly is. See you all again next year!

Mumps!

Simon Willison — 2004-11-15T14:02:08-00:00

I've become yet another statistic in the Bath Mumps epidemic of 2004. I'm quarantined until next Monday, and this afternoon we had a camera crew from ITV West come round to film some doom-and-gloom footage warning students to get vaccinated. Amusingly the camera man hadn't had Mumps and took suitable precautions to avoid infection. I'm told that the piece will go out on ITV news for the south west at 6pm this evening.

Keeping up appearances

Simon Willison — 2004-10-29T11:41:39-00:00

Wow, I think this is the longest gap in my blogging since I started! I wish I could say I've been enjoying the sunshine or taking up a new hobby, but the truth is that the weather's been horrible and I've just been run off my feet readjusting to life in England and at University.

One thing I haven't been doing is reading blogs. My aggregator (currently the excellent NewsFire, although NetNewsWire 2.0 could easily steal my affections) has been lying dormant, and aside from occasionally checking a few sites (congratulations Matt on the new job!) I've been reading more academic papers than weblogs. My final year project is tentatively titled "Collaborative annotation of web resources" and looks set to take up a big chunk of my time over the next six months or so.

I certainly miss the information flood of blogging, but there's something very liberating about dipping in every now and then rather than following several hundred constant streams of consciousness, Scoble style. I guess you could say I've been re-evaluating my priorities. I'll certainly be scaling back some commitments in the near future, though which ones and by how much I have yet to decide.

Back in England

Simon Willison — 2004-09-30T10:54:05-00:00

And I'm back.

This is just a quicky because I'm paying five pounds an hour for 'net access in Starbucks. England isn't as wireless as I had hoped. I'm going to be mostly offline for the next few days getting my affairs in order and readapting to life this side of the pond.

I've had a fantastic year and I'll be sure to write something up about it once I have access to a cheaper Internet connection.