We Are Team Rubber

On Friday afternoon I headed down to Bristol eOffice to the first Bristol Knowledge Unconference.

I’d never been to an “unconference” before, and found the format quite unusual, essentially a fifteen minute talk, followed by small group discussions at your tables before asking the speaker questions.

“The Fragmentation of Knowledge in the Brain” - Derek Smith

The other unusual feature of the conference was that until we turned up we had no idea what most of the talks were going to be about.

The talks were great, ranging from the BBC News website, to the Open Shakespeare project. The two I probably found the most interesting though were the talk by Derek Smith of the University of Wales Institute Cardiff on the way in which the brain stores semantic knowledge and relates that to syntax, and the “on-the-day” Steve Loughran of HP Labs who’s working on Hadoop (readers may remember the high resolution buhddabrot that I posted a few months ago, which I rendered on a hadoop cluster). It was great to be able to ask some questions about Hadoop, especially since I had to miss the Hadoop conference in London a few weeks ago.

Steve Loughran Shows how he’s using Hadoop over anonamous bluetooth logs to show the council how many people regularly use local footpaths.

Bristol Open Coffee ran again this week, with a nice number of people for free-ranging conversation. Things we kicked around included:

• eBay -> will it be there in ten years? What about vertical auction sites? Is everyone just using Amazon?
• Mobile applications -> how to get the location data at low cost.
• Vouchers -> Why does Orange Wednesdays work, and why do other mobile voucher schemes seem like too much hassle? Orange invested significantly in their scheme; they made redemption easy for retailers and customers; they supported it with well-funded advertising (we pitched on some).
• Twitter and viral voucher or referral schemes.

Next Bristol Open Coffee: September 9th 2008. Thanks to Starbucks, Park Street for hosting.

Got sent some links through from our arch-nemeses ‘Bristol Sifty’ with some pics of them on Flickr competing in the Bristol Media football tournament.

So I went in search on the Bristol Media Flickr pool of photos for some of our warriors.  Fortunately there were no professionally taken team photos for Kirk to ruin, but there were some others:

We posed.

We played.

We got supported.

…and we didn’t get through.  It was a big sack of fun though.

Bristol Harbour Festival

No money required and absolutely no burning piers….

“The OpenCoffee Club was started to encourage entrepreneurs, developers and investors to organise real-world informal meetups to chat, network and grow.” I’ll be there.

Starbucks, Park Street, Bristol, UK, July 29th 2008. Usually Starbucks offer free drinks to participants, which is nice.

More here: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/group/4416/

– update: John Bradford sent notes for the event –

“I was at the launch of NESTA’s latest research report on Hidden Innovation in the Creative Industries up in Manchester. One of the findings was that many business model innovations and particularly those occurring in the digital and creative sectors aren’t being captured by Government & researchers.
http://www.nesta.org.uk/hidden-innovation-in-the-creative-industries/

What innovations have you seen (and can share), and what barriers exist still need innovations to remove?”

We can talk about other things too of course.

Another good Bristol Open Coffee event. Revamped Open Coffee is working well. Early starts aren’t my favourite, but it’s worth the time.

I’ve met good people at each event; this time Glen, Juliet and Tilly from Future Intelligent Transport Systems were explaining their research project about user-innovation in transport - interesting project. We also talked about the Pervasive Media Studio and the benefits of connections between different networks.

Mark from OK:Cool was very excited about Claude Hopkins and Scientific Advertising. I’ve read Hopkins too so we’re trading book suggestions (welcome to the Team Rubber Library Mark). Also good to see Nick Sturge from Set Squared there.

Next event July 29th, details here. http://upcoming.yahoo.com/group/4416/

Thanks to John Bradford for organising, and Starbucks for free drinks.

On the 27th of July a team of young athletes will be donning boots and shinpads to enter the prestigious Bristol Media Five-a-side football tournament. We will also be submitting a team. This team will consist of a mish-mash of Team Rubber, Mobile Pie and Thought Den personnel.

We have a mere couple of weeks left to train, get a kit sorted and to re-learn the rules of the beautiful game. Time may not be on our side, but a mixture of childish enthusiasm, naked delusion and the chance to win a free night at the Mercure Hotel - complete with nosh and massages - are telling us that we are going to/have to win!

Our squad for the event will be:

• Ben “TEMPLETITS” Templeton
• Dan “OI COURSE” Course
• Ben “BEANPOLE” Whitnall
• Alex “BEARDY” Pitkin
• Tom “GUN” Dowding
• Ian “TWINKLETOES” Ochiltree
• Kirk “THE DADDY” Hullis
• Owen “QUICKIE” Curtis-Quick

Chairman of the board:

• Andrew “THE MONEY” Parkhouse

Well, today was the final day of Europython - and it’s been a great conference, unfortunately I can’t stay for the sprints over the next few days, but I have met some really interesting people and learnt a lot of advanced Python tips.

Conference Swag:

There seems to be a habit in the blogosphere of posting a picture of all the “Schwag” given out free at conferences, so here’s mine. As you can see, I’m heading to the plane tomorrow morning with significantly more tshirts than I came here with - Thanks to Google, Canonical (Bazaar) and Opera for adding their clothing to the official conference tshirt.

I also found an OpenSolaris Live cd, and a copy of NetBeans and the latest JDK from Sun in my welcome pack - to be honest I was a bit confused about having a Java Development Kit given to me at a Python conference, until I heard the news that Sun has decided to support Jython (the Python VM written in Java) in a big way - and now has several developers working full time on it - great news for anyone that wants to integrate Java with Python (e.g. for Hadoop)

Well, that’s it for now - I’m off to finish reading “Wikinomics” and try to avoid falling asleep before my early morning plane.

It’s been an interesting day today, as I headed through talks on topics ranging from large scale python applications and software ideology to methods of inserting TeX-formatted maths into web pages - but here are some of the most entertaining events.

Harald Armin Massa gave another great talk as an introduction to the 5 minute lightning talks - “Is Python ready for Enterprise” introduced the new module ncc1701.py (google code page):

(Sorry about the quality of the image)

Part of this code:

>>>import ncc1701

>>>p = ncc1701.Phaser()

>>>p.fire()

Traceback (most recent call last)

  File "<input", line 1 , in <module>

  File "ncc1701.py", line 86, in file

    raise PhaserNotLockedOnTarget

>>>s =ncc1701.Shields()

...

Despite the initial flaws, in the end we all saw that Python is indeed suited for controlling Enterprise applications.

At the end of the day Hans Rosling gave a very interesting keynote on the world’s economy using some very interesting interactive visualisation software designed for “people who are always being told what to do - young children and world leaders”. Here was one interesting slide:

“Where is child mortality highest?”

Yup, child mortality is higher in professors than in students, and almost as high as in Chimpanzees.

I am blogging this from the sunny city of Vilnius, Lithuania - the setting for this year’s Europython - straight after Guido’s keynote talk on Python 3000 (via teleconference, and at the end of the day due to the 10 hour time difference).

I’ll definitely say that I have really enjoyed the first day of the conference - especially Harald Armin Massa’s “Discouraging the use of Python” - a tongue-in-cheek look at different ways that “crafty developers” try to sneak Python into software companies, and ways to counter-act them. Here was my favourite example:

Developer:

“With Python, you have to write a tenth amount of the code as with C”

Why this is to be avoided:

“Less code means less programmers, less man-hours spent on your project, and a lower expenditure, which means that as a manager you will end up with a parking space further away from the office - stop it at all costs.”

I also went to two very interesting talks on PyPy, an interpreter for Python (and more) that would take more time to describe than I have now (and more than most would be willing to read through). It was great to be able to ask the developers some questions, and according to their first talk, we should expect production ready PyPy in between 6 and 12 months.

I also enjoyed the talk on “Building an App in a week” - a talk tailored at hacking together a django web site in very fast iterations - with some great tips, mainly under the heading “avoid doing work at all costs”.

If there is one slight problem I would complain about, it is that the wireless network here doesn’t seem to have been prepared for this many developers to all turn up at once with our IRC, email and ssh connections all running constantly during the talks. I heard one person complain that it was taking him 45 seconds to load the Google homepage - but amazingly Guido’s talk seemed to come through fine.

Signing off for now,

Tim