Just a quick note to remind people that this coming week is the third Cardiff meetup for web types in wales. It’s in 10 Feet Tall on Church St on Wednesday 4th June from 6.30pm. Featured speakers include Matthew Cashmore (Development Producer for BBC Future Media & Technology, Research and Innovation) and Tim Holmes (Course co-ordinator for the Postgraduate Diploma in Magazine Journalism and the MA International Journalism: Magazine Pathway at Cardiff University’s School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies). It sounds like its going to be two really interesting talks with Matt discussing BBC Backstage and Mashed, whilst Tim will be chatting about journalism for the web. If thats not enough, there is even bands that you would normally have to pay for on afterwards.
Archive for category Events
We’re off to see the Hackers
Jun 15
The wonderful hackers of, er Britain. When I say we, I actually mean me because my wife to be has to head back to Abergavenny before me. Which means that actually I’ll be the only one able to make use of my free invite to see the rumble strips. Oh well.I’m actually a bit nervy about heading over – I have done an extreme lack of preparation in terms of programming and I’m going to be sleeping in a room full of nerds and pcs, or possibly not. I’m also pretty clueless of the many api’s about. Anyway, if you’re heading over and love t shirts, music like me or using the web to change the world for the better, I’d probably enjoy stuffing my face with pizza in front of you.
Google Developer Day
Jun 3
I’ve just returned from my stint in the South East after being invited to attend Googles London Developer day on thursday and remaining there to hang out in Haddenham for the weekend. Theres a ton of photo’s over on a picasa web album which has been built up from peoples pics. I even got interviewed regarding using the google web toolkit, but my experience was not exactly extended so I don’t know if it would get used at all. Essentially the event was used as a launchpad for a number of new pieces of kit that Google are introducing:Google Gears – Firstly, google gears was pitted as much the golden child of the day, with google demonstrating the new offline-enabling of appications which functions much the same within a browser without an available connection. We were shown this with the new offline functionality which Googles rss reader has built in. It looked to be a quite powerful tool for those who may have intermittent internet connections. For the most part though, I wonder how useful really is when the problem more obviously is about having any connection at all to give synchronisation in the first place or having a connection all the time. This was kind of inadvertedly demonstrated through the event having a rather dire internet connection and later through a Mountain view webcast where the demonstrater couldn’t get rid of his connection. The web toolkit now features gears funtionality as well.Google Mapplets – Essentially a way of having several third-party google maps projected onto one map. So you could search say hotel rooms and weather conditions from a Met Office and Holiday in mapplet and see the two on the same map. Nifty, but I bet it might put a few people out of business…Google Mashup Editor – I hadn’t heard of this tool until the end of the day during the Mountain view webcast, but this is essentailly an editor to quickly produce mashups. You can read more of this here.Anyway, the whole day was great and Google even gave us a night in a fancy London bar too. I think the fish and chips served could have done with being about 10 times larger though. I met like-minded geeks, and thats never a bad thing.
Yay for Hackday!
May 18
I just heard I’ve got invited to Hackday! That’s totally awesome, I’m really excited! I signed up half expecting to be told to “go jump” and I’d contacted the administrators of the list due to hearing nothing about it and some confusing responses at first – but I just got my proper invite. Woo! – Impressive as I didn’t put much of an explanation of my work on there. I guess it was my sob story about my ongoing PhD.Props go to Tom Coates whose blog first pointed it out for me. Oh, and the fact he maybe has something to do with organising the event!Interestingly, this is a week before my stag do and a week after my moving house – which means I probably won’t be getting much sleep in June.