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Going freelance and moving to Brighton
These few months hold some pretty exciting changes for me and Simon. Monday of last week was my last day at Torchbox, I have spent a very happy two years there but the time was right for me to move on.
As of the 10th of September I will be working as a freelancer, available to hire for semantic CSS / (X)HTML / JavaScript client-side development work, usability and IA consulting. Simon and I also plan to take on some freelance work together.
We are also leaving our two bedroom flat in its leafy Oxford suburb to make a new home in a shiny one bed in the vibrant area of the North Laines in Brighton. I am terribly excited about the move, the main emphasis at the moment though is to pack all our worldly possessions into boxes in time for the move.
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So that was Oxford Geek Night 2
The second Oxford Geek Night last night went well and was by all accounts a success. We came across various hiccups in setting up but several totally ingenious solutions and a few friendly geeks later we were all set.
The talks were great, and in my mind they really made the event what it was. So, a big thank you goes out to all the speakers. Also in my list of thanks is our very generous sponsor Torchbox who kindly funded the event, keeping it free for all to attend.
Most of the slides and links from the talks are up online already and the remainder will follow shortly. Also to come soon are the videocasts and podcasts of the event. I'll keep you posted as to when they are ready.
The photos are now up online too. If you are uploading any then the official Flickr tag is 'oxfordgeeknight2'. If you tag them they will appear on the site for the event.
If you were at the event last night you may have noticed two women with fancy video cameras interviewing and filming, they were from BBC Oxford South Today. The media coverage has all been a bit of a surprise really, I guess when it got picked up by the Oxford Mail after the last one everyone else wanted to have an "and finally, geeks leave the house" type story! :)
Interview with BBC Radio Oxford (Wednesday 11th, 11:30):
Get Flash to see this player.
(Download Interview)
Oxford Geek Nights on BBC South Today Oxford (Thursday 12th, 18:30)
See high resolution Quicktime version (4.8 MB)
I am really keen to get other people inspired to organise their own, more specialised events. So if anyone wants to start up, say, a JavaScript meet-up, Oxford Pub Standards, Oxford 2.0 or anything really, then that would be absolutely fantastic! I would be happy to help.
I would really love to hear your feedback on Oxford Geek Nights in general and on the last event. I have set up a (optionally anonymous) feedback form, so you can let us know what you enjoyed or how we can improve the next one.
We have set up an announce only email list as a Google Group for Oxford Geek Nights, or you can use our new Atom feed to keep up with news and information.
The Oxford Geek Nights are every two months so watch this space in June/July for the next event!
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Talks for Oxford Geek Nights announced
The talks for the forthcoming Oxford Geek Night event have now been announced. You might already know that Jon Hicks and James Webster are lined up for two great looking keynotes on Typography and Amazon web services respectively, which is very exciting. What you might not know yet is the fantastic line-up we have for the microslots ...
- Jim Purbrick - Second Life Meets The Web
- Josh Hart - The making of Diarised
- Simon Whitaker - Yahoo Pipes introduction
- Mark Norman Francis - Code review processes at Yahoo
- Nick Grandy - Semantic Mediawiki and DiscourseDB
- Marc Tobias Metten - Geocoding
- Matthew Westcott - DIY Javascript effects without Scriptaculous
- Dave Sant - Quakr, 3D modeling of the world
Update [07-04-07]: Due to illness, Norm's talk above has been replaced with Simon Willison talking on 'Why HTML 5 Matters'
So it looks to be a fun and informative event! I hope to see you there, feel free to sign up on upcoming to give us an idea of numbers.
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Hacking del.icio.us with Python
I wrote this a few weeks ago, it's a hack for del.icio.us to scratch an itch that I had. At work we have a communal del.icio.us account so that if one of us finds a link we think might be interesting or informative to the others we can post it, together with our name as a tag to the account.
This is great if you don't also have a personal delicious account, you just stay logged into delicious and use the 'post to delicious' bookmarklet, dandy. The problem for me at least was that I wanted to post to my del.icious, and only occasionally if I found something really interesting, post it to the Torchbox delicious account. In order to do that however, I had to be logged in to my account to use the bookmarklet to post to my delicious, then go to the delicious site log out and then back in again with the Torchbox details in order to use the bookmarklet again. Not optimal!
To scratch the itch I wrote a Python script that runs every 20 minutes from the crontab. I wanted the script to look at my account for link posts I had specified with a particular tag ('fortorchbox' in my case) and to take these and post to the communal account.
Realising other Torchbox-ers would likely want to use this too, I set up the script to read from a configuration file to know what user names and corresponding tags to look for. Given that all delicious api requests are done over https and require HTTP-Auth, getting the delicious user names and passwords for the accounts of my colleagues was not really a good plan. Instead, the script sucks in and parses the public RSS feed for the user it is looking at. This now means that that the only password you need is that of the communal account.
Instead of the hassle of logging out and in again, all I or any of my colleagues covered by the script have to do is post a link to delicious with the pre-agreed tag. This can be different for each user - mine is 'fortorchbox'. The script then posts this to the communal account together with a tag of the user who submitted it.
If you suffer from a similar problem of communal link sharing, to use my solution all you need is the python script - which in true modern style losing vowels in proximity to an 'r', I called snaflr - the configuration file with the names etc, and the following line in your crontab (which you can run anywhere in your server by typing
crontab -e)0,20,40 * * * * /usr/bin/python /home/natbat/applications/snafflr/sync.py
This then runs every 20 minutes. The first path is the full path to your python (you can get this by typing
which python) and the second is where you have put the script - once copied dont forget to rename the file from sync.txt to sync.py, the config file remains as .txt.I put the script and configuration file outside of my public html directories for privacy as it contains login details for the communal account.
The configuration file is then in the following format:
#Username - tag prefix - tag to look for - mainusername, mainpw username1, realNameToTag1, tagToLookFor1 username2, realNameToTag2, tagToLookFor2 username3, realNameToTag3, tagToLookFor3 username4, realNameToTag4, tagToLookFor4 ...
Each user has their own line, lines starting '#' are comments, and the line starting '-' is the login information for the communal account.
Feel free to take this script and improve it as you like, it is released under the MIT License.
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Oxford Geek Night 2 call for proposals
As there are limited places available for microslots and demos at the forthcoming Oxford Geek Night in April, I have set up a wufoo form (I really love wufoo!) to manage talk submissions.
If you have a talk proposal please fill it out the form below or go to the wufoo form:
Powered by Wufoo -
Oxford Geeks hit the media!
It looks like the last of the Oxford Geek Nights has caused quite a stir in the media recently. I'm not entirely sure how the Oxford Mail initially came across the story but it got half a page of coverage in last Wednesday's edition (see online version or archived online version)
As a result of this I was contacted by BBC Radio Oxford, BBC South Today and Radio Oxford (Formerly Passion FM) who are all interested in covering the next one. Radio Oxford also interviewed me for about 10 minutes, snippets of which were used in the news every half hour for the next morning.
Get Flash to see this player.
(Download News snippet)
Adam from the breakfast show heard the interview I gave to the news team and wanted to interview me live on his breakfast show, although this meant me waking up at 8am on my holiday, I agreed.
Get Flash to see this player.
(Download Breakfast snippet)
With all this news coverage and potential publicity for the next event, I decided to start planning for the next one. We are looking at Mid April, likely the 11th of April for the next event.
Consider this a call for participants, I need 2 keynotes of 15 minutes and 8 Demos or lightning talks of 5 minutes each. Let me know if you are interested - nat@natbat.net
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First Oxford Geek Night a success!
Thanks to everyone who came last night. I really hope everyone had a fantastic evening, we had some interesting talks and some cool demos. It was pretty tricky to judge numbers from where I was sat, but I have been told that we had over 100 people at one point, which is great!
The running order of the night went as follows ...
Keynotes
- Simon Willison - An introduction to OpenID
- Olly Willans - Demonstration of Photoshop CS3
Microslot set one
- Tom Dyson - Peastat
- Jonathan Leighton - Ruby on Rails Migrations
- Tim Almond - Wordpress as a CMS
- Gemma Hentsch - Concatenating forms, a Django extension
- Garrett Coakley - Drupal 5
- JP Stacey - Building an ultra thin CMS with XSL and Atom
Microslot set two
- Nick Birch - New Popular Edition Maps
- Artem Pavlenko - Mapnik, a map rendering engine
- Matthew Westcott - London Underground Tube map demonstration
- Bryan Gullan - Avoiding accessibility pitfalls
- James Wheare - Live bus times, a Google maps mashup
The photos from last night are online and can be found on flickr, the slides, links and hopefully audio of the talks will be available soon.
A big thank you to the fantastic speakers yesterday, to Torchbox for their generous sponsorship and to all the wonderful people who helped me out on the night.
We're planning to organise a second Oxford Geek Night in a few months time.
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SEOmoz | Web Developers: 13 Command Line Tricks You Might Not Know
SEOmoz | Web Developers: 13 Command Line Tricks You Might Not Know — Always useful!
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Line-up for Oxford Geek Night
The debut event for Oxfordshire based geeks draws ever closer, this coming Wednesday at the Jericho Tavern! As you may have already read, the doors to the upstairs bar will open at 8pm and the talks will then start at about 8:30.
We now have a fantastic line-up for the evening, starting with two 15 minute keynotes on very different subjects. Simon Willison gives an introduction to OpenID followed by Olly Willans demonstrating the latest version of Photoshop - Photoshop CS3.
The set of 5 minute microslots cover a wide range of exciting topics. The first 6 cover content management, frameworks and statistics, the second set explores maps, mashups, JavaScript and accessibility.
Microslot set one
- Tom Dyson - Peastat
- Jonathan Leighton - Ruby On Rails Migrations
- Tim Almond - Wordpress as a CMS
- Gemma Hentsch - Concatenating forms, a Django extension
- Garrett Coakley - Drupal 5
- JP Stacey - Building an ultra thin CMS with XSL and Atom
Microslot set two
- Nick Birch - New Popular Edition Maps
- Artem Pavlenko - Map rendering engine
- Natalie Downe - The importance of permalinks in unobtrusive JavaScript
- Bryan Gullan - Avoiding accessibility pitfalls
- James Wheare - Oxford bus times, a Google maps mashup
There will also be plenty of time in between the talks for socialising and drinking at the upstairs bar.
Look forward to seeing you on Wednesday!
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Oxford Geek Nights
A note to anyone in or around the Oxford area on Wednesday the 7th February, or even to those willing to travel .... The first Oxford Geek Night will be held at 8pm upstairs in Oxfordshire's fine venue of "The Jericho Tavern".
For more information of the event and directions, please see the official site
Oxford Geek Nights offer a chance for web developers and designers in the local area to get together, share their skills and talk about new ideas, techniques and technologies.
The format of the night will include two or three keynote talks of 15 minutes each, followed after a healthy period of socialising with a set of open microslot sessions.
I personally believe that Oxford has a thriving, talented and enthusiastic geek community. This event is a chance for everyone to finally meet up and share their skills and ideas.
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How to install ANYTHING in Ubuntu!
How to install ANYTHING in Ubuntu! — I installed it, but where did my program go? - something I often find myself asking.
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Screencast Guide: Tools for screencasting in Linux.
Screencast Guide: Tools for screencasting in Linux. — Screencasting for Linux.
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Ubuntu sugar cookies
Ubuntu sugar cookies — Im not sure what a sugar cookie is but Im all for trying to make Ubuntu cookies!
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Using hasLayout to fix bugs in IE
Recently at work I came across a particularly tricky IE bug that I have seen a couple times now. I thought I would share the solution since it wasn't immediately obvious.
On the new Business in the community site (just launched by Torchbox) there is a timeline facility to show information about different events in Business, Politics and 'Business in the community' over time (Matthew did the awesome javascript that powers it).
The scrolling is controlled by animating the horizontal position relative value of the inner timeline div, the container window has
overflow: hidden. Whilst styling it, initially in quirks mode, the animation of the timeline div's worked just fine. IE behaved and respected the overflow on the container. However, in standards mode the overflow failed and the timeline divs were appearing outside of the container in both IE6 and 7, where of course other browsers were fine.
When debugged I realised that adding a position property fixed the issue, from this and from experience it was then apparent that the inner timeline was having its hasLayout property set to true in IE but the container was not.
The
hasLayoutproperty is Microsoft's way of identifying elements that form part of the structure of the page, it treats them differently and some crazy bugs can occur because of it. The solution was then to force the container to also sethasLayoutproperty to true, so putting position:relative on the container made theoverflow:hiddenbehave.hasLayoutis really annoying, it defaults to false unless (as found on the Microsoft site) an object has the properties height, display, float, position or width set (or also writingMode or zoom which are both proprietary Microsoft properties) however I would be careful believing entirely the 'remarks' section especially as it doesn't listposition:relativeas one of the triggers where as in fact it is.In case you haven't come across it before now, other craziness that can occur from the
hasLayoutproperty includes some elements disappearing behind containers with background colours (again quite easily fixed by forcing the elements inside to have thehasLayoutproperty as true)hasLayloutalso affects keyboard navigation in subtle ways as explained in this article. -
Koders - slave.c
Koders - slave.c — great comments in gnome.
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Installation:Ubuntu - IEs4Linux
Installation:Ubuntu - IEs4Linux — this is the most amazing thing ever!
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Calendar Server - Trac
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Show and tell at work
You never think at the time, when you are about 8, that the times you bring in your Guinea-pig to school and tell the class how you bath it, what you feed it and how well it gets on with the bunny rabbit actually are preparing you for public speaking later in life. Indeed it was only today that I remembered back to that time and realised that other than just a fun and easy to plan lesson for the teachers, it was also an idea to build up our confidence.
A little while ago I gave a talk at the Techa Kutcha night (or 'Ask Later') about Usability testing - which I'm sure I shall write up at some point - I was so nervous, it was my first time talking at anything like that and I spent ages preparing, writing slides, rehearsing what to say etc. I gave the talk as a practice to people at work, it couldn't have gone worse if I had tried, it was a difficult format 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide but in my practice run i don't think I finished a single sentence, it was 6 minutes 40 of incomprehensible ramblings, thankfully after practicing again with Tom, the actual run went much better but it made me realise how bad I was at public speaking and I wondered if there was an easy way to get better at it.
Today at work I we held a 'show and tell session' for useful / interesting things we had found on the net, it was a nice relaxed atmosphere for us all to talk in a big group, I really believe that informal chats in a large group like that is indeed the easy way to get better at being confident at public speaking.
The content of the show and tell itself was high too, Sian showed the cool news ticker she had seen on the NME site Sally demonstrated Remember the milk, the to-do list application we both use (its really neat), JP found this ultimately cool flickr image search based on a colour wheel that I cant remember the URL for, Matthew stole the show though with his JavaScript demo, using nothing but native browser rendering techniques, so cool!
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cHBs - Open and Free Project Management Tools
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developerWorks : Linux
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Backing Up in Ubuntu / hddsaver.com
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Bug 106165 - Enhance KDevelop snippet support - KDevelop snippets in true opensource spirit
Bug 106165 - Enhance KDevelop snippet support - KDevelop snippets in true opensource spirit — .
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The Kate Project - Writing Kate Plugins HOWTO
The Kate Project - Writing Kate Plugins HOWTO — something that looks very interesting to play with ...
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C editing with VIM HOWTO
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Efficient Editing With vim - Jonathan McPherson
Efficient Editing With vim - Jonathan McPherson — Having no choice but to use vim, this page might just save me from messing up too many files.
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Linux Command Directory: Index
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O'Reilly Network Safari Bookshelf - Ubuntu Hacks
O'Reilly Network Safari Bookshelf - Ubuntu Hacks — This looks really cool.
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Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger)
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Unofficial Ubuntu 5.04 Starter Guide
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