Author: Ianforrester

Senior firestarter at BBC R&D, emergent technology expert and serial social geek event organiser. Can be found at cubicgarden@mas.to, cubicgarden@twit.social and cubicgarden@blacktwitter.io

d.construct in a nutshell: great conference

Microformats needs you says jeremy keith

I wish I had gone last year, but to be honest it was great to attend this year. I only wished I wasn't still feeling tired after BarCampLondon, which was a week ago now (I got the last train to London with Chris, Murray please tell me you didn't sleep on the beach). I happened to have filmed and photograph most of the sessions from d.construct and finally uploaded them to blip.tv. Please be warned there filmed at the lowest quality so I could get the battery life out my camera, plus my camera battery died in the middle of Jeffery Veen and Derek Featherstone's talks. I was also able to get a couple of interviews with Paul Boag, Gary Broadbent and Yahoo's dynamic duo Paul and Simon. My favorate session was of course Jeffery Veen, but a there was draw for 2nd place between the Yahoo's dynamic duo and Jeremy Keith. Thomas Vander Wal on tagging, Aral Balkan on Flex and Derek Featherstone on Web 2.0 accessability are also worth watching. Jeff Barr, well to be honest I wasn't that impressed by the presentation but the work Amazon are doing in this area is very cool.

Jeremy Keith really went to town on Microformats and everyone noticed. This is a good thing because as Ms Jen pointed out, the UK is in need of a Tantek type person. Jeremy then took to the outside park to lead the Microformats lunch. I wanted to get Jeremy for a interview, but by the time we got to the bar it was too late. Anyway, Kudos to Andy Budd and everyone else who helped him out, it all seemed to go really well and smoothly. I'll be back next year for sure.

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d.Construct 2006 tomorrow

d.construct programs

Tomorrow I get to sit back and relax while someone else arranges a conference. Yep d.construct is upon us and this time around, I have a ticket. So I'll see some of you there. In the usual way, I'll hopefully take tons of photos and some videos if my batteries last long enough. After the day of conference speaking comes the social events and it looks like the beach side location is going to be a great ending to the day.

Jeremy Keith, that famous podcaster has tons of details about some pre-event happening right now and some open street mapping happening Saturday. I'll only be down for the Friday, but might be convinced to getting the first train to London if people are up for a all-nighter. There is also a Microformats picnic which looks to be good. I'm also thinking about doing some little interviews with some of the guys I met at BarCamp. Hey and lets not forget to get a game of Werewolf going at some point. Maybe Werewolf on the beach around a small camp fire with a full moon? You know really get into the mood.

Andy did ask me if I wanted to run a geekdinner after d.construct on the Saturday, but finding a venue in a city I don't know well on a Saturday night was a very tall order. Specially with all my time taken up on BarCampLondon at the time. Next year, for sure…

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BarCampLondon – an incredable weekend for everyone involved…

Playing Werewolf

I have been reading tons of blogs talking about BarCampLondon. I don't know what else to say about BarCampLondon which hasn't been said. So I'll do my best to comment back on everyones blogs and round up the best parts in this blog post. So onwards and upwards…

So first up, Sarah Blow from the Girl geekdinners, decided to have an exclusive girl geekdinner in the middle of BarCampLondon. It was great stuff and I think we had a really good conversation about women and technology. Sarah with her brand new Toshiba Tablet PC (2 generations ahead of mine) recorded the whole session and we would have carried on if not for the Pizza delivery (thanks Yahoo for that). I didn't attend the mystery session but thats also up and online. Good work Sarah, I look forward to listening to both of them.

Sarah Blow

Simon Wilson introduced everyone to Werewolf while the Mashpit started in the main room. Mashpit started off with a range of topics but slowly filtered down to a very small amount of people. Rob, Sheila, Tom and myself were around one switch talking interchangable about XSL, Ruby on Rails, pipelines, etc. I think while me and Rob argued about frameworks, Sheila and Tom had settled into a session on learning XSL. Now Tom's well into XSL.

Simon explains WerewolfMashpit or Werewolf

Sheila also taught me how to use XSLT. It's so unbelievably cool!

Sheila and Tom

Me and Ben had not planned to be attending many of the sessions because we thought we'd be too busy cleaning up and directing people to the right place (or something). This was certainly not true, specially on Sunday. But to be honest, it was all to do with the helpers we had. People just helped out and for example at 4:45pm on Sunday the place was pretty much cleaned in 15mins flat. Yep 5 meeting rooms and a reception just needed a hover and a polish here and there. It was truely awesome and ended the conference perfectly. Unfortually I made the mistake of recommending a pub which was actually closed down, so people did carry on but it was over for me. It was a shame because I should have phoned Sarah Blow or someone. Damm it! *smile* Don't worry guys I'll make up for it all at d.construct this Friday.

After BarCamp drink

Nicole and others make a really good point about the lack of post-conference support. I hoped that the wiki would be used more but we're still having the lock problem with PB wiki so now people are using Ben's Wiki. Ideally we would have something like the Backnetwork, but you have to remember its a unconference so nothing can be planned beforehand. However it would have been great to have all the presentations online so I could revisit the ones I missed.

Don't worry folks there's lots more to come…. once I finish writing up the rest.

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Who’s game for Werewolf hunting on Friday night?

Me pointing the finger

While I delay my rather large post rounding up BarCampLondon, I've been thinking about Werewolf the game. I'm thinking about doing a game at the next geekdinner, as I think it could go down really well. Check out the Videos I posted from BarCampLondon and one from FooCamp by Tara Hunt 5 days earlier. Honestly the game is as adictive as Poker but can be played with more people and has that key thing I love about poker. Reading people…

So who's up for it after d.construct on Friday?

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I live for weekends like this! BarCampLondon

BarCampLondon starting session

I'm almost in tears writing this, why? I don't know its really stupid but while driving back from BarCampLondon a few minutes ago and it hit me, we just had a near perfect BarCamp. Its hit me hard and I'm just overjoyed and tears are slowly running down my face now. Sheila asked me afterwards if I had a good time? And I answered with a kind yes but now I'm thinking fuck me, we just pulled off the first British BarCamp, it was an amazing event and everyone loved it. I don't know one person who complained about anything this weekend. Everyone was glowing with praise about the event and now I'm getting it.

Thanks to everyone who attended and made this one of the best weekends I've ever had. So much was learned but I'll get around to the sessions in another blog post. Till then please do check out Blog posts on Technorati, Pictures on Flickr, Bookmarks on Delicious and Videos on Blip.TV

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International Blogday

So its international Blog Day according to the site (which is currently down, db issues with WordPress). But the idea is to link to 5 other blogs which you feel others should discover. So here's my little list.

  • Electro^plankton

    because real people interests are diverse according this excellent blog. I love it because its like coolhunting and we make money not art but they only post on the best niche stuff.

  • Torrentfreak

    Now he's started podcasting, I've come to realise how much of a freak this guy really is. But he certainly has the lowdown on Bit torrent, P2P and other darknet information.

  • Read/Write web

    Great site and yes I know its quite poplar already but worth mentioning for those who may not know it.

  • Schneier on security

    I don't know what to say about Bruce, but him blogging about stories he reads is very engaging reading.

  • Jon's Radio

    Yes another blog which has got a large readership but tends to get left out of most developers subscriptions. I like reading Jon Udell because he does the simple things with simple tools. I guess from my stand point he's the ideal developer.

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Geeky week and ever so geeky weekend

BarCampLondon

Yesterday (tuesday) was the very successful girlgeekdinner which was great as usual (pictures here and here). I recorded the talk and will upload it to archive.org tonight, so keep an eye on this url. The quality isn't great because it was so dark and I hadn't played with the best settings yet.

Friday looks to be a busy day but will be a quieter geekdinner with Ben Metcalfe, which is maybe a good thing because of course the rest of the weekend is BarCampLondon.

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Windows Media DRM cracked, no one cares?

DRM

Well I've just installed Napster and tried out the Fairuse4WM application. I'm pleased to say it worked for me just fine. But you know what, browsing through Napster's quite small catalogue of dance music, I've quickly come to the conclusion that Cory and Derek are correct

Last night, I got a tip that the WM DRM was cracked; Endadget has now confirmed that the tool exists and works. While interesting news, it's rather irrelevant to online media services using WM DRM. Most users won't care about these decryption tools, not because the DRM is 'consumer-friendly,' but rather because there are already easily-accessible alternatives for acquiring unencrypted copies of practically any song or movie. Thus, users already could readily get around the DRM's unfriendly limits, without any actual decryption tool.

Its actually getting really tired thinking about new tunes to download. See, unlike a torrent site or something like last.fm, there's no creditable community recommendations. The Amazon like recommendations are ok but not actually very useful when finding new music because there based totally on artists. Anyways, the fact remains that Windows play for sure DRM is broken and easily taken apart. This in my mind is still quite amazing and proves that – #59, DRM does not work because the customer/user has the key, cipher and ciphertext in the player. Now Napster, MSN music, etc with there all you can eat pricing are the playing grounds of everyone with a little knowledge.

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Flickr releases maps for photos

Flickr Maps for London

There's some debate if this is geotagging or geo anything so I've used maps for now. Found via Digg, Thomas Hawk has a nice review of the new mapping feature in Flickr.

I have to say its pretty neat and works even better than Frappr at the moment. Although I'm wondering open this data is? For example will I be able to take the geo data out of Flickr once I've arranged all my pictures so nicely on the map? And if so, how? But for right now, London is looking a little bare at the moment so go add pictures! Look out for the lack of mapping from Yahoo maps outside northern america.

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