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Trust the United Kingdom to out do the American's, Scoble believes the biggest geek dinner in the states was 60. While tonight's Geek Dinner in London had about 200 people in total. No wonder Scoble and his wife are so happy in the picture above. Good night, good people, good conversation, shame about the food. Next time we'll have to get somewhere much better for 20 pounds a head.

So how did the night go, well generally pretty good. I was one of the first ones there because I had finished up what I was doing else where earlier that expected. The whole event took place on the top floor of the Texas Embassy which was big enough for more people that 200 but felt good with the people who turned up. By 8pm there were over 100 people and some well known names from around London. Scoble was also walking around a bit but was surrounded by a circle of people who wanted to talk to him about different topics. Small amounts of food was being circulated and people were happily buying drinks from the ok-ish price bar. I think around 9pm was when the real food was rolled out. I say real but I honestly dont mean real! A mixture of Tex-mex and hints of Mexican spices were involved but honestly I dont think it was eatable. During this time I had a really good conversation with a guy from Deutsche Bank. I cant remember his name but we were talking about emergance inside of companies and why ceo's are so cut off from whats actually going on. A lot of the rules of the cluetrain manifesto was discussed during our long discussion over dinner. Ben Metcalfe somewhere along the line ended the conversation and we started talking about how great backstage.bbc.co.uk is. At somepoint scoble stood up and gave a really brief speech which was nicely recorded by Jon Kosso at Podbat.com. After which there was little time left and everyone started making there way home. During the geek dinner I finally met Kosso as mentioned before, Tom Coats again, Dr Jo Twist at long last, Hugh MacLeod, Robert Scoble and many many others…

The Night was Highly recommended specially in the light of the Apple announcement (which I have yet to talk about on my blog) and the secret Microsoft announcement which is meant to happen at Gnomedex soon. Something to do with RSS aggregation and podcasting is what a lot of people are saying including Scoble himself. There are tons of photos on the geek dinner flickr group and the wiki has changed to reflect the post event status.

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I was unsure where to put this entry, socially offline seemed a good point between culture & politics and science & theory. Anyhow while I write the rest of this on the Croydon Tram today, you can imagine a night with the London 2600 crew and the Scientologies…

So I have been ill for the last few days since coming back from Amsterdam, I didn't really plan on going out on the Friday night. Anyhow I didn't want to be a crowded bar because the Smokey and somewhat hot atmosphere may have started my terrible cold off again. This is when I received a im from nizam asking about going to a 2600 meetup, so I thought what the hell – been meaning to go for ages anyway. So long story cut short, we ended up in a large pub snooker room (college tavern I think) not far from totterham court road. Interestingly enough there was little or actually no smoking from the 2600 guys. It started out with 6 of us then increased to about 10 when we found the pub. Which increased to about 20 by the time I'd finished my poisoned shark drink (Tabasco sauce mixed with shark energy drink, I much prefer to mix using redbull). Anyway the conversations mainly centered around wireless and RFID which were interesting but not at the levels it got to in the end (no offense meant to anyone). So with Nizam wanting to leave a hour ago, we finally left and started walking to Goodge street tube station. This is where my Friday night became very interesting indeed.

Before I go on, if there are any scientologists reading – please note, both me and the woman involved below (huggs) are over 18, we both were able to terminate the conversation and I actually offered her a chance to walk away many times. Also note I have had similar conversations with other religious pushers (call them followers if it makes it sound better or makes you feel better) including the witnesses, alphas and christen right. I'm not picking on scientology as such, its just I have never blogged a religious conversation.

There are times when I have felt like spending some time talking to religious pushers. Why? Because I love being sold to, its somewhat educational to hear and figure out the new moves and tricks used by the pushers. Religious pushers tend to pickup the best (worst) of management, advertising, media, etc. (Or is it the other way?).
Anyhow, I was walking along Tottenham Court Road with Nizam and didn't have any thoughts about the Scientology Church till we were offered a stress test. So playing dumb I asked why and whats wrong with stress? isn't a certain amount of stress needed in peoples lives? Well the woman who had stopped us (who I later found was named Huggs) tried to explain how some people deal with stress better than others, but wouldn't it be great not to have any stress at all – and she could show us the way to have stress free lives. Well I couldn't resist! I started to push the point about certain levels of stress are good and keeps you feeling human and alive. She bite that hard and somewhere along the line we got stuck on the subject of drugs and drug abuse. Although the mistake Huggs didn't talk about was the differences. I kept talking about drugs and how they could have a positive and negative effect. While she was saying all drugs which alter the mind were bad. I asked her why? She came up with something about altering the minds state (interesting point which we shall go back to later). So while Huggs was thinking about drugs like the hard drugs which are commonly thought about, I added sugar, coco powder, caffeine to the mix. And learned our sweet heart Huggs is still a smoker. Indeed! What fun I had with her on the fact she was still addicted to fags.
But oh no I was only just getting started. Nizam came back as he had been looking in a shop window and wanted to go home. He suggested that there all nuts and that we should go. Trying not to blow the conversation I dumbly asked what he meant. So quickly explained that they were a religion of some kind and crazy to boot. Along this time I think I asked (playing dumb again) could Nizam (who is muslin) join if he wanted to? Huggs made it clear that anyone could join, and about this time she pointed out that she was actually jewish and a scientologist. Well before I could start, Nizam handed out the killer blow, how can you be both? there must be conflict between the two faiths? There must be one you follow over the other? Well this about the only time when Huggs started getting very defensive. She really didn't have a answer to supply us, so instead she tried to sidestep around the issue with some rubblish about do we believe in spirituality? But like a pain in the ass, we kept pressing her about her faiths. I believe this about the time when Nizam went home and I stayed because I wanted to keep the conversation going. And yes I did ask her if she want to leave or end the conversation as it may be getting a little too personal talking about her drug habit and faith conflicts. Huggs was happy to carry on…

So Huggs what do you make of this dialects stuff I asked. Cue ridiculous speech about how amazing the author was/is and what a mind and life changer it is. After she finished, well I say finished it was more like prompting me out of my light sleep. But yeah I started on the fact that religion is/can-be like a drug and has all the same effects if your not too careful. Lost of personal time, lost of work, people hating to be around you, lost of money, people taking advantage of you, etc, etc you all get the picture. Huggs made the mistake of trying to separate religion and drugs which was a hoop I had made large enough for her to just jump through. On the otherside of the hoop was a minefield of hot sticking points, so to start off I suggested she may want to call it quits right now. Huggs was fine about carrying on and so I used her speech about how dianects can change your life into explaining why drug use may also not be so bad. Huggs asked if I was on drugs myself and I laughted – however Huggs wasn't.

That was about the moment when the pin dropped for myself and I realised Huggs was so deadly serious about conversation. Now I guess I felt a little sorry for this brainwashed lady so layed off a little – not too much though. It turns out that she was born into scientology through her parents. Her dad was heavily into it and married her mum who was jewish and obviouslybrainwashed converted her into it too. So for Huggs, scientology has been in her life forever. Shes never known of anything different. I was tempted to compare her parents who take drugs (including smoke) while the woman is pregnant and risk causing there unborn child permanent damage. But then again most parents do a similar thing when it comes religion and kids. So I guess i'm actually saying is, scientology is somewhat far below most religions. And honestly that wouldn't be far wrong. Anyway before I start to airing my religious views, on with Friday night.

The last sticking point was around openness. So I started questioning what influence Huggs could have on Dianetics. She came up with the usual line that it was great and perfect, why would it ever need changing? Then about 20mins later she explained how the guy who wrote the book will return and write another chapter. Well I was away, what a reversal of what she had just said 20mins earlier and I launched into why she wouldn't be involved in the process of Dianetics 2.0 (as such)? Well Huggs was well on the backfoot now and she made her position much worst when she explained to me that Dianetics says all people who are gay, are seriously distressed. I asked Huggs if she really believed this? She replied that she has friends who are gay and she always feels pity for them. I was outraged but kept my cool head on. I suggested to her that if Dianetics was written 20 years earlier, it may have a lot to say about people of different cultures and colour. Hey and even futher back maybe a lot to say about women. Huggs was well on the backfoot and kept trying to change the subject. In the end I let her change it but not before she admitted that I may have a point.

Over the 2 hours we talked about many topics but kept going back to the issues of openness, transparency and pyramid selling. Huggs commented that honestly it was one of the better conversations shes ever had with a stranger because I was quite educated about scientology. I suggested she may need to stop preaching and do something else. Generally, we both had fun talking and although Huggs was only a Level 2 sciencetologist could debate and hard sell like the best of them. I expect someone higher up would have simply walked away earlier but to Huggs credit she never till we both really needed to go home. In the end Huggs felt sorry for me and I felt a little sorry for her. Oh well, another smart brain wasted.

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Things I went to at Xtech…

Wednesday
XAML and Avalon – (microsoft)
Building with XUL – Ben Goodger (google)
Apply the Just fucking do it Principle to public data on the web – Tom Loosemore (BBC)
All XML Databases are equal – John Snelson
Connection social content service with RDF, FOAF and REST – Leigh Doods
RSS syndication for a worldwide audience – Ian Forrester (myself)

Thursday
Structure and Chaos, wikis, xml and structured authoring – Paul Prescott (Blast Radius)
Achieving Interoperability between RDF and Topic Maps – Lars Marius Garshol (W3C RDFTM WG)
Simple Worldwide Aggregation Using XSLT – Ken Holman
XHTML2: Accessible, Usable, Device Independent, and Semantic – Steven Pemberton (W3C)
Bridging XHTML, XML and RDF with GRDDL – Dominique Hazaël-Massieux
Beagle: Free and Open Desktop Search – Jon Trowbridge
BBC News and RSS, Or: How We Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Open Data Services – Joel Chippindale and Kevin Hinde
Mozilla's Birds of a feather QandA – Mike Shaver and some Mozilla developers

Friday
Dynamic Topic Maps using Web Service Interfaces – Eric Freese (IBM)
The Oracle XSLT Virtual Machine (XVM) – Anguel Novoselsky (Oracle)
Managing Complex Document Generation through Pipelining – Jeni Tennison
Streaming XML with Jabber/XMPP – Peter Saint-Andre

So first up, generally it was an excellent conference (maybe the best I have been to). I have never known so many friendly people in the industry. The mood through-out was pretty cool and encoraged a quite flat structure where even the Gold speakers and sponsers were around chatting with people. I didnt even know there was speakers lounge till the last day, and I found no one was ever in there. Speaker became listeners and everyone made up the audience. Just what you need in a 3 day conference.

The BBC was out at the conference and made up 4 of the many talks at the conference. But the BBC was 2nd behind the huge array of Mozilla guys, who I believe used Xtech as a way of first time meeting each other. There was a birds of a feather session on the Thursday which I attended and then they disappeared leaving only Mozilla gear (I need to take a picture of my Firefox T-shirt really). According this blog they all went on a boat trip while most of the BBC guys spent time in the Japenese resturant with Edd Dumbill and a couple others. Great food, good company lots of flames.

Anyhow from the start… Xtech really did cover so many parts of the XML world and covered them very well. Some of the highlights of the first day for myself included the battle of the xml user interfaces, mozilla's xul vs microsoft's xaml vs Laszlo. I only stayed for the xul and xaml talks.
The Avalon/Xaml talk was interesting but i had already seen pretty much the same presentation on channel9 a month earlier. Anyhow it was useful to see xaml upclose and to ask questions. I also never knew the difference between Avalon express which runs in the IE browser and normal desktop Avalon (like a application/widget on the desktop). Theres also BAML which is the binary version of XAML. Someone asked the question of cross platform compatiblity, and Rob Relyea turned it back on the xtech crowd suggesting microsoft are very open to communties porting avalon to other platforms besides windows. Someone also asked about the seperations of concerns in regards to CSS and XAML, Rob made it clear CSS would need to be upgraded to be taken advantage of. But it would be possible to convert CSS to something XAML could use.

The xul questions were actually equally harsh but Ben Goodger from google had no problem putting his hands up and taking the criticism. What was interesting for myself was firefox 1.5 which once installed will have everything someone would need to run and develop a xul application. A trojan for xul adoption maybe? To add to this xul push, xul runner is in development. This will be the xul, gecko and chrome engines in a simple excutable program, which once run only needs the xul application parts to run. Best way of thinking about is like flash/shockwave player standalone. This reaslisticly means a mozilla browser is not needed to take advantage of xul. Goodger was also keen to point out the cross platform nature of xul. Linux, Windows will have xul runner first with mac support coming a little later (there was a little unrest on this last point). The general view is to make XUL applications as easy to write and deploy as extensions in Firefox right now.

Lunch was surved in te main hall around the booths of companies displaying there wares. This was a good idea but it all became a little too crowded sometimes. But finding somewhere to sit was not a problem at all. On the same point, wireless was excellent throughout the whole event. Plus there was enough electrical points for people to juice there batteries. I took a english 3 way adapter which was useful when others came along. I swear the mix of people on laptops and people not must have been almost half and half in some rooms. Trying to quote Matt Biddulph talking with Edd Dumbill one night, sometimes it works sometimes it does not, in Xtech it did. Honestly most of the talks were so interesting I bearly had time to write notes.

After lunch, Tom Loosemore's presentation titled Applying the JFDI (just fucking do it) Principle to Public Data on the Web. Was great as expected and well received throughout the open data room. Tom is well established figure in the bbc and public data fields. Some of the best known projects include theyworkforyou.com, upmystreet and faxyourmp. This was followed by All XML Databases are equal by John Snelson which outlined all the different factors which need to be considered when thinking about XML storage. Quite useful as the SQL/XML Databases are now starting to get a lot of the coverage. It was also good to see Exist DB on the comparision list, not just the Oracle's and SQL Servers. Its a shame I missed Gavin Bell's presentation about bringing a open european constitution in xml and the ROME presentation, which I may start using for aggregation instead of the almost dead Flock. Leigh Dodds talk titled Connecting Social Content Services with FOAF, RDF and REST was great to hear. I had been following hints on his blog for some time now and I was pretty pleased to finally hear some of the very interesting results. I wont try and summarise Dodds but it was very good and raised tons of questions and thoughts about consistency and ease of use in the case of REST webservices.
The last talk of the day, was my own which I wont talk about here, because I was meant to write about it here instead.

Other sessions worth noting I went to.
Structure and Chaos, wikis, xml and structured authoring by Paul Prescott of Blast Radius, was useful as it compared the very loose structure of wikis against the rigid structure in most xml based content management systems. Which leads me to the Xwiki presentation which I missed but had a personal re-presentation later on the last day. Basicly the guys behind the open source project have built a scripting engine inline and allows for structured user input and webservice integration. Its all pretty much sumed up here and here. Anyway, it all leads me to consider using Xwiki for personal and maybe professional projects.

XHTML2: Accessible, Usable, Device Independent, and Semantic – Steven Pemberton from W3C. The room was packed full while Pemberton discussed XHTML 2.0 and the thoughts behind it. Besides the usual, more useability, better accessability, better independence, less scripting, better internationalisation, better semantics, less presentation and more structure while making the world a better place. There was talk about some of the new elements and attributes included. < h > and < section > allows for unlimited levels of structure simular to OPML. < hr > has changed to < seperator >. Paragraphs finally can include lists and other inline elements inside of its self. Images still exist but the src=”” attribute can be applied to almost element, aka allowing for another level of structure which was not possible with < image >. RDF/A was talked about and is RDF with attributes, allowing everyone to get involved in the semantic web without having to learn RDF. property and rel attributes can be applyed anywhere. Think of it like the class attribute but without the style thinking behind it. This in turns makes a complete RDF triple without the HTML community learning RDF. Interestingly enough, Pemberton mentioned RSS and joked that there is no need for RSS when XHTML 2.0 comes around. He showed an example but didnt quite make it clear except to say there were already 7 versions, why not add enough?

Bridging XHTML, XML and RDF with GRDDL Glearning Resources Descriptions from Dialects of languages) by Dominique Hazaël-Massieux was quite mind blowing and had links to XHTML 2.0. I do not know where to start really. It seems to be a standard way to extract RDF semantics from XHTML and XML documents using XSLT. Which is very interesting when you consider RDF/A in XHTML 2.0.

Beagle: Free and Open Desktop Search by Jon Trowbridge was fantastic to see and talk about. It was a shame his laptop died the day before because the only demos he could show us were the flash movies. But Jon really went into detail about the relationship between him and Novell, the push for free and open desktop search and its rivials.

Managing Complex Document Generation through Pipelining by Jeni Tennison, was very good and gave me lots of extra ammo for pipelining as much more than just a concept. I actually caught up with Jeni at lunch time and asked her more about her presentation. She said she has used Cocoon quite a bit in the past but said I should check out Daisy too – which happens to be one of the presentations I missed earlier on Wednesday. And last of all talks worth mentiioning that I attended has to be Streaming XML with Jabber/XMPP for the same reasons as Jeni's Talk. Lots of ideas and thoughts and a general feeling that these technologies are not as far off as I'd been tricked into thinking recently. See for example in the case of pipelining and jabber, I have known about these and the advantages for a long time, but have not had the drive to push them into my work life, maybe that will change.

Some of the presentations which I also heard were good or interesting include.
The Future of XML at W3C – Community Participation by Liam Quin, which I didnt want to miss but had to for the Jabber presentation. Are Server-Side Implementations the Future of XForms?, Rich Web: SVG And Canvas In Mozilla which I heard had a display of a fully useable google running at 30 degrees using SVG foriegn object. Printing XML: Why CSS is better than XSL caused a massive disagreement I heard, Can OpenOffice be the new XML schema IDE? which I really wished was on another day and the same applies to Comparing XSLT and XQuery.

On a whole Xtech was well worth the time and I'm so what glad I picked it over WWW 2005. I'm sure to be there next year which might involve a change of venue but it will still be in Amsterdam hints Edd. Thanks to everyone who made Xtech 2005 such a good conference and that also includes speakers and the people who paid to go.

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In one word, Great!

I was very nevious that my presentation would be quite controversial and put a disclaimer up at the start highlighting this fact. But I really didnt need to because it was well recieved. Unlike my test runs at work and at home, I went though the slides nice and quickly stopping only for blasts of the nice ice cold water which was supplied. By the time I got to the nitty gritty of RSS and suggesting that RSS 1.0 was the best of a bad bunch the room had started to fill up. I believe there were about 40 people at the start and I ended up with about 60+ but I may be wrong, it certainly felt like more to myself. Something I also did which I didnt plan for was lots of talk around unicode directionality. I guess I was quite sparked up about it after talking to Shoshannah over email about the same issue. I expected lots of questioning about this point and typed up extra notes around this area but in the end didnt really need it, most of the audience actually agreed that its too much of a difficult area for most people and just as how RDF/A was created for those who would find namespaces too difficult for xhtml 2.0. Maybe there should be something else to define language direction. Shoshannah's example of software engineers deciding direction on encoding went down a storm just like yahoo's entity search. I saw lots of head nodding and shaking at the correct moments, so I expect my pace was good and the slide layout pretty good too.
One of the highlights in the question and answer session afterwards was from the developer behind ROME looking at his code and admitting that ROME never took advantage of xml:lang attributes right in the middle of the Q and A. Liam Quin activity leader of the W3C's XML activities asked me a very tricky question. What can the W3C be doing in this area to help? I was really stumped but suggested this maybe the time the W3C gets back involved in RSS development even if it means pissing off some people. This was about the time when Dan Brickley also got involved and talked about the problems in the past with RSS. They were both quite impressed that we choose RSS 1.0 when almost every single other news corp is using plain RSS 2.0. Dan suggested the problem with high versions numbers could also be the reason why most choose RSS 2.0. Which sounds hard to believe but I dont douht it so much now. They also both work on the RDF specification by the way, Dan also suggested a reference article should be written up about best practices in the area of languages and direction in RSS, something to be considered once I rewrite my final paper. My manager Deborah Cawkwell wrote this article about unexpected characters or blank lines and Why use the language attribute? as part of a this set of i18n FAQs, which I used quite a bit in research for my paper and presentation. So there is scope for doing one for RSS too maybe?
There was a question about ATOM and how we should get involved in the last call for version 1.0. I couldnt agree more, and thats an action point for futher disucssion just like the article idea from Dan. There should also be scope for getting involved in shaping RSS 1.1 or RSS 3.0 if it falls to the version numbers game.
There was criticism that I never settled on a clear solution for language direction and I take that on board and I believe we (BBC WorldService) should do something even if it breaks a good percentage of RSS readers. Its like Tom Loosemore puts it, just fucking do it. If we dont, then were just part of the noise, we need to step out and suggest a solution even if its not very popular or valid.
I can not remember too many more of the other questions but I got the main ones I believe.

So to clarify, everything went really well and even better than expected. The question I pose for developers to get involved and use our feeds seems to gone over quite well, and this would be even better if we do come up with a solution for language direction. Its something to work from and thats better than nothing at all.
If your interested in reading my presentation its available here. I have to warn you its about 4 meg big and requires Open Office 1 or 2 beta. I will supply a PDF and maybe a XHTML (maybe S5) version soon enough. My paper titled RSS Syndication For A Worldwide Audience is also available for reading online. Please be aware this is version 1 and its going to be re-edited soon with recommendations for solutions and additional resources.

Thanks to everyone which helped me in my presentation and paper, specially my lovely wife who put up with my stressing and endless nights of reading.

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I'm telling you I love this city, yes its full of shadey people at night and theres the hard drug pushers walking around offering tourist all types of anything but you cant beat the vibe in this city. Anyway I have to report that the Lloydhotel maybe quite a bit from Central Station (about 25mins walking, 5mins by taxi) but its certainly worth it. I'm using there very fast and free broadband connection which is plugged into every single guest room. Yep on the wall there is a nice network connection just waiting for you to plug in. I can pick up the 4 different Wireless nodes which are placed downstairs in public places like the bar and lounge areas. But being on the 3rd floor makes the signal a bit weak. Anyhow for some reason my ipaq seems to do a better job picking it while walking around the hotel. It seriously takes some getting use to. Being surrounded by free wireless while away from home does not quite compute in my own mind. But dont worry, I'll be taking full advantage. I already have noticed someones elses iTunes playlist is available via the local lloyd network. But I can not for the life of me connect to Jabber, skype is fine but not jabber. Its almost like the ports have been blocked… Email is also fine, so email me on my hotpop or rave address if you want to tell me something urgently.

The actual room and hotel are pretty good and this wireless aside has to be the best hotel I've been in. its not the biggest (vegas hotel room at Lady Luck was huge). But this hotel is smooth, simple, clever and stylish. Theres little touches like the lights which can be moved around the wall using strong magenets and a set of spare enthernet cables just in case you forget to bring or buy one. Sarah asked me to explain the room and hotel and I answered simple, sensible and clever. You can tell the designers had a great time.

I have to spare a thought for Matt biddulph, whos hotel did not have wireless and needed to go down the RAI centre to get some. I now have my stuff together and should be ready for tomorrow's talk. Just like Dodds, I also extended the week into the weekend so I wont need to rush home after the conference. Sarah is coming over so we can spend the weekend together in Amsterdam.

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Quick note to all who contacted me after reading about the last Geek Dinner
. There is only 24 places left for the next one which is planned for 7th June in the Texas Embassy Cantina, near Leicester Square and the Mall. So if I was you I would seriously make up your minds and get your name down on the wiki sharpish. It should be a good night, lots of bloggers, geeks and interesting people (not to say bloggers and geeks are not of course).

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