Barcamp North East 3

The weekend of 20th and 21st March saw the arrival of the 3rd Barcamp North East to come to Newcastle which also marked the end of Newcastle Science Fest, a ten day event which aims to increase the North East's enthusiasm for science and to encourage the younger generation to consider a career in the science field.

Barcamp North East 3 was held in the Center of Life, Newcastle. A contemporary science and learning center just round the corner from Newcastle Central Station.


Saturday

Sessions I attended on Saturday were (not in any particular order):

Paypal Hacking - Tim Nash
Tim Nash gave a talk on the PayPal API and how it can be used in your own projects.

Finding Creativity - James Rutherford
A discussion on how designers, developers and other creative types find creativity in the everyday world.

Scaling :: Scaling Lingscars.com
A presentation on how lingscars.com could be upscaled for higher performance on the web.

Real Time Web or having a socket in the browser - Alex Kavanagh
Alex gave a talk about real-time updates on the web using Django, COMET, STOMP and Morbid Q and the issues that he has faced.

80s Video Games Anonymous - James Rutherford
A round circle discussion and quiz about 80s video games

The Modern Day Interview - Martin Cunningham
After being on the job hunt for 3 months now, I decided to give a session on the modern day interview and the ups and downs of job hunting. The main point of the presentation was to say that we need things like standard ways of doing things such as job application forms as one is never the same as the other and how interviews need to be brought down a notch and not be so formal.

How to impress the ladies with JQuery - Rich Quick
Rich quick gave a session about the basics of JQuery and where beginners can find resources to help them out. Rich's slides for this presentation can be found over at richardquickdesign.com

Dr Horribles Singalong - Everyone
A singalong to Dr Horrible's Singalong blog which was created exclusivly for Internet distribution.

Powerpoint Kareoke - Dom Hodgson
A favourite session of mine as it is always so funny and yet so random. After volunteers have been chosen, they each must present an impromtu random presentation which they know nothing about. A very parody based session as it presents the absurdity that many business presentations are.

Usual Barcamp games such as Warewolf
A question I will never let down after this Barcamp: "Martin, are you the seeer?"



Sunday

Sessions I attended on Sunday were (not in any particular order):

Breakfast at Spoons
A few poeople including Dom, Tim, Leeky, Cristiano, Melinda, Carolyn, Heather and myself went for a breakfast to start the day in Wetherspoons not too far for the venue.

Stop taking photos - Chris Neale
Chris gave a talk on why cameras and laptops should be left back at home when attending conferences and events. The argument was that when you take technology to a conference it takes you away from the event and not as much enjoyment is to be had. Also the other side of the story was do the photos taked of an event really portray the day to other people.

Get off your arses, no excersise required - Tim Nash
In this talk, Tim explained some of the projects that he had worked on and how you can make money out of niche ideas.

Chat Roulette - Dom Hodgson
Dom held another round of chat roulette on Sunday afternoon. Following from what Dom had previously said to me on the Saturday, I had to go along to this session to see what it was all about!

Daily Dragon, the upstart friend of Mr Duck - Caz Mockett
Following on from the Duck365 project that Alistair has worked on, Caz has decided to do a Dragon365 with a little purple dragon called Dai and it's lion friend Leo. This talk was an introduction to the project and a show and tell of the pictures that the dragon is currently up to.

On the Sunday afternoon I hung around for a few drinks, then Caz, Alistair, Carolyn, Tim and I went for a Japanese meal, this was then followed my Tim, Carolyn and I heading back to the Head of Steam for a few more drinks before they travelled back down to Leeds with Dom and Heather.

Barcamp North East 3 was yet another awesome weekend. A big thank you should go to the people who helped out such as Yahoo Developer Network, Microsoft, Center of Life, Newcastle Science Fest, SuperMondays and of course Alistair who organised the whole thing.

A big shout out should also go to the attendees: Alex Kavanagh, Alistair McDonald, Brian Degger, Sarah Degger, Ian Simmons (Center of Life), Stewart (Center of Life), Carolyn Jones, Caz Mockett, Chris Neale, Cristiano Betta, Danni Matzk, David Batty, Dom Hodgson, Heather Burke, Eric Nelson, Harry Palmer, Ian Puncey, James Rutherford, Robert Lee Cann, Mick Cunningham, Melinda Seckington, Neil Crosby, Mr Duck, Dai the Dragon, Peter Bull, Rebecca Parker, Rich Quick, Richard Hyatt, and Tim Nash for making it such as great weekend.

UK Maker Faire 2010 and Soul Technique release the ST EP!

A couple of weeks ago, I spent Saturday along at the 2nd Makerfaire to be be held in the UK as part of Newcastle Science Fest, a ten day event which aims to increase the North East's enthusiasm for science and to encourage the younger generation to consider a career in the science field. Makerfaires have been going for quite a while now in America and have only just came over to the UK in the last couple of years, much to the surprise of me being held in Newcastle. Makerfaires celebrate arts, crafts, engineering, science and the DIY attitude.

I went to the 1st Makerfaire to come to the UK last year, again held in Newcastle and thoroughly enjoyed myself, the visit also incorporated a photo walk with some of the usual's from the Newcastle Photo Walk group on Flickr and when I saw the event organized again and coming back to the North East I just had to go along. This year you had to pay an entrance fee to get into the Center Of Life where the event was held (Last year it was held in Times Square), still it was quite reasonable at around £4 which also included access to the other exhibitions in the building. This year the event was also a lot bigger both with the amount of attendees and the amount of makers and stalls available to look around.

Here is a run down of some of the makers which I found most interesting.

Sugru – Make things more user friendly by hacking them
Out of all the stalls I saw at this years Makerfaire this was the most useful product. A product called Sugru which allows further hacking of an everyday product to make it easier to use. It is a putty/rubber like substance which then sets and can be used on basically anything.

The 3 Drunks
Three robots which act drunk and who interact with passers by.

ZomeTool and Polydron
Exploring the ideas of symmetry in 2D and 3D by building mathematical sculptures.

Shapeways
A fascinating project which I first noticed at last years Makerfaire which print objects in a variety of 3D shapes using various different materials.

Twinkly, Sparkly cocktail bar
Demonstrated by Oli Wood, this is a cocktail bar made with LEDs and recycled products.

Web Cycle
A project created by Tom Scott and Matt, the Web Cycle uses open source Arduino technology and open source Ubuntu software. By cycling faster, the internet connection speeds up allowing you to browse pages faster.

Compukit UK 101
A project that is 30 years old, built from scratch and demonstrated at last years Makerfaire.

Percussion Kit II
Alistair McDonald's scaled up version of the original Percussion kit which he built at a hack day last year in London. Very interesting to see how the younger people interacted it.

Power Tool Drag Racing
Racing power tools such as modified Angle Grinders, Dremels and Saws down a 30ft track.

Complete a Rubicks cube in under 30 seconds
A robot which detects the rubicks cube, computes the possibilities and solves the problem in under 20 seconds.

Soul Technique release the ST EP!

Following the Makerfaire on Saturday night we headed over to the World Headquarters as Soul Technique, a Newcastle band I've followed for a while now were releasing their EP which had been in the pipeline for a few months.

The gig was down to start at 8pm but as with any event like this, the unwritten rule is is that it will start at least 30mins later. We turned up for 7:50pm, the doors were closed. Odd I thought, but then a woman came to the door and told us that we had to stay outside (Event asking if we could use the toilet, she pointed to the bar across the street). 15 minutes later we were allowed in, and even then the girl taking the money on the front counter wasn't ready. I found this very bad customer service and World Headquarters nearly lost two customers by doing this.

After paying the money to get in (and getting a free EP CD), I caught up with Ruth, the lead singer and had a bit of a chat. The night started with a set from Skrufz a rap group for the North East. I quite liked some of their stuff, but wouldn't have minded seeing them again as I'm sure they would have grown on me.

The second set of the night was given by the main group of the night. A brilliant set including a lot of their older tracks and some new ones. I've found with a lot of Soul Technique gigs and their style of music that when people get a couple of drinks down them and the audience gets into the spirit of things, they can bring the building to the ground with their mix of soul, pop, bass and grungy music and the EP release was no exception!

Some of the tracks played on the night included: “Move with me”, “Ugly”, “I've been here before”, “Golden Era”, “Freakshow” and “Slow Down”.

Even with the troubles we had when we first arrived this was a truly fantastic evening. Soul Technique regularly play in Newcastle, so get yourselves along to the next gig!

Soul Technique can be found here: myspace.com/soultechniqueofficial

Mobile Android Development and Using PHP with Web Services

SuperMondays returned to Newcastle on the evening of 22^nd February with an attendance of over 100 people. The attendees came to see 2 speakers, Alex Reid and Lorna Mitchell.

Android Development with Alex Reid
In this session, Alex gave an overview of Mobile Apps, How to write a mobile app, Differences from the web, Mobile device constraints and benefits and Android itself. Alex demonstrated 2 applications which he has already developed for Android including “Ask the Hoff” and “Next Metro”, an application which allows you to see which Metro will arrive next and if it is on time. He explained that to write a mobile application yo have to decide which device(s) to target, get to know an SDK, testing and publishing the app. Later in the session, Alex explained the differences of Mobile to the Web and how efficiency is the key when developing mobile apps.

PHP and Web Services and why they are the perfect partners with Lorna Mitchell
Lorna Mitchell is a big name in the PHP world and community and so needs no introductions. Lorna came to SuperMondays to discuss PHP and Web Services and why they are the perfect partners. During her talk she explained how PHP is solving the web problem, how the problem evolves and how PHP evolves to solve the problem. Lorna showed the architecture of Web Services and how different data formats can be used to communicate with Web Services including JSON and XML. She also discussed different services types which are normally associated with Web Services including *-RPC, SOAP and REST.

Alex's slides can be found here:
http://www.slideshare.net/AlexJReid/development-of-a-mobile-app-for-android

Lorna's slides can be found here:
http://www.slideshare.net/lornajane/php-and-web-services-perfect-partners

NE Bytes is born

Andrew Westgarth and Jo Noble have brought a new Microsoft Technology user group to the North East with the launch of NE Bytes. The launch event was held on Wednesday 20^th January and I went along to the event to see what it was all about.

NE Bytes revolves around both IT Developers and IT Professionals in the North East who use Microsoft Technologies in their day-to-day work and it also showcases up and coming software in the Microsoft suite of products.

For a launch event, it was great to see the number of people who attended. Over 90 people and the 3 speakers (Steve Smith, Mike Taulty and James O’ Neill) were present.

Highlights and features of Microsoft Office SharePoint 2010
The first session of the evening was given by Steve Smith, a SharePoint MVP and Director of Combined Knowledge (A specialist SharePoint training consultancy). Steve talked about some of the new features in the up and coming release of SharePoint. He covered topics such as Metadata management model, Records management, Records routing, The Ribbon, Office integration, Migration options, Architecture and the new layout of the software.

Silverlight – 2 Years, 4 versions and where are we now?
Mike Taulty who currently works in the Developer and Platform Group at Microsoft UK gave the second session of the evening. Mike talked about Microsoft’s UX technology for RIAs and covered what is available in Silverlight such as various User Interface components; he also demonstrated what is available in the new Silverlight release, Silverlight 4 which is currently in Beta.

Hyper-V with James O’Neill
The third session of the evening was given by James O’ Neill who works on the Evangelist Team. He covered the Hyper-V virtualisation technology which is bundled with Server 2008, including the improvements which were released in Server 2008 R2. He also demonstrated System Center Virtual machine Manager and managing virtualised systems using Windows PowerShell.

VBUG Newcastle - A tour of SysInternals

Richard Diver, Microsoft Premier Field Engineer, returned to Newcastle on the evening of 25th November 2009 to give a tour of some of the SysInternals tools which are available for IT Professionals.

Below are a few notes which I jotted down during the evening:

Process Explorer:


ProcExp.exe

Process Explorer can be used as a replacement for Task Manager.

Hide when minimized to always have it available.

CPU History can be viewed by opening the System Information graph.

Allows sorting of Parent/Child processes.

Enough data available to choke a whale.

The target icon can be used to find the process attached to a certain window/application.

Highlighting of processes can be found under Options -> Configure Highlighting.

Process Monitor


ProcMon.exe

Process monitor is a real time file, registry and process thread monitor.

When in doubt, use Process Monitor.

Enhancements over Filemon/Regmon include:
- More advanced filtering
- Operation call stacks
- Boot-time logging
- Data mining views
- Process tree to see short lived processes

ProcMon can see associated files or registry settings.

If using ProcMon on another machine, you need to capture data first over a period of time, then bring it back to analyse.

Autoruns


MsConfig.exe == Bad, don't use.

Autoruns.exe, is better than MsConfig, due the facet of having a lot more options to remove disable start-up process in a number of places.

Boot execute should be empty.



Resources

live.sysinternals.com
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals
Wikipedia Article
SysInternals Forum

Dorkbot Newcastle

The ever popular Dorkbot event returned to Newcastle on the evening of 17th November at the Centre of Life.

Demonstrations and presentations were given regarding TouchScape, Humaniquarium and Chipdisco.

TouchScape

A very hands on presentation showing what this new start company from Newcastle has been working on based around multi-touch technologies. The TouchScape team includes Cassim Ladha, Karim Ladha and Wayne Smith.

Humaniquarium

A presentation given my Robyn Taylor, Guy Schofield and John Shearer. The Humaniquarium is a way to entice viewers to interact with the humans inside. Hand movements on the window relays information directly to the people inside changing the output of the mood or music at the time.

Chipdisco

This session was presented by Brendan Ratliffe. I've seen him play one of his sets earlier this year at the after party of the first UK Makers Faire held in Newcastle. This presentation went into how he produces his music by using 'Tracking' and a demonstration of some of the software which he is currently working on.

Dorkbot Newcastle - People doing intresting stuff with electricty

On Monday 5th October I decided to go to the Newcastle Dorkbot event hosted at the Life science center in Newcastle, the event was based around three speakers covering three different topics: Live performance drawing, Arduino and a percussion instrument hacked together by Alistair.

The first talk/demonstration was given by Evan Raskob, he talked and demonstrated some of his live experiments in Live Drawing using JelloTail, and Cartoon Tenticles.

The second talk of the evening was given by Aaron Nielsen of Oomlout who recently moved to Leeds from Vancouver to develop his business of developing Arduino micro controllers, he gave a short presentation about the joys of Arduino and gave a small live demo. However I'm still asking the question "Is there any practical use for Arduinos or are they just a bit of geeky fun?

The third talk of the evening was given by Alistair Macdonald on his hack for Music Hack Day based in London earlier this year. The percussion instrument uses the Arduino and a small set of sequences, by tapping the lollypop sticks on glass bottles it makes and sound and simple notes. There is an in-depth write up from Alistair here.

TEDx Newcastle

TEDx Newcastle (part of TEDx North) was held on 30th September at the Tyneside cinema and I had the pleasure to attend the event organized by Codeworks and Herb Kim.

TEDx is now a worldwide thing and it involves leading speakers talking about what they are most passionate about. By the way TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, with the x bit standing for Independantly organized event.

The first TED talk of the evening (shown by video) was given by Ed Ulbrich, he gave an in depth overview of the visual effects which were placed into the film Benjamin Button. I've never seen this film but It was amazing to see the effects and considering the first hour of the film is actually a computer generated face of Brad Pitt this is really cool, and makes you think how many more films they can make in the future using fully 100% digital actors.

The second talk of the evening was given by Mike Stenhouse, a User Experience and Interface Designer from Trampoline Systems, his talk revolved around Pattern Recognition & the Power of Story in Product, Experience & Interface Design.

The third talk of the evening was a very interesting talk around Privacy, Anonymity and the Futur, presented by Chris Stainthorpe of the B Group creative industry. He went into things such as even if Twitter ends, your tweets will still be stored somewhere and how we need to regain privacy. He also talked about how the older generation are more careful about giving using Facebook as they are worried about privacy, however the younger generation go in with all guns blazing and upload give away o lot of information about themselves by the status updates they post and the pictures that they upload.

Herb Kim from Codeworks then presented the Thinking Digital 2010 launch video, he discussed what the conference is all about and speakers which where expected for next year. Tickets are still available.

The fifth talk of the evening (shown by video) was a video of Dan Pink talking about motivation in the work place and different types of working environments and how managers can reward workers (or not) depending on what they have been working on.

The sixth talk of the evening was a very informative talk about the User Experience Curve given by Andy Budd from Clear Left in Brighton. Andy talked about things such as people remembering the good points and bad points of something and how you normally remember the start and finish of something but not necessarily the middle section of an experience, and how these can be transferred to websites for users.

After the main event, food and drinks were served in the bar as part of Codework Connect's Think and a Drink (TAAD) series of meetups. It was good to catch up with Greame Littlewood, Ashley Green and Dan Scott from Fusebox, Alistair McDonald, Ross Cooney and Alex Kavanagh.

Databases at the Bedson

Supermondays returned on 28th September to the Bedson Teaching center in Newcastle. Around 80 people attended to hear three speakers talking about the history of databases, SimpleDB, Google App Engine and RAQUEL.

Ross Cooney from Rozmic stood to the podium first of all, he talked about the history of databases, why they are important and some of the theory behind them including ACID and BASE. He also talked about CAP theorem and distributed databases.

David Lavery was up next, David talked about Amazon's web service SimpleDB database product and Google App Engine.

David Livingstone from Northumbria university was the last speaker of the evening. He talked about and put forward a new database product called RAQUEL (Relational, Algebra, Query, Update, Executive Language) being developed at the university and how it is lego like in nature as it can use plugins and modules.

September VBUG and Too Far North

September's VBUG event was held on Wednesday 23rd at Newcastle University organised by Andrew Westgarth and Jo Noble, with guest speakers Richard Diver and Dr Dan Oliver from Microsoft giving informative talks about Performance and the Dynmic Desktop Experience.

Alexandria Ball and Sarah Melrose, two of the Microsoft Technet marketing girls also attended the event whilst on thier little road trip from Reading in London.

Part 1: Richard Diver - Performance Monitoring and Analysis

A Premier Field Engineer with 10 years experience implementing and supporting a range of Microsoft technologies, specialising in Active Directory, Server Platform and Virtualisation.

Richard Diver kicked off the event by asking for introductions from each attendee and then he went into his talk about Performance Monitoring and Analysis for proactive and reactive support, server baselining and capacity planning. Richard talked about a free tool that comes in all current versions of Windows called Perfmon. He gave a couple of quick demos and also went into other tools called Resource Monitor (Win 7) Reliability Monitor (Win 7), PSR (Problem Steps Recorder) and SysInternals.

Richard also gave a couple of examples on how to make the experience of XP performance monitoring better, more details can be found in the following Microsoft KB articles:

• KB283110
• KB300884
• KB281884

Part 2: Dr Dan Oliver - The Dynamic Desktop Experience

A Pre Sales Architect within Microsoft UK’s Speciality Technology Unit with some 14 years’ experience of Microsoft-based solutions primarily in the virtualization and systems management fields.

Unfortunatly I don't have much to blog about regarding Dan's talk however during his talk he went into:

• Desktop Optimization pack
• System Center
• Bringing down costs, doing more with less
• Management approval for Group Policies
• On Demand Apps
• User State Migration Tool

Notes:

There were meant to be three speakers for this event however Conrad Sidey (Session: Novell and Lotus Notes - Migrating to Microsoft), couldn't make it.


Following the VBUG event I visited the Head of Steam opposite Central Station. Soul Technique were playing as part of the Too Far North set of gigs however I managed to arrive just as Ruth and the gang were finishing their last song of the set. Iam pleased I went down when I did though as after Soul Technique had finished another band called Saint and the Cynics played the next slot and I have to say considering this was the first time I'd seen them play, I'd definatly go elsewhere to see them again. Other bands which played the gig included Peculiar Disco Moves and Black Marcs