Simon Hammond Blog

Whilst I still have a few fragments of memories from this event last month, I want to get them down.

This was my first barcamp and, although I’d looked it up, I didn’t really know what to expect.  Nevertheless, at Jon’s recommendation, I opted to spend my birthday there.  I’m glad I did.

Hosted at eBay headquarters in Richmond, it was an ideal habitat for web monkeys.  The resulting openess and energy was palpable. It stoked my latent geek no end.

Nobody was concerned about popularising blogging, spreading social media or seeking local relevance.    These were all geeks revelling in their element where tagging via blogs, Flickr and Twitter, were a given.  The ‘digital divide’ could naff right off.

Talks were all organised by participants sticking post-its to a grid on the wall.  Alongside ‘XUL School’, ‘App testing with Selenium’ and ‘Accessible javascript’ there were bizarre yet informed talks on  ‘The Ancient Art of Stabbing People’ and ‘Tentacle sex’.

It pained me greatly that I had to slope off just as the beer was coming out on the Saturday and miss the real mingling.  I had to dash home to get engaged and attend my gran’s 80th before the weekend was up.

Tags: techie, unfiled, web by si
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The map above shows the places in Brum that are ripe for informal coworking sessions, gleaned from the Cowork Brum Wiki. Look hard at those markers and you might see what Pete and I envisioned a few days ago: a coworking crawl!

So tomorrow (that’s Thursday 23 April) we’ll hit each place for an hour or two working out our trajectory as we go, starting with a breakfast place most likely. Anyone who wants to can drop in or out whenever. You can track us on Twitter, natch. A TWM travelcard might also be useful for keeping up.

I’ve never actually been to Jibbering Records so I’m looking forward to checking that one out. Any other places we should definitely hit?

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UPDATE: We hit Kitchen Garden Cafe, Jibbering Records and Rooty’s in the end. Excellent write-ups provided by Pete Ashton and Pete Lewis. Michael Voong and Stef Lewandowski also popped up. The day was tweeted with the #brumcoworking hashtag.

Tags: techie, unfiled by si
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Another tenuous analogy dreamed up during insomnia and served up during holiday dead time…

There’s a funny little phenomenon in biological evolution that makes it possible for very cool things to happen. And most people have never heard of it. I’ll introduce it using mitochondria.

Mitochondria are the power packs of your cells turning oxygen into energy. Without them, getting out of bed in the morning would be impossible. They are rather self-contained and even have their own DNA (which you only get from your mother’s side). The mitochondria enjoy the comfort and reproductive advantages of the cell while the cell gets a boost that would put Red Bull to shame. It’s a cosy arrangement but it raises the question of how it evolved, since of course it DID evolve. Current thinking suggests that rather than the mitochondria popping into existence inside the cell via mutation or crossover it actually had a previous existence outside the cell and was swallowed up at some point. It’s one example of the major transitions in evolution.

Evolution by sticking simpler things together rather than messing up complex ones.

I just installed the Firefox plugin that integrates my favourite ToDo list app with my favourite webmail app, Remember The Milk and Gmail respectively. When I say ‘integrates ‘ I mean seamlessly. If Google themselves had just added this feature they would have renewed my respect but the fact that it comes from two guys and a monkey demands awe. The juxtoposition of the ToDo list with the inbox is blastingly obvious with hindsight being as that is a major source of tasks and now I can’t see myself doing without. Clearly Google needs to extend this gift to all users (regardless of browser) but how?

Flickr shows an alternative to a straight acquisition. It has always been deficient of any photo-editing tools such as the excellent Picnik. This was until Flickr did the smart thing and integrated them. Picnik now gets a bunch of exposure to be converted into premium accounts and Flickr gets slick editing functionality without much extra work. This is a fascinating approach to building complex applications that is distinct from parasitic ‘mashups’. Two standalone applications which complement each other are brought together to major effect.

You might argue that what RTM manages by hacking and Picnik gets from partnership is freely available on the Facebook platform. For example, the Scrabulous Facebook app — sucky though it is — is actually more usable than the mother site in my experience and so I was forced to induce my Scrabble-fiend mum onto Facebook in order get a game. The only contribution of Facebook in this case is that it forced Scrabulous to streamline its interface. It doesn’t add any actual functionality in itself. It’s an environment rather than an organism, albeit an adaptive one. I’ll avoid a huge tangent by pointing you at The Triple Helix by Richard Lewontin here…

Tags: social software, techie, web by si
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I’ve been looking into 3D printers for work (aka rapid prototyping machines). I remember seeing one demonstrated on Tomorrow’s World yonks ago and was interested to see how they had moved on.

The good (but dull) business solutions: For $40k, Z Corp can supply you with an machine that will sit happily in your office and knock out full-colour models without getting your hands dirty. The upstart, Desktop Factory, aims to well undercut them with a cheap and cheerful version at $5-7k.

However, the really interesting stuff comes from the academic hackers doing crazy, speculative stuff with head-spinning implications. For starters, they want to put these machines into homes with the Fab@Home project.  They’ve reported printing 3D models out of cheese and chocolate.  Even more startlingly, the RapRep project wants to get these machines manufacturing their own, possibly superior, components aiming for a clearly insanely suicidal self-replicating process.  They have a video showing how easy it is (look out for the funny guy at 1:18).  Both these projects totally open-sourced designs with estimated costs of just a few hundred quid.

Tags: techie by si
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