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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My formal mathematical eduction began by copying sums off laminated strips and completing them. This was ‘work’ and it didn’t do it for me. I preferred playing with those connectable cubic centimetre bricks, working out what sort of things you could build.

Fast forward to A-levels and I was playing with my programmable calculator. I was the biggest Casio fx 7000G nerd in school. I took it everywhere and would spend breaks cramming those 422 bytes with racing games, rotating prisms and Mandelbrot generators (clearly not all at the same time).

The lesson I’m sidling up to is that learning should be interactive. Ideally, play.

If you’re not a reader of my personal press then you may not know that I’ve spent the past month getting into a new job. It’s based in the Maths department of the University of Birmingham on a project called STACK, conceived and developed by Chris Sangwin. My job is to extend it and ready it for the big time.

What’s it all about? In plain English: it’s an online tutor/tester that really ‘understands’ maths and so can intelligently interact with a learner.

More geekily: At the heart is a computer algebra system which gives you lots of high-level commands for generating and processing mathematical entities. On top of this you can build arbitrarily-complex potential response trees to analyse, credit and give personalised feedback on student input to randomly-generated problems. This whole thing then plugs into Moodle, a supremely modular virtual learning environment. It’s open source from end to end. The STACK acronym alludes to these layers.

There’s a lot of ideas and research behind this project and a book in the works. Maybe a few blog posts too.

Tags: unfiled by si
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Twitter continues its relentless march of decremental functionality and turns off free SMS sending in the UK.

Twitter earned support by offering something for free that previously wasn’t, essentially paid for by VC funding. Buying in a decent search engine must have left them strapped last month.

As bounder put it:

no SMS? Am I going to have to start using my phone to text? Gawd.

Why the UK networks no want to play ball? It might just be that they want to protect their revenues. They still just about manage to charge for txts and they’d now like the masses to also take mobile internet packages.

Let’s be clear. SMS is a dead-end, legacy, push mechanism for messages that demand your immediate attention. It was always going to be a temporary catch-all for old phones and habits until mobile internet gets a grip.

Bluemilkshake sums it up:

Twitter is just a site that doesn’t have as many features as Facebook.

Twitter was always much more formidable in its community spirit than its feature set. Now it doesn’t have any features that your average freelancer couldn’t roll into their own home-grown app. When APIs mean I can update Twitter/Facebook/RandomApp from anywhere then status sharing becomes a service where the only real difference between each app is that it can represent a different crowd to share the update with (the problem of duplicates remains unsolved in practice but trivial in principal).

If Facebook could let me restrict my updates to subsets of my friends (like Plurk and Pownce) and even optionally forward them to Twitter then I think I could have a second honeymoon with them.

Tags: unfiled by si
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Having to cut back on my whimsical surfing lately has forced me to face a problem you may well share.

There is more online stuff that I would love to partake of than I could ever conceive of doing so.  Shared items from social networks, blogs and recommendation engines only swell this ‘fire hose’.  Declaring ‘bankruptcy’ on email/feeds by marking all as read only throws the baby out with the bathwater and should only be a last resort.

Therefore, given I only have a finite amount of time, I have to be prepared to selectively trim my sources.  If I don’t then I am handling important stuff with the regard as the fluff and sampling everything at random.  You can call this process prioritisation or just cutting out the crap.

My target is 1-2 hours a day.  In this time I’m aiming to respond to all email, read all essential blogs/subs and get the latest stories on the social feeds.  I’ll have to continuously refine my ‘diet’, dropping some things as I add others.   Maybe this comes naturally for some people but I expect a challenge in curbing my appetite.  I’ll post any lessons if I can fit them into my regime.

It may sound severe but the goal is more fun all round.  Other people will be happy since I’ll be more responsive and sociable.  I’ll be happy because I’ll have focussed my online attention on the stuff that’s important to me whilst consciously bounding my online activities to make time for talking, reading, visiting, drinking, thinking, snapping, writing, creating, listening, playing…

Tags: unfiled by si
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