Richards Weblog

Due to the incredible success of Geeks in the Peaks 2010 back in June it was decided that another outing should be fitted in before the end of the year. This weekend saw the second GITP camping trip of the year. Once again, the camping expedition was held at Haddon Grove Farm Campsite. This is a reasonably sized camp site at Haddon Grove, between Over Haddon and Monyash, close to the village of Bakewell and also Chatsworth House.

GITP runs from the Friday till the Sunday. The family and I decided to go out to the camp site a couple of days early since the kids and wife were on holiday from school and I was on holiday from work for a couple  of weeks. We arrived on the Wednesday afternoon to pitch up in the same field that we has been in for the last GITP. The field was empty apart from 3 other small tents. This was to change from the Thursday onwards and by Saturday afternoon you could have been mistaken for thinking that there was a festival being held at the site. Pitched next to us on the Friday and Saturday nights was a few people from the Chesterfield Astronomical Society. It would be an understatement to say that the telescopes they had were quite large. This was a great group of people who were friendly and informative and allowed us Geeks to take a look through the telescopes at Jupiter and other stars and were happy to answer our questions.

On the Thursday, the family and I made a trip to Monsal Head and walked along the viaduct, which is something that I have been wanting to do since I was a small child.

On Friday whilst waiting for the Geeks to arrive, a few of us that arrived at the camp site early went for a walk and to try and find a geo-cache.

Haddon Grove sits above the Lathkill Dale which is a great place for walking and very scenic. It’s also a fantastic place to hide the caches. Ian Ibbotson showed the way using C:Geo on his Android phone. After about an hour we made it to the site and managed to find the cache quite quickly. It just so happened that whilst the group was looking for the cache I sat down on a nearby stone along with my youngest daughter. The stone we were sat on appeared to have space underneath it and as I looked down, in between my legs, I say the prize that we were looking for. At this time the immortal words came forth from my mouth “Hey Guys, Come and take a look between my legs”. This was the first time that many of us has been geo-caching and it was so much fun that we were eager to go find another, which we did on Saturday.

The remaining group of Geeks started to arrive late Friday afternoon and that evening, a great Tandoor BBQ was cooked by Jagusti and the GITP team which was quite extraordinary. The Tandoor chicken was excellent and I was reliably informed that so was the panir cheese.

Saturday started off a little slow due to the frivolities of the night before and after lunch we set out on another geo-caching expedition.  This took us in the opposite direction down the Lathkill Dale towards the small village of Over Haddon. This was a great walk and the kids loved it, especially playing with the walkie talkies. The second cache of the weekend was found close to a disused mine, just off the beaten track. After finding the cache, we continued along the trail and to the Lathkill Hotel in Over Haddon for a well deserved drink. By the time we all got back to the camp site it was a little late for the communal dinner so everyone made their own dinners and then it was time to huddle round the camp fires once more and drink some beer and toast some marshmallows.

The weather over the weekend was superb with some of the campers evening getting sunburnt. Sunday was a laid back affair with the communal breakfast becoming brunch and campers starting to pack away.

A couple of things we have noted that we need for our future camping expeditions is a solar charger for charging the mobile phones and some walkie talkies so that we can keep in touch with the kids. They did tend to run off in to the small woodland areas around the camp site and to the kids play area.

Geeks in the Peaks is an awesome weekend and the family and I can’t wait until the next weekender and what it may hold. For now though, the camping kit has been packed away until next season.

admin GITP

I have recently purchased two new domains, one for my wife and one for me to use. The site for my wife is to let people know about her hand made bears, to show pictures and basically provide some marketing for her. My new site is for me to be able to look at making some of my own open source applications and promote these on the site. I’m looking to start using MySQl, Ruby and some client side scripting, probably Javascript. We are currently in the process of getting the hosting sorted out for these domains and I’ll update you and let you know what they are when they are available.

Another items that I have been working on this week whilst I’ve been having some time off work is to get an old Qume QVT119+ dumb terminal working against Ubuntu. This was actually quite straight forward to get going with the only issue being that the terminal itself developed a fault. After closed inspection, and managing to get the display logic board out of the housing, I found that the board was a little burnt out. Luckily I had another terminal around which would not power up, however the board in this terminal was actually OK so a quick swap was made and the terminal is up and running. I have a couple of lose ends to tie up, i.e. getting the getty to run at start up and also working out the best emulation to use or write my own QVT199+ emulation (if a can find a manual on line). The plan is to document this project and post it up on this website.

Another project which has kept me busy over the last few weeks is tweets4sweets. This is a project for SHACKNET which uses an Arduino and Ethernet shield to search twitter for a given phrase and when it sees the phrase it will release a sweet. The code is now working but needs refactoring and we have ideas for the hopper and the release mechanism. The next Shacknet meeting on the 20th September is going to be a good one.

I now have to go and lay a little wooden floor in our attic where my work area is and then I can get on to working on some of these projects in more comfort than a bare floor.

Richard

admin Personal

Yesterday I attended Barcamp Barnsley. This was a one day event held at the Digital Media Centre in Barnsley, close to the town centre.

The event ran from 9.30am to around 6pm. The event attracted around 60 delegates from around the Yorkshire area as well as from further afield including the North East. I’m sure that the exceptional weather for the day was mainly to blame for the less than expected numbers with the pull of family and BBQ keeping people at home. They don’t know what they missed!

The Digital Media Centre is modern and stylish and was an excellent choice of venue for the day and was suited to the number of delegates that attended and could have easily coped with many more. Parking is available next to the building and was free for the weekend which was a great bonus. Refreshments were available throughout the day with pastries and muffins available for breakfast and afternoon tea and pizza for lunch. I liked the fact that there was tea, coffee and bottles of water available all day to just go and pick up.

The day started off looking as though there were not going to be many sessions to choose from as it appeared that for quite a few of the attendees it was their first attendance at a Barcamp and were unsure of what to expect. The board started to fill up and the sessions started.

I attended at least 6 sessions ranging from JQuery to protecting intellectual property to what to expect in a job interview. Other enjoyable sessions included coding standards and how to write an API.

I always come away from a Barcamp with some new knowledge, friends and ever so much more enthusiasm. Barcamp Barnsley did not disappoint and the Powerpoint Karaoke for the last session was as funny as ever. @marcjohnson and @jagusti did a great presentation for the Ikea Kitchen Build (but no one will ever live up to the presentation for this given by @KianRyan at #bcman2)

I didn’t make a presentation this time but I have one planned for my next Barcamp.

Unfortunately I can’t make the Barcamp Leeds next week but I will be at #bcblackpool and I look forward to helping out with the next Sheffield event. I also understand that plans are afoot for a Barcamp Bradford later in the year.

For anyone who has never attended a Barcamp I cannot recommend doing so more highly. They are experiences never to be missed and I hope to attend many more.

admin Barcamp Barcamp, barnsley