Well, what can I say, the day didn’t get off to the best start when  our train to Liverpool was cancelled. This resulted in a half hour wait and a full train to Manchester with a quick jog between platforms at Piccadilly station.

Barcamp Liverpool was taking place at DoEs Liverpool. The event has been run over two days, Friday 18th and Saturday 19th november.  Saturday had a good turn out with about 40-50 people in attendance.

I was lucky  in that @martinwass had been the day before so knew the location of the event.

Once inside, the location provided 3 quite large spaces for talks and also a chill out area where tea, coffee and snacks were available.

Free WiFi was available but it was quite slow.  A nice touch was power strips being laid out between seating so that no one was fighting for the available power sockets.

Sessions were set to 20 minutes each with 10 minutes between sessions. In reality it turned out that all the sessions I went to ended up taking the whole 30 minutes with some actually running over.

The morning simply zipped along, moving from one session to another. The most outstanding talk of the morning was from @teknoteacher about enthusing kids about programming/development. The fact that programming is no longer taught at school, like it was when I was at school (on the BBC computers), is just tragic and something should be done about it. Alan and others, including the BBC, are working towards getting kids interested in programming and looking to get this back in the school curriculum.

Lunch was kindly supplied by the sponsors and gave us all a bit of time to chill out, have a drink and a bite to eat and catch up on emails.

The first session I attended after lucnh was looking at using RFID with your computer or Arduino. I now want to get a reader for my Arduino and start tracking the cat coming in and out of the house. Should be a doddle with the Twitter API for Arduino )

The afternoon continued along the Arduino route with a game based on RFID using wav files running over an Arduino.

Automatic testing with Selenium  was next on the list. Selenium allows you to script the testing of browser applications. It also allows you to control remote browsers. Looks like something I’ll have to have a play with when testing my browser apps. I like that it supports quite a number of languages and IDE.

In conclusion, this was a great event and well worth the trip across the hills. Thanks to the organisers for a great day. Hope to see you again for the next one.

I have thought for a long time that an on-line session wall application for Barcamps would be a great idea. I know other people have also thought this but up to now I don’t know of one actually being used. Here are my ideas on what I think would be needed to make this a viable working system. Let me know what you think.

The application would be hosted on the Barcamp web site.  Alternatively a central Barcamp site could be created where the organisors of a Barcamp could set up their event and then allow registered users of the site post sessions for that event. The benefit of having all the events registered on a single site is that participants would only need to register on a single site rather than for each Barcamp.

The organiser of the event would set up the start and finish dates/times for the event along with information on how long the sessions are to take and when breaks would be. The system would then calculate the wall based on this information.

The organisor would also be able to dictate at what times the session board would be available for participants to post sessions. This would stop people being able to post sessions ahead of time.

Organisors would have overall administration of the event session wall to be able to move a session on the board or to remove a session. Moving a session would result in a notification being sent to the person that created the session to let them know that the session has been moved and give them the ability to accept the change or move it to another session slot or to remove the session altogether.

Participants would register on the site. Participants would be asked to register before the event so that they don’t have to sign up on the day. The sign-up address would not be accessible from any menu or links on the site, the link would come in an email to the participent. The reasoning for not publishing the address is to avoid just anyone signing up for the site.

Once a participant is registered on the site they can then post sessions that they would like to host and to sign-up for any sessions that they are interested in.

Registered participants would be notified of any new sessions that are posted, moved or removed.

Registered participants would also be sent notifications a few minutes before a sessions that they have signed up for is about to start.

One of the things I have experienced at Barcamps is that there are often session times when there are multiple sessions that I would like to attend on at the same time. What the system would allow is for a participant to request a person hosting a session to see if they would be willing to move their sessions to a new time or if they would be willing to run a second session. The person hosting the session would be able to see the amount of interest in their session and either move or add a new session if the demand is there.

A participent is able to register their interest in a posted session. This will show the event organisers and the session host how much interest there is in the session. This information can be useful if the rooms that are available are quite small and there is a lot of interest, a change of session room may be in order.

Participants would also be encouraged to leave comments against a session to let others know what they thought of the session. The session host could also post links to any documents or information that was given in the presentation also.

There could also be a rating system so that participants could rate the session that they have attended. This could lead to an awards ceremoney at the end of the event for the most popular sessions.

Sessions would have tags associated with them which would allow participants to filter sessions that they may or may not be interested in.

The application need not be just web based but could also have mobile phone applications.

How about using the session wall application in a code retreat weekend as an example application to build?

As I have mentioned at the start, I know others have had the same idea of a session wall application and so this application may already be out there and available and may have a lot more functionality than I have mentioned in this post, however, do let me know what you think and if you have any other suggestions for this kind of application.

I look forward to hearing from you with your ideas and comments. Let’s see if we can make this happen.

Once again it was time to hit the coast and Barcamp Blackpool. Barcamp Blackpool is one of my favorite Barcamps and number 3 did not disappoint.

The day started off early picking up @martinwass and @richardathome for the drive from Sheffield. This proved to be a good run with hardly any traffic and we arrived in plenty of time to find parking close to the venue at the Casino in the Pleasure beach and to grab a Canadian Steak sandwich for breakfast.

The venue is quite large and provides 3 rooms for talks as well as a break out area and booth seating around the edge of the main room. The seating around the main room did sometimes cause distraction as people were talking and disturbing some of the speakers. Unfortunately this is only to be expected when you have a “public” area in one of the session areas. All-in-all though this was not too much of an issue.

After the initial greeting talk from @ruby_gem, the session board filled up pretty much straight away.

With regards to the session board, I had heard rumour that there would be an on-line board being tested out but there was no mention of this.

I think an on-line board is a great idea. I would like to see attendees being able to post their talks on the on-line board and also for me to be able to say that I would like to attend a talk and receive an email reminder 5 minutes before a session to remind me where I need to be. It would also be good to be notified of new sessions being added or moved. Another idea would be to be able to request a duplicate session, especially on the two day barcamps as sometimes there are times when two good talks are on at the same time. Anyway, I digress.

There wasn’t one time where I didn’d have a session to attend. Most of the sessions I attended seemed to be around software for kids and the teaching of IT/ICT in schools. Since I have two young daughters and I know that computing isn”t taught anymore like it was when I was at school, with hands-on programming, then I was interested to hear what peoples views were on this and what could be done to bring computing back in to schools to give an idea of programming rather than just using Microsoft Office products.

The best session of the day for me was a presentation on Game Maket (yoyogames.com). This is a system for making games for kids and was presented by a secondary school child. It was shown how easy it was to make a game using this system and home captiviating it could be and how it could keep the interest of children. My eldest daughter (8yo) has asked many times about being able to make her own games, like the ones she plays on the CBBC site. The day after Barcamp I was able to give her my Acer Netbook and she sat and read through the tutorial and made her first game, which she and her sister loved playing. It was able to keep her interest for a few hours whilst she read the tutorial and went at a pace that she could see new things very quickly.

A downside to the venue was the WiFi which only seemed to work in the main Beach room. I look forward to this being resolved for the next event. I like to be able to perform searches and tweet, etc whilst in a session.

Freebies were available a plenty including the great T-shirts and Blackpool rock. Of course, the best freebie for me personally was the free ebook download from O’Reilly which has got me started on my Microsoft Certification trail.

Throughout the day we were treated to impromptu science lessons from the Physics Busker. These little sessions were a gem and very entertaining, my favourite being the home made rockets on the promenade. These were made from old camera film containers, an Alcaseltzer and a little water. Much fun.

It was a pity that we were not able to stay for the evening festivities, but plan on doing so for the next event.

@ruby_gem, @biglesp and the team made Barcamp Blackpool 3 an awsome day and I’m looking forward to think next one and many more.

I used to be a Microsoft Certified Professional many years ago when the certifications were first introduced. I was certified in Windows 3.1. Yes, that’s how long ago it was.

I have been thinking about becoming certified again for quite a while and have been playing with Microsoft MVC3. This prompted me to finally take the plunge and I have now obtained a copy of the 70-515 self paced training book, thanks to a free book offer for O’Reilly that I picked up at Barcamp Blackpool 3 earlier this month.

I am hoping to gain more knowledge in web development using ASP.Net, C# and MVC.

The first exam that I am looking to take is 70-515. This will be the first of 4 exams that I need to take to get my Microsoft Certified Professional Developer 4 on Visual Studio 2010.

The exams for this certification are: -

Unfortunately I can’t afford at copy of Visual Studio Professional 2010 at the moment so I’m looking to complete the training using the free Express versions of the development tools. Since my company will not pay for certifications then I will be providing my own funding for the training resources and exams.

As I find bits of information and links I find useful I will add these to a new section on my site. This will be a location mainly for me to be able to store information and links that I have found and may be others will find the information of use too or be able to comment and provide additional information or links on any items.

In my job I’m fortunate enough to be able to travel all over the world. I work for a company called Gentrack which is based in Auckland, New Zealand. From time to time I have to travel to our head officer in Auckland, which is quite a trek but worth every minute.

Here is a list of a few things that I think are great to see or do in Auckland when I am in town.

• Go up the Sky Tower.
  You can pay to go up to the viewing platform or better still go for a meal in the revolving restaurant. The meals are not expensive (max $39 for a main) and not only do you get the views as you are eating ut you can also have access to the viewing platform too.
• Sky Tower Casino
  Whilst visiting the Sky Tower check out the casino. The casino is located in the Sky Tower building and is not small. Even if you don’t gamble, which I don’t, it’s worth taking a walk around just to take it all in.

• Visit Auckland Museum
  Auckland museum has to be one of the biggest I have ever been to. You can spend all day there.

• Auckland Zoo

• Museum of Transport and Technology
  MOTAT is really good if you like looking at old vehicles. There is plenty to do with some outside items also. Well worth a trip and if you want a full day out, the Zoo is a few minutes walk away so you can do both in the same day.

• Mount Eden
  Auckland is built on volcanoes and there is a great view from the top of this one to all parts of the city and the islands.

• Take a boat to Devonport

• Take the Link bus and travel around Auckland. There are a few little areas around Auckland that are worth visiting, like Parnell and Newmarket (good for shopping). Well worth taking a day and going round the different areas on the Link bus. The link bus travels around the CBD and is very cheap. As of Aug 2011 there are now 3 different link buses going to different parts of the city.

• Kelly Tarltons
  This is my most favourite aquarium in the world. It’s fantastic. This is a must see trip. A bus from the central bus station takes you to outside the door and if you’re feeling up to it you could actually walk it (warning: it is quite a way so could take a while, probably best to tget the bus).
• Queen Street.
  Queen street is the main shopping street in the Auckland CBD. Take a look after dark on a Friday or Saturday night and watch the guys with their modified cars driving up and down the road.
• Maritime museum.
  Located down by the Viaduct area you can see the history of the sea in this museum. You can also take a trip around the harbour on a small boat.
• Americas Cup
  Auckland was the base for the Americas cup for quite a few years and you can actually go out on one of the boats and be a crew member. This is really good fun and afterwards take in a meal in the Viaduct area.
• If you fancy a pint, the Shakespeare on Albert St is worth going to. It has it’s own brewery and you can see the equipment through the bar. The London Bar is good for Jazz on a Friday or Saturday night (sorry, this place is now a Thai restaurant). The Corner bar is a nice little bar at the bottom of High street. The Viaduct is the place for lots of restaurants and  fancy bars. O’Hagans is a nice little Irish bar serving good beer and food. If you’re interested in running then they hold a 5k fun run every Tuesday evening setting off at 6pm. I did this a few times band it was a lot of fun. Pay $7 to enter and get a free beer and there is a raffle afterwards too so you could win a bottle of wine or some running shoes, depending on what is on offer that week. I won some power gels to aid with running.

Auckland is a great city for walking around or for using public transport. To go further afield you could take organised trips which I’ve done a couple before including the Glow work caves and Rotorua and to the treaty house at Waitangi.  Rotorua is well worth seeing. Another trip that you can do is to Hobbiton. I haven’t yet done this but I may try this one out before the end of my current trip if I get a chance.

Wow!! What can I say. Barcamp Sheffield has been Fantastic!!!

Barcamp Sheffield was held for the first time at The Workstation in Sheffield along with space at the GistLab. Previous Barcamps and UnSheffield have been held at The Showroom. The Workstation is a 5 minute walk from the train station and so makes a very convenient location. There are plenty of places close by for food and beverages. The Rutland Arms (@RutlandArms) was the main location for evening sessions beverages and was conveniently part of the CAMRA beer festival weekend. Also in evidence for the weekend in The Workstation was a national gaming convention with some of the entrants being dressed in costume.

Both Saturday and Sunday were well attended with the session board filling up very quickly. Sessions ranged from Elevenses – Tea and Cake to CSI: Rogue SysAdmin. I gave a session on using the Balsamiq (@balsamiq) wireframing tool which I had also given recently at Sheffield GistMag.

The weather on Sunday being so good allowed for a session on Geocaching which had most of the Sunday attendees ferreting around in the bushes and art installments across the road from The Workstation, conveniently located between The Hubs (Sheffield Hallam University bar) and Spearmint Rhino. What were they really looking for in the bushes I ask myself?

I attended some interesting and informative talks throughout the weekend. The stand out sessions for me were an introduction to Mobile Development using Titanium by @TheWarpedCoder and Using TinyWeb for C# web development from @MartinRue.

The talks on gaming from Liam (@losvaive) and Claire (@kitation) were well received and in fact was so popular that it ran over time and took up a second session. Gaming talks were very popular this weekend.

An interesting session was had talking about Barcamps in general and looking at what the webdomain http://barcampers.org/ could be used for. My suggestion is to have a site where there is a list of Barcamp Events happening around the country as I’m sure I don’t hear about many of them.

As always it’s a great way to meet new people and to put faces to those twitter names that you follow.

Many thanks to Jag (@jagusti) and the team for putting on such an awsome weekend. Looking forward to the next one.

Yesterday we made the trip from Sheffield to the Digital Media Centre (DMC), Barnsley for the second Barcamp hosted at this venue. DMC is an excellent venue for the Barcamp with free parking right next to the building on Saturdays.

We started off with breakfast at the local Weatherspoons as we arrived a little early. I must admit that I was totally surprised to see some locals enjoying a pint of beer or two, before 9am. Breakfast was being served at DMC but I have to admit that I’m not a fan of Danish pastries so the full English was much appreciated before hand.

The turn out for the event was not what I expected. It appeared that many more tickets had been requested than the amount of people that attended. I do think that if you take a ticket then you should either turn up or give at least 24 hours notice that you won’t be turning up. There is a lot of effort and cost in putting together a Barcamp so please do let the organisers know if you can’t make it.

Ok, so my little rant over, back to more details of the day. The board started to fill up quickly with presentation ranging from photography to selling a project to a journalist. The first presentation I went to was about Time Travel. This was a fascinating talk and really did make you think about all the different angles as to how time travel could exist, including bending space time and wormholes.

I had to rush off before the end of the time travel presentation as I was presenting my Introduction to Arduino talk. When I walked in to the room there was already quite a number of people waiting and I hope that they all enjoyed the presentation as much as I enjoyed giving it. It’s always great to see people enthused by Arduino and to here about other peoples projects and experiences.

Lunch was quite a large number of Pizzas and I hope that people got to take home the left over Pizza as there was quite a number that went untouched, possibly because there was meant to be more people attending than actually turned up.

After lunch I attended a session on Geocaching. Geochaching is something that I have only recently gotten in to thanks to the Geeks in the Peaks event. Did you know that there are geocaches on the top of Everest and in the International Space Station. This was another great talk and afterwards a few of us set out to try and find a geocache that appeared to be just on the otherside of the car park. After about 20 minutes of searching where the co-ordinates were (and with some interest from the local constabulary driving by) we gave up on trying to find the cache. It appears that the co-ordinates were incorrect or as part of a wider puzzle cache. Still, much fun was had and I really recommend geo-caching for anyone.

My last session of the day was on robots and Artificial Intelligence, given by the same person that gave the talk on time travel. Again, a very enlightening presentation and very well put together with media clips to push home some of the points being made.

We ended up leaving a little early so we missed the lightening presentations and the powerpoint karaoke.

The event was very well put together in a great location and the venue is ideal. Thankfully there wasn’t any of those ice breaker sessions at the start. My only comment would be that there were no name tags which I alway like to see.

I look forward to the next Barcamp Barnsley with great anticipation. It’s well worth the trip.

So this last week I have been reading “Learn to Program” by Chrise Pine. I wanted to learn to program in Ruby and this book has been great so far. Very easy to read and very amusingly written. After being a developer for more than 20 years, the basics in this book I already know (or hope I do) but it has been invaluable in getting the basics of Ruby.

I have installed on my Vista Home laptop Ruby 1.9.2 and also an IDE called Geany. Geany is a great little IDE and I’m enjoying using it.

My first few programs in Ruby have been the simplist of program, such as prompting for you name to be entered and displaying it back to the user. I have also created a new class in a separate file and used require to pull it in to the main module. All very simple stuff as you can confirm. What I want to be able to do is to have a browser front end to call some Ruby script and to update a database such as MySQL.

This is all really fun learning new stuff like this and there will be more learning with creating the browser front end.

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.

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