Knife Throwing at the C4DI Developer Meetup

OK, so we didn't actually throw any knives. Because if we had I think that people would have died. Those knives were sharp, really, really, sharp. Jon was running his finger over the blades and saying how sharp they felt. I reckoned I'd make that judgement just by watching him....

Some people regard cooking is an art form (as opposed to something you do when you feel a bit peckish). The company CuttingEdgeKnives sell knives to such people. If you want the best tools for the job, these are the business. They are hand crafted in Japan and really look and feel the part. 

You might be wondering what they have to do with software development.  Well, tonight at C4DI James Young, Creative Director from Offroadcode was explaining how diversifying into luxury knives had paid dividends for the website development business. It's all very well making Content Management System (CMS) based sites for companies that sell stuff, it's quite another thing to be putting stuff in boxes and selling it via a CMS powered site of your own.

James made some very valid points as he described the trajectory from an initial investment in a box full of knives to successful niche business. Some points from his talk that I think make a lot of sense if you're selling things:

• If you want to use Google and Facebook to promote your products this is really, really tricky to get right. Get in some appropriate expertise if you are going to do this. 
• Competitions and paid advertising don't work as well as you might expect, but giving samples to influencers and reviewers does. 
• Writing good editorial copy (and regularly updating it) will help sell your product.
• If your customers need to think a while about a purchase give them time to do this by ensuring your shopping carts take a very long time to expire.
• Address customer concerns about a purchase directly and at the point where they are making the transaction. 
• Ask your customers "Did we nearly lose your business?" to find out what might be stopping others from parting with their cash.

The talk left me thinking that setting up a niche business like this is not a bad idea, and it gives you a lot of credibility. If someone is about to hire you to build them a site that helps sell stuff, it is useful to be able to show that you have built a site that works for you. 

All in all a great talk, followed by Pete Duncanson, Founder and MD of Offroadcode, who talked about the fun you can have when using Content Management Systems (CMS) to build web sites for clients.  A CMS system provides a friendly interface that lets a company edit their product range, prices, special offers etc and generates a web site that their customers can interact with.  All the product details are held in a database and the CMS is customised for the business needs of the particular client company. Offroadcode use Umbraco, which is a system I've heard good things about and seems to work very well. 

Pete gave a very good exploration of the psychology of dealing with clients who take your lovely web design and then subvert it to the point where you aren't proud of having made it any more. He explained how and why this happens and offered a lot of human and technical tips to make sure that the integrity of your design is preserved as long as possible. Some points he made include:

• Plan for expansion. If the client swears that there will never be more than three of something, plan for an infinite number. If they promise that the number of items on a page will always be small, add paging anyway. This is not because clients tell fibs, or are silly, it is just that business needs change over the lifetime of the site, and the operators of the system might not be the people that gave you these design assurances.
• Add pickers. Letting the operator enter an item directly is nice enough, but if they can pick one from a list, and then go back and fetch that item again, then they will thank you when they have to add the "Christmas Special Offer" again next year.
• Constrain as much as possible, but in a constructive way. You don't want huge images on sites that the client creates, but just refusing to upload them will cause offence and lead to support calls. Much better to resize and then cache the image so that you can send out appropriately sized pictures when your system serves out the web pages. 
• Use sensible names and be consistent about them. If you have a field called "Page Header" which is the header for one of your pages, use the same name throughout. 

This is all good, solid advice which is not a million miles away from what we tell our students on the Software Development modules. And it was all presented in a very entertaining way. Great stuff and a most enjoyable evening.

If you are not coming along to C4DI events, you are missing out. All the events are free and open to anyone, including Hull students who really, really should come along. 

The next C4DI event is the June hardware meetup. You can sign up here. 

The next C4DI develoepr meetup is also in June. Sign up here. 

C4DI and Bald Secret Agents. And wedding lights.

We had our third hardware group meetup at C4DI this week. A bunch of plucky souls turned up to develop some software to help secret agents who have no hair. No, really. You can find the notes here if you want to have a go yourself. 

I took along a few of my wedding lights to show folk how they work. You can see them under construction above. The next meetup will be in a month or so.  I'm presently writing up a document that covers exactly how they work, which you might find useful if you ever want to create remote controlled stuff.

C4DI Accelerator Program Launched

I got this slide from Jon's deck today. I hope he won't mind...

Today Robert and I went down to C4DI in Hull to see the start of something big, the launch of the C4DI accelerator program. An accelerator program is a way of making ideas real. Take a good idea, a bunch of folks that want to run with it, add in some mentoring and a ton of hard work and you should end up with a strong pitch that will get you on the road to great things. 

C4DI have partnered with PwC who will be supporting the enterprise, along with Handlesbanken, Campaign Monitor, FreeAgent and Ebuyer. 

The principle is that you get funding, a place to work and support and mentoring in exchange for a chunk of your action, on the basis that any percentage of something is better than 100% of nothing.

Selection starts in October this year, with the first teams in place by February 2015. Then, later in the year they will hold the final pitches and demo day. There's space for 8 teams, each of which will get up to 16K of  seed investment and 16K of match funding to keep them going over the 90 day incubation period. (I stole all these facts from Jon's presentation - go there if you want more details and a picture of a dog dressed as a horse). 

This is such wonderful stuff. I would so love it if some of our graduating students took that amazing idea they don't know what to do with, and ran it through the C4DI accelerator.

C4DI Hardware Meetup - With Nerf Guns

Lots of Industry

Tonight was our second hardware meetup at C4DI. I knew that things were going to go well when I arrived to find everyone had already set up and was building stuff and making it do things without us needing to do anything. Peter was in charge of the exercise tonight (you can find his lab here) and he had made really good use of the flex sensor in the SparkFun Redboard Kit to create a shooting game that you can play with Nerf guns. Which he had thoughtfully provided too....

Everyone had great fun building up the circuit, getting the software working and playing with the result. The lab was great because it shows how you can create a fully formed solution (a shooting game where you have a few seconds to hit the target three times) based on this technology. 

No Cows were harmed in the making of this game

Peter had even provided a bunch of 3D printed parts that support the flex sensor target, and some cows (taken from milk cartons) to use as targets. 

March C4DI You Really Should Be

David Gilson and Jon Moss, and a Media Centre

I really like the "Your Really Should Be" events at C4DI. And so do lots of other people it seems. The place was packed.

There were four speakers, starting with David Gilson who took as his stating point "You really should be looking at XBMC" (or Xbox Media Centre) to use its full title. XBMC is a media client that runs on most anything, from Raspberry Pi upwards and lets you spread media around your house. You can even start watching a movie downstairs, move upstairs and continue from exactly where you left off. You can integrate it with other media tools such as BBC iPlayer and replace shelves full of DVDs with a single mass storage server tucked behind the TV.  David took us through configuration and usage scenarios and had even brought along a Ouya video game console which he also uses as a media centre device. 

Chris Gooding - Telling us all to train our replacements

Next up was Chris Gooding.  He is definitely a man after my own heart. I've always thought of programmers as "Creatively Lazy" people. We will work surprisingly hard to find solutions that we convince ourselves will save time and effort in the long run. Chris argued for taking this to the next level. Rather than programming computers to do things for us, why not program people? He reckoned you really should be training your replacement. If you spend your time showing other folks how to do your job they can pitch in and do your work for you. And if your boss does the same thing (and they should) then this will result in expertise trickling down the workforce and making it easier to keep all the skills inside the company. Nice idea.

Jason Taylor. The text on the screen says "Take Risks, Throw Darts, Make Rubbish, Surprise Yourself". Amen.

Jason Taylor was next. He reckons that we should play more. Jason comes from an arts and product design background and gave a great talk about the benefits of just playing with stuff. I agree. Recently I've had a lot of fun playing with things just to see if I could make them do stuff. Hitting a specification and making the correct deliverable is all very well, but sometimes there is nothing nicer than just fiddling around with bits and bobs. I reckon this is particularly true of game development. Some of my best gameplay ideas have come from just starting with a few things on the screen, getting them moving and seeing what happens next. 

Mike Clarke on the automation trail.

Finally Mike Clarke gave us another slant on the "creatively lazy" aspect of developers. But he took the perspective that rather than training people we should be making every use of the tools that are available to us.

Rather than perform actions we should create scripts that do them automatically. This has two happy outcomes. One is that you can do the task a second time very easily. The other is that you now have a documentation of that task. If you start out with this approach when you begin to do a job it will really pay off further down the tracks. I heartily agree with this way of working. It is very often the case that you find yourself repeating something that you thought you'd only have to do once. If you've built that into an automated action you can repeat it very easily. 

Then, right at the end of the session we had our first ever C4DI rap. Alan O'Donohoe gave a pitch perfect (if you can do that in rap) rendition of why you should be engaging with technology in general and Rasperry Pi in particular. 

All in all a great evening, and as usual I left with a whole bunch of ideas.

John Connelly Talks Hull City Plan

Today we had a Rather Useful Seminar from John Connelly of C4DI. He came along and told us about the exciting developments centered around the Hull City Plan. I wish more students had been around to hear all about it. As it is, there are lots of interesting things coming along soon, including a "Three Thing Thing" application development hackathon that we are going to run based on data that the City Plan is making available. 

I reckon everyone who is interested in getting and using data from the area should sign up and get involved. There are lots of problems that are well worthy of an attack based on big data and novel solutions. You can sign up to be kept informed of the plans here. 

Arduino Fun and Games at C4DI

We had some great fun at C4DI tonight. We were all playing with Arduinos and trying to get lights flashing, make strange buzzing noises (with a little sounder that is part of the kit) and then reading buttons and reacting to input.

C4DI turns out to be a great environment to do this kind of thing. I'm really grateful to them for letting us have access to such a well set up area. It is a great place to do little sessions like this.

I think the mood of the night was best summed up by one chap who had come along to take part. We'd given him one of the loan kits to work with and at the end of the session he handed it back in again because on the strength of the evening he was going to get a device of his own.  

The next session will be on Thursday 3rd of April at the same time, same place. I'll bring along a Mars Bar for the best thing that anyone has made. The fun will start at 6:00 with setup/show and tell, and then we'll begin the practical stuff at 6:30. 

Keep an eye on the Hull Digital Meetup calendar to register for the event. If you want to have a go at the labs you can find all the notes here. 

Developer Meetup at C4DI

Last night we had a Developer Meetup at C4DI. I really like these, they give you a chance to find out what other folks do with their computers. 

First up was Jon Polling, speaking on behalf of the Ruby programming language. I didn't know much about Ruby, but I know quite a bit more now. It looks like a great way to build applications, particularly the way that you can reuse code by importing Ruby "gems" that have been written by other folk. It looks like it would be perfect for writing server based stuff, although there are also toolkits for Android and ios. The syntax of the language looks interesting too, the way that you can integrate frameworks was very impressive. For me personally it looks like a solution to a problem I don't have at the moment, but if I ever have to write a hosted solution I'll be taking a closer look. 

Next up was Steve Bowman talking about Continuous Integration. This was another very interesting talk. To understand what it was about you have to first think about how people write software.

If there are several people working together they will have central code repository which holds the latest version of all the code being written. If Ethel wants to work on the menu system she will check out the code for that module, make some changes, test them, and then check her code back in again.

Every now and then a complete new version of the system is built from the code and tested. Sometimes this build process or one of the tests will fail and "break the build". Breaking the build by checking in dodgy code is seen as a bad thing, and usually involves the guilty person having to buy everyone donuts for the next week.

The problem with this model is that there can be quite a delay between the breaking changes being checked in and the fault being detected. If you only build a new version every day or so it can take a while to notice that something is broken and if there have been a large number of changes in that time it can take a while to figure out the cause of the problem. 

Continuous integration involves you having a build server which is constantly scanning your code base for changes, rebuilding your solution and testing each time new content arrives. Faulty code is detected very quickly, the person checking in the faulty code (along with the rest of the team) will get an error report within minutes.

Steve gave a demonstration of the system in action, and explained that the build server doesn't have to be one of your own computers, you can actually do all your building in the cloud by renting some space and spinning your own build server there. This also allows the build process to scale if you have a very large system and lots of developers.

Apparently people like Google, Amazon and Facebook do this kind of thing a lot. It is common practice to create and even deploy their latest code with bits of the user interface "switched off". Then, when all your tests in the field turn out OK you can switch on the new features. 

You can get started with Continuous Integration for free. Steve recommended the TeamCity platform which is free for up to 20 projects. He also made the point that the approach works very well even for an individual developer. It looks very interesting, I think I'll have a go with this. 

The third talk of the evening was by John Connolly. This was all about the awesome work that is going on between C4DI and Hull City Council. For me this was a follow on from a Meetup in 2012 when Adam Jennison and Benjamin Welby talked about plans to make available the huge amounts of data held by the council. It seems that things have moved on a bit since them. C4DI and the Council are now working together on the "City Engine" which will provide a central point of access to all this lovely data. We are so going to have to run some hackathons with this stuff, stay tuned for a proper Three Thing Thing event built around making the most of open data.

Finally Mike said a quick word about our Hardware Meetup next week. We are going to be firing up some Arduinos and seeing what we can do with them. Stay tuned for more details.

To me this all looks like the "Perfect Storm of Fun". We've got C4DI and Platform Expo providing a great environment for startups from games to data mining. We've got Hull City of Culture in 2017 to aim at, with the potential for all kinds of interesting things, and we've got the council making available tons of data to that can be combined to make ground breaking applications and services. Truly a very interesting time to be in Hull. 

Tech@Hull Launch Event

Andre Hitchman is one of our second year students. With some big ideas. One of them is Tech@Hull. He launched it this evening at C4DI. Tech@Hull aims to bring students and business together to encourage entrepreneurship and innovation. Which are things that I'm quite keen on too.

The launch event was great, plenty of people, food, drink and discussion. Jon Moss of C4DI urged us all to get out of our comfort zone and go and talk to other folks, something I've always been spectacularly bad at, but I did my best.

If you are a student in Hull you'd be bonkers to miss out on this opportunity. Tech@Hull will be running lots of events where local developers and students can meet up, learn from each other and make plans together. You must, must, must be involved in this. 

Andre has set up a web site for the group. It's under construction at the moment but you can sign up for news of when it goes live here. 

Hardware at C4DI

Robin talks radio

Tonight we had our first "proper" Hardware meetup at the C4DI. There were talks from Robin and Mike about radio hardware and one from Robert about robots. With added robot. And I stood up and waved some flashing lights around and talked about our upcoming Arduino sessions. Very, very interesting.

The first two talks, about radio communications, were amazing. It was all about the challenge of using tiny amounts of power to send signals huge distances and of designing and refining analogue circuits.

Analogue electronics has always seemed like a kind of magic to me. I'm very happy with digital signals, where things are either on or off. But analogue signals are all about signals that can take any value. The good news is that the signals obey a bunch of laws, and we can use this to build circuits that process analogue inputs in particular ways. I'm used to writing instructions for programs that tell them what to do with data that comes in. Analogue circuit design is programming with hardware. You use your maths and physics knowledge to come up with component configurations and values that should work. Then you spend ages tweaking the imperfect physical realization of your design until it does what you want.

Robin and Mike described the challenges, but also the deep satisfaction that you can get from contacting people in distant countries using hardware that you designed and made yourself. And this technology also lets you communicate when you can't get any signal bars on your shiny smartphone. 

Robert then took another hardware tack. He'd brought along a robot which contained around 34 lines of program code. Not a lot perhaps, but enough to make it navigate round the room avoiding obstacles. It even backed up slowly (with appropriate warning beeper) if things got too close for comfort. Robert did a great job of explaining how what appeared to be complex behavior was actually very simple from a programming point of view. 

Finally I got up and talked about our plans for future developments. We thought it might be fun to do some Arduino sessions getting to grips with programming the device, and I suggested that the Sparkfun RedBoard Starter kit would be a good basis for our work. Then something amazing happened, Ross Hamilton, C4DI regular and all round good egg, offered to sponsor our sessions to the tune of 10 RedBoard kits. This means that although it would be useful for you to have your own hardware, at a reasonable cost of 36 pounds each (less than the price of a video game) now you don't need to. I've set up a special part of this site  where you can sign up for more information, and I'll post any materials that we produce up there as well. 

Hardware Group at C4DI

Tonight we had our first meeting of the new C4DI hardware group. There seem to be lots of peple who are keen on getting to grips with hardware and embedded systems, with interest in Raspberry Pi, Arduino and Gadgeteer to name a few. I took along some toys, as had other folks. Above you can see the insides of my Tagomatic device, along with some pinball machine related shenanigans which includes using an Arduino to capture messages inside the pinball table circuitry and some coils of electro-luminescent wire. That lights up and looks really cool. 

Stay tuned for details of future events, this looks like it is going to be great fun, and it's not too late to sign up over at the meetup page for C4DI.

Retro Fun at C4DI

Tonight it was time for some Retro Fun at C4DI. Nothing on the agenda as such, just bring along your retro gear and be prepared to tell its story. We had some great stuff turn up, including a laser disk system and a Theramin.

Peter had brought the Apple II (by the way, the missing key is the | key) and a Palm Pilot. Ian brought the Sinclair Scientific calculator and I brought the hand cranked calculator. (did you know that people that used these were actually called computers?).

You can play "How many of these did you own?" here. I had two, and I really, really wanted an Apple Newton....

It was very interesting to see just what people had brought. There were Sinclair Spectrums, Walkmen (Walkmans?), Amstrad Portable Computers and all kinds of tech. It is sobering to reflect that these were all state of the art in their time, and that the iPhone that you adore so much is destined to become just as retro as these gadgets in a few years time. 

Thanks to Jon for setting it up. The next meeting of the Hull Digital is Thursday 16th January, when they are having the first Hardware Meetup, which should be very interesting. 

C4DI Retro Hardware Meetup

C4DI are having their first meetup of the new year next week. The subject of the meeting is "retro technology". We have been invited to take along something old that is involved with technology. Time for a trip up into the loft methinks. 

Fiddling with Hardware at C4DI

Jon Moss gets things started.

We had a great evening at the C4DI tonight. It was another of the “You Really Should Be” events and just to make it even more interesting I was giving one of the presentations. But first we had Jon Moss, making the point that “You Really Should Be speaking at events”. He made a great case for talking in public, not least because it is fun once you get going. He also made the very good point that the aim of a presentation is to get your audience to do something and what this is should be set out and reinforced at the beginning and the end of your presentation, when the audience is most engaged.

My Audience. Thanks for the applause.

Then it was my turn. My topic was “You Really Should be Fiddling with Hardware”, and I’d brought along some hardware that I’d fiddled with, including coloured lights that can be controlled over Bluetooth from my Windows Phone. Everything worked, eventually, and folks clapped at the end, which is always nice. You can find the slides from the presentation here.

Next up was John Polling who reckoned “You really should be working on a side project”. By side project John means something which takes you into new areas and helps you develop your skills. I like the sound of this. I’ve always found that the technical things that I’m not really supposed to be doing are the ones that I find the most interesting at any given time. By formalising this and giving an outlet for folks who want to make something different you can get happier developers and some surprisingly useful outcomes.

Finally we had Steve Fewster. who rounded things off with “You really should be - developing apps for the ‘Global Cloud Accounting’ community”. I’m not that familiar with accounting, but I do know about the cloud and how lots of business process is now moving into it. Steve, who is in the business of providing tools and services that add value for cloud users, took the line that “There’s gold in them thar hills”. In other words, the market is just getting going for people who want to bolt their ideas onto cloud based accounting systems. The system makers are keen to encourage an app infrastructure and so they make it easy to create apps and there is lots of scope for neat ideas to become the next big thing.

All in all, a very thought provoking and enjoyable evening. Thanks to C4DI for putting it together.

You Really Should Be Fiddling with Hardware

Find out what you can do with this, and how much it costs, at the session next week.

In an attempt to stop myself just buying components and start myself actually doing something with them, I’m doing a session at the next C4DI “You really should be..” event.

I’m going to be talking about the joys of making programs that talk to hardware, and just how easy and cheap it is to get started. Expect flashing lights.

The session starts at 6:00 pm on Thursday 12th of December. It’s at the C4DI in The Fruit Market. You can sign up here.

Data, Insight and Customer Weirdness at C4DI

Andy points out his achievements, including coming up with the slogan “8 out of 10 cats…”

We are all surrounded by data which is harvested, refined and bought and sold just like any other cash crop. In the C4DI meeting tonight two excellent talks showed how this “big data” can be used to deliver useful outcomes, but how you also need to be aware of the human context behind the numbers.

First up was Andy Parkinson who now works for Kingston Communications as their Head of Insight and Analytics. He used to work for Hull City Council and gave a great description of how the council has been using the data it collects to refine and target services to make them more efficient. He showed how we can all be clustered into groups and how this helps to target resources. It seems that everybody is unique, but we all mange to be unique in a fairly structured way. And when you can characterise and map this, you can work out where you need to target what you are doing with your resources.

Having told us of the power of all this analysis, he then went on to mention that people can also behave in untoward and unpredictable ways that don’t fit their profile, or just act on “auto-pilot”. This reminded me a lot of my favourite maxim of the moment “Plans are useless, Planning is crucial”. By all means analyse your data and take actions based on it. But be well aware that you will always have to deal with some weirdness around the edges and behaviours that arrive “built in” to people. Of course, if you can harness these you can get some really big wins. So don’t be afraid to try stuff that targets the “automatic self”.

Next we had a talk from Nick Thompson who is Managing Director of Hull City and was formerly Director of Consumer Services with Kingston Communications. Nick took what Andy said and added an even stronger human dimension. By breaking down the Hull City fanbase into sections and analysing their motivations and actions he provided a lovely example of how data can tell you some useful things, but that you need to understand what drives the people in your numbers and how they behave.

It turns out that the spending habits of the fans seem to follow the well established “80 – 20” law, which in Hull City terms means that that 80% of the income of the club comes from around 20% of the fans. And these are not necessarily the most fanatical ones, who see their passion for the club transcending things like replica shirts and other merchandise. Very interesting.

Nick make the point that you can make decisions based on the data, but this must always be done in the light of the emotional attachments and drivers of the people themselves. What made it all the more striking was that Nick has obviously been a huge fan of the club for a very long time, and presumably fits himself into one of his categories as well.

The talks fitted together really well and made for a terrific evening.

3D Printing Fun at C4di

Well, that was fun. Peter, David, Helen, Paul and myself all got together to talk about 3D printing and scanning at C4di. I took along Una, my Ultimaker printer, David, Helen and Paul took along their 3D scanner and MakerBot printer and Peter showed off his “Richmond” printer.

Within no time the place was full of the smell of hot plastic and the sound of machines whirring away. We had a huge audience (in that there were lots of people, not that they were giants) and they seemed to really enjoy finding out about 3D printing. I started things rolling, with a quick zoom through my presentation about how I got into making things and then Peter followed up with a talk about how he came to design and build his own 3D printer from scratch. As you do.

Finally David rounded off with a description of how 3D printing and scanning technology is being used in his business and how it will undoubtedly develop in the future. Helen and Paul were showing off their modelling and scanning skills and the whole thing ended with lots of happy people wandering round, taking a look at the technology and getting to grips with it. Without getting their hands burned.

Thanks to Jon Moss for setting up the session and C4di for hosting it.

C4DI Meetup - Building a legacy

Today I went along to another C4DI meetup. This one was presented by Andy Whale, who is director of engineering at Kingston Communications. For those of you unlucky enough not to live in the Hull area, you might not know that we have our own local phone company. This makes it unique in the UK.

When every other regional telephone company was wound into a nationalised service many years ago, for some strange accounting reason Hull got left out, and it has functioned independently ever since. This means that we had innovations like untimed local calls for years before anyone else, and it also means that Hull phone boxes are painted white in colour. 

Andy was talking of his trajectory from British Telecoms engineer to being the man charged with rolling out Lightstream, one of the most ambitious networking projects in the world. There is a lot of talk today about putting the awesome speed of fibre optic based networking into people’s houses, but it turns out that there are two ways to do this.  One is to run an optical fibre to a box in each street and then use wire for the last part. The other is to actually put optical fibre into the house. The first is comparatively easy. The second is much more challenging. It is also the best way and how Lightstream is being deployed.

Once you have a continuous stream of glass fibre from the exchange to the house you can unleash completely staggering amounts of bandwidth, should you ever need to. The glass fibre itself will last pretty much for ever and is not prone to degrading over time. The devices that put signals onto the fibre are improving every year so the whole thing is future proof.

Of course, the snag is that the effort to get the glass out there is considerable. Andy spoke of the difficulties in getting connections through ancient conduits and under and over roads. He also made the point that a successful engineer must also work with a certain amount of cunning and faith in themselves and their people to get the happy ending that everyone wants. KC has rolled out several thousand installations of fibre, developed new techniques, patented new technologies and changed the lives of lots computer users.

The legacy that Andy is building will keep on changing lives for as long as we keep on thinking of new ways to use the highly reliable, expandable performance of the network infrastructure that is being put in place. I feel proud of being in a city where this is happening.

Before Andy left British Telecom he was assailed with warnings of how this kind of widespread optical fibre deployment was impossible and probably unnecessary. And now it is here, he is making it work and people are loving it. One person at the meeting made the point that if they could bring bandwidth like this to his premises, he would move his business to Hull to take advantage of it. The question on everyone’s lips (mine included) was “When can I get Lightstream to my house?”.

Andy brought along some props, including old style cabling. This is how it used to be.

This is where it is going. Still coloured connections, but with thousands, perhaps millions of times the capacity.

The government is pumping money into banks to try and get the economy going. This would seem to be changing the lives of a few bankers, making them slightly richer. Also some house prices in Surrey are going up a bit. It makes me really cross to think that projects like this are not being funded and rolled out everywhere in the UK. This is life changing technology which will be used well into the future and bring about things we can’t even imagine just now.

Andy and his team have shown that it can be done. Thanks to him for great talk that really brought out how engineers can directly change lives.

You really should go to “Your Really Should” events at C4DI

Simon Hudson (left) and Jon Moss, with a Lumia 1020 in the middle..

I seem to be spending  a fair bit of time at C4DI at the moment. Tonight I was there for the first of their “You really should be..” events. The format is simple enough. Take the words “Your really should be..” and put them in front of something that you can talk about for fifteen minutes. Then take questions and repeat twice. It works really well, generating discussion and interesting things to do in equal measure. And the first topic was right up my street, when Simon Hudson spoke on “You Really Should Be giving a Windows phone a try”. Absolutely.

Simon gave a great description of what makes Windows Phone is such a nice platform, starting with some impressive sales figures (now phone platform number three) and moving on to the neat and useful things you can do with the device. Of course, I don’t need convincing of any of this, but it was lovely to hear someone else voice the same opinions and give some strong context about how Windows Phone is proving so useful to them. Highlights were Voice SMS, Live Tiles and Rooms. You can find Simon’s presentation here. For me the killer fact was that his daughter was into Windows Phone first and he got his after her.

Next up was David Gilson: “You Really Should Be buying Bitcoins!”. Bitcoins are “maths made money” in that the actual currency is created as a series of mathematical proofs, each of which identifies a particular coin. Coins are mined by computers that grind through calculations to generate the proofs which are assigned to owners.

When you buy a bitcoin or use part of it to pay for something the transaction is stored as part of the bitcoin infrastructure in a series of tamperproof blocks. You can use bitcoins to pay for stuff and you can buy them and keep them in your digital wallet. There are 21Million possible Bitcoins out there, and they will get both harder to mine and more valuable over time. At the moment around half the Bitcoins have been “mined” and people are investing in ever more powerful systems to find more. The idea is to do away with the present volatile paper based currency systems and replace them with something clean and mathematically sound.

As you might expect, the world of finance is looking a little askance at this attempt to make an end run around the systems that have made, and are keeping them rich. Bitcoins, with their untraceable ownership and easy electronic transfer, are also also ripe for use by various unsavoury enterprises. Me, I’ll be keeping my cash in traditional forms for the time being, but David did make a very compelling case for “having a flutter” on Bitcoins.

Finally Jon Moss rounded off a very enjoyable evening with a session called “You Really Should Be using Textexpander”. The TextExpander program installs on your Mac and allows you to create and manage keyboard shortcuts to vastly improve your speed when creating documents. Rather than typing “From the pen of the desk of Rob Miles” at the end of each email I could assign that to ESIG or some other combination of letters and numbers. TextExpander monitors your keyboard and then inserts the expanded version when it sees the shortcut.

That’s nice enough, but there is a lot more besides. You can create template documents, for example meeting minutes or email responses and have them all created automagically. If you find yourself typing the same phrase, or building the same document, time after time then this system would save you a lot of work.

It is a pity that the program is only available on Mac (although it is available across all the Apple platforms and works really well on iPhone and iPad). If you fancy having a go at this and are using a Windows PC Jon reckoned that PhraseExpress is your best bet.

It was an absolutely great evening. And when I went out of the office I was able to grab a nice picture of The Deep again.

C4DI have set up a web site:

http://www.youreallyshouldbe.com/

You really should be keeping an eye on it.

Update on 2013-08-28 12:27 by Rob

You can find David's Bitcoin slides here and a video of his talk here.