Northen Stars at C4DI

A good sized audience

It would seem that the C4DI is taking up quite a large chunk of my life at the moment. Last week we had the awards ceremony, yesterday Jon Moss came and gave a Rather Useful Seminar and today I'm down at the Northern Stars. The idea behind the event was simple. Make a three minute pitch of your startup idea to an audience. Best one on the night wins an iPad. Twenty of the best pitches from events around the area win a slot in the grand final and a chance to go for top ten startups of the year. A great way to get your name out there and learn how to work an audience in 3 minutes.

Jon Polling pitches I'm In

Unfortunately I was in a student lab session when the event started (embedded development - great fun) so I didn't get to see all the presentations. I was sorry to miss the pitch from Arc Studios, especially when they told me that they had based the content on my Lectures in Rhyme. After pizza, and a really interesting discussion about technology and the area, the winner was announced as MrLista, the ultimate Wish List generator.

Now that's a good sign....

On the way out I spent some time trying to get a good picture of The Deep, which was looking very splendid in a high tide.

Carefully stitched....

There were a few of our First Year students amongst the crowd. I told them that I expected them to be pitching their ideas this time next year...

Jon Moss from C4DI at a Rather Useful Seminar

Jon Moss from C4DI came along today to give a Rather Useful Seminar. We had another great audience and I was really pleased to see so many First Year students turning up. I'd asked Jon to come and give some tips for success, and to talk about the new C4DI and what it means to our undergraduates.

Jon gave a fantastic talk, drawing on his experience of life to set out a really good agenda for success. I'm not going to steal the content of his entire talk (although it is tempting) but I did make notes of the ten important points that he made.  I hope you can read my handwriting.

The C4DI is entering a really exciting phase, with a new building and lots of local interest in startups and technology. It's going to provide a really great trajectory for students who want to stay in lovely Hull and build something great. The reason I can say that with confidence is that it has already done this.

Thanks again Jon for an excellent talk.

Hull and East Yorkshire Digital Awards at C4DI

Now, that's what I call a well set table....

I was very lucky to be invited along to the Hull and East Yorkshire Digital Awards tonight. Actually we went in mob-handed, with bunch of University folks and a whole heap of nominations for people who work in the same place I work.

Adam from Betajester on the big screen...

Adam from Betajester was up for one of the awards which was nice. He didn't quite end up winning it, kudos to him for making it to the glittering final though. We're well proud of you sir as we are of the folks from Lab on a Chip,  Seed Software, Arc software, Vertual and a host of others from the campus. You can find out more about the Hull University success here.

Rory Cellan-Jones announcing winners

We had the BBC Technical Correspondent along to run the show, accompanied by his boss, the chairman of the BBC, which was kind of awesome. It was unfortunate that Martha Lane-Stewart was unable to get to the event because she was unwell, it would have been lovely to have heard from her. But we had some great technical chat (favourite fun fact - a third of the optical fibre in England is in Hull - providing high speed data links to homes and businesses) a question and answer session and a quiz which our table very nearly won. If only I'd known that Linked-In was started before Myspace.....

Anyhoo, we staggered out into the night way past my bedtime and went home after an evening of good food and good company, awestruck but the new C4DI premises which hosted the event and were opened today.

I'm looking forward to taking a proper look around the new building sometime soon. In daylight. The future is going to be a very interesting place.

Hull Northern Stars Event on October 29th

In Hull we're really lucky to have the C4DI (or Centre for Digital Innovation). They will soon be moving into their spiffy new building and one of the first big events they are hosting is a heat of the Northern Stars initiative.

This aims to give innovators and entrepreneurs a platform where they can pitch their ideas. Each entry gets a three minute slot to make a splash. Best pitch of the night gets an iPad and a chance to move into the big league.

These events are great fun, both to watch and take part in. They are also the perfect place to meet up with fellow developers and backers and trade ideas and business cards. If you are first year who just wants to come along and find out what pitching is all about or a finalist who wants to find out if their idea is a good one you should sign up and take part. And if that wasn't enough incentive, they have free Pizza and Beer too.

I've already booked my ticket. You can get yours here.

Could you be a c4Di Intern?

The C4DI (Centre for Digital innovation) in Hull is looking for an intern to join their team and help business make the most of technology.

This would really suit a Computer Science person who want to branch out and maybe even start their own company along the way. It can happen.

You can find out more about the position here.

I've been racking my brains to try to work out why the new C4DI headquarters looks familiar. I've finally found the answer.

These are the living quarters for Stingray personnel from the iconic sixties TV series. This team of fearless aquanauts used a super submarine to fight evil underwater. Suddenly it all makes sense. The new C4DI HQ is right next to the docks......

NFire 1 3D Printer on Kickstarter

Alex from C4DI has recently launched his NFire 3D printer on Kickstarter. It's a good looking beast, as you can see. The ideas is that you can easily swap out components and print larger pieces or add a second extruder. The price is very competitive (particularly if you managed to snag one of the early bird offers) and it uses a very nice hot end (the bit that actually extrudes the filament.

Worth a look if you are in the market for a low cost and extensible device.

C4DI Startup Event

This overhead view of the new C4DI building was stolen from an awesome video by Jon Moss. Click through the image to view it.

We are really lucky to have C4DI in Hull. And it is going from strength to strength. It provides homes for new business, advice for existing ones and links nascent companies to investment.

As you can see above the new home for the C4DI is coming along a treat, and they've got some great events planned for the future.

On 30th July they are having an event aimed at startups. If you want to test the water with an idea you've been working on, find like minded folks who might want to go into business with you or just find out how C4DI can change your life (it's already done this for quite a few of our students) then you should come along.  Sign up here.

Docker at C4DI

After all of the shenanigans of the last few days I was probably not in the best mental shape to go along to the Developer Meetup at C4DI tonight. But I went along to meet the folks and hear about Docker. Adam Carlile works at Board Intelligence and uses Docker to build highly secure, discrete systems that generate confidential management reports.

Docker is especially useful to Adam because it provides a way of packaging up a particular configuration of machine into a "lump" of data which can then be transported and executed in a secure way on another device. It is essentially a highly portable virtual machine configuration, but with the advantage that the Docker container is very lightweight and can be layered in a way that makes it very easy to create and amend configurations.

If you like playing with operating systems, or have a need to distribute work in a secure and managed way, then Docker is well worth a look.

C4DI Hardware Meetup - You Should Come Along - Really

If you live in the Hull area and have any kind of interest in technology there's a very good chance you'd enjoy a C4DI hardware meetup. They are first Thursday of every month and we have a mix of folks who like playing with computers and hardware and stuff. This month we had a Raspberry Pis of various flavours (which sounds wrong but it's right), flashing lights, amazing embedded devices you can get for less than a fiver and some brilliant discussions amongst other things.

Keep an eye on the Hull Meetup site for the next one.

Hope and Glory Coffee at C4DI

Something different at C4DI tonight, with a visit from a bunch of folks from Hope&Glory coffee. I'm not much of a coffee aficionado myself, but number one wife is, and so we both headed out to find out about roasting and blending and whatnot.

Turns out that there is a lot more to this than I thought. Apparently coffee is second to oil as the most valuable commodity traded worldwide, it originated in Ethiopia and has been round the world since. It takes many years training to acquire the ability to properly discern different types of bean and there are only sixty or so people in the UK with the highest level of ability in this area. One of them is from Hope&Glory and we had a fascinating session where she showed off an iPhone controlled coffee roaster and talked about the business of sourcing the right beans, how they are prepared, what happens during roasting and lots of other stuff.

Then we took a look at different ways you can take your ground coffee and make it into a drink.

This was my favourite way to make a brew. In fact, it might turn out to be my favourite way to make any drink ever. It involves naked flames, steam and vacuum power to make a really nice cup of coffee. Heated water is forced up into the top container to mix with the coffee grounds. Then you take away the heat and as the steam in the bottom bulb cools it contracts and pulls the liquid back down through the cloth filter.

A great way to end a dinner party methinks, as long as you don't burn the house down. You can get all the kit from Amazon for around thirty quid. I've ordered mine. Much more exciting than a video game and actually cheaper. I was tempted by this amazing device but I think it is probably a bit expensive even though it looks enormous fun. If you aren't sure how to make any of this stuff work there are some rather nice howtos on brewing on the Hope&Glory site.

We left after an hour or so of learning about coffee, clutching a sample pack of beans. There are three different types of bean available from the Hope&Glory site. The prices are reasonable for coffee this nice and they do free postage, with the packets designed to fit through your letterbox and be waiting on the mat when you get home.

I still don't really think of myself as much of a coffee drinker, but after tonight that could change...

Happenings in the Department

Muyiwa Olu  gave a really good (and Rather Useful) seminar this week about the Python language. It is great to see someone being enthusiastic about a platform they obviously enjoy working with. I reckon that every programmer should have a bit of Python in their lives, because it is just such a fun language, and it was lovely to see some of the features brought to life. A great presentation from one of our second year students. 

You can find the slide deck for the session here. 

Next week we have Charlotte talking about Computer Science internships and her time at Airbus Industries writing software, including some Python code...

This week we also had our first meeting of the new "Embedded Development Club". Quite a few folk turned up, if just half of them come back next week with some kit to play with then we'll consider that a win. You can find the slide deck for the presentation here. 

And tonight we have a Hardware Meetup at C4DI. It's all go.

Flashing Lights and Drones at C4DI

Today we had another of our hardware meetups at c4di. Great fun was had by all who attended. We had two activities, playing with coloured leds or creating a Larson Scanner. Ross had brought along a little quadcopter with a video camera and much fun was had with that too. I'm not saying you should get one, but if you fancy making an investment you can find it here.

Soldering Stuff for C4DI Hardware Meetup

At the C4DI Meetup on Wednesday we are going all Christmassy with coloured lights. I've been soldering up some kits for folk to play with. Should be fun. You can sign up (if you havn't already) here. 

Completely Mad Tuesday

Today was completely mad. It started at 6:00, getting up to grab breakfast and zoom up town to review the newspapers with Radio Humberside. Which was fun. Then over to C4DI to chat with David Burns (again on Radio Humberside) about technology, Hull and the exciting things going on at the moment. And all against a fantastic sunrise which I managed to grab some snaps of.  You can find them here.

David Burns and Jon Moss of C4DI get the wide angle treatment. With a guest appearance of my knees.  

If you're quick you can get to hear the broadcast here.  I arrive around 20 minutes or so in...

Then it was back to the department to give a 10:15 First Year programming lecture in the nick of time. Then more lectures, labs, delivering chocolate brownies to a cake sale and finally a bit of Python Wrestling. 

By 7:15 pm I was wandering around the lab bouncing of walls and muttering "Today has been great, and busy, and all, but I'd quite like it to stop now...."

Open Data and the Leeds Data Mill at C4DI

You can learn some really interesting things from data. And there is a lot of out there, freely available to anyone with a theory to test or an idea for an app. Mark Barrett and Simon Zimmerman work at Hebe Works where they are trying to make more data available and tell interesting and useful stories from what is already visible.

Yesterday they came over to C4DI to talk about what they are doing and tell us all about Leeds Data Mill.  Mark took to the stage and told us all about the challenges of making data available. He is also the chap behind the GP Ratings App for iPhone, a wonderful program that leverages thousands of patient ratings and uses them to show you how good the doctors are in your area. 

This was a very thought provoking talk with an eye on the future. Mark and Simon reckon that open data is a great way to create completely novel applications, as well as giving people much greater insight into how the services around them actually tick. 

I headed over to the Data Mill and had a look round. There are some interesting data sets that you can just download, or hit with ready made Python, Ruby or JavaScript templates. I happened upon one that give the incidence of parking fines in the city and how many miscreants have paid up. And I started wondering if people who get fined in the morning are better payers, or worse, and when during the day they take the most fines. And I was hooked. Not written the program yet, but there is a good chance I will. And there are over 150 (and growing) data sources to go with that one.

C4DI are working with the Hull City Plan to bring this kind of open data to us. I'm really looking forward to seeing it all come together.  

Car Trouble

I managed to get this stepper to turn, which was more than I did with my car engine...

I've not had a car let me down for a very long time. It happened today. I was moving at speed, heading for the C4DI Hardware Meetup when I pressed the button to start the engine and nothing happened. 

Nothing.

So I checked all the obvious things, changed the battery in the remote and finally called the RAC man. He arrived in very good time, took one look at the car and said "I got called out to one of these a while back. Couldn't get it to work".

And so it turned out. The car is presently awaiting  transporter awaiting a trip on a transporter to the garage for diagnosis and hopefully repair. The fault seems to be with the steering column lock (which is at present unlocked but might lock when we start turning the wheel). 

I'd put the notes for the C4DI stuff on the web (we were playing with stepper motors, you can find the stuff here). Hopefully everyone did too.

Singing the SharePoint Song at C4DI

We use SharePoint at work. All the modules that we teach (and lots more besides) have SharePoint sites that contain notes, coursework and other useful stuff. It works for me.

It works for Simon and Steve too. Tonight at the C4DI Software Development Meetup they gave a presentation which started with a song. (something I've never dared do) and then went on to lay out, in well structured detail, just how much you can do with this platform.

Things that came out of the talk for me:

• SharePoint an "everything machine". You can use it to share data, you can use it to manage process, you can use it to present stuff. And lots of other things too. It will provide 90% of the features of highly expensive platforms for things like document management, version control, group working and lots of other business needs. And if it doesn't do what you want out of the box you can use it as a platform for customised apps that can run on a huge variety of devices.
• SharePoint is cheap to get started. Individuals can use the online version which is part of Office 365  for a few quids a month, and you can get developer access for not much more. And even an individual can get value out of using it to manage their data.
• SharePoint is becoming a cloud application. You can run your own servers, but the number of reasons for doing this is falling over time. 
• SharePoint is like a lot of things in life. You get out what you put in. A little planning at the start will pay off hugely when you start to use the system. 

I only use a tiny percentage of what our departmental SharePoint site offers. After this talk I left resolved to find out more.

Making the Web Work for you at C4DI

Another interesting evening at a C4DI meetup.  I don't actually make a website that sells anything (other than the brand of me I suppose) but the session was fascinating even so. Mike Jessop from Strawberry gave a talk on Digital Marketing. Used properly the technology can give web vendors invaluable insights into how their customers tick and what makes them actually go ahead and buy stuff.  Used badly it can give customers the feeling they are being stalked by an oven. 

The most important single point for me was that Google Analytics is where you need to go and live if you want to this kind of thing properly. I do have it switched on for my site, but I don't really use it as much as I probably should. But then again, I'm not really selling anything.

Analytics is free, and very powerful. I didn't know that you could use it to create dashboards that show real time activity on the site, summary reports of the way your site is being traversed by visitors and even perform a/b comparison of site designs to work out which is the most profitable. 

The other thing that came out was just how much tagging and profiling goes on. Mike recommends the Wasp profiler as a way of finding out how many tags each web page contains. A tag is a link embedded in web page that lets servers behind the scenes track what you are doing and pass the information around so that what you see on the next page reflects where you have been.  This is how my oven managed to follow me from site to site.

Apparently the Holy Grail of web marketeers is a system that can track the way that you move between mobile, tablet and desktop as you move from following a link in an advert through finding out more about the product from your Facebook friends to search for the product on Bing and then buying it. We are not quite there yet apparently, but we are heading that way.

Personally, I'm not sure if this is scary or not. I remember years ago that when you answered an advert in the paper and you put "Department G176" on the top of the address you knew that this was how they were tracking the success of their promotions.  However, nowadays it all takes place in the background. I reckon it is all about making sure that folks are aware that this kind of thing is going on.

Mike was very keen to make it clear that if you get too heavy handed with the technology and start gaming it to swing results your way this will end in tears as the users and the service providers change the way they behave, and his talk provided a really good overview of how to make the best use of what is out there. The best sessions leave you wanting to find out more, and this one did that for me.

C4DI Hardware Hacking

Last night we had our monthly Arduino hardware hacking session at C4DI. Lots of the regulars were there and one person even brought her long-bow along. Which was a highly impressive piece of wood. 

The theme of the evening was Sci-Fi movie effects, using programs to make whooshes beeps and all kinds of space age noises. You can find out what we got up to (and even have a go yourself) by grabbing the lab sheet from here).  Great fun was had.

I brought along my latest purchase, an Arduino powered pen pushing robot that you can pick up from RoboSavvy for the amazing sum of 18 pounds. Peter and I had enormous fun building it, particularly when we (or more accurate I) wired the motors the wrong way round and had the robot printing perfectly - but from right to left). However, with a bit of adjustment we got it out of "arabic mode" and managed to get it printing properly.

Amazon at C4DI

Tonight at the C4DI June Developer Meetup we welcomed Ian Massingham from Amazon Web Services, who gave a great talk about cloud based deployment of computing resource. Put that way it doesn't sound that interesting, but whey you go on to think that it allows computing infrastructure to change performance and scope with just a flick of a virtual switch you start to see just how compelling this model is.

Consider a situation where you have an idea for a product or service which, if it works, would be useful to millions of people. More than that, you might have an idea which only works properly if you have millions of users. How do you get started? Well, the answer is to put your system in the cloud. You don't have to buy anything at the start and you just pay for the computing power that you use. If things go well you use your revenue to pay for more processing. If things go badly you walk away and have another idea.

Ian talked about the way that the Amazon service is provisioned around the globe so that your data doesn't need to to leave your part of the world, and how clever management of the addressing of addresses means that your users will always be connected to the fastest servers in their neck of the woods. 

It's very clever stuff, and it lets you do things and play with things in a way that was just not possible in the past. Want to test out a new service for a while, need a high performance cluster for twenty minutes,  reduce the power of your end user platforms and do all your rendering off site? Cloud services can do this kind of thing and their power is going up and their prices going down all the time. 

When I met Ian I made some fairly silly comments about Python, a computer language that I've been playing with during the "Wrestling with Python" sessions we are doing for teachers. I made the point that for some applications, where security is right at the front of the things you are worrying about, I don't think that Python is the best choice (I'm going to have to write a complete blog post to get my feelings on this one properly set out).

However, for cloud type stuff Python is pretty much perfect. It provides the fastest way to get from idea to running code that I've found. A skilled Python coder can wrangle hugely complex systems together really quickly. I still prefer C# personally, but when you hear what developers can put together in Python in record time you can't help but be impressed.

Python is a perfect language for the "Move fast and break things" culture where companies survive by innovating faster than the other guy. If your new services are a bit fragile that's a price worth paying, and you can always iterate until you get solid systems.

All in all, a very thought provoking presentation, which ended with some hugely tempting AWS offers from Ian to members of C4DI and anyone thinking about their startup programme starting soon.