Opentech Approaches

This year’s Opentech conference is this coming Saturday at ULU. It’s earlier than usual this year, so it might have crept up on you a bit. I’m speaking at the conference again this year and I’ve been promoted to the main room. I’m on in the 4-5pm session speaking for twenty minutes on “Watching the… Continue reading Opentech Approaches

Opentech 2008

I spent yesterday at Opentech. I had a great time there. Here are my thoughts on the talks that I saw. Rembrandt, Pr0n and Robot Monkeys: Lessons From the Present About Flesh and Technology – Kim PlowrightThis could have been interesting, but I think it was somewhat constrained by the short time allocated. It seemed… Continue reading Opentech 2008

Opentech 2008

The full schedule for Opentech has been announced. There are three tracks of talks and it looks like that I’ll need a couple of clones in order to see everything that I want to see. The previous Opentech conference (was it really three years ago) was a lot of fun and I fully expect this one to be… Continue reading Opentech 2008

Sexism in IT

So overnight I was planning another entry that would explain further why I don’t think that “tequila slammer girls” are appropriate entertainment for a professional software conference. But this morning I read this and this. Pointing out the offence in what Russ Michaels is doing is one thing, but submitting his web server to denial… Continue reading Sexism in IT

Speak Slowly and be Loud Enough

I’ve just found this write-up of day one of the recent YAPC::Europe conference. It was written by someone who spent that afternoon in my Advanced Databases for Beginners talk. It sounds like he found the talk useful, but I particularly liked this line. Dave speaks indeed slowly and he’s loud enough I’d like to use… Continue reading Speak Slowly and be Loud Enough

Light Bloggage

I’ve just realised that it’s two weeks today that I go off to this year’s YAPC::Europe and I still have two talks to write – one of which is a three hour tutorial. So don’t expect much writing from me over the next couple of weeks. I’ll be far too busy working on other things.… Continue reading Light Bloggage

EuroOSCON on the BBC

This week’s edition of the BBC programme Click Online contains a report about EuroOSCON. The transcript is here and the Real Audio stream is here. The programme is repeated a number of times on various BBC channels (mainly News 24) over the next couple of days. It’s the first report in the programme, but its… Continue reading EuroOSCON on the BBC

EuroOSCON Day 3

Late, but I thought it was worth recording what I did on the final day of EuroOSCON. As always, we started with the keynotes. Marc Heglund talked about privacy issues and the possibility of an “open data” movement. David Heinemeier Hansson talked about the secrets of Ruby on Rails and MySQL’s Kaj Arnö showed us… Continue reading EuroOSCON Day 3