04.11.08
Posted in sussexdigital, £5 App Meet, Life
at 4:36 pm
OMG. I remember Ribot sitting there with his Nokia doing some live video stuff at our last £5 App by Madgex co-founder Glenn but I didn’t really pay it much heed…until now when I’ve found the videos. One the one hand - very cool, on the other - my privacy gene is doing somersaults.
‘Glenn Jones on building Madgex pt 1‘ (26 mins), ‘Glen Jones pt 2‘ (5 mins with long comment train) - Glenn opens the evening with the main talk on how he and 4 others grew Madgex from their humble beginnings to now where they’re one of Brighton’s larger tech employers.
‘Simon Willison talks Walrss‘ (16 minutes) - Simon did a 2nd talk after Glenn, in association with ClearLeft, on Walrss - a natty little Python app for reading website content via RSS streams on an iPhone.
‘The Future of £5 Apps‘ (22 minutes) - after Simon both John and I led a short session asking our 41-strong crowd what we should focus on for future events in the summer. We’ve had a ‘year of success stories’ which have been great, now we want to run workshops aimed at getting everyone to take their bootstrapped startup or project and move it a step forwards.
Sitting here now watching the talks (and seeing me speak) is just plain odd, but kinda cool at the same time. The long comment train here is interesting too - the event was being broadcast by Mr Ribot on his Nokia phone (neat zoom too!), via wi-fi, to Qik, then back out live (or delayed like now) to the world.
Thanks Ribot!
John and I will have more news on the future of our £5 App over the coming weeks - we have a wiki in production so we can discuss the long list of requests from the end of the night. We’ll probably do a coffee-chat soon so we can discuss which events to hold first and who helps to run them, we’ll probably also put up a google group for low-volume chat.
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Posted in ShowMeDo
at 4:04 pm
Two months ago we started our ShowMeDo Club where paying subscribers get access to specially crafted Python tutorials. These series are generally much longer and more involved than most of the free videos on ShowMeDo, they tend to include exercises with worked solutions too.
We’ve had a very good response and everyone who has bought access has sent me great feedback. It is really rather rewarding to receive feedback from individuals who have benefited from my series. I’m also very happy to say that Kyran (my business partner) and John are about to start authoring Club videos too, again focusing on Python - from wxPython GUIs to CGI and the Google App Engine.
My most recent series have been for unit-testing a website using Twill and pyWin32 and COM programming for Python.
The Twill series is about teaching the same test framework that we use to reliably test ShowMeDo. The pyWin32 series is a collection of tips basically for using Excel as a cheap charting tool for Python with just a few lines, then builds up to writing a full COM server in Python.
These are all a part of our ‘python tutorial‘ section which now contains over 231 Python videos - how cool is that? I’ve also been making free screencasts on topics like installing easy_install, installing nose_tests and installing twill.
These are just short videos but they seem to really help out new users - if you’re used to a web-based installer, but the interweb is playing up, then you don’t know what the error message you see is all about. These 3 videos are there just to show how a successful install looks, with a check at the end to confirm everything is there.
I’m up to 96 videos now (see them here) which puts me at the head of the nbr-of-videos table, though Dai is quite close with 73 videos on topics like OpenOffice and Scribus. Very soon I’ll have over 100…I wonder how many minutes that is?
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04.01.08
Posted in sussexdigital, £5 App Meet
at 3:03 pm
Next week’s £5 App event is on April 8th at 13 Brunswick Square - this event marks the end of a ‘year of stories’ and from here we move to a workshop-style set of sessions.
First we showed that you can build a business or project without funding during our 11 great talks over the last year (see talk listings at the base of the page), now we want to concentrate on building up the skills that you require so everyone can take their next steps forward.
As always the event is free, I provide the beer and wine, John will bake a cake.
For this event Glenn Jones of Madgex will talk about the early days of the company and its formation and then some of the folk at ClearLeft will talk after the break on their new project.
After this John and I will discuss what we want to achieve in the new sessions and we’ll solicit ideas from you for the topics we need to cover.
This event marks a watershed in our approach and the plans we make could have a very positive effect on your own projects over the coming year. We’d welcome your ideas and input - please Attend on Upcoming to let us know how much beer we need to buy (and UnAttend if you can’t make it so I have sensible numbers for catering!).
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02.18.08
Posted in ShowMeDo, Programming
at 1:23 pm
John and I are holding our first Brighton Python meet this Wednesday 20th at The Hampton Arms. Paul Silver’s The Farm is running on the same night - we’ll be sitting on a nearby table.
We’ll have a copy of Learning Python on the table, I’ll have my laptop with ShowMeDo’s TurboGears code and John should have his laptop with the Django-based FivePoundApp.com code.
We can talk about A.I. and C-integration stuff (IPython, scipy, matplotlib, Numpy, ctypes) too, along with IDEs, resources and anything else you need to know. You can be experienced or ‘just interested’ - all are very welcome.
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02.16.08
Posted in £5 App Meet
at 6:15 pm
Earlier in the week we had a great talk from Rupert about how he and his brother built the ‘overnight success’ Eurogamer in ‘just 10 years’ 
I’ve written the event up at Rosie’s ProjectBrighton.
If you’re interested in presenting an idea, work-in-progress or fully-fledged story at a future event then please just get in touch, we’d love to have a chat.
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02.15.08
Posted in ShowMeDo, Life
at 2:00 pm
I’m rather proud to say that we released our Subscription package for new Python programmers last Saturday. We aim to be the on-line ‘Python school’ that so many beginners are looking for.
Python is a great language for beginners, has many learn-Python books and a strong Python Tutor mail list. One area that it lacks is in making it really easy for a non-Python programmer to get up to speed on the language easily and confidently.
Our target audience is ‘new Python programmers’ - at first those who have some prior programming experience (so they know about e.g. ‘if’, functions and variables) who want to learn how to write ‘good Python code’. Next we’ll probably target those who know less about programming.
I’ve already covered some of the basics like file reading/writing, csv data files, unit-testing, refactoring and common IDEs in my previous series. In my new series I’m looking at wxPython GUIs and later we’ll look at web-applications with Django and CGI.
This marks a turning point for us - now we know where we’re focusing and what we have to deliver (previously we had too many ideas and not enough focus).
Next I have to create several solid new series over the next 2 months and figure out how to market to the right users. It feels like this is a constant quest for skills-acquisition!
I’m very pleased to say that John Montgomery is joining us as our 3rd Python author - he has a great background in Python, Java, programming for the web and all sorts of geek topics. His videos will make a great addition to ShowMeDo.
Onwards and upwards for 2008
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02.07.08
Posted in Life
at 2:07 pm
This morning Ubuntu’s UpdateManager ran and informed me of 1 update to do with the Adobe flash player. I let it install…and promptly I no longer had the Flash player in Firefox 
An ‘about:plugins’ confirmed that it was missing.
A few minutes poking on the web revealed this write-up and this bug-report which spells out the fix.
By following the setup and then removing flashplugin-nonfree, then adding it again, the Flash player reappeared in my Firefox. Fixed in 2 minutes.
After this I removed the ‘proposed updates’ from Software Sources (added via the bug-report’s instructions) and all seems to be well.
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01.16.08
Posted in sussexdigital, £5 App Meet
at 11:24 am
2008’s first £5 App will be held on 12th February with Rupert Loman (founder of EuroGamer) talking on how he built the company from humble beginnings. As usual please sign-up on Upcoming so we know how much beer to buy and cake to bake.
I’m also happy to say I’ve written my first article on ProjectBrighton discussing last night’s Café Scientifique talk in Kempown. The neuroscience talk was great and the turnout was amazing - close to 100 people!
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01.09.08
Posted in sussexdigital, Life
at 10:56 pm
John and I have decided to organise a Python pub meeting here in Brighton, the date is the somewhat-distant Feb 20th.
Why? We want to figure out how many Python programmers are down here and find out what people are working on.
Personally I’m also interested in receiving some feedback on which Python topics we ought to be covering inside ShowMeDo and knowing who else knows TurboGears (and Django too). Sign-up on Upcoming and come drink with us!
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01.08.08
Posted in ShowMeDo
at 6:42 pm
I wanted to test ShowMeDo’s rendering on IE6. My Windows XP box uses IE7 and I figured my Ubuntu box could run IE6 via Wine…it turns out to be just a simple install step. I was up and running within 5 minutes.
First - install wine. Second, get the ies4linux installer and run it using their last instructions (their step 4):
wget http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/downloads/ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
tar zxvf ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
cd ies4linux-*
./ies4linux
I had to run ./ies4linux three times to complete the installation, I chose IE6 with Flash. The installer visits microsoft.com to fetch the right versions of everything. It was installed (after the 3rd attempt) as an icon on my desktop and available via the command line: /home/ian/bin/ie6
I then used IE6 to visit windowsupdate.microsoft.com and it identified two updates, both ‘complete’ but upon returning to WindowsUpdate it flags one of them as still being required. My version of IE6 running on Ubuntu 7.10 is ‘Version: 6.0.2800.1106′.
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