I figured a quick report on my fab move from Demon Internet to BeThere was in order.  I was ‘pretty happy’ with my Demon adsl but I’m pretty wowed by BeThere.

I decided to switch as a friend did a speedtest and had a much faster connection than I was getting with Demon under my 8mb plan.  My Demon customer support chap told me that ‘I’d be unlikely to get a faster connection if I moved so I shouldn’t bother’ - since he was wrong I figured some numbers were in order.

I’ve moved from a £20/month plan to Be’s Pro £22/month.  My adsl has jumped from 3.5mb down/400k up to 11.1mb down/1.1mb up.  In fairness the new line is ADSL2+ whilst the Demon connection was ADSL but, heck, the customer support chap thought nothing of this.

I’m also impressed at Be’s attentiveness - I had a number of txts and emails telling me the status of everything and ‘it all just worked’ when I plugged it into my Ubuntu box.  I’m a happy customer.

I’m asking you for some feedback - which science-based companies do you know of around the Brighton/London area?  Can you leave me a comment if you know one that I don’t already know?

Why am I asking?  I’m an A.I. researcher by trade, I’ve used Python, C++, Java and Matlab to solve ‘interesting problems’ over the last 8 years for a number of clients.  Most of them have been somewhere between Brighton and London.

I’m looking for new A.I. research work and I’m wondering which other companies exist that I could approach.  Possibly you’re an A.I. bod / geek / post-grad researcher in the area who’d like to know which companies might offer jobs or consultancy work.

So far I can think of:

• PANalytical at SInC (one of my current employers for interesting A.I. work)
• Proneta at SInC (very small company, John Hother sometimes has A.I. related questions)
• Observatory Sciences in Hove (seen via their job ad)
• Infonic in Guildford (formerly Corpora, they acquired my old employer Algorithmix years back)
• DataSlide via SInC (current employer, tiny + very smart ’storage solutions’ company)
• Ambiental at SInC (past employer, nice flood-risk simulations and modelling)
• Elektro Magnetix at SInC
• NeuroRobotics at SInC
• MindLab at SInC (new company, looks cool if works as claimed)

There’s the rather obvious bias towards the Sussex Innovation Centre (SInC) in the list above. I’ve been involved with companies that are here so I know an awful lot of faces.  I’m sure there are related companies out and about in the local area - any suggestions?

I’ve also spotted one related company:

• Oban Multilingual (via job ad) needing a math/stats analyst for SEO analysis

On the evening of Tuesday July 8th (upcoming) we’re having a Demo Camp in Brighton as the new format for our regular £5 App hack/story evenings.  Everyone is welcome, we normally have 20-40 people, London Python folk are especially welcome.

The current 6 talks (2 for Python - woot!) are:

• ‘Google Maps + GPS + Python + Series 60 + giant pencil == live biking location demo’, Tristan Roddis (CogApp)
• Google App Engine ’stuff’, Simon Willison & Natalie Downe
• Evolvable flight-paths for crash-resistant landing vectors at a major airport, Matt Sarjent
• ‘Pistach.io: a cracking idea!’, Aral Balkan and Dave Stone
• ‘Inuda’s first public app… after two years of ‘Innovating’ alongside client work’, Jon Markwell and Kev The Dev
• ‘Arduino - Beyond Blink’ - Making cool stuff with LEDs, Seb Lee-Delisle

Do you have something to demo?  Get in contact (ian AT ianozsvald.com), maybe we can fit you into this event or maybe the next one.  The next event may well have more of a start-up focus (if you’re running a start-up and you’d like a demo spot please do get in touch!).

The location is a bus-ride along Western Road, it’ll take about 20 minutes from Brighton station (see the upcoming page for maps).  The evening is free, it’ll be bring-your-own-beer (and I’ll aim to bring some spare beer and a hat-for-cash for those who forget).

Ribot was kind enough to video the last event, take a look to get an idea of what to expect (at this event we were trying to figure out the format for 2008’s talks).

At likemind beer last night Jon told me about his new HowSociable.com app, a demonstrator for the kind of projects that Inuda like doing.

I plugged in ShowMeDo (howsociable.com/showmedo) and discovered that several users have been twittering, some photos of an old presentation are in flickr and that some of our videos are in YouTube.

By itself this service is pretty limited - now I’ve seen what’s out there there’s nothing else I can do.  I hope that Jon extends this, it’d be useful to e.g. receive monthly updates on how the numbers have changed from the previous month.  Having a passive update of our popularity delivered to my inbox would surely be a useful service.

Emily’s MX-5 is for sale, she describes it as “Good condition. Very reliable. Tons of fun to drive.”.  I’ll agree with the Fun To Driveness of it, I love taking it out for a spin.

Since she works in town now the car just sits outside the house which is a bit of a waste, Emily’s planning to build some robots with the capital the car will release instead.

You’ll see pictures of the car by following this link or this photo, contact details are there too:

Yesterday I moved my blog to WebFaction from GoDaddy.  The process was mostly painless, it tooks a few minutes to configure GoDaddy’s DNS system to point at WebFaction and it took over two hours for my domains to work properly at WebFaction (due to global DNS updates), but otherwise was painless.

Currently I’m running this blog from a WebFaction Shared1 account which allows unlimited applications and is very Python friendly (ShowMeDo runs at WebFaction, it is written in Python using TurboGears).

If you need Python[or Ruby]-friendly hosting then do checkout WebFaction, Remi and co are very helpful, problems are sorted within 24 hours (we’ve run ShowMeDo there for a year) and everything ‘just works’.

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.

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

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.

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!