We’re plotting our 14th £5 App meet.  This, our second Christmas Special, will have a gamesy happy crimbo feel.

Date: Wednesday 10th December, sign-up on Upcoming please.  Location TBC.

Our very own Aleks Krotoski will lead the evening with the launch of the Guardian’s new on-line text adventure SpaceShip!

We’ll probably run the second half of the night as a demo spot for some of the local gamers.  Beer, cake, good crowds and the pub will all occur as usual.  See photos on the fivepoundapp site if you’re not sure what to expect.

If you have a game to demo, please get in touch.

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Ian is a professional screencaster (ProCasts), Python programmer, Artificial Intelligence researcher (Mor Consulting), sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

We’re having our second Brighton Python (Upcoming) meetup next week on Weds Oct 29th at The Hampton Arms (gmap), a 15 min walk from Brighton station.  The pub is 5 minutes from the Churchill shopping Centre and the clocktower off of Western Road (the main shopping road that runs parallel to the sea front).

This is the same location that we used for the last meet and again we’re combining this with the Brighton freelancer Farm meetup for a larger crowd.

Some more details are in this previous post, hope to see you there!

John and I are organising another Brighton Python meet for the evening of Wednesday Oct 29th (Upcoming for details). [photo by southtyrolean]

We threw one months back along with Paul Silver’s The Farm freelancers, we filled the The Hampton Arms with close to 60 geeks IIRC.  The pub is a 15 minute walk from Brighton station (note to GnuBlade and other Londoners, this pub is much closer to the station than the building we use for £5 App meets!).

Amongst others we had Jim of SecondLife UK, a Microsoftie who likes lightweight languages, several pyQT programmers from a medical company and a whole bunch of others.

As before it’ll just be a meet n’greet pub outing, I’m expecting 10-20 Pythonistas along with 20-40 Farmers (they’re PHP, Web, db, graphics etc local freelancers), lots of beer and conversation.

Please sign-up (Upcoming) so we’ve an idea of who will be along.

I’m very pleased to say that the first version of ProCasts, my professional screencasting site, is now on-line.  I’m taking the professional screencast activity that I performed for three years under the older ShowMeDo Services site and building it up as my own activity.

The site has one screencasting example by me (along with many external examples - more of my own to come) and a short entry on screencast hosting (I’ve decided to blog about screencast hosting options instead).  Through ShowMeDo I’ve created over 130 screencasts, I plan to integrate some of these examples and the knowledge I’ve gained into ProCasts in due course.

ProCasts was developed through eLance, I blogged about how I was experimenting with eLance a month back.  I’ll have a full write-up, with positive review of my outsourcer Gursimran, later.

What a fab night!  I counted 46 people which makes this possibly the largest event we’ve thrown - thanks to all for attending.  Sponsored beer, live Qik video, 6 great talks and lively post-event pub conversation - who could ask for a better evening?  Josh made this rather excellent panoramic view of us all:

Each of the 6 talks lasted 15 minutes and covered a wide range of geek and tech-business topics:

• ‘Google Maps + GPS + Python + Series 60 + giant pencil == live biking location demo’, Tristan Roddis (CogApp)
• LiquidFold using Google’s App Engine, Simon Willison & Natalie Downe
• “An airport that you can turn-off” - evolvable flight-paths for crash-resistant landing vectors at a major airport, Matt Sarjent
• ‘Pistach.io: a cracking idea! [blog-based advertising platform, new start-up]’, Aral Balkan and Dave Stone
• AllSizes+ - hacking flickr with GreaseMonkey, Premasagar Rose (of Dharmafly)
• ‘Inuda’s first public app [howsociable.com - brand metrics company side-project]… after two years of ‘Innovating’ alongside client work’, Jon Markwell and Kev The Dev

Ribot both sponsored the event (great beer - thanks!) and made live Qik video streams for the evening.  I believe these segments are correct:

1. Video 1 - quick intro from John and myself
2. Video 2 - Tristan’s Python Series 60 demo starts
3. Video 3 - Tristan concludes, full talk for Simon and Matt (followed by break)
4. Video 4 - Second half - Premasagar, Dave, Jon+Kev

The Ribots also sponsored the beer, they skinned the bottles to show three stages of the design process:

More images can be found tagged in flickr and via the fivepoundapp homepage.  If you’ve a question about the night then come join the FivePoundApp google group.  Finally - thanks to Danny for hosting and to John for yet more great cake.

Possible talks for the next event could include something about ClearLeft’s SilverBack, a Chumby demo and Seb’s postponed Arduino hardware hacking.  I’d love to see some more internal-company demos/start-ups/proto-projects, please ping if you’d be interested in talking.

Addition - great write-up at Ribot HQ, including discussion of how and why they branded their sponsored beer..

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).

I’m now on the look-out for some interesting A.I. or Python related work in the South-East.  An interesting challenge involving Python around Brighton/London could be quite cool.  My skills and experience are listed on my MorConsulting work site.

I have some more time on my hands as I’m winding-back my involvement in ShowMeDo (the video-tutorial site with a Python focus that I co-founded in 2005) as Kyran will shortly be taking the reigns full-time.

I could have two weeks a month to bring to bear on a new problem, preferably something hard that needs some A.I. and thinking.

Does the Python community have a ’skills available’ site for the UK?  I couldn’t see anything so I figured that this public post might be the best way to get the word out.