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.

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

Currently we cache the main pages for 1 hour, these ought to be extended to ‘forever’ since I have a good cache-expire key for these pages.  If I fixed this then I’d imagine our cpu usage would drop even further.

Getting it installed and running with the ‘cache using files’ version took about an hour.  Developing some custom keys (one for each type of page) took another few hours, we’ve had no bugs and we’re darn impressed.

John developed this decorator for his Chrss and our ShowMeDo - we’re in debt to John for digging us out of our performance woes.  Much obliged!

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 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.

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.

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:

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’.

We’re looking for an even split between neat-geek and new-startup (preferably bootstrapped or angeled startups, no shiny-suits for sure).

Mark you attendance in Upcoming as usual (and un-attend if you can’t make it to leave space for others). We had 40 people last time, do reserve your seat sooner rather than later.

We have 6 confirmed speakers:

• ‘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

If you’d like to present at our next Demo Camp then get in contact with me (ian AT ianozsvald com) or John (demo AT fivepoundapp com).

Mr. Ribot has offered to Qik live-video the event (as he did last time), we’ll have beer and cake as usual and then we’ll be off to the pub.

‘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.