Entrepreneurial Geekiness
Entrepreneurial Geekiness
Ian is a London-based independent Chief Data Scientist who coaches teams, teaches and creates data products. More about Ian here.
Ian is a London-based independent Chief Data Scientist who coaches teams, teaches and creates data products.
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£5 App Xmas Special Write-Up
We had a lovely night! 50 or so enlightened souls joined us at The Werks in Hove for Aleks and Barry‘s talk on the development and launch of SpaceShip! followed by 4 excellent gamesy-themed 10 minute demos.
As Richard says:
“I mean, how does this sound: I turn up at The Werks, icy cold, to be handed a lovely hot mulled wine by the Ribots, directed towards the mince pies, and then entertained with a range of funky technology stuff. Mmm.”
See additional write-ups by Ribot, Mark – thanks chaps. Short write-up by Emily at robochick. Longer write-up by Richard at lastminute labs.
For the first hour (video, slides) Aleks talked about the inspiration and development of SpaceShip!, a text-only adventure set in the mold of Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy and other Infocom adventure games. Barry then picked up with a look at the Inform programming language behind the game.
We then had 4 great demos (sadly our 5th, Dom with the iPhone game, couldn’t attend due to illness):
- Eye-controlled Pong by Ben Rubinstein (CogApp) (video – thanks Ribot)
- Fighting Mini-sumo robots by Emily (video)
- Lightsaber mobile phone duelling by Richard and Russ (Lastminute.com Labs) (video)
- Flash 3D Snow and Xmas games by Seb (PluginMedia) (video)
Ben led the way with a fun look at eye-controlled Pong. Emily followed with line-following and fighting mini-sumo bots. Russ and Richard did a great two-part demo showing Nokia N95’s with Python controlling 2-player (across 2 phones) Pong and lightsaber-fighting using accelerometers and bluetooth.
Seb finished with some super-neato demos of particle physics, webcams and augmented reality (see a demo here).
The wonderful Ribots sponsored the night, they provided piping-hot mulled wine, mince pies and beer. John brought some extra beer (which, um, we finished about midnight) and ginger cake, everyone got a taste. We also had some announces about The Werks and Ribot’s new office (see video – thanks Ribot).
I was very happy to see some ex-MSc students and Inman Harvey (Sussex Uni’s MSc supervisor for the EasyMSc) – I’m keen to forge more links with my old Uni to get more students involved with local companies and perhaps start some collaborative projects in motion.
John finished by announcing the 5k Competition (rules: still evolving – talk to John or post in the google group), pencilled in for some time next year. Contact John for more details.
For past events see fivepoundapp.com. Join our low-volume google group to discuss what you saw, put up new ideas and follow new announces. See all photos under the £5 App tag at flickr.
Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.
£5 App Xmas Special Listing Details
We’re plotting our 14th £5 App meet. This, our second Christmas Special, will have a gamesy happy crimbo feel. Picture (from a few months back) kudos to Josh:
Date: Wednesday 10th December, sign-up on Upcoming please. Location The Werks (Hove nr Palmeira Sq) – note their piggy bank for a second projector at the end of this post please.
Our very own Aleks Krotoski will lead the evening with the launch of the Guardian’s new on-line text adventure SpaceShip!
Following Aleks’ main talk we’ll have a set of shorter 10 minute demos:
- Lightsaber mobile phone duelling by Marko (Lastminute.com Labs)
- Fighting Mini-sumo robots by Emily
- In-development 3D iPhone game + backstory by Dominic Mason
- Flash 3D Snow and Xmas games by Seb (PluginMedia)
- Eye-controlled Pong by Ben Rubinstein (CogApp)
You’ll meet lots of local developers, freelancers and business founders including people of Farm Brighton, Girl Geeks, Sussex Innovation Centre, Inuda and The Skiff, The Werks, EuroGamer, BrandWatch, ClearLeft and Madgex.
The Ribots are sponsoring us with Festive Alcohol and (fingers crossed) Xmas Cakery.
Related – Seb’s Big Screen Bonanza Flash night is the day before ours, check it out for 200+ seatage Flash-demo crazyness.
Note – The Werks are looking for donations towards a second projector, do the right thing and support ’em here:
Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.
Upgrading Ubuntu Hardy to Ibex
I’ve just upgraded from 8.04 LTS to 8.10. Inevitably there were some hiccups – no sound, difficulties with the nVidia drivers.
The initial upgrade was flawless, it took under 30 minutes to prepare itself, download the new packages, install everything and reboot.
I have an NVidia 8500GT which requires the non-free driver for decent video performance. I also have an NVidia 7050 built into the motherboard which I ignore.
After upgrading to Ibex the default video driver was the free NVidia driver – boring but stable. I tried to use ‘envyng -t’ (the GTK frontend isn’t working for Ibex yet) but it crashes with
TypeError: list indices must be integers
Instead I used the restricted driver manager – this installed, but on reboot I got dumped at the console.
The clue was in /var/log/Xorg.0.log with a message like ‘(!!) More than one possible primary device found’. dmesg showed nothing useful. Previously I’d booted to safe mode with the latest kernel and tried ‘xfix’ but that didn’t seem to do anything useful.
The problem is explained in this bug report, the solution is to manually add a BusID line to the Devices section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf (after backing up your xorg.conf just in case). My xorg.conf now looks like:
Section "Device" Identifier "Device0" Driver "nvidia" VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation" BusID "PCI:02:00:00" # !This is the line I manually added EndSection
Now that I can play video I notice that there’s no sound. Investigating System->Preferences->Sound I see that everythign is set to play using ALSA and the on-board HDA NVidia (Alsa mixer) default mixer device.
I only use my SoundBlaster Audigy for sound playback. I changed the Default Mixer Track to Audigy 2 ZS [SB0350] Alsa Mixer, then each ALSA output device to Audigy 2 ZS p16v (ALSA) and sound now plays back in the sound tool.
To get sound playing in Amarok, VLC and mplayer I had to make sure that Audigy Analog/Digital Output Jack was ticked, ALSA was selected in each media player and pulseaudio was killed in the process list. There are some notes here and here. I unticked PulseAudio in Preferences->Sessions, as noted in the first link above.
Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.
Girl Geeks, Flash Big Screen, £5 App Xmas Special
Here are three local events that I’m rather looking forward to:
Girl Geeks on Tues Dec 2nd with Emily on Building Robots. Emily will walk you through a history of robotics, show neat demos and then show real live hand-built robots (4 of ’em) Doing Stuff including, just possibly, sumo wrestling. Someone remind Emily to update robochick with more robot posts!
Flash Brighton have a big event on Tues Dec 9th for 200 people called the Big Screen Bonanza. Lots of Flash geekery, prizes and a whole lotta people.
Our £5 App Xmas Special is on Weds Dec 10th. Aleks will launch SpaceShip with The Guardian then we’ll follow with a set of fun gamesy demos including bluetooth+accelerometer driven Lightsaber mobiles, Xmas snow+games in Flash and a 3D in-development iPhone game, with more talks to follow.
Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.
£5 App Xmas Games Special
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.
Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.
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Oreilly High Performance Python by Micha Gorelick & Ian Ozsvald AI Consulting
Mor Consulting Ltd. is an A.I. focused consultancy offering strategic research and development owned by Ian Ozsvald, based in London (UK).
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