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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New ProCast for Inuda’s HowSociable
I’ve just completed a new screencast for Inuda’s HowSociable.com brand-measuring site. I show the social services (e.g. Flickr, Facebook, Ning) that are used to measure a brand’s visibility on the social web and tell the viewer why they will want to sign-up for monthly updates.
This is the first piece of pro bono work I’m providing in ProCasts, I plan to updates this screencast in a week when Jon launches a new version HowSociable. If anyone else here in the community thinks that someone could benefit from a demonstrative screencast, please point them my way.
CamTasia tip – increasing the call-out length
I’ve just spent 15 minutes trying to figure out an odd behaviour in CamTasia v5.1.0. The documentation (great video demo) explains that a call-out can be added, and then by dragging the call-out we can change the length for its display.
Only…it seemed that you couldn’t drag the length. You can easily drag its position, but why not the length?
After some frustrated hacking around, I saw a solution (in the darned-awful UI!) at experts-exchange for Camtasia: How to Extend the Duration of a Custom Callout in the Timeline. As wize-owl says:
“The timeline has a zoom feature to change the viewing resolution. It is adjustable by the plus (+) and minus (-) symbols. Click the + zoom a couple times. This will expand the timeline and the callout, and give you a larger area by which to grab the edges. Now you can expand the callout to cover a larger area of the timeline.”
I had to zoom in 8 times to see the +/- symbols, I’ve since reset the default time-length for call-outs from 3 seconds up to 8 seconds and the +/- symbols are more visible.
If you follow the above experts-exchange link, you might find that they’ve shielded the solution from you until you login (that darn awful UI of theirs…). If so, either goolge for “camtasia length call-out experts-exchange” and click the cache’s link, or try this cached link.
Want to learn more about screencasting? Take a look at my screencasting blog which has a screencast tutorial category, this includes entries on how to convert CamTasia 6 mp4s into flv videos and discusses the rate of adoption of the new mp4 standard, amongst stories of how to decrease your bounce-rate and increase sales with screencasts.
Read The Screencasting Handbook – I’ve written this handbook to share 4 years of screencasting experience, purchase includes access to our forum and some private consultation time with us.
Brought to you whilst I’m wearing my ProCasts professional-screencasting hat.
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.
Successfully using eLance for static-website design
To develop my professional screencasting site ProCasts.co.uk I chose to out-source development via eLance. Knowing that out-sourcing smaller, easily-defined jobs is likely to become common-place as time passes, I figured that diving in and working with someone elsewhere on the planet for my new site would prove to be an interesting and useful experience.
Lo and behold – it worked, it was easy and dare I say fun to boot!
As I blogged a few weeks back I had seen Patrick McKenzie discuss using eLance for one of his new sites. He wrote positively about Gursimran Kaur and I chose to ask her to bid on my proposal.
After 7 days of bidding (attracting 22 bids from individuals and companies in the US, Europe and the Far East) I opted to work with Gursimran – her price was average against the bids and communication with her was clear and professional.
Most of the bids were cut/paste replies backed by uninspiring sites, several stood out including Gursimran’s. Gursimran went the extra mile to re-work my proposal and suggest something more substantial (for the same price), I was impressed and the deal was done.
I had hoped to have the site up in 1 week after bidding, ultimately it took closer to 3 weeks due to the larger proposal and our out-of-sync working hours (she’s in India). The end result is well worthwhile however and cost the equivalent of 1.5 UK man-days, including logo and site design, css implementation and stock photography.
If you’re looking to develop a simple static site (ProCasts is 5 pages of html, with custom logos and styles) then I definitely suggest using eLance. I recommend Gursimran (in eLance), you might also want to invite Danet.Solutions (in eLance) to bid (their example sites were good, their communication was also very good).
The only scary part was submitting money after I’d chosen Gursimran into eLance’s escrow system – it makes it clear that the money is non-refundable (unless the selected service provider fails to come through). Once I’d bitten the bullet, everything else was easy (the site’s not entirely intuitive, but better than eBay’s horrid interface!).
My suggestion would be to start with a small job if you’ve never done this before – something where you don’t risk a ‘large’ (relative to your comfort zone) amount of money. Now that I’ve been through the mill I’d be happy to use eLance to run larger projects.
ProCasts.co.uk – first version on-line
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.
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.
Learning Python via ShowMeDo
Every now and again it is useful to look back at what’s been achieved – ShowMeDo started three years ago and we considered ourselves lucky if 1 Python video was contributed a month. Now we get several whole series each month! Often each series is information-laden and created by a competent screencaster. Viewers learn very quickly and they remember ‘seeing it happen’ after they’ve watched the video.
I figured that a look at some of the recent series might be useful. In total we have over 330 Python screencasts, with 8 series alone for Django. Over 150 of the screencasts are aimed at Beginner Python coders.
We’ve had several series which cover test-driven development (TDD), unit testing and coverage, as well as discussing the whole development process. Seeing these hard-core videos teaching ‘a good way of coding’ is really nice, these skills are hard to describe and easy for a beginner to ignore. Three that spring to mind are:
- Agile Development Tools in Python inc. VirtualEnv, PasteScript
- Agile Python+Pylons inc. TDD, coverage, unit testing
- Developing emol! inc. use-cases and class diagrams in 24 beautiful episodes
It is nice to see some web-framework series sprouting up:
- Pylons in action (mentioned above)
- Quick-start guide to TurboGears 2
- Setting Up the Django Dev Environment
In the Club (for paying users) we’ve been busy, currently we’re simultaneously publishing several meaty series. They’re aimed at beginner/intermediate Python programmers, mixing Python background with useful worked examples:
- Loops and Iteration
- Common Variables and Containers
- What does Python look like?
- Database Programming
- Introducing the Google App Engine
In total we have 11 strong series in the Club which reduce the learning time for a beginner. We’ve also commissioned some of our open-source authors to join us in the Club, two new series on ‘batteries included’ and ‘C+Python’ are in the works.
We welcome new open-source authors – each author’s contributions are special to us, we don’t stick ads on the pages or require ownership of any rights. We just do our best to bring an author’s knowledge to a wider audience.
I guess the biggest thing that we’ve achieved is ‘recognition’ – it is nice mailing a project author to discuss a relevant series that we’ve had submitted and to have them say ‘ShowMeDo – yes, I was watching some cool stuff there just the other day…’.
Read my book
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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PyData London provides a forum for the international community of users and developers of data analysis tools to share ideas and learn from each other.