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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Convertible Mazda MX-5 for sale – super fun!
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:
Moving to WebFaction
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’.
£5 App Demo Day on 8th July (1 demo-spot left)
We’re trying a new format for the next £5 App event, it’ll be an evening Demo Camp (barcamp.org) where 6 people get to demo something cool or start-upy.
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.
£5 App a la Ribot (Qik live video blogging)
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.
Teaching Python at ShowMeDo
Two months ago we started our ShowMeDo Club where paying subscribers get access to specially crafted Python tutorials. These series are generally much longer and more involved than most of the free videos on ShowMeDo, they tend to include exercises with worked solutions too.
We’ve had a very good response and everyone who has bought access has sent me great feedback. It is really rather rewarding to receive feedback from individuals who have benefited from my series. I’m also very happy to say that Kyran (my business partner) and John are about to start authoring Club videos too, again focusing on Python – from wxPython GUIs to CGI and the Google App Engine.
My most recent series have been for unit-testing a website using Twill and pyWin32 and COM programming for Python.
The Twill series is about teaching the same test framework that we use to reliably test ShowMeDo. The pyWin32 series is a collection of tips basically for using Excel as a cheap charting tool for Python with just a few lines, then builds up to writing a full COM server in Python.
These are all a part of our ‘python tutorial‘ section which now contains over 231 Python videos – how cool is that? I’ve also been making free screencasts on topics like installing easy_install, installing nose_tests and installing twill.
These are just short videos but they seem to really help out new users – if you’re used to a web-based installer, but the interweb is playing up, then you don’t know what the error message you see is all about. These 3 videos are there just to show how a successful install looks, with a check at the end to confirm everything is there.
I’m up to 96 videos now (see them here) which puts me at the head of the nbr-of-videos table, though Dai is quite close with 73 videos on topics like OpenOffice and Scribus. Very soon I’ll have over 100…I wonder how many minutes that is?
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.