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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Last £5 App in our ‘year of stories’
Next week’s £5 App event is on April 8th at 13 Brunswick Square – this event marks the end of a ‘year of stories’ and from here we move to a workshop-style set of sessions.
First we showed that you can build a business or project without funding during our 11 great talks over the last year (see talk listings at the base of the page), now we want to concentrate on building up the skills that you require so everyone can take their next steps forward.
As always the event is free, I provide the beer and wine, John will bake a cake.
For this event Glenn Jones of Madgex will talk about the early days of the company and its formation and then some of the folk at ClearLeft will talk after the break on their new project.
After this John and I will discuss what we want to achieve in the new sessions and we’ll solicit ideas from you for the topics we need to cover.
This event marks a watershed in our approach and the plans we make could have a very positive effect on your own projects over the coming year. We’d welcome your ideas and input – please Attend on Upcoming to let us know how much beer we need to buy (and UnAttend if you can’t make it so I have sensible numbers for catering!).
First Brighton Python Meet – Weds 20th
John and I are holding our first Brighton Python meet this Wednesday 20th at The Hampton Arms. Paul Silver’s The Farm is running on the same night – we’ll be sitting on a nearby table.
We’ll have a copy of Learning Python on the table, I’ll have my laptop with ShowMeDo‘s TurboGears code and John should have his laptop with the Django-based FivePoundApp.com code.
We can talk about A.I. and C-integration stuff (IPython, scipy, matplotlib, Numpy, ctypes) too, along with IDEs, resources and anything else you need to know. You can be experienced or ‘just interested’ – all are very welcome.
Rupert and Eurogamer at the £5 App
Earlier in the week we had a great talk from Rupert about how he and his brother built the ‘overnight success’ Eurogamer in ‘just 10 years’ 🙂 I’ve written the event up at Rosie’s ProjectBrighton.
If you’re interested in presenting an idea, work-in-progress or fully-fledged story at a future event then please just get in touch, we’d love to have a chat.
Learn Python – ShowMeDo Subscriptions
I’m rather proud to say that we released our Subscription package for new Python programmers last Saturday. We aim to be the on-line ‘Python school’ that so many beginners are looking for.
Python is a great language for beginners, has many learn-Python books and a strong Python Tutor mail list. One area that it lacks is in making it really easy for a non-Python programmer to get up to speed on the language easily and confidently.
Our target audience is ‘new Python programmers’ – at first those who have some prior programming experience (so they know about e.g. ‘if’, functions and variables) who want to learn how to write ‘good Python code’. Next we’ll probably target those who know less about programming.
I’ve already covered some of the basics like file reading/writing, csv data files, unit-testing, refactoring and common IDEs in my previous series. In my new series I’m looking at wxPython GUIs and later we’ll look at web-applications with Django and CGI.
This marks a turning point for us – now we know where we’re focusing and what we have to deliver (previously we had too many ideas and not enough focus).
Next I have to create several solid new series over the next 2 months and figure out how to market to the right users. It feels like this is a constant quest for skills-acquisition!
I’m very pleased to say that John Montgomery is joining us as our 3rd Python author – he has a great background in Python, Java, programming for the web and all sorts of geek topics. His videos will make a great addition to ShowMeDo.
Onwards and upwards for 2008 🙂
Disappearing Adobe Flash Player on Ubuntu (Gutsy)
This morning Ubuntu’s UpdateManager ran and informed me of 1 update to do with the Adobe flash player. I let it install…and promptly I no longer had the Flash player in Firefox 🙁 An ‘about:plugins’ confirmed that it was missing.
A few minutes poking on the web revealed this write-up and this bug-report which spells out the fix.
By following the setup and then removing flashplugin-nonfree, then adding it again, the Flash player reappeared in my Firefox. Fixed in 2 minutes.
After this I removed the ‘proposed updates’ from Software Sources (added via the bug-report’s instructions) and all seems to be well.
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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