Posted by dave
So tonight I am speaking at GeekUp about this weeks buzzword, OpenID :) It isn’t going to be an in depth talk about all the technical details of OpenID but is going to focus on what OpenID is/does, how to best use OpenID (delegation!) and also I am going to talk about some of the weaknesses of it. It is only going to be a short talk, 10 minutes or so… so even if you are completely unconvinced and I don’t manage to turn you around, at least the torture won’t last long!
Just a quick note too, for those people who noticed the blip in the encoding of the BBC Backstage video, I have re-encoded it and uploaded it to a different video sharing site and replaced the version in that blog post so if you wanted to see the end of the talk, try again :)
See you tonight at GeekUp
Posted by dave
Back in September last year at the first BarCamp in the UK, Paul Farnell and Matt Brindley created a super cool little web app that generated a Pecha Kucha slideshow from your last 20 del.icio.us links… it went down pretty well at BarCamp and has been used at several other events I have been to since then, it was really well used at the 2nd BarCamp London a couple of weeks ago which unfortunately neither Paul nor Matt could make it to :( but it was really nice to see it being used anyway.
Unfortunately, it did have some issues, it used iframe tags to load your bookmarked pages and so if any of them had javascript to break out of being viewed in a frame the whole presentation would come to a grinding halt or if the web page didn’t set a background colour you could sometimes see the next page being loaded underneath the current page… messy…
Anyway I have just found out that Matt has upgraded it to use their Site Vista back end to create the presentation so now what it does is it goes and takes a screenshot of your last 20 sites using the screenshotting engine from their product Site Vista and queues the screenshots up for viewing instead of trying to load the actual pages… JavaScript can no longer destroy your Pecha Kucha… Awesome ;)
I have been wanting Matt to change it to do it this way since he first talked about having an API for SiteVista and I am so pleased that it has happened, here is to many more uses of it ;) I hope it gets some wider recognition too. Bring on more Delicious Pecha Kucha, maybe at the April GeekUp?
Posted by dave
So a couple of days ago Ian Forrester spoke at a special GeekUp event and I filmed the talk and so after many tedious hours of importing it into iMovie, here is the footage from it…
It came up in the pub afterwards that it might be a good idea to just do the GeekUp events in the pub like Ian’s Geek Dinners and as I noticed a lot of new faces at this event I think it is worth mentioning that we usually DO do this just in the pub! This was a bit of a special case because Ian was in town with a more substantial talk than we usually have at GeekUp but the regular event is mostly just in the B-lounge pub on Piccadilly in Manchester (more details on the GeekUp site) so if you fancy a night in the pub with some fellow geeks then I will see you there on Tuesday ;)
Like I said, there were a lot of new faces at this event so I am going to take this chance to do a completely blatant plug in case any of you are interested in other free events like this, check out the North West Ruby User Group or the Manchester .NET User Group who both meet at the same venue.
See you Tuesday…
