Publishing 2.0 + Alan Turing

Publishing 2.0 was very enjoyable. I picked up some interesting perspectives/twists/thoughts on the future of "traditional" publishing - mostly from an STM perspective. Congrats to Alex, Eamon etc. on another great event.

The venue was probably the most spine tingling one I have ever been in for a tech. conference. Bletchley Park. The ghost of Alan Turing walking around the huts. The clickity clack of colossus. Turing of the famous test. Turing of the limits of computability. Turing who took Wittgenstein to task on the Phil of Mathematics (and survived). Turing of Cryptonomicon.

A very enjoyable day.

42 = f(x). Therefore f(x) is?

For 365 days from now - if an indifferent universe will suffer it - I will eff the ineffable. If my current age is the answer, then what was the original question?

McGrath drones on about one of his hobby horses

McGrath drones on about one of his hobby horses[IMG] at Barcamp Dublin.

Barcamp Galway: Mashing up the Enterprise: Why Mashups/REST/RSS change *everything*

I have put a more pointed title on my planned talk for Barcamp Galway in September.

My plan is to develop some of the thoughts that went in to
I'll push and you pull. The mashup approach to application integration.

Note to anyone from outside Ireland who might be thinking of doing Barcamp Galway as part of some bigger trip around this part of the world : Galway is a great place to spend a weekend.

Going forward, going backward, changing

"The word 'progress' has such positive connotations doesn't it? Language can be such a tricky thing..."-- Going forward, going backward, changing

PyCon UK

The PyCon phenomenon comes to the UK : PyCon UK. Great. I will try to get over to that event.

Barcamp Dublin : slides and thoughts

Barcamp Dublin was a fun event. Great location (once you get inside the building), terrible WIFI (for *any* place - never mind for a Digital Hub) but a great space that gradually filled up with interesting people with interesting things to say and all sorts of synergising banter going on. Very high content to fluff ratio.

I had to head home to the metropolis of Sligo afterwards so I missed the pub bit which I'm sure would have been equally good - and probably had better WIFI.

Early on, Joe Drumgoole pointed to the smallest of the three meeting rooms and said something like "all of you who want to talk about Java and XML and whatnot, go in there". So, I grabbed the bull by the horns and ended up speaking first with a free slot that I was able to flow into after my official slot.

Time flew. Although my talk was mostly about Jython but - thanks to an interactive audience -strayed over much wider territory: Java, static typing, IDEs, Erlang/Shared Nothing, the GIL, Star Wars, Sun Hardware, Second Life Scripting, Mono, Rails, IronPython, Agile Development, Web 2.0...

The slides only dimly reflect what we talked about but here they are : in OpenOffice format and PDF format.

Some items I noted

• Atom was not mentioned even once. Never. I don't know if that is because RSS is the collective noun for syndication formats or because nobody there has Atom on their radar or becuase it just never came up.
  
• The word "Ruby" was never mentioned on its own. The Teutonic noun Rubyonrails was always used. The more I hear about it, the more I think "Lotus Notes done right". By contrast, TurboGears and Django when mentioned were always distinct from Python the language and there were many references to Python that had nothing to do with RAD for database-oriented webapps.
  
• There is a sense in the blogging community that there will be a lot of social media usage surrounding the upcoming Election that may awaken mainstream consciousness to the power/implications of all this Web 2.0 geeky mullarky.
  

Finally, did I mention that the WIFI was terrible?