More praise for design constraints

"Tools with constraints that focus attention on simplicity can be excellent catalysts for change." --
More praise for design constraints

Python Meetup, London

Well the snap Python meetup was fun. The Porterhouse Pub is something of a maze so I was glad I eventually found the table with the O'Reilly Book on it. Some folk who turned up later didn't find us at all, apparently.

It was great to put faces to some (blog) names.

My big takeaway from the evening: I worked in Financial Services in the City of London in the late Eighties. It wasn't fun (technically speaking) - 8086 assembler and C (if you were lucky).

Today, well, lots of interesting Python stuff going on in the City. *Lots*. Most of it going on under the covers in the if-I-tell-you-I'll-have-to-NDA-you area.

Its a fun time to be in the City if you are a Python developer.

Bursty broadband making streaming video a pain? - A doh! moment

My home broadband is very bursty at the moment. Bandwidth fluctuates wildly. Not a problem for, say, downloading stuff but a real pain for any streaming media like youtube video etc.

Today, I filed the following very effective technique under "Doh! Why didn't I think of this before?".

Start the video playback. Then pause it and go get a coffee. The stream gets buffered under the hood (you will most likely see a progress meter indicating how far ahead of the curent position has now been buffered.). Return with coffee, hit play and the stream will stream smoothly.

Darn I feel stoopid to have suffered this for a while now without realising I could just buffer up stuff.

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.