Barcamp Manchester 2 happened this weekend (twitter: #bcman2). As you can guess by the title, this was the second barcamp run in Manchester, and at 200 people, was one of the biggest community event held in the area for a while. We had a great range of people turning up, from Londoners bringing N900s, through to locals playing with giant robots. What happens when you take that amount of people, a near limitless supply of tea, coffee, soft drinks and sweet things and put them in an awesome space? Sessions happen, discussions are had and people come up with ideastm.
Venue
Barcamp this year was run in the Contact theatre (twitter: @contactmcr), which is not just a phenomenal space (several stages/cinemas, rooms and excellent communal bar spaces), but comes with THE BEST STAFF I HAVE EVER KNOWN AT A BARCAMP. Seriously, considering they were there for two days solid, they came into sessions, ran session, did some beatboxing and honestly added to the atmosphere. They really wanted to get engaged, and even came up on stage to do some powerpoint karaoke. You guys rock – we’re definitely working with you again!
Talks
I admit it, I didn’t get to many talks this time around. We got a little wrapped up in making stuff happen, then sleeping, then taking a much needed walk. I did make a talk on Monotouch, the port of the Mono project the the iPhone. Looked cool, especially as a .NET developer by trade.
For those that are visiting my blog from my android demo talk, you’ll find the resources on the talk and the code on this blog post. If you have any questions, catch me on the usual channels: twitter and e-mail.
Food
Pizza. Cheese And Ham Coissants. Sushi. Ice Cream. Nuff said.
Paul Sylvester – Magic’s Best Kept Secret rocked the floor yet again. This time he was performing close up magic, working with small groups at a time. The perfect combination of magic, pizza and some light drinks was spot on, and the magic kept going all evening. People splintered out for some Beatles Rock Band (note: next time – bring the lot. If I ever hear another Beatles song it’ll be too soon), and then we moved for the time honoured tradition of Powerpoint Karaoke. I take it no-one got videos of my impression of a Sweedish IKEA designer? I’m not sure I can repeat that gig.
Thanks go to all the organisers for making it happen and the army of minions which spent the weekend running around making sure that stuff happened. We now need a month to recover. WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT’S GEEKUP MANCHESTER TOMORROW?
I travel quite a bit. Mostly around the UK, I end up visiting clients all over the place. A travel and stay cheaply, I require very little. I ask for a clean room, half decent shower, and pleasant staff. That’s about it. I have stayed in some dodgy guest houses, scary hotels and borderline B&Bs. But on no occasion have I been a place quite like this. I was so impressed by their attempts to thwart my enjoyment of my stay I decided it deserved a blog post.
This is a long post with pictures. More below the cut.
Also an awesome announcement that BAE Systems would be putting a large amount of cash behind the entire GGD movement. There’s also some mumblings of organising Girl Geek Teas, as a more frequent meet up with the same ideas of Geek Girl Dinners.
Here’s a few videos from the event. Apologies for the orientation – you would have thought that Youtube would give you an option to rotate them once they’re uploaded. Audio quality is a bit pants as well, taken on the phone. As is the video quality. In general, they’re a bit pants – but you can at least get a feel for how the evening went.
On Saturday I presented a short talk on building a basic android application in 20 minutes. This was the full process, from generating the shell project, to writing the code, generating the layouts, testing on the emulator, signing the application and uploading the binary. I wasn’t able to do this as “live” as I would have liked – I’ll perfect the routine in time for Barcamp Manchester, but the group did a good job of being a dummy audience.
For those interested the application is called “Barcamp Blackpool” (available on the Marketplace). It downloads the latest 20 tweets with the bcblackpool hash tag and displays them as a list. Clicking on an individual item will then launch a browser session showing the tweet on the twitter website. Basic but functional. The source code for the application is available on Google Code.
If there are other things people would like to see in a 20 minute Android demo – please feel free to comment on this post and I’ll see what I can do for Barcamp Manchester.
This weekend saw the first Barcamp Blackpool, held at the Blackpool Pleasure Beach. Many thanks go to @ruby_gem for organising the event, and to the various sponsors, including Yahoo for sponsoring the all important bar and Pixel Programming for ensuring we had a venue and noms. My apologies to to all those I may have caused hangovers to for the following day. We also managed to lose Phil Winstanley for a few hours.
Talks were wide ranging, from some light-hearted ones on upcoming social network Pokebook through to code reviews of the new W3C website and my own talk on building and publishing an Android application in 1 hour30 minutes 20 minutes (code to follow).
Evening entertainment was provided by Paul Sylvester, who provided the BEST MAGIC SHOW I HAVE EVER SEEN (don’t let the website fool you). So much so, there’s speculation about hiring him for one of the next Geek Girl Dinners.
You know, it’s absolutely right. We’ve got so obsessed over security of liquids, toothpastes and belt buckles that people appear to have overlooked that laptops, iPods and mobile phones are potentially a hell of a lot more lethal. Maybe we should just point to all people with beards and laptops and scream “terrorist” instead.
Our industry is passioned and opinionated. This is a statement of fact. Be it Emacs vs Vi, Linux vs Windows, iPod vs … errr[1], people often fall in love with tools, philosophies and companies. And this is fine. Within the industry we call them “holy wars”, since the genuine fundamentalists have gone long past the tenets of logic and rationale (at least to the naked eye).
And like all good religions, their virtuous leaders are exalted[2]. Ballmer, Jobs and Stallman, each seen as personifications of the ideals they represent. Ballmer identifies with the corporate world, where big commercial software dominates. A big man with a bald head and a known temperament, he’s a figure people associate with boardrooms and big money. Jobs appears as a slight of a man, usually seen at keynotes with a trademark roll-neck and jeans he’s become the representative of design and cool, embraced by the younger generation. Stallman is another large guy, but rather than corporate groomed appears in t-shirts with long ragged hair and beard to match. A visual throwback to the hippy days, he comes with the embodiment of “free”, leading the free software revolution.
As any good personification of an ideal, their attitudes and ideas tally with their images. Ballmer has spoken repeatedly about the values of the corporate workplace and denounced free software as evil, Jobs speaks regularly on the functions of design and Stallman denounces any software or standards not truly free as evil.
And this is fine.
Because these contrasting attitudes set up a triangle of views with these figureheads and beliefs as cornerstones. There are those that will naturally gravitate towards these polarising opinions and those that will middle around the centre, or leaning between two points of view, subscribing to different tenants of each.
Some people will insist on using nothing but free software. Some people will insist on using nothing but beautiful, design driven products. Some people are driven by the business world and purely by suits and management. Some people may be primarily driven by business, but enjoy rollneck sweaters and iPods at the weekend. Some people may use free software on top of their proprietary systems. Some people may use free software on top of their business OS to talk to their design driven MP3 player[3].
And this is also fine.
The strength of a community is based upon the mix of people within it. Even within domain-specific communities, there will be a range of philosophies and beliefs which everyone will not subscribe to. And although we may occasionally decry these firm believers, and believe them to be as much a fundamentalist as their own religious leader we should respect (even if we disagree) their position because they provide the cornerstones of diversity for the community. The more diverse a community, the larger the range of interests and the higher the liklihood of intelligent (if sometimes a little crazy) discourse. The better the quality (not necessarily quantity) of debate, the more life exists within a community, and the higher the longer the community is likely to last. I would like to see those communities I take part in last for a very long time.
Humanist vs Belief
Free vs Commercial
Pragmatic vs Puritan
Emacs vs Vi
So I say welcome to the fundamentalists.
I say welcome to the middlers.
All communities need both.
[1] I’m kidding, there’s plenty of alternatives. I use a Sansa Clip myself.
[2] For the sake of simplicity, I’m restricting the set to three. I realise that in reality the triangle is more like a multi-sided polygon, but it creates a more dramatic image this way.
[3] Did I get all the combinations there?
Apparently, hitting the “publish button” on articles that aren’t finished, or in some cases even started is all in vogue this year. First of all techcrunch manage foot-in-mouth syndrome over Spingate, and now Forbes has managed one, publishing an internal memo or note over the Polanski affair. Link available as long as it’s live.
This begs several questions:
Who is Frank?
Who are the sources in the Justice Department.
Does no one even look for the draft button anymore?
I’m currently writing an e-commerce system for some very nice people which is quite literally all-singing, all-dancing. When we originally wrote the prices part of the system, we had a very serious conversation about how pricing and VAT would be handled. It went something like this:
Client) We want to store prices inclusive of VAT.
Me) Are you sure? Inclusive of who’s VAT?
Client) We want the prices to be nicely rounded, and then we take the VAT off the total price.
Me) Are you sure? This has some interesting international implications.
Client) Yes, we’re sure. Here – go do pretty things.
Me) Ok.
Seems fair enough. They want pretty rounded prices on the site which meant they didn’t have to think about VAT. Which is great for working in the UK. Then I received a change request asking us to display the VAT dependant upon which country the user was purchasing from. This would still be calculated as a percentage of the earlier specified total price.
Me) So if the user’s country has a VAT of 90%, you’re happy to only receive 10% of the total sale value?
Client) Erm…. Ah.
This is a little extreme, no-one as of yet uses a VAT of 90%. The UK has a rather modest 15%, but countries such as Norway have a rather more eye-watering 25%. Admittedly, if you’re shipping to Panama, you’re quids in, since VAT is only 5%.
There are several different ways pricing and VAT can be managed on an e-commerce site. When I brought this topic up in an IRC channel I frequent, I thought the following exchange illustrated the complexity and confusion rather nicely:
15:17 <@ccooke> kian: you need to store the VAT on the exact item at the exact moment it was stored.
15:18 < kian> ccooke: no you don’t.
15:18 < kian> ccooke: hold. for which scenario. a, b or c?
15:19 <@ccooke> which one’s which?
15:19 < kian> ccooke: a) static price, flexible VAT b) static base price + UK VAT, remove VAT add countries VAT, c) Price Ex VAT + WhateverVAT, d) sod this – pub.
15:20 <@ccooke> d!
15:20 < kian> I’m with you. Be there in three hours.
So, for your interest and ponderings, here are the three options I see:
Fixed Price, Flexible VAT
Price is stored, inclusive of VAT. VAT is calculated as a percentage of the price at point of sale with respect to the user’s country. So if you buy from the UK, you’re paying £100 of which 15% is VAT and if you buy from Norway, you’re paying £100 of which 25% is VAT.
Pros: Nice pretty prices.
Cons: The amount of money you return from each sale is dependant upon where the user purchases your item from.
Price + “Home” VAT, Flexible VAT
Prices are stored, inclusive of “home” VAT. When calculating prices for foreign countries, the VAT for the home country is deducted before adding on the VAT for the user’s country. So if you buy from the UK, you’re paying £100 of which 15% is VAT, and if you buy from Norway, you pay £108 (100 * 1.25 / 1.15 ) of which 25% is VAT.
Pros: Pretty prices for home country, protected base price for foreign country. If home VAT rate changes, prices remain same (gain or loss dependant on home VAT).
Cons: You could end up with some odd prices for non-home countries.
Price Ex VAT, Flexible VAT
Prices are stored, exclusive of any VAT. VAT is calculated on the shop at run time dependant on the user’s country. So if you buy from the UK, you’re paying £115 of which 15% is VAT, and if you buy from Norway, you pay £125 of which 25% is VAT.
Pros: Your base price does not fluctuate, therefore the value of the VAT is irrelevant.
Cons: Potentially ugly, non marketing friendly prices. Price changes on VAT changes.
We’re still debating which one of these is the best option for the system we are currently building. We are currently using “fixed price, flexible VAT”, but this position may change as we delve into the implications more deeply.
If you’re still with us at this point, well done. I’ve spent an hour trying to get my head around this rather prickly topic, double checking import/export and VAT regulations as I go. But its a good example of how something so initially clean-cut as product pricing can lead into a headache of trouble.
The Android 1.6 API has now been released, and with it is coming one feature which outshines all others. The “Quick Search Bar” provides instant access to local phone and Google results in near real-time.
Basically, it’s spotlight for Android, launched as a widget from your home screen. I can see this really becoming the central hub of any phone.
The new marketplace looks a hell of a lot better as well.
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