SF Gateway specialise in putting Ebooks out there for classic SF titles that will probably never see the light of a printing press again (they also have some classic well known SF listed as well). They’re well edited, and the books I’ve had through Kobo have been excellent.

Enjoy, and have a Merry Christmas.

In Manchester, our sessions revolved around Conway’s Game of Life, a simple cellular automaton. Working in pairs, every 45 minutes we would throw away our work and start again in a new pair.

Nothing is more frustrating than spending a whole day writing code, and having nothing to show for it. So this evening I hacked out a javascript implementation of life, and a HTML/JS front end for it. Set a grid size, then click on the cells to set the initial state. Start and stop the game and alter the state at any time.

You can try it out here, and the code is available to do with as you please on GitHub.

(Cut for images)

NU.nl homepage @ 20^th October 2011 17:30

BBC News homepage @ 20^th October 2011 17:30

Some of them are getting a little over-excited over it though. Both the BBC and NU.nl are showing pictures of Gadaffi’s body on the front page, with no warnings – just plastered in your face. This may be rather unsuitable for younger viewers, for which the beeb and various news sites are seen as trusted sources, and as such are accessible behind school firewalls. It’s also very triggery for a lot of people, especially those who have been involved in trauma or handling the recently-deceased.

BBC News Article on Dale Farm @ 20^th October 2011 17:30

Even viewing news articles not on the front page isn’t particularly safe, since there’s a picture and reminder in the top right that Gadaffi is dead, and just to back that up, a picture of his dead face, still covered in blood.

I’m against censorship of the internet, but I am for an awareness of your viewers. Beeb, Nu.nl, you may want to take this in to account.

Apple apparently fixed this issue with 10.7.2 and closed the related ticket. Alas the issue is not closed, although it is much better. There is also a temporary way to resolve the issue until the machine is rebooted.

Send the machine to sleep, and wake it back up. The related graphics problems should now stop.

I have no idea why this works, or how this works, but it does indeed work. I’m now happily using ScreenRecycler again and VMWare isn’t getting so attached to my cursor anymore.

Another weekend, another barcamp… But blackpool is a little different to the other ‘camps held around the country. Whether it’s the epicness of running the event at the Blackpool Pleasure Beach Casino (I kid ye not), or that we have a near infinite supply of rock, Blackpool always manages to blend the geek with the surreal.

Three to four years ago, when I first started to attend Barcamps, talks were always based on computing technical topics. Ruby on Rails, iOS and Android were the new kids on the block, and Barcamps were seen as a way of getting people involved (or at least introduced) to those platforms. As the years have gone on, the amount of computing-technical content has gone down, and we’ve seen sessions run on knitting, hama-badge making and British Sign Language. Always interesting, but I had started to wonder whether we were losing focus on things to do at Barcamps.

This year, I was pleased to see a range of talks run over a number of tracks, some technical, some less, some nostalgic. I think the most popular, and certainly the most well received talk was “A Brief History of Error Messages”, including live demonstrations of Spectrum loading[1] and a real Windows ME machine. Well stitched together, there’s a potential stand-up routine here to rival Dave Gorman’s Powerpoint Presentation.

For my sins, I ran “Introduction to Teaching” – an explanation of the IDEA methodology with some practical work involving games, and “Propositional Logic for Beginners”, which caused much comment about attendees’ preference for sausage.

Barcamps come with after-parties, and Blackpool’s have become the stuff of legends. A little more keyed down than in previous years, after the buffet (otherwise known as the meat-fest), some Rock Band was played and a few, rather large games of Werewolf. The person who managed to sing Free Bird really deserves an award. The people at the bar thought we were listening to the recorded track…

As always, Barcamps can’t happen without the support of sponsors. This year’s Barcamp was sponsored (in no particular order) by: Testled, The H, Indigo, Magma Digital, FTP Concepts, JMC Website Design, Magic Missile (also winner of the dodgy logo award), Sugru, Tweetdig, Neterix, Mediaburst, FY Creatives, Our Learning and the Brookson Enterprise Freelance Fair.

Money is one thing, but actually having the stuff to put the event together takes even more, so a big shout-out goes to RubyGem and BigLesP for throwing away their sanity, and possibly their dignity to make it happen.

–

[1] – there is genuinely something wrong when you hear the tones in the next room and think “that’s the header loading…”.

This year we had a range of organised challenges from the sponsors.  Essendex ran a challenge for the most inventive use of their
SMS API, EBuyer asked developers to design and build a game for their winter promotions, CodingFutures ran a challenge for their
payment API and AffiliateNetwork ran a challenge to ask developers to do *anything* with their 4GB data set of merchant products.

This year I turned up with no team and no real idea, just some scribblings I’d made on the Xoom in ThinkingSpace on the way over. 
I was lucky to find Joey and Martyn in a similar situation, so we formed TeamFK and decided to tackle the affiliate challenge.  We
built BzzFinder, an application which searches for social data (buzz)
around a given product and produces a timeline of that data with
affiliate links to buy the products.  The social data includes information from Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and a range of blog sources
including Blogger and Livejournal.

Trials and tribulations happened over the weekend.  Not everything went according to plan.

Unfortunately, our entry failed to impress the judges and we failed to make a mention in the top three, let alone making a bid at the
prize.  All props go to PleasePledge, who made an impressive product and took the prize of an Apple TV each, and £100 of iTunes vouchers.
(

All thanks go to the sponsors: Essendex, Affiliate Window, EBuyer, CodingFutures, JustEat, et al, without who (obviously) the
event could not happen.  Please dig around these people and find out what they do.  The more interest they get from Hack Day attendees,
the more interest they have in sponsoring future events.

This weekend saw the inaugural Barcamp Nottingham, held at Nottingham’s most awesome Hackspace. The space is easily one of the most awesome geek-spaces in the UK, consisting of a sofa area, open discussion space and generous space for two screens. They’re also easily packing some of the most awesome geekery I’ve seen, from 3D printers to LED tweet boards and enough soldering irons to allow Alistair to set most of the UK on fire.

Talks were wide and varied, ranging from robotics through to lace making, Haskell through to balloon animals. Some barcamps can take themselves too seriously, and focus too hard on technical geekery. Geekery comes in many forms, and it’s great to see some of the more obtuse aspects being investigated. Where else are you going to find discussions on the mathematics of origami?

Over the course of the talks over the weekend, I have come to a startling conclusion. The human race is near the end of its existance and will soon be at a tipping point where we can no longer save ourselves. No, I’m not talking about recycling, global warming and self-sustenance (although these were all covered over the weekend). I’m talking about the fact that we are one step away from self-powering robots feasting on human flesh which can replicate themselves and hunt us down.

Dear people, the future is here, and we’re all doomed.

To get around this, either make your JSON requests happen by POST, or change:

return Json(object);

to

return Json(object, JsonRequestBehaviour.AllowGet); 

Not too bad if you’ve only got a couple of instances, but if you’ve got Json coming out of your ears, it’s a pain to implement it everywhere. You can either derive yourself a controller object and override the default Json behaviour – or use a Visual Studio find and replace regex to change your Json responses for you:

Unlike our Ruby, PHPing and Perl counterparts, regular expressions aren’t something that .NET developers tend to come across on a regular basis, and as such we often forget they’re lurking in the toolbox. Visual Studio find/replace has a reasonable regex mechanism, but it’s not perl standard. Check the docs for details.

For reference – we know this isn’t best practice, but if you need a quick and dirty fix, this will do it.

When constructing your CV – remember your target audience. The person on the other end of the desk is looking for a fit in to a team. In our industry, he’s looking for a skills fit, a range of experiences, and possibly curious about what you do out of hours to flesh your character. Your CV will be given five minutes. If you don’t make your mark in that time, that’s it. Here’s a few tropes to avoid to help with that.

Personal Statement & Brown Nosing

Nothing says “hire me” like the sound of anal slurping. Holy Christ, how many times do I have to hear “I would love to work at your company because…” or words to that effect. You want a job with a community, which pays money and is enjoyable. As does everyone else. Just try to avoid making it sound like your trying to give me colonic irrigation with your tongue at the same time.

Personal Skills

I am a hard-working, trustworthy, flexible person who is a good team-player…

Really? You mean these aren’t qualities I would normally expect to find in a regular employee? Do you think I make a habit of recruiting scum of the earth who steal from old ladies and are the mentally unstable loner types, who require a darkened room at all types to operate in? The fact that you’ve had to state these on your CV immediately raises flags in my mind that maybe, just maybe you had to list these incase they weren’t obvious when we met face-to-face. Think about that.

Repetition

At Job A I did project X! Project X consisted of A1, A2, A3. At Job B I did project X! Project X consisted of A1, A2, B1! At Job C I did project X! Project X consisted of A1, A2, B2! At Job D I did project Y! Project Y was fun!

Some skills are implied. Sharepoint is the one that immediately comes to mind. If you’re a sharepoint developer, there are some obvious associated skills which come with this. I can guess you probably worked with SQL Server at all your sharepoint jobs. Repeating yourself over and over only shows to me that you’ve got a very narrow field of experience. This immediately worries me – what happens when you’re working outside of your comfort zone? Tell me something I don’t know.

Stuffing

If you’re a fresh graduate, or new to this industry, you’re going to have a short CV. If you’ve been in this game for a few years, your CV will be somewhat bulkier. Don’t try to make your CV look impressive by adding crap to it. Crap includes every academic result you’ve ever had, and a one page long “personal statement”. Keep it tidy, keep it short. There is nothing wrong with a one page CV if that’s all you’ve got. People will respect you more for having the balls (or other bits of anatomy) to do it.

Hobbies and Interests

This one also comes under brown-nosing. This is about showing you’re a rounded personality, not that you live your life in your job. There is nothing wrong, nothing wrong at all in having geek related hobbies. You code games in Python for fun? Fucking A. But if you tell me you code sharepoint servers for kicks, I’m going to have some serious problems believing you. Same goes for reading “technical journals”. Very few people I have met actually do so. Some do, but it sits out a mile if you’re lying. Do you enjoy cooking, or a game of footy on a Sunday? – these are fine. As are extreme ironing, hiring escorts, and reading. Reading is a great chill-out hobby, more people should do it.

Technical Skills of the Gods

Don’t claim you have rockstar/ninja/word-of-the-month skills if you don’t. This seems obvious, but so many people still do it, it’s painful. Claim you have two decades of .NET experience, and I’ll raise an eyebrow. Claim you wrote NHibernate and I’ll ask you questions. As will other interviewers.

I now run a small technical test for all interviewees. It’s not hard, but represents a typical workload. I expect people to manage it, or at the very least have a good stab at it. If you can’t do this, why did you tell me you could?

Happy gig-hunting folks.