Reading Geek Night

Following on from his talk on SOLID at a previous geek night, Luke Smith will be demoing ”Linq for JavaScript”. According to Microsoft…

LINQ is a set of extensions to the .NET Framework that encompass language-integrated query, set, and transform operations. It extends C# and Visual Basic with native language syntax for queries and provides class libraries to take advantage of these capabilities.

Luke will demo a library which takes these principles and makes them available in JavaScript. He says…

Are you familiar with Linq? Have you ever thought “hey, this is cool but I wish I could do it on the client”? Probably not. Well you can, kinda. Linq2JS is an opensource JavaScript library that brings much of the .NET Linq API to the wonderful world of JavaScript.

Still space on Tuesday for one more 5 minute talk if anyone wants to pitch in…

How about this for a topic… What happens if you combine hardware, software, Web services and 3D modelling with a bit of Augmented Reality thrown in for good measure?

At Tuesday nights event, Mike Beardmore will be presenting a talk titled “Connecting your 1st and 2nd Lives”. Mike says…

With many years of using new tech to solve current tech problems, I still love the new opportunities that tech brings. On Tuesday I’ll be talking about how I connected real world stuff to virtual stuff in the Reaction OpenSim World.

So with a talk on Web security from Pedro, Virtual Worlds from Mike, and another talk I’ll be announcing soon, it looks like its going to be an eclectic and informative evening.

Hope to see you at Copa from around 7.30 on Tuesday night!

Things are coming together for the fourth Reading Geek Night. The first talk to announce is from Pedro Laguna. Pedro describes himself as a ’security geek’ and has recently moved to Reading from his native Seville in Spain. With 8 or so years of web security experience behind him, he’s going to give us an introduction and some practical tips for hacking sorry testing website security…

Pedro’s will be talking about “Firefox as a Pentesting tool”. He says…

I´m going to show some Firefox extensions that can be used to bypass simple security measures in websites and others than can be useful later in future security talks at Geek nights. Probably some of the extensions are going to be well-know by most of the web developers but I´m going to use them in a different way to test the security of some websites.

Hope to see you there… Remember its Tuesday 9th Feb at Copa from 7.30pm onwards.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the best way to organise the talks for Reading Geek Night. So far its always ‘come together’ at the last minute, but thats led to a couple of issues…

• Until the full line up of speakers is confirmed, its difficult to publicise the event. The posters for rdggeek 1 & 2 seemed to go down well, but in both cases they were only produced a couple of days before the event. I think that to be effective we’d need to get them out there at least a week in advance.
• I’m realising that one of the most valuable things I can do is to try and ‘balance’ the talks for each event – the feedback from the first time was clear – you want it to be an eclectic evening. Pulling things together at the last minute means that I don’t have the ability to shuffle things around to make sure that each evening gives a range of different types of talk.

So… what I want to do – and will need your help doing it – is to get a “pipeline” of potential talks going and start pencilling them in for future events. That way we make sure we get the right mix at each event and I’ll keep my hair for a little bit longer!

I’m going to start with the next three events (Feb 9th/ Mar 9th / Apr 13th). There are two things you can do to help Reading Geek Night be a success in 2010…

1. If you can do a 5 or 15 minute talk slot in the next three months or so then let me know. It doesn’t have to be a fully formed idea, just expressions of interest will do.
2. If you know someone else who you’d like to see do a talk, then butter them up (or whatever your favoured persuasion mechanism is) and get in touch

You can get in touch via the comments, or jim at readinggeeknight.com, or DM @rdggeek or @JimAnning. Look forward to hearing from you.

Three things have prompted me to change the plans for this month’s Reading Geek Night .

• Because everyone has been busy (plus the whole Christmas and New Year thing), we had fewer talks lined up than usual.
• With the recent weather (apparently it’s been snowing! Who knew?) , a couple of the planned talks for Monday evening have fallen through because there are question marks over speakers being able to travel to Reading.
• I’m expecting that fewer people will want / be able to make the trip into town when the forecast is for more of the white stuff and the roads and pavements are so icy.

Given that, I’ve decided to cancel the ‘formal’ version of Reading Geek Night for January and re-schedule the talks that were lined up for either next time or future events.

However, I’ve also always said that if at least 10 people are willing to turn up, then I would make sure it happened. So with that in mind I will be in Copa (prob upstairs) from 7.30ish on Monday night (even if I have to crawl there on my hands and knees from Caversham!) and would love to see anyone who can make it for a more ‘informal’ version of Reading Geek Night.

Heres the second confirmed talk for Monday 11th January’s Reading Geek Night (7.30pm at Copa).

Dan Moon (@danwtmoon)will be focussing on trends in web based application adoption and questioning the future role of traditional IT departments.

Dans says…

The wealth of 2.0 applications for business poses a real question of the role and value of traditional IT. This will be a short, provocative discussion on who needs IT when you have 2.0?

Hopefully there will be a couple more announcements of talks over the next day or two, but we’re always open to offers of speaking. Its a friendly crowd and we like to see a diverse range of topics. So if you’d be happy to share some knowledge / expertise / opinions  then please get in touch.

Happy New Year!

In true last minute fashion I’m pulling together the speakers for next weeks Reading Geek Night. Its on MONDAY 11th downstairs at Copa. Doors open 7.30pm.

There is still room for more speakers – we’re a bit light on technical content this month, so anyone who can stand up and present a bit of geekery would be more than welcome.

Anyway the first confirmed talk for the first Reading Geek Night of 2010 is from Yad Jaura.

Yad has worked in the enterprise mobile software market for about 17 years for companies including XcelleNet, Sybase, HandStep and most recently Critical Path. His friends call him a ‘gadget man’ but he doesn’t recognise the label
Yad says…

I”m going to spend 15 mins talking about and showing you my top 10 iPhone apps. It’s amazing how much you can do and how much fun you can have with a smartphone these days. I’m going to show you why I love these devices and what my favourite uses for them are.

So hope to see you on the 11th – Tell your friends, drag your colleagues along. Plus look out for more announcements of talks in the next few days.

OK… So I know I said that it would be on the second tuesday of the month… but (mainly due to me not getting off my bottom) Copa is double booked for 12th January.

Therefore, the date for the next Reading Geek Night is MONDAY 11th January 2010.

Here’s the poster for Reading Geek 2. ( A3 PDF 1M here ). Once again it would be great if you could print it out and put it on display somewhere where fellow geeks will see it. Last time, with it being the first event, I didn’t really want to go too mad with the publicity, but I reckon that this time we should be a bit bolder.

We have four top Apress books (2 x Coders at Work, 1 Advanced CSS, 1 Zoho) and a few Apress keyring torches to give away at this months event… To qualify for a freebie you’ll need to put the poster up, take a pic of it in place, add a link to the pic in the comments below (and if you are a twitter type then please tweet it with the #rdggeek tag). On the night, I’ll ask the people doing talks to judge the poster pics that, in their opinion, provided the best publicity for the event. I’ll leave it to the speakers as to the final judging criteria, but I’d imagine that positioning, the number of people who would have seen it, comedic effect,  and artistic merit could all be taken into account!

The final talk I can announce today is from Simon Cobb who will be doing a short talk on “Making It: ideas I’ve stolen from other people”.

It’s a whirlwind tour through my favourite quotes and ideas on how to make almost any kind of stuff, but mostly I use them to build internet stuff.

Theres still room for another one or two five minute slots. So drop me a mail if you want to do one.