Reading Geek Night

Get yourself a lovely poster!!

It would be great if you could print out an A3 poster for Reading Geek Night 5 and pop it on your notice board at work. The more people who come along… the bigger the pool of people to do talks is… the bigger the diversity of talks the better the night gets. You get the picture!

There are two A3 PDF versions… the Colour one (for those of you with plenty of red toner)…. and the Black & White one.

The last of the talks to announce for Readging Geek on Tuesday is from Dan Moon (@danwtmoon). Dan is the founder of Strawberry Way and was going to present at the Geek Night in January which got somewhat snowed off!

Dan 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?

So thats it for the lineup. Hope you can join us on the 9th.

The third talk for Tuesdays Reading Geek Night is from Laura Blackmore. Laura is part of a team at Microsoft who share research and findings on how the workforce is changing to accommodate for changing generations. She says…

We’ll talk about findings from the Whitepaper research on “The New World of Work”, who are Millennials, companies that have embraced changes to accommodate for new workforces coming through, statistics for social media and quotes from Millennials, and finally show Microsoft’s vision of the future in a video format.

One of the things I love about how Reading Geek Night is turning out is the range of talks people are coming up with… So far we have @alanb talking about NoSQL, @robashton about statistics (and toilets!), Laura presenting some research backed by a big corporate… and theres a fourth talk to announce later.

Hope to see you there on Tuesday (9th March). As usual its downstairs at Copa in Reading town centre, doors open at 7.30pm

When I ask people what kind of talks they want to see at Reading Geek Night, the answer is usually along the lines of ‘all sorts of stuff.. techy, non techy, keep it eclectic’. So hold the ‘eclectic’ thought in your head as you read on!

Rob Ashton is a software developer based in Reading, and reckons he shouldn’t be allowed to talk in public, but he’s making an exception for us to bring some statistical rigour to an age old problem…

Men have traditionally been castigated not putting the toilet seat back down after use by the women of the household.

With this talk I aim to cover the various options that both sexes have when operating the toilet seat, and through some statistical analysis work out a strategy that can make everybody happy.

Keep an eye out for a couple more announcement re talks over the next day or so. Plus I’m planning on getting another poster done to help you entice your work colleagues along.

The next Reading Geek Night is on Tuesday 9th March and is already shaping up to be an interesting evening. The first talk to announce is from Alan Bradburne. Apart from being a #RdgGeek regular, Alan is a freelance web developer, author of ‘Rails Social Networking Sites’ from Apress and developer of furnish.co.uk. (You can find him at @alanb, photoblog at http://alanb.me).

On the 9th he’ll be looking at alternatives to conventional databases. In his own words…

Relational databases and SQL have served us well the last 40 years or so, but recently a new breed of data stores have started to gain in popularity. These schema-less, SQL-less, non-relational databases are powering sites such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and soon, Twitter. What are they, what are they good for and how can you get started using them?

It’s going to be a great night – and I’m looking forward to seeing new and old faces from 7.30pm (ish) downstairs at Copa.

So it looks like tonight’s Reading Geek Night will be a good ‘un. We have three excellent talks…

• Luke Smith will demo Linq2JS
• Mike Beardmore on “Connecting your first and second lives”
• Pedro Laguna on using “firefox as a pentesting tool”

PLUS there will be one very mediocre talk by Jim Anning (yep folks, thats me!)…

“How to screw up every project you ever work on” – Some observations from my time running projects and programmes of all shapes and sizes – Five sure-fire ways to make sure that your next project is an abject failure.

As usual we are downstairs at Copa in Reading Town centre. Doors from 7.30pm and the first talk will be around 8:00pm(ish). See you there.

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.