How many techies does it take to build an elephant tower?
Result –
This elephant is, of course, the mascot of PHP. Attending the International PHP Conference in Barcelona, I was surrounded by these lovely cuddly toys. As you can well imagine, the conference, organized by the PHP Barcelona User Group, was not for the soft-hearted but for the top PHP programmers/developers. Altogether there were 350 attendees coming from as far as India to listen to some brilliant talks.
Once again Rasmus Lerdorf was invited. He gave a brief history of PHP and talked about good security when using PHP. He was rather critical of the use of frameworks and design patterns – saying that the developer should always be in charge of his/her code. (Since the website does not show Rasmus’ talk, I gathered that information from talking to people who attended his talk. Hope I got it right!)
Other talks of interest included:
. The State of Quality Assurance Tools for PHP by Sebastian Bergmann
. Symfony 2.0, a Sneak Peak by Fabien Potencier
And many more.
Interested in PHP? Look out for PHP Barcelona 2010 as I am sure this conference will go from strength to strength.
And this seems an apt time to remind you about Erlang User Conference 2009 in Sweden, Stockholm from the 12 Nov 2009 to 12 Nov 2009.
We are currently accepting proposals for talks; so if you are a systems administrator or developer, we want to hear from you. We are seeking papers covering all aspects of systems and network administration, including:
- security and audit
- authentication and authorisation
- operating systems
- ethics and legislative compliance
- storage solutions
- network file systems
- databases and directory services
- nomadic and wireless computing
- benchmarking and performance tuning
- configuration management
- scripting and task automation
- cluster management
If you have a novel solution to a problem, experience of a particular application or hardware platform, tips and tricks for fellow systems administrators, or a favourite tool you could talk about, please submit a paper for consideration by the programme committee.
Talks should include a high level of technical content and not involve sales pitches.
Significant Dates
To offer a talk, or make enquiries about a partially formed idea, email spring2010@ukuug.org
- Initial closing date for abstracts: 15th November 2009
- Accepted speakers notified by: 22nd November 2009
- Final date for all talk materials to be submitted: 28th February 2010
Collaborative Strategies and Challenges of Making Things the Open Source Way
This is an event to bring key projects, their participants and stakeholders together in the emerging field of Open Hardware development, organized by 40Fires in partnership with Nesta.
The 40Fires Foundation is a forum to develop energy-efficient cars, and other sustainable products, using an open source approach.
The event aims to inform participants about Open Hardware, to be a space to discuss and learn and to explore practical solutions and potential collaborations to help Open Hardware work better, for a better world.
Confirmed speakers include Christian Alhert of Minibar and Open Business fame, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino of Tinker.it and Francesco D'Orazio of FACE. Patrick Andrews of Riversimple/40 Fires will be talking about The Hyrban, the Open Source car, Adrian Bowyer about the RepRap Project and its Community, and Andrew Katz will discuss A framework for open licensing of hardware.
I've signed up - should be a cracking day.
Background: "The Girl Geek Dinners were founded on the 16th August 2005 as a result of one girl geek who got annoyed and frustrated about being one of the only females attending technical events. She was tired of being assumed to be marketing, tired of constantly having to prove herself and decided that she just wanted a change and to be treated just the same as any other geek out there, gender and age aside."
The speakers for the Leeds Girl Geek Dinner will include:
christine morris // @cmoz;a Canadian living in the UK for over ten years with what she refers to as a healthy obsession with technology. She is always after the latest trends & research in the field, hoping to explore it further.
She has received joint funding (British Council & Arts Council) for digital works, namely re-writing Freud, which was shown at ProgME Brasil, France, Scotland, London. This was an algorithm written for a wall mounted touch screen, which randomized the entire book The Interpretation of Dreams, and re-printed it in a completely new order every time.
Working in education for several years keeps her motivated and her research & fascination has led her to her current project, Apps & Hats - a quirky iPhone application review show, created only a few months after the app store launched.
sarah hartley // @foodiesarah;
a digital editor for the Guardian and has been an online journalist since 2000 after starting her career in regional newspapers.
She blogs about the evolution of journalism, social media and online communities, as well as the Media Guardian’s PDA blog.
Journalism training and development is an area of particular interest for Sarah who has run courses in all aspects of online content production, blogging and multimedia for organisations in Britain and oversees ranging from NATO to NCTJ journalism colleges.
Before joining the Guardian she was the head of online editorial for MEN Media in Manchester, publishers of the award-winning Manchester Evening News.
There will also be a showing of her code, 
"a short film, bringing together a series of interviews with women in leadership positions across Silicon Valley."
The Her Code: Engendering Change in Silicon Valley study was conducted in the first half of 2009 by Orange Labs's Pascale Diaine, in San Francisco.
And to do so, you could buy a book or go to the web - both perfectly sound options, especially the book buying bit! - or you could find an expert and learn from them. But should there be a chance to spend a complete weekend in the company of wall-to-wall experts, who are happy to let you know what they know, then surely that's an opportunity worth leaping at.
All of which is a preamble to set up The Bristol Knowledge Unconference:
The Bristol Knowledge Unconference will be taking place at the Arnolfini Arts Centre in Bristol, UK on the 12th and 13th December. It fuses together knowledge/information/wisdom, discussions, games, being social, networking and a bar!
The Bristol Knowledge Unconference is for all people who are involved with "Knowledge", and like to go to an event which is practically focused, yet informal. No matter what background you have you are free (gratis and libre) - whether you're a Web Developer, a Knowledge Engineer, a Semantic Web Engineer, a Graphics Designer, a Psychologist, a Scientist, a Knowledge Manager, an Information Architect or Anything Else - there will be something there for you. The mission is to bridge the gaps between different communities and to learn.
This years Bristol Knowledge Unconference (2009) will have a subtitle: "The Art of Knowledge". It is one part of a weekend entitled "unCraftivism", which brings together various art+tech events (such as the Knowledge Unconference, Dorkbot and Robotics Labs), "unCraftivism" itself is a satellite event of the "Craftivism" exhibition at the Arnolfini Arts Exhibition.The event is an unconference (a very informal conference, a bit like a Barcamp), and so there is no charge for entry and it's quite free-form during the days. Attendees will be free to move from talk to talk across the events happening that weekend. Feel free to put your name on the "I'm coming" list on the Bristol Knowledge Unconference 2009 web page, and if you feel like giving a talk, discussion, demo or game then please do. You get get in touch with Daniel Lewis, the organiser of the Unconference, if you have any questions, queries, comments or suggestions (Tel: +447834355516 - Email: danieljohnlewis [at] gmail [dot] com ).
... a 1000 sq. ft. former shop in the Northern Quarter – open Thursday-Sunday from 10am-late (plus other evenings when there’s an event happening).It’s a space you can get together with like-minded individuals and work on your urban gardening, crochet, hacking, programming, media arts, filmmaking, animating project without worrying that you’re in a library, coffee shop, pub or other unsuitable venue. We know hackers and craftspeople need work space and may need to get down and dirty – we also know sometimes you need a quiet area to present and show works to your peers. We support both activities. And we hope there will be a rich mix of individuals who’ll get out of the usual zones, the knitter talking to the software architect, the cupcake maker scheming with the laser etching builder. We know some good will come of this.
If you’re organising a workshop, meetup, unconference, user group, or knitting circle and want to use the space then drop us a line!
Madlab are hosting Robot Hack Day on the 24th of October, 2009 as part of the Manchester Science Festival. It's a chance to break apart that disappointing electronic gadget you got last Christmas and create something new and inspiring out of it, to get crazy with solder and a glue gun and bring a bunch of resistors, capacitors and motors to life, and have a laugh while you're doing it. And there will be Robot Football! I mean, if that isn't a fun day, what is!
Here's Madlab's Dave Mee to tell you more:
Erlang Conference
The User Conference consists of a full day of talks from experts, the obfuscated Erlang competition followed by an Erlounge in the evening where there will be drinks and snacks.Erlang University
Tutorials
In the week of the User Conference, from 9th-11th November, there will be three-day training courses in:
On Friday 13th November there will be a series of Erlang and Test-Driven Development Tutorials. These will allow delegates to learn about and how to use a number of tools including:
The inventors of these will be leading the Tutorials so if you want to learn about testing Erlang programmes, this is the place to do it.
Sign-up before 15th October and SAVE SEK 450 (excl VAT) with the Early-bird offer!
Due to growing demand - 40 people at the first Meet-Up, 140 at the fifth - we switched venues from the Horse and Groom, which is close to being my favourite pub in London, to 24 on Kingly Street, which was kindly lent to us for the night by the good guys at Yuza Mobile. With its interactive walls and tables, it certainly looked the part as a venue for a high-tech meet-up.
Disco:24 has a concept like no other night-club in London and is without doubt the first fully interactive bar in the world. Created with bespoke tailoring in mind, you can hire your own area and surround yourself with your own personalised back-drop.
Chief Organiser Jason Dunne had just one speaker lined up, but this is living proof of quality, not quantity: Luke Johnson, the Chairman of Channel 4, gave a 15 minute pep talk for all the would-be entrepreneurs in the audience. The message was simple - give it a go. There is great satisfaction to be had in making your own decisions, in choosing your own path, and if a particular idea proves unsustainable, there are worse things than failing. The internet has brought a golden age for start-ups, offering a lower barrier to entry than there has ever been, with the added advantage that if you fail, chances are no one will notice. After the talk, I nattered to umpteen people, half of whom were setting out on their own using the iPhone or the Smartphone as their platform, and it was clear they were each rallied by Luke's words of encouragement.
I ran a competition to win Programming the iPhone User Experience, which was won by Ross Sleight, who had remembered from the very first iPhone Meet-Up that the bestselling computing book of 2008 was the iPhone App of iPhone Missing Manual. Ross, you're a marvel!
UKTI
SynchroArts - Jeff Bloom
Newsdog - Steve Morris
En-Tyn - Steve Kennedy
and an impromptu shout-out from Dave Mee from Madlabs in Manchester.
The Full Frontal JavaScript Conference will be taking place in Brighton, UK on the 20th November 2009.
Full Frontal is a conference for the front end developers with JavaScript skills ranging from beginner to advanced. If you’ve dabbled with JavaScript in the past and wanted to learn more about how the language works and what makes it tick: then this conference is for you.
The conference is a one day event held in one of the UK’s oldest cinemas, the Duke of Yorks in Brighton and tickets are available for £100 under the early bird price until the end of the month where tickets will be available at full price.
The speakers for the day include:
The event is also running a free ticket prize draw where you have the chance of winning a free ticket or the cost of your existing ticket is reimbursed - so everyone has a chance.
More details about tickets, the location and the event can be found on the Full Frontal JavaScript Conference web site.
The event is sponsored by Yahoo! Developer Network, Guardian Open Platform, Opera Software, with support from media partners O’Reilly and .net magazine.
The first speaker announced was the magnificent Ben Hammersley, Wired dude, podcast-coiner and indeed O'Reilly author, and since then a marvellous cast of speakers has been assembled. At the time of writing, there are still places to be grabbed, so if you're in London on the 18th, cook up an idea for a talk and get it submitted!
And I'll see you there!
I had a fantastic day on Saturday at the launch of the Geek Atlas. Between the draw of the Brunel Museum and the people who came along specifically, we had a fine crowd wandering by all afternoon. Everyone we spoke to was friendly, interested and determined to enjoy their day. Author John Graham-Cumming did a marvellous, indefatigable job talking to those who came to the stall wanting to know more: I suppose if you've spent six months writing a book then a few hours in the sun listening to people telling you what a great idea it is is hardly a hardship, but the Great Man handled himself superbly, and the insight and good nature that make it such an excellent book were abundantly evident in person.
It was interesting to hear how people had come to be at our stall. Many came to the Brunel Museum as part of London Open House Weekend, so the Geek Atlas was new to them. (It was certainly of note how many of the purchasers asked for the book to be dedicated to their Geek father - seems like I wasn't the only one to get dragged round museums and cathedrals when I was a kid). Others came across the book via John's Alan Turing petition. Some were hard core User Group developers who knew the Geek Atlas via O'Reilly's catalogue, (a hearty shout out to Dave Green and Werner!) And others had picked up on the publicity for the launch itself, and happened by to see what the fuss was. Overall, it was a fun day, and well worth the effort.
Things I've learned - every book launch I've ever attended has been in the evening, where wine has invariably been drunk. Turns out with a Science crowd, mid-afternoon, where wine's concerned, you literally cannot give it away.
Thanks to Rob Hulse, the Director of the Brunel Museum, who got us involved and set a great relaxed tone. Rob spent the entire weekend down in the shaft explaining in twenty minute shifts how and why Brunel built the tunnel: when he emerged Saturday tea-time, he was still good humour personified. Thanks to the volunteer staff at the Brunel Museum - Dave especially - who are clearly proud of their museum and the men it honours, and who made us feel very much at home. Thanks to all the attendees, no matter how they came to be there. And particular thanks to John, for writing such a great book and making this sort of event worthwhile.
There are lots of reasons I love working for O'Reilly - on Saturday, in the launch of the Geek Atlas, I found another one.
The launch will take place between 2pm and 5pm. It's a marvellous chance to talk to the Great Man himself, and to ask about both the Geek Atlas and his wonderful achievement in procuring an apology from Prime Minister Gordon Brown on behalf of the British government for the treatment of Alan Turing.
It would be great to see you there.
The conference will cover Web 2.0, Parrot/Perl 6, Database interfaces, Web development (mod_perl, Catalyst, application servers, CMS, etc), Perl development (internals, methodologies, test frameworks, optimizations, etc), POE, Moose, System administration and so on. This year we've invited several Perl "celebrities":
* TIM BUNCE, Perl DBI interface author. Tim has written not only DBI, but also other important CPAN modules (DBD::Oracle, Devel::NYTProf, responsible for the Perl 5.4.x series), he wrote Programming the Perl DBI for O'Reilly, and he has delivered tutorials and sessions for many years at OSCON and other conferences and workshops.
* DAVE ROLSKY, Moose, HTML::Mason, and DateTime project author. Javascript JSAN project contributor. He wrote Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason and RT Essentials for O'Reilly.
* JONATHAN WORTHINGTON, one of the core developers of the Rakudo Perl 6 compiler and the Parrot Virtual Machine.
* THOMAS FUCHS, a Javascript guru, is the author of the script.aculo.us user interface JavaScript library, a member of the Prototype core team and a Ruby on Rails core alumnus. Co-author of Agile Web Development with Rails for Pragmatic Bookshelf.
* AMY HOY is a user interaction and product design expert and regular speaker at OSCON and other workshop and conferences.Moreover Dave Rolsky will give a World Class day's training on Moose on October 21, 2009 (the day before the conference). This mini-course will be a paid event, and will be expressly for the purpose of covering Dave's flight to Europe and hotel expenses. The cost for person is likely to be around EUR 100 (with a maximum of 25 participants). If you're interested, let us know by sending an e-mail to info@perl.it.
The event is sponsored by National Research Council, pair Networks, Opera Software, Dada Spa, Seeweb, Smart Open Software, Italpro, ActiveState, Apress, Pragmatic Bookshelf, No Starch Press, Geoesse, Nestoria. The event has patronage of The Perl Foundation and YAPC::Europe Foundation. During the workshop, companies will organize recruitment sessions for the participants in which anyone will be able to present his Curriculum Vitae.
What is OSDC.fr?
This Open Source Developers Conference (OSDC) aims to be a place for meetings and exchanges between developers from different communities, which too often ignore or distrust each other. The goal is to go beyond trolls and see what we can learn from each other. Similar conferences have been organized in several parts of the world: http://www.osdcon.org/
For the first conference of this kind in France, we'd like to begin by bringing together communities that do innovative open source programming using dynamic languages such as Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby.
The goal is to learn by seeing what others are doing. Many concepts and techniques are not tied to a specific language.
We of course welcome many other languages and technologies, particularly the most innovative or specialized, such as Erlang, Haskell, OCaml, Smalltalk, Scala, Groovy, etc.
This conference mainly targets developers and advanced users of free and open source software. The idea is to be able to talk tech without fear of not being understood.
The advantage of OSDC.fr is that it is a place to present these kinds of inter-language talks in a neutral setting, outside of the specific context of a particular language community.
Although French is the main language of the conference, English speakers are welcome: several talks will be given in English, and we welcome more.
dConstruct 09 brings together leading thinkers from the fields of ubiquitous computing, interface design, gaming and mobile to explore the challenges of designing for tomorrow.
Nice to be at a seaside resort on a sunny day! A great venue, the dome, unfortunately no sea and no sun for me, I stayed in, selling books and chatting to different people. In particular, I met: –
. Brian Fling, author of Mobile Design and Development. His book was a great success even though it is not yet published in the UK. I did sell all my advances and took several orders. Brian will be back in Europe soon for Design Week, 26-30 October in Barcelona.
. Aral Balkan showed me his new iPhone App which should hopefully be ready in two months. Watch this space – it looks great but I am not allowed to talk about it yet.
Have fun deciphering some sketchnotes on http://www.flickr.com/photos/psd/3888237888/, I am sure that these notes will tell you more about the talks than I ever could.
Altogether, I have the feeling that people enjoyed the talks and would like to come back next year.
Thank you Clearleft for putting up a great conference!
From Friday November 27th 2009 till Friday 18th December, they have 12 events lined up, covering cutting edge topics ranging from Lean & Kanban to Cloud, from BDD to Grails which should challenge and stimulate even the most jaded of geeks. Here they are, in all their splendour:
27/11/09 Agile Testing & BDD eXchange
01/12/09 Lean & Kanban eXchange
02/12/09 DroidCon
03/12/09 RoR eXchange
04/12/09 Amazon WS eXchange
07/12/09 Functional Programming eXchange - details coming soon
08/12/09 Cloud & Grid eXchange
09/12/09 Groovy & Grails eXchange (2 days)
11/12/09 Ubuntu Day - coming soon
14/12/09 Flex on Java eXchange
15/12/09 Opensource in Fin eXchange - details coming soon
16/12/09 Spring in Fin eXchange
18/12/09 DDD eXchange
Contact Skills Matter for further details.
The Brunel Museum (map) sits on the site where Marc Brunel sank the initial shaft which began the construction of the Thames Tunnel. To quote from The Geek Atlas, Entry 70:
In 1843, the first tunnel passing under a body of water opened beneath the Thames River, between Rotherhithe and Wapping in London. The tunnel was built by Marc Isambard Brunel and his son Isambard Kingdom Brunel. It opened as a pedestrian tunnel featuring underground shops and entertainment, but within 30 years it had been purchased by a railway company and to this day is used to run trains.
It promises to be a lovely afternoon. The launch will take place in sync with the London Open House Weekend, in which the Brunel Museum will be participating. Museum Director Robert Hulse will be conducting guided tours of the Grand Entrance Hall, which has been opened up for the first time in 140 years. As Robert puts it, the Grand Entrance Hall is "an impressive secret underground chamber half the size of the dome of St Paul's. The hall is above a railway and temporary access is through a small tunnel and haki staircase. A very Geek space."
So, if you're within striking distance of Rotherhithe of Saturday 19th September, 2009, come along to the Brunel Museum and take part in the launch. It would be great to see you.
UPDATE: The Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has apologised on behalf of the government to Alan Turing for the way he was treated. This is great news. Here is John's blog post explaining how the apology happened:
http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/09/hello-john-its-gordon-brown.html
In other Geek Atlas-related news, Graham-Cumming was on BBC2's Newsnight last night, (3rd September 2009), talking about his petition calling for a public apology to the estate of Alan Turing for the way Turing was treated by the British establishment. Turing was gay at a time when homosexuality was illegal in the UK. He was convicted of Gross Indecency, and given a choice of imprisonment or chemical castration to reduce his libido. Turing opted for the latter - his suicide followed two years later.
Here's a snippet:
Q. 13. Python continues to attract more and more interest from programmers skilled in other languages. Have you any learning recommendations for people moving to Python?My top recommendation is to consider that you probably don't have to MOVE to Python, in many cases: Python can probably play nicely with the languages you used to prefer (C++, Java, Objective C, C#, Fortran, ...), so you can "have your cake and eat it too" -- keep using the frameworks, libraries and tools you know and love, use Python to keep it all together and flowing smoothly towards your applications' goals ....
.... The second-from-the-top recommendation is to bend over backwards to NOT program in Python "as if" you were programming in your previous favorite language -- this applies to ANY case where a programmer is adding a new language to their quiver, but more so when the new language is especially powerful and flexible: I've seen people "do Cobol in Java", "do Fortran in C++", "do C in Perl", etc, but "do X in Python" is scarily widespread for many values of X. The more different languages you're skilled with, and the more idiomatically you've learned to employ each of them, the less this particular risk becomes -- but especially if Python is just your second language, *beware* of striving to use it "just as if it was" PHP, or Perl, or Java, or... it _isn't_ --
(The photo is a still from an Alex Martelli interview with James Turner on O'Reilly.com).
It is with some apprehension that I went to Lisbon for YAPC::EU::2009. I kept hearing that Perl is too old and that it is now superceded by better, more funky languages. Rest assured Perl is still here and the Perl community is well aware of the problems and is now fighting back. Over 300 attendees from all over Europe and further afield, gathered in sunny Lisbon to hear the masters of Perl and Larry Wall’s keynote.
O’Reilly was well represented with so many authors giving a talk or just attending the conference:
- Larry Wall
- Damian Conway
- Dave Cross
- brian d foy
- Curtis Poe
- Andrew Ford
- Philip Bruhat, this year's White Camel Award winner with Tim Bunce and Michael Schwern.
(Philip translated some of our books in French.)
I was very sorry that Chromatic had to cancel.
The conference was divided into 4 tracks:
- Corporate
- Everyday
- Beginning
- Workshops
Larry Wall on Perl 6 – “Next year, we will be launching a solid working subset of Perl 6 which will be fully supported. This of course will not be the final version of Perl 6 as we all know that open source software is evolving every day.”
Lots of thanks to the Portuguese team: Alberto, Joanna, Jose for putting such a great conference together.
Me: "What about Brooklyn Bridge?"
Them: "Humber Bridge."
Me: "Statue of Liberty?"
Them: "There's the statue of William Wilberforce - he freed the slaves, you know. He's the British Abraham Lincoln."
Me: "Central Park?"
Them: "Boothferry Park."
Digital / technology / web mavens have traditionally been served by conferences held in Leeds, Manchester, Newcastle, Liverpool and London. We’ve seen and experienced a groundswell of excitement and activity about the online / digital world from people in our region .... Hull Digital Live 2009 is where we expand our horizons and share our vision with the world. From web designers and developers to online marketing experts and optical networking gurus, we already have internationally successful people, businesses and resources… it’s time to get organised!
Hull Digital Live is a spin-off from Hull Digital, an amalgam of the city's tech activity focused around a monthly meeting at Hull Guildhall, (there's one happening tonight - 26th Aug 09 - if you're in the area). Moving up to a full-blown conference is the logical next step. It's good to see a mixture of speakers on the bill, some local, some national. Already confirmed are Rory Cellan-Jones (BBC Technology Correspondent), Charles Arthur (Technology Editor - The Guardian) and Mike Butcher (UK and Europe Editor - TechCrunch), among a host of illustrious others. A special mention should go to Rob Palmer from Newcastle, who designed the site, and very handsome it looks, too.
At the time of writing, there are still Early Bird tickets left at £65. Worth snapping up.
It's great to see Hull as a city stepping up and making something happen for themselves. I have a big soft spot for the place, and it's heartening to know its future is in good hands.
The stupendous Kris Buytaert writes:
Over the past couple of years operations and deployment have become more and more important to the applications that you folks write. Sometimes people call the new trend Devops, others call it Agile System Administration or Devministration, but one thing is sure, today's Linux guy is different from the Unix admin 10 years ago. In the US, O'Reilly already started with Velocity, this year already in it's second edition, but in Europe we didn't really have an event catering for the much needed interaction between developers and system administration.
DevOpsDays 09, will try to change that, DevOpsDays 09 will take place in the lovely city of Gent in Belgium on 30th and 31th October. It will be a 2 day event hosted by IBBT where the first day will be a more formal conference featuring speakers such as Teyo Tyree from Reductive Labs of Puppet fame, Lindsay Holmwood of Cucumber Nagios fame, Chris Read, Matthas Skarin and different others. The second day of the event will be an OpenSpace event where the participants will determine the actual program.
Follow as DevOpsDay develops at @devopsdays
About ten years ago I went on a family holiday to Cornwall, and one day I dragged my unwilling kids to a delightful but otherwise undistinguished beach so I could point out to them the spot where the world’s first undersea telegraph cable came ashore in 1870.
They were about as impressed by Porthcurno beach as they had been on our trip to the fabled Saxon burial site of Sutton Hoo, which my son memorably recalls as ‘mounds in a field’, but I felt a moment of geek joy that has stayed with me since.
That first cable linked Britain to India, and helped create a communications revolution that transformed the world. The telegraph, as Tom Standage makes clear in his excellent book, was ‘The Victorian Internet’, and undersea cables were vital to its development. The cable at Porthcurno was the precursor of the Seacom cable that has just gone live in Kenya, and is a direct antecedent of the complex web of fibre-optic cables that make today’s Internet possible.
The museum was closed on the day I made it to the beach, and no amount of persuasion would persuade my kids that the drive was worth making a second time. But if I’d had The Geek Atlas with me I would have been able to plan my trip properly and managed to make it into tunnels, dug during the Second World War, and explored the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum.
John Graham-Cumming’s book The Geek Atlas is a travel guide for those interested in the history of science, mathematics and technology, and lists 128 sites around the world, including Porthcuno and nearby Polhdu from which Marconi made the first transatlantic radio transmission. And if I have to explain why there are 128 entries you shouldn’t be reading the book.
Locations range from the Jacquard Museum in Roubaix, France, where you can see the punched-card weaving technology that inspired Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machine and led to modern computers, to the Stadtfriedhof in Gottingen, Germany. Max Planck, Friedrich Wohler and David Hilbert are among the many notable scientists and mathematicians buried there, while Carl Gauss can apparently be found just across town in the Albanifriedhof.
It’s primarily a guidebook, with details of the historic importance of each site accompanied by visitor details and, of course, the precise latitude and longitude of each place listed so you can plug in into your GPS tracker and make sure you’re on exactly the right spot. If you don’t have a GPS tracker you’re probably outside the target market.
But each entry also has background information on the science, maths or technology itself, with entries covering complex numbers (Broom Bridge, Dublin), penicillin (Alexander Fleming Laboratory, at St Mary’s Hospital, London) and the infinite loop (Apple HQ, Cupertino, CA), so it’s worth picking up even if you’re stuck inside during a typical British summer deluge.
Geeks cover the world, and the atlas offers places to visit in Australia, Ecuador, Japan and the Ukraine, but forty-five of them are in the UK and therefore more accessible than the magnetic north pole or the White Sands missile testing range in New Mexico, USA.
So if you’re planning a summer break in the UK this year, whether because of the financial situation, your desire to reduce your C02 output or just because it’s a lovely country, you should pack The Geek Atlas along with your National Trust handbook and good hotel guide.
First stop, of course, has to be 51° 59’ 47.44” N, 0° 44’ 33.94” W – better known as Bletchley Park, home of the British code breaking efforts during the Second World War and now also the location of the fabulous National Museum of Computing, but you might also find time to visit Manchester for the Science Walk and the Eagle pub in Cambridge.
The site of the old Mathematical Laboratory where the EDSAC computer was built doesn’t get an entry, perhaps because it’s now a modern lecture theatre with a plaque on the wall, but I’m prepared to forgive that omission and head off to discover places I hadn’t even heard of, and find out more about the places where science, mathematics and technology happened or is still happening.
It’s our geek heritage, and the more we make people aware of it the more likely it is to be preserved in some way. After all, the work that Hooke and Boyle and Newton did during the Enlightenment has had at least as much impact on the modern world as that of the artists, architects, authors and musicians who make it into the big national museums.
The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science & Technology Come
Alive, was written by John Graham-Cumming and is published by O’Reilly
Media. www.oreilly.com
50p from each UK sale for the next year is being donated to Bletchley Park
"I'm a big fan of Scotland on Rails, and the first year, Alan Francis stood up and encouraged everyone to think about organising a local conference - I remember him saying that it's not as hard as it looks! So, that got me thinking, and when I knew that I wasn't going to make RailsConf in Las Vegas, and there was no RailsConf Europe, I thought "Why not?" Also, I thought it would be a good way of making a contribution back to the community that I've got so much from over the last couple of years."
Among the speakers we had:
Once again, JetBrain was represented. The first time I encountered this company was at QCon in March. It is really nice to see an Eastern European company represented at a conference as usually I can find only Western European or American ones. I am told that JetBrain developed the very successful inteliJ IDEA (java) and is now launching RubyMine for Ruby of course.
Just under 200 delegates came for the 2 days representing 12+ countries including Russia, Bulgaria and of course UK and our nearest neighbours.
Follow him on Twitter @meetdux.
Just a quick note about the series of TEDx - http://www.ted.com/tedx events coming up this summer in the North of England.
TEDx North - www.tedxnorth.com. Is a combination of 5 different TEDx events.
TEDxLiverpool - 7th August 2009
TEDxLeeds - 10th September 2009
TEDxSheffield - 16th September 2009
TEDxNewcastle - 30th September 2009
TEDxManchester - 2nd October 2009Each event will have excellent live speakers and previous TEDtalks. They promise to bring you a taste of TED without the huge cost and long waiting list. Tickets are available now and I'm happy to say the BBC's famous Studio 7 will host TEDxManchester on the 2nd October. We have room for 100's of people, so it should be one of the biggest.
For you guys in the south wondering about TEDx in the south, midlands or Scotland, there was one recently - http://tedxthames.com/ and there's some upcoming ones here - http://www.ted.com/pages/view/id/284 which include TEDxLondon and TEDxBirmingham
So don't forget to sign up early and we'll hopefully see you soon.