Now being a relative newbie to Slideshare (I don’t publish very much), I hadn’t had this happen before, so I was (modestly) quite excited. Looking on the Slideshare home page, my preso was indeed listed No.3 – one place ahead of something on Amy Winehouse. Nice to know that, for a brief period at least, I was more popular than her, LOL!

Look, Ma - I′m more popular than Amy Winehouse!

Nottingham’s first BarCamp was held over the weekend in the awesome NottsHack space. Like many smaller regional BarCamps, I enjoyed it for its friendly atmosphere and relaxed feeling. The sessions were quite varied, with quite a few non-technical ones on the board. Talks I attended on Saturday included:

• Are We Asking Too Much – a discussion lead by Micheal Heap (@mheap) about the difficulties he’s had hiring someone for front-end developer role.
• Less: Spruce Up Your CSS – session by Michael Mokrysz (@46bit) – interesting because I have recently used LESS whilst freelancing with a company in London.
• Turning Data Into People – a genealogical talk by Alex Wolf (@101ofawolf).  My dad did a lot of genealogy in the 1980′s and always had his head buried in the census returns. But Alex pointed out that these just give you the bare facts about someone. She has researched one branch of her family from the Victorian era who were a bunch of scoundrels – information which has been gleaned from local papers of the period. It certainly helps to give some characterisation to our ancestors – but beware as you may not like what comes out of your closet!
• How To Build Your Own Museum – a session where @katemonkey talked about using Tumblr to curate your own online museum of long-tail or niche interests.
• Pomodoro – Gemma (@ruby_gem) explained her albeit brief experiences of using the Pomodoro productivity technique for the first time recently.
• The Scooby Van And Other Fun – in which @alistair finally divulged what he’s been doing playing with DAB and GPS at Nottingham University.

Shifty dude who looks nothing like Alistair

Sunday was rather more practical in terms of which sessions I went to:

• Soldering 101 – making a flashing @HSNotts badge. Well although I’ve done a lot of soldering in the past, someone had to keep an eye on Not Alistair when he fired up his iron
• Origami Maths – in which Dan Hagon (@axiomsofchoice) got us to make components for a dodecahedron out of 20 sheets of A4 paper.
• Photowalk – after lunch, Alistair, Martin and I went for a quick photowalk and geocaching session to the nearby City Farm. Alistair met a dalek, I held an owl and Martin “vandalised” a sign!
• Balloon Bending – Dan held another session on making balloon animals, which was great fun.

My Session

I ran a session about my recent adventures into the world of High Speed Flash photography, which was well attended. You can view my slides from Slideshare here – although they make more sense if you’re listening to my chatter as well

Photos From The Weekend

Here is a selection of the best pictures I took – as you can see, much fun was had by all:

Much steam, many geeks, and of course, lots of trains. What more could you want?

This was one of @alistair’s mad-cap ideas, and we had immense fun driving the trains around, noshing burgers (and other burnt offerings) and generally geeking out.

Here are some pics from the day:

The Hodge driving – be afraid! Tim does look rather worried.

Neil takes charge.

The lovely Sweet Pea, steaming up.

Me driving Sweet Pea, solo - thanks to the very trusting owner, Jim MacDonald – Alistair’s dad!

I hope we can do it again next year. Until then, here are the rest of my pictures from the day.

Arranged by @vero, the event was very well attended with standing room only by the end.

I enjoyed @garethr‘s talk on Asynchronous Messaging for Web Apps, it was a great intro taster to the subject. You can view his slides here.

Then we had a lightning talk from @martinkl about his new browser testing software Go Test It, and a lady called Helen from @HoldsworthPR on a startups conference being held soon.

There was also plenty of opportunity to socialise and have a few beers (shame I was driving). Good to see so many locals in attendance as well as a few of us from further afield.

I shall keep my eye out for the next one. Stay informed by reading the Cambridge Geek Nights blog, and come along next time if you are in the area! You can also follow the tweets here.

It was great to return to Sheffield (where I did my electronic engineering degree) after an absence of more than 13 years. Far too long!

[Showroom Cafe/Bar/Cinema, the venue]

The venue was in a rather nice Art Deco cinema/cafe/conference centre called the Showroom, in the heart of the city. It worked well as a place to host the BarCamp, with most of the rooms we used very close to each other. And the food was excellent – right from Dinner on the Friday night through to lunch on Sunday.

The warmup party on Friday night was a lot of fun. We were encouraged to make thought bubbles with our tags/interests and contact details, as a bit of an ice breaker. I think we felt a little daft at first, but with the aid of a few beers, we generally got into the swing of things!

[Three loonies wearing thought bubbles: Jay, me, Alistair]

I really enjoyed some of the presentations and discussions which were run during the event. I got mine over with early on, A Newbies’ Guide to Geocaching, which you can download from Slideshare.

Next up was a discussion about Community, and what it meant to us, lead by Alistair MacDonald. Some interesting points were raised, and this also lead nicely into another discussion a couple of sessions later on Social Isolation, lead by Kian Ryan.

After lunch, I noticed the sun was out, so I skived out for half an hour to photograph some nearby sights with a bit of decent light. The sculpture Cutting Edge made it as picture of the day, but I also liked this [right] one of a little lad admiring the cascade fountain near the station:

Alistair & I also managed a geocaching session in the city centre, before it got too cold and dark! Then it was back to the venue to thaw out and watch a session on Self-Defence for Geeks run by Paul Stanton.

Before long it was time for dinner and moar beer and silliness. You can imagine what the evening ended up like. And you can imagine what state some folks were in the next morning. Thankfully, the reving properties of copious quantities of tea and bacon soon did the trick.

Some Sunday sessions which I enjoyed included Jay Cousins‘ talk on Language and how it can influence our perception of technology. He made up some pretty neat words too!

Emma Persky ran a discussion about the imbalance of women in positions of influence within the web, when there is more or less parity now with the ratio of male/females who use the web. Not sure that any concensus was reached, as we seemed to talk in circles for a bit!

Tom Scott ran an excellent quiz during the Sunday lunch slot – the team I was on won, so of course it was excellent! We also had an open discussion with the organisers about the way things had gone over the two days, chaired by Jag Gill. Certainly they did some things differently; some worked well, others not quite so well, but overall I think the team did an excellent job at organising their very first BarCamp! Bravo to Jag, Ibbo, Josie, Jay and all the others.

Jon Linklater-Johnson ran a session on 10 Top Tips To Stop You From Messing Up Your Website. There was also a session about Tea, which was quite appropriate since lots of geeks seem to be obsessed with the stuff. Later on, there was a special showing of Dr Horrible, something I’d heard much-Tweeted about. Quite funny in places, purely bonkers in others!

The after party saw a few hardy souls do more damage to their livers, play Semantopoly, do silly things with Alistair’s BathCamp duck, and then go out for a massive curry. Great way to wind up the event.

[Jay and his Pirate Duck]

But I really think the last word should go to Ruby & Perl, Gemma’s ferrets who made a guest appearance on Saturday. Now I’ve experienced a BarCamp with ferrets, things will never be the same again!

[Ferrets ahoy!]

So that’s it really. A great weekend of geeking out. Thanks to all the folks who organised, contributed and turned up. It was a pleasure to meet you all. You can see the rest of my photos from the weekend on Flickr.

After the first day’s sessions came to a close, the socialising began in earnest. Here we see Mr Boozeniges living up to his name:

[First steps in drinking the mighty Google dry]

Inevitably, where geeks gather, there will be interminable rounds of Werewolf, for it is writ in Lore.

[Short break in a round of Werewolf. Cheer up! Anyone would think someone just died... oh wait!]

I think I must have played at least half a dozen games during the evening. But the most satisfying has to be the one that wrapped up around 5am – final round me [Werewolf] versus Tom Hughes-Croucher and Sebastian “CB” Grünwaldt [villagers] and Tom decides to nominate CB – mwahhaha! I win! Yum yum, tasty villagers.

Talking of tasty, as if the mountains of food served for dinner weren’t enough, Google laid on a midnight feast for the geeks – freshly cooked waffles, pancakes and a chocolate fountain. Man, you could get soooo fat working here…

[The chocolate fountain - just had to be tried, didn't it?]

There were loads of games to play (Wii sports, tabletennis, fussball) and even a Segway to fool around with. However, Jan and CB, two of the crazy German LondonBubble guys decided they could go one better than the Segway with their two-seater “find”:

[Ticket To Ride - CB drives with Jan on the back, looking justifyably worried]

But the weirdest trick of the evning must go to Oliver Uuberholz (another LondonBubble boy) who decided the empty beer fridges were going to waste and his Mac was getting too warm:
[Macs in the fridge]

Enough craziness, and being about dead on my feet by 5:30am, I went to find a quiet bit of floor to collapse on for 3 hours.

• To raise awareness in the media of digital rights abuses
• To provide a media clearinghouse, connecting journalists with experts and activists
• To preserve and extend traditional civil liberties in the digital world
• To collaborate with other digital rights and related organisations
• To nurture a community of campaigning volunteers, from grassroots activists to technical and legal experts

[Becky explains the work of the Open Rights Group]

[Attentive audience]

The ORG’s website is well worth a read if you are interested in any issues regarding digital rights of various kinds.

The first event I’d like to make a post about was the excellent -

Web Standards Group Meeting on Javascript

Some of us shy away from JavaScript (until recently, myself included) on the grounds that it’s not accessible. But these days, if it’s done right, it can be positively beneficial to accessibility.

Demystifying Screen Readers – Steve Faulkner
Steve is very knowledgable on screen readers and all their foibles, and is Director of the Web Accessibility Tools Consortium. This talk mainly centred around Jaws (65%) and Window Eyes (35%). The bracketed figures are from a US National Federation of the Blind market share survey – it’s obvious these are the two big players.

The key issues revolve around:

• Dynamic updates – user initiated and independent
  Can the user access the updated content?
  Is the user aware that the content has been updated?
• Rich Internet Applications (RIA)
  Can the user understand the role of the control?
  Can the user successfully interact with the control?
  Is the user able to access information about the current state of the control?

He then explained the differences in screen reader modes:

• Browse Mode (virtual buffer) – the user can navigate page content via paragraphs, headings, links, lists etc. They can also activate links and some form controls. But text characters can’t be input into form fields, or interact with select elements in this mode.
• Forms Mode (browse mode off) – the user may only navigate through a document to focusable elements via the TAB key. Text access is limited to “read all” functionality. Most of advanced content navigation is unavailable.

The crucial question we have to consider is, when and how does content become available to the user after it’s been updated in the browser?

[Steve Faulkner and the Latency Issue]

Latency is a problem because the virtual buffer does not update and the user doesn’t know anything has changed. However, JAWS v7.1 started “listening” for virtual buffer updates in response to things like:

• window.setInverval()
• object.innerText (for IE)
• object.textContent and object.appendChild (in Firefox)
• changes in form control values
• And other stuff like ALT or TITLE attribute value changes.

Jez Lemon has an excellent article on Improving Ajax Applications For JAWS Users on his webiste. Steve summed up with some recommendations:

• Do not code to accommodate the poor support shown by JAWS and Window Eyes.
• Use unobtrusive methods where available and appropriate, to help screen readers along.
• Don’t use the excuse that JavaScript / Ajax is not accessible for screen readers to not bother to design for accessibility.
• Start developing interface elements that use WAI-ARIA specs, which will provide some benefits now and many more in the future.

Steve’s thought-provoking presentation was followed by a turn from Christian Heilmann entitled Seven Reasons For Code Bloat

[Christain's been on the beanz again]

His notes are available for download from his blog, so I won’t repeat them verbatim. Needless to say, it was a fun presentation and contained the obligatory photo of a kitten . Meanwhile, he’s thinking of this as the title of his next book:

[Christian's Next Book?]

PubStandards XVIII
Of course, the next item on the social agenda was the PubStandards gathering. Lots of fun and revelry as usual, here’s one photo, but you can see more on Flickr.

[Patrick & Ashe go head-to-head, while Ross butts in the middle]