Geekup Liverpool

Well i thought it be about time that I gave a quick write up on my first GeekUp Liverpool. This is a long overdue post, I should add I started it Friday morning, but then had to go to two weddings this weekend and now here I am! Any how back to the post. Now Geekup has interested me for a while but I have never justified going to Manchester for one, but now they have appeared in Liverpool. Unfortunately I missed the first few due to other social commitments but this time I had it marked in my diary well in advance. As I work local I decided to stay at work until 6 and then head over. As well as myself Chris Alcock also attended from our office and before heading over we decided to have a quick game of FaceBall with Derek. Sadly Derek whoopped both our asses :( We got to Parr Street just after 6 but found out that the room hadn't been booked and we couldn't get in until 8.30, This however wasn't such a bad thing, it allowed for a good hour or two of socialising with fellow geeks and getting to know each other. This for me was the best part. Thom Shannon was there and Chris, Thom and I got chatting to John McKerrell, he works for Multi Map and seems to play a big part in the OpenStreetMap project. We talked about OpenStreetMap as well as other things and Im know seriously considering get a GPS device so i can get involved, North Liverpool especially needs mapping. It was at GeekUp that I finally decided to start using Twitter, John showed us how he was twittering using his phone and get results back from multi map using it. All very cool. After a free half glass of Bulmers and a few beers later we finally got into our room and Dave Verwer gave a brief talk on Unobtrusive Javascript. I have been using Javascript and in particular YUI alot in the last few months and I did go into the session expecting to know most of what was being said. Dave went for an example driven talk and it was quite good, covered the basics well and there was good participation by all 10 people who turned up. Sadly after the session I had to dash as I Hayley was picking me up and we had to go home and organise what we were wearing for the wedding we were attending the next day. I had hoped to get to know some of the other guys more but such is life, there's always next time. So GeekUp was very good and I will definitely attend again, I managed to take a few pictures these can be found on flickr - http://flickr.com/photos/mjjames/sets/72157600540738499/

Del.icio.us Links For 27/06/2007

Core JavaScript 1.5 Reference:Operators:Special Operators:typeof Operator - MDC - 27 June, 2007

quick reference on using typeof
Link: http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Core_JavaScript_1.5_Reference:Operators:Special_Operators:typeof_Operator

Del.icio.us Links For 25/06/2007

Mike Davidson -- sIFR 2.0: Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses - 25 June, 2007

A funky way to use custom fonts
Link: http://www.mikeindustries.com/sifr/

Del.icio.us Links For 22/06/2007

Mix:UK 07 - 22 June, 2007

Microsofts Mix Event in the UK
Link: http://www.microsoft.com/uk/mix07/

Del.icio.us Links For 20/06/2007

Yahoo UI Library : Begin with Aptana - 20 June, 2007

A quick tutorial on integrating the latest YUI library with Aptana
Link: http://www.hedgerwow.com/360/doc/aptana-how-to/demo.html

Aptana: The Web IDE - 20 June, 2007

A Great App for writing AJAX sites, YUI Integration is awesome
Link: http://www.aptana.com/

Welcome to Hack Day

The Train Journey

Well today started at the unearthly hour of 4am :( Once I was packed Hayley picked up Chris and myself and dropped us off at Lime Street. Here we met up with Derek, Kath and Thom with Sunny going to meet us in London. The train journey was abit of a failure, we had the grand idea of paying a little extra on our tickets and going first class for the nicer seats, free food and drink and an overall better experience. This however wasn't the case, they were short on staff so we ended up having to go to the Shop in coach C and get a free tea or coffee, a bottle of water and a biscuit :( While on our journey we tried getting internet access through my mobile on 3 as I have the X-Series package. We failed misserably, even though we got Chris' laptop hooked up via bluetooth, we couldn't for the life of us share this across our adhoc network with his Windows Vista. Thom then got us into playing the original Grand Theft Auto across the network, which he owned us at but hey :D We then arrived in London, found Sunny and then got a taxi to "Ali Pali"

Beginnings

As we arrived at 10:04 we were in the tail end of registration, this was a very smooth and quick process and i must say Hats Off to the organisers. I got a wrist band, 2 beer vouchers, a t-shirt and a "goodie" bag. The goodie bag had the usual leaflets and pens but there was also a very geeky but very cool keyring. A wifi finder :D I have actually wanted these for months and now I have one. It's only basic however it tells you is there a network available and how strong, but it's free ;) The T-Shirt is cool, my one is Navy and no doubt there will be some images taken and chucked onto Flickr later. We have now got straight into sessions. So far the ones I have atended are, bbAuth, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Maps and now Yahoo! Answers. For me these sessions have mainly only given me a few ideas, most of the stuff I have seen before but it's cool to put faces to names. We have also been dogged by Wifi issues :( Hopefully this will settle down soon. Gotta love BT :D Right off to grab a coffee and attend another Session, catch you later.

Del.icio.us Links For 14/06/2007

OOP in JS, Part 1 : Public/Private Variables and Methods - 14 June, 2007

OOP in JS explanation, one to really read and then play with
Link: http://phrogz.net/JS/Classes/OOPinJS.html

Del.icio.us Links For 13/06/2007

@media Ajax | London, 19th-20th November, 2007 - 13 June, 2007

Link: http://www.vivabit.com/atmediaAjax/

Del.icio.us Links For 12/06/2007

Optimize Guides and Diagnostic Software - 12 June, 2007

A good site that lists lots of tweaks and diagnostic softwares for windows
Link: http://mywebpages.comcast.net/supportcd/

Del.icio.us Links For 11/06/2007

Apple - Safari 3 Public Beta - Download - 11 June, 2007

Safari but for Mac OR Windows :D We can finaly check for Safari compatability in Windows, thank goodness!
Link: http://www.apple.com/safari/download/

Going on a Safari

So earlier today Safari 3 Beta 3 was released to the online community. Not only will Safari 3 be a long overdue update for the Mac but it will also be the first version of Apple's gem on Microsoft Windows, Vista and XP. For me as a web developer, and I'm sure other web developers will agree, this is a good thing. No longer will developers that use MS Windows as their primary OS have to borrow a mate's Mac or use an online screen grabber just to see if their site works ok in Safari. This is great news especially if you are developing a lot of AJAX and YUI based interface's which can be time consuming to debug on two different machines. So being an excited geek that I am I decided to download this beta on to the laptop I am currently using. Needless to say the installation was smooth, although having to choose if I wanted quicktime, is this really necessary???, and if i wanted to use Bonjour! was a minor niggle to me. After a quick install I fired up Safari and I must say it loaded very quickly, and I was presented with a very familiar Safari interface that trys to make your machine look more like a Mac than a PC. What struck me most was the anti-aliasing all over the GUI. I knew this is how Mac's worked but I never figured it would port to XP that well. Vista I expected would work but not XP. I can happily say it works amazingly well. In fact I'm writing this post in it, input fields look round and sexy, none of my text looks jagged its all smooth and yummy! Any how I decided to check a few of my favourite site's to see if I could spot any issues, especially JavaScript ones, but so far I haven't spotted any. Although I must admit I have only visited big mainstream sites that you would expect to work anyway. So far every site I have loaded has done so in a very quick manner and can i just say it again, anti-aliasing. Obviously a quick half an hour play doesn't really constitute a full tech grilling, and as it's only beta 3 I wouldn't recommend putting it on a machine which you wouldn't want harmed, but so far so good. A few month's ago Thom Shannon blogged about having to get a Mac or use screen grabbers to test site's, it now looks that this isn't the case. Just goto http://apple.com ;) I look forward to playing with this beta over the next few weeks and you never know, maybe Safari could still my heart and become my general web browser when I'm not developing. You never know ;)

Del.icio.us Links For 08/06/2007

ubroadcastâ„¢ - 8 June, 2007

An interesting internet radio startup. Could be cool, a g33ky radio station anyone?
Link: http://www.ubroadcast.com/

Lightmapper - The Code Project - JavaScript - 8 June, 2007

An interesting way to use HTML's map element and make it useful
Link: http://www.codeproject.com/jscript/Lightmapper.asp

Del.icio.us Links For 07/06/2007

Hackday London Back Network - 7 June, 2007

Hack Day me silly :p
Link: http://hackdaylondon07.backnetwork.com/

Hackday Excitement

Well this evening has been exciting. Tonight Chris Alcock, Derek Fowler , Sunny Lum and myself got together for a pre Hack Day meeting. The purpose of which was to thrash out some idea's and possible hacks.

hack day ideas

After a good hearty takeaway and a few brew's we came up with a list of 4 possible ideas. Not a great list but some thing to start with. Now I won't go into our ideas for now however I can say it's alot harder to come up with ideas than it looks. What I think we struggled with was that as programmers, we automatically homed into the API's available, instead of looking at problems and then looking how we could use various API's to create this solution. We did make some headway though so that was good.

hackday backnetwork

Also tonight the hackday backnetwork was opened up and we got our profiles up. For now I have just put basic information up and my general avatar. All looks good so far with a basic chat facility and the seminar session list. This is where my current dilema resides, so far I know I'm going to the following sessions:

• Yahoo! APIs: BBAuth and Yahoo! Mail
• Yahoo! APIs: Maps, Local & Answers
• Using the YUI Library

however i'm not sure what to do for the 13:00 - 14:00 slot, Flickr API or Pipes :S so if you have any ideas let me know! I suppose it all depends on which hack idea we go for and what will be of most use to us. At least i have a little over a week to decide ;)

Doing the Monster Mash....

Last Friday I came across the Google Mashup Editor, after glancing at the tour I decided to request an invite hoping to be lucky enough to try it out early on in the game. I was pleased to find this morning in my mail box an acceptance onto the beta. So today i decided to have a quick play and get to grips with it. I have to say after logging in I was quite impressed. Your presented with the all too familiar "Google blue" styling as I have named it and a nice ajax'd interface which is clear and easy to use.

Initial Meanderings

The first thing i decided to was to open one of the sample projects, this gave me the chance to see how google's tags worked and how it all fits together. The editor itself is a nice online editor, line numbers, basic highlighting, save etc. My only bad comment so far is that some times when editing the editor just pauses and then catches up. I'm hoping this is just a beta issue and gets ironed out, nothing worse than typing away and then noticing you have lost a couple of lines/ Any how, after playing with the various sample projects I decided to start tinking, as I was in a rush earlier I decided to only attempt to alter the Task List project to something more suitable for my needs. My aim was to play with some rendering, remove some fields and add another so that I could organise my tasks for the day and have a task list for each project I'm working on. Needless to say this simple task was very easy, and within 20 mins I had sussed out how it all worked and how i could import style sheets, JS etc. I should mention at this point that when you test your mashup project, the editor compiles your code to check for glaringly obvious mistakes and then gives you a nice preview. Thia quick and simple step is nice and compiling doesn't seem to take any more time than saving, not in my simple testing anyway. I did spot another annoyance while testing and compiling however. I assumed, which i think is a natural assumption, that when you compile and test that your project is saved. Much like Visual Studio. However sadly this is not the case :( Guess who tested his changes and quit the app by mistake only to find they weren't saved. :( :( I also had a quick gander at the very nice taglist feature. This list all of the tags and how they can be used. It's good to see Google haven't let us down with documentation, especially when you look at the entire help section.

Putting my MashUp Out There

My next step invloved publishing my simple mashup to the world. This was exceptionally easy -> Publish. You even get to choose a name for the url. .googlemashups.com Very nice. And that really was it, once you ok the domain the mashup publishes and you can go tell all your mates about how awesome your mashup is. Whats also good is how simple it is to republish your project or if you find you have published a project with a glaringly obvious error in it you can "unplubilsh it". Sweet.

Rounding it all up

Overall so far my experience with Google Mashup Editor, all though very much early days, has been good. Apart from the two niggles I noticed earlier I haven't found any major issues and I'm looking forward to playing with it more and using multiple feeds with it. In my eyes I see Google Mashup Editor as a more programmatic version of Yahoo! Pipes. Pipes for me so far has been a bit of a let down as I havn't really been able to do alot with it, I'm hoping that ill find Google Mashup Editor more useful, and you never know I may even write myself a widget for my Google Sidebar ;) If you really feel the need to look at my basic mashup then take a trip to the New Mind Project Task Manager