Tim Almond

I’ve had an eventful couple of days this week.

I was driving to Windsor on Wednesday morning when my alternator decided to give up, just after J11 on the M4 and before I could get to the hard shoulder. Thankfully, a driver stopped and helped me move it off the road. The AA came and were brilliant and took me to a Toyota dealer who are sorting things out. It’s been a great car - first trouble in 5 years. It’s whether to go for a Skoda or another Toyota now.

So, I took the train to work, and after, I took the train to Oxford for Oxford Geek Nights where I did a little talk about the wonders of Wordpress. It was a wonderful event. Natalie Downe did a great job setting it up. The two main talks were on OpenID and Photoshop CS3 by Simon Willison and Olly Willans respectively. OpenID looks great. Single sign-on without central ownership. I don’t use Photoshop, as I’m not really having to manipulate graphics, but CS3 has a lot of great features for photographers. The way that it can blend photos for a panorama, and how it can "cut out photos" is something that I’ll have to dig into.

There were also some "microslots". J-P Stacey did an interesting talk on XSL/Atom for lightweight content management which struck me as a novel approach. Nick Birch demoed the New Popular Edition Maps site which allows for the creation of an open geo postcode site by using customer input against out-of-copyright 1940s maps, or if you’re just interested in old maps. James Wheare demonstrated his livebus site which mashes timetable and Google Map information.

Lots of interesting people and discussions on a number of subjects. Oxford has a wealth of talent. There seems to be a whole lot of Djangoing going on out there too. 

Then Thursday, up early, off to Oxford Station through the snow. The trains ran a little off timetable, but I think that FGW did a good job. Then at the end of the day, on the train to Swindon (which ran perfectly).

Tags: Fun, Software Development, Technology, Travel, Wordpress, Events, General //