London.pm had a tech meet last night. Thanks to the kind sponsorship of Fotango, we had booked the upstairs room of The Angel pub by Old Street. Holding a tech meet in a pub is awfully convenient, as it lets you go get beer half way though, and no-one has any concerns about security. OTOH, there's no bandwidth.
The talks this month were excellent. Spurkis kicked off with a talk about a project he'd been working on and showed us that people other than Fotango are using projects like OpenFrame, Pipelines and Pixie in the wild and are having great success with them.
blech's talk on MP3 and ID3 went well, and he's bang on schedule for presenting it at YAPC::Europe. I spoke to him afterwards and he's going to make a few changes which I agreed with, but in the whole, I think it's looking to be an excellent talk.
sky stood up and talked for about twenty minutes about the PONIE project. The structure of this talk was spot on - it weaved though seemingly irrelevant details at the start which were entertaining ("I don't like rewrites", jokes about the internals of Perl) and then moved onto discussing the meat of the matter which suddenly pulled in those irrelevant facts. I think sky converted quite a few people, or at the very least convinced those that were wavering, to help out.
After the break for food, richardc and myself played bommerman (or whatever the GNU clone is called) on the projector. He beat me. This having been said, we were playing using our mobile phones, via bluetooth, and some wrapper code that richardc had written with his Perl module, controling his PC, so I claim I was distracted.
Tim Sweetman did his really quick talk on sticking meta information down the side of wiki pages. A nice concept, and I think if he can get the balance right, it could become a common feature in our local wikis.
Dom gave his 'I only wrote this two hours ago' talk on XML namespaces. I understand a lot more now. I think he lost a reasonable number of the audience, but as far as I'm concerned that talk was wonderful. I suspect that he's saved me at least two or three days of pain, so that's a win.
We ended with Nigel giving the second part of his IP talk. He had problems in this talk - loss of power to the projector half way though, and he kept getting interrupted by people asking questions. I'm not sure what the answer to this should have been. Maybe we should have scheduled more time, or maybe we should have instigated a one question per audience member policy; The problem was people debating with the speaker, rather than asking questions...which lead to a big overrun. Nigel did well not to give up under the pressure. Next meet I'm getting a bell for "Your time is up", which I'm going to enforce a "No more audience questions" rule after, so speakers can complete their talks.
All in all a truly excellent tech meet. By the end of it, I was totally exhausted. I've been reading gnat's journal and I wonder how he manages the whole of OSCON.
Anyway, submissions for the next tech meet (provisionally scheduled for the 18th September) are now open.
Anyway, I hope that some people found it useful, even if it did draw a load of blank stares...
-Dom
DrDyde invited me along, to what was my first PM meeting of any kind, and though the topics were quite a random set, I was impressed with the quality of all of them!
