Birmingham.pm had a technical meeting last week. Being the last of the year for us, and the last for a few months, I hoped to have a fair few people attending, and several talks to go along with it. Unfortunately several had to send their apologies for various reasons, but thankfully we did have a good attendance. I think there were about 15 in all. I managed to persuade 3 speakers to come along and give talks, 2 of whom were guest speakers.
John Pinner previewed the launch of his company's new product, PayThyme. The product is unusual in that the company are licensing it under the GPL, and giving it away. John Pinner is a stong believer in Open Source and a long time ago realised that if Linux was going to make it in business, then the killer apps it needed were not the Office type products, but bread and butter apps that are part of every business. These primarily being Accounts and PayRoll. PayThyme is Clockwork's contribution to the payroll app. The talked started with an introduction to payroll computing, with J. Lyons Bakeries running the first automated payroll system. As an aside my father and Brian's mum worked on this many years ago (LEO would eventually become ICL). Some 50-odd years later, PayThyme starts its life running the payroll for Durham-based Peter's Cathedral Bakers. The talk generated many more questions than I had anticipated, and a 45mins talk quickly grew to nearly 90mins!
Next up was Shevek, who followed up his talk from earlier in the year, looking at 'A Computational Introduction To Security Systems'. He's promised to come back and a practical talk at some point and put all his ideas on show. Although there weren't too many questions, it did generate some interest afterwards. Unfortunately Shevek did have to shoot off before the end to catch his train back to Bath. I'll allow a bit more time in future.
Last up was Brian, talking about his Games::Fluxx module. Since Belfast, Brian has been coding away all the game elements for Fluxx. He is now reaching a point that he needs some help. Mainly regards graphics and testing. I volunteered for the testing and others have raised their hands for odds bits too. Brian did say at the beginning of his talk that Birmingham.pm doesn't have a group project, so perhaps this could be it :)
Among the audience we also had a couple of longer distance travellers. Andrew Ford had come along, and had confessed to being disappointed he hadn't been able to get along to others in the last few months. Hopefully we'll see him a bit more often next year. I've already got him to tentatively agree to do an XS talk for us.
The other honoured guest among us tonight was Karen Pauley. Karen was in town for a couple of days on business, and decided to coincide her trip with one of our meetings. Unfortunately we didn't get too much time to chat, but we did take her to a nice pub and kept her glass filled. Some of us are hoping to return to Belfast in the new year, for one of Belfast.pm's technical meetings, although Karen has to organise one first!
All in all another successful meeting, and great company too.
We're having a break from technical meetings for the next few months, as I don't have time to organise them. Next month Christmas gets in the way, and January and February I'll be too busy playing Daddy again. Ethne is due to arrive on 1st Feb, but in all likelihood she'll be early. I don't expect to be too active online during those months, but I'm hoping normal service will resume in March.
Re:Interesting!
barbie on 2004-11-29T20:03:39
John did describe it, but I can't remember it all. I'm hoping I can get the slides from him at some point, or they will be online somewhere, and I'll point you to them.Basically the idea is to give away the product and promote the idea of Open Source, which seems to have a bad rep within business. They already have Ford signed up, so they haven't done bad. They then sell the support and training aspects around it. One of the questions asked was whether they feel that would support the company. In the beginning they're not expecting it to, but there has been a lot of interest, and they are figuring on the reputation to help them get the contracts.
John is aware that someone else could easily provide the software, support and training, but he still feels its worth doing. They still get the reputation as the software will have their name in the source code. They are also committed to providing upgrades as and when any financial changes are made in the budget. Knowing those changes also gives them an advantage over most software houses, at least to begin with.
I tried one evening to code something along these lines. I think I did that the day I bought my own Fluxx.
It's nice that Birmingham.pm has its own pet project. I wonder how you can publish it without risking the game's publisher's wrath, though.
Re:Games::Fluxx?
barbie on 2004-11-30T10:45:24
Brian has already contacted the publisher with regards to this. They actually have a page on their website that goes into some detail about it. Brian has highlighted that we need to ensure that any final release will have to have a license that covers the games publishers clauses as well as the Artistic or other license.Brian has thought a lot about how to implement the game, and has gone into a lot of detail regarding the scenarios that can be created. I think he's pretty much covered everything there is. It should be fun coding the server and web front end
:) Re:Games::Fluxx?
jplindstrom on 2004-11-30T16:11:40
"Today we have decided on a plan. We have decided to fully encourage fan-built computerizations of our games, and to think of any money we might have made from an electronic version to simply be part of our advertising budget to promote the physical version of the game."
That is very cluetrain.
