November Tech Meetup - Virtualization and time travel!

I was about to title this post as "November Tech Meetup - another success" but then thought that it was getting cliched... Nonetheless the November Meetup was pretty "successful" with about 60 people attending. We had enough pizza for everyone this time... :-)

Trial of Corners Idea

This time, on popular demand, we finally tried the corners idea. We labelled five corners in the room as "Games and virtual worlds", "Cool AI applications", "Databases and scaling", "Web design" and "Employers and job seekers". Though it seemed to be working in the beginning, and many people were asking what and where the corners were, towards the end most corners were empty. We think the reason was that even though people came to these corners, they saw no one there and went somewhere else. So it seems that it takes people dedicated to a corner to start a community around it. This may be something we can think about and try again in the future...

This time we had only one talk, but it was a good one...

Virtualization

Virtualization, or V12n (as there are 12 chars between 'V' and 'n', I didn't know that), is one of those buzzwords in the IT industry that you hear a lot, but very few people really understand what it means.

So it was great to hear Dan Shearer explain V12n, esp. since he is really passionate about it. Dan is a veteran of open source (he once told me, he first started developing software when I was 2 yrs old), and is a founder of the Samba foundation. But apart from all that, he is one of the smartest people you'll meet. So I was really looking forward to his talk...

Virtualization first began as a mechanism of testing software. As a software developer it has always been a pain to develop and test over all kinds of electronic devices out there. There are different chip sets, operating systems, motherboard and device configurations, and you can never be sure if what you have written works "fine" on all of them. So virtualization began with a purpose of simulating all kinds of hardware, with software. As for the software being tested, it doesn't matter if the underlying system is "real" or "virtual".

So Virtualization is essentially "Abstraction". You can simulate electronics and hardware, physical interfaces, people (how users interact with the system) and even time (speed up or slow down the computation to test for faster devices, and even change the direction of time)...

"All software is crap" (Dan says, not me... ;-) )

The point here is that even if software is perfectly written and tested on all current hardware/software configurations, we never know how it is going to perform in the future on unknown configurations like hardware that is 100 times faster or physical interactions that have not yet been imagined and created!

But these impossible configurations can be "virtually" created and the software can still be tested on these virtual configurations. So, Virtualization gives us a powerful method of preparing and testing for all kinds of strange future situations.

Time travel (oh yeah!)

If we take snapshots of a system every say 10 secs, we could restore these snapshots every second and make time run 10 times faster! Or we can restore these snapshots in reverse and even make time run backwards (virtually of course)...

This can be of tremendous help esp. while debugging. I have always feared programming in C++, as after you have removed all the obvious bugs, the scary part starts... If there are any memory leaks or hidden bugs in the system, the program crashes while running online (and taking down 10 other systems in the process). And there is rarely any way of recreating exactly what happened (unless you have heavy logging). But such backward time-travel could allow you to go back from a crash to see exactly when, where and how the problem started.

I can't wait to actually try out one of these debuggers...

Here are the slides for Dan's talk:

Virtualization - Dan Shearer

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: shearer tech)

Apart from many amazing new attendees we were very happy that Randy Haykin of Outlook Ventures, and who was the author of the original Yahoo strategy in the 90's, joined us.

I hope we continue to attract cool people to the Tech Meetup, and it evolves to be the hub of technologists and tech-preneurs in Edinburgh and Scotland.

</rant>

Previous meetups: First (September) Tech Meetup and the October Tech Meetup

December Tech Meetup - 10th Dec

The Tech Meetup for this December is scheduled for this Wednesday, i.e. 10th Dec. The venue and time are the same as last time...

Venue: 8th Floor, Appleton Tower, Edinburgh
Time: 6:30 PM

There is lots to look forward to as this time we'll have demo's from Hypernumbers and Dot-Red Games and a talk on "Web Analytics" by Andrew Hood of Lynchpin Analytics.

Can't wait...

update...

Sorry for not posting in a while... there were a lot of things happening...

My visa application (for UK Tier 1 visa) was rejected while the previous visa was about to expire. Apparently, the UK Border Agency doesn't recognise any income made through Paypal and Paypal statements are not considered valid. And hence, I did not have sufficient "valid" or "provable" income for the past one year to clear their minimum requirements (even though I have payed tax on it).

So it seems, my mistake was not taking a "regular" job after graduating and trying something different...

Anyway, am still in the process of sorting everything out. Fingers crossed...

Will get back to posting soon.

Second Tech Meetup: another success...

Edit: Added an older video of Yann's demo

It seems the Tech Meetup has caught the attention of the techie folk around Edinburgh, and the second meetup on 8th October was also a big success. We had about 70 people attending, which was a lot more than we expected. Consequently we also ran out of pizza and beer...

So as the self-designated official blogger for the event, I'll try and relate the happenings of the night...

Like last time, we started around 7 o'clock with people filtering in till 7:30. This, lets call it 'group chat time', was useful as it is a good way for people to chat with acquaintances and meet with people they already know. On the other hand, it also takes up a lot of initial time. So for the coming meetup in November we are going to start earlier at 6:30 instead of 7:00, so that we can do the introductions earlier, which means people can start meeting new people earlier.

Introductions

After pizzas had arrived and everyone had had a slice or two, we started with the public introductions like last time. Going through all 70 people did take time, but we think it was pretty useful as it helped break the ice. Even though this might not scale as the number of attendees grows, we still want to carry this on for as long as possible. The main objective of the meetup is to get people meeting and chatting to people they don't already know. A public introduction helps this because even though people don't remember each and every person's name, they can still remember their faces and then come and chat to them afterward.



We are looking for ways this can scale in the future. We are trying to avoid name-badges, etc as that would make the Tech Meetup feel like yet another formal conference or a networking event. Having peoples' profiles and interests on a website beforehand might be a way, but people will still not know who the person is that they want to meet in the crowd (unless we have clear photos on the website, or use name-badges... ).

Many have also proposed a "corners idea", which we are going to try out this time. Basically the idea is to designate certain corners of the room to certain topics where people who want to talk about that can gather. I think it is a good idea. Coming up with a general and yet interesting set of topics for the corners is the hard part. We would love to hear more feedback on this...

Demos

We had two demos again like last time. We had more lined up but sadly had to cut short as we ran out of time, and it was getting late. So, this time starting earlier would help...

Wii Loop Machine

In the first demo, Yann Seznec gave a great demo of his Wii Loop Machine software. Yann's application allows users to create new electronic music using a Wii remote. A big part of producing electronic music is to do with looping music samples and mixing them in a good rhythm. Yann's software allows you to control, mix and match these loops, just like a DJ would, using a Wii remote. It also looks fun because you start dancing with the Wii remote, while producing music.



Here is a video from Yann's blog:


Wii Loop Machine 2.0 :: an intro from The Amazing Rolo on Vimeo.

Technically, Yann mentioned that he is using aka.objects library for accessing Wii remote developed by Masayuki Akamatsu. Yann also has plans of porting the Loop Machine to the windows platform soon. All in all, it was a fun demo.


Erlang



Gordon Guthrie of Hypernumbers gave a high level yet interesting talk on Erlang. He focussed on the philosophy behind Erlang which was designed from ground up to be a concurrent & distribution-oriented programming language. Even though Erlang syntax is similar to many other functional programming languages, it provides native concurrency and multiprocessing capabilities. So an application written in Erlang can scale easily to a large network of computers.

As scalability is one of the biggest concerns for any successful and growing software application, having this functionality inherent in the design since the beginning is a big plus.

Here are the slides for Gordon's talk:

Erlang

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: programming erlang)

Photos

Thanks to Adam Yates, we have some great photos of the meetup. Here are some of them (all throughout this post). I have also uploaded them to the Facebook group.



Future plans

• Dates: The next meetup is fixed for 12th of November which is a Wednesday again. We have also decided to hold meetups in the future on the 2nd Wednesday of every month, so that it doesn't conflict with most of the other events.
• Website: We have a plan for a getting a full-fledged community website up for the Tech Meetup. It will have videos of demos, photos, member profiles and facilities to contact each other, forums, Job listings and Event registration. This looks like a lot of work, but we hope to roll it out in phases soon... All suggestions are welcome...
  
• Venue: If we continue to grow, 8th Floor of Appleton tower will soon be too small. Bigger halls in the new Informatics Forums are an option. We have decided to stay with Appleton tower for the coming meetup, and see if we do actually outgrow it...

All in all, it was another great meetup with lots of new people coming this time. Can't wait for the next one...

Python

This is a presentation I gave at work on Python. It is a quick overview for anyone interested in the language. I tried to keep it not too technical (but there are still some jargon in there)...

Why Python

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: python programming)

For more on Python, I recommend these articles:

Interview with Guido von Rossum: Making of Python

Eric Raymond: Why Python?

Data structures in Python

Python: Myths about indentation

Peter Norvig: Spell Checker in Python in 21 Lines

Performance computing in Python

Second Tech Meetup on Wednesday

So, its been a month already... the second meetup is set for this Wednesday (8th October) at 7pm. The venue is the same: Appleton Tower, 8th Floor.

Expecting lots more cool people this time...

First Tech Meetup: success!

Thanks to everyone who showed up yesterday! The tech meetup last night went great. We had a group of about 50 people all interested in technology, talking about technology. Even though there were many startuppers and some investors in the crowd, the business chat was to the minimum...

The two demos were great too. Tom Griffiths from Hubdub gave a quick run through of their very popular website and some insight into prediction markets. Matt Aylett from Cereproc also gave a great demo of their Speech Synthesis software and how it can mimic George Bush as well as generate West Bromwich accents.

Special thanks goes to Andrew Mitchell, Colin Adams, and the University of Edinburgh for letting us use their space, and sponsoring the Pizza and Beer... The space on the eighth floor of Appleton Tower was actually very well liked by everyone.

I know many people couldn't make it to this event because of the short notice. I will do a more detailed post about what went on soon. But if you are interested in coming and meeting all sorts of cool techies, just drop us a line...