Daily Archive: December 3, 2007

Agile North 2007

Start
So the Agile North conference was off to an interesting start with the loss of my two compadres, Matt and Chris, who were unavailable at the last minute due to vicious experiences with the gremlins in cyberspace. So I got up at 5.30 a.m. after a late night (circa 1.30 a.m.) and snoozed my way to Manchester all alone.

Cafe Nero
Sat in the Cafe Nero in Manchester to have a semi decent cup of coffee instead of the grit they serve on the train and discovered that the 'surf and sip' service at Cafe Nero comes in the attractive price packages of:

£10 – for one day
£40 – ad hoc – Month by Month
£30 – Monthly contract minimum one year.

(approx – due to it being taken in American dollars)

If anyone actually chooses to pay that amount when their mobile phone provider will give them a wireless card for the same cost, then they are insane. I can understand an ad hoc daily charge of a tenner, but I would have thought they would get more custom if they made it a monthly charge of £10 with the option to pay for a yearly amount in full up front for £100 or so. £360 a year to get wireless internet access in a coffee shop is an unreal expectation. I ponder how much they charge in the US for the same service, I doubt that it is the $60 a month that converts into.

Venue
The venue was the Palace Hotel in Manchester, which from the outside looks like a fairly rundown building, but is in fact a fantastic Victorian edifice on the inside with high ceiling and many original features such as glazed tiles which gives the whole thing a feeling of a grand hospital built by a Victorian Patriarch or a railway station (many of the doors had arched frames in glazed tile with glazed lintels.

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Conference
So the conference. Well without repeating verbatim some of the talks as there is a web link to follow, the conference itself was of a good quality. There were a broad range of speakers, some very well known in the UK Agile field and they covered a number of topics and showed the breadth of the Agile movement. The only real criticisms is that is still feels a little hedge-wizardry at the grass roots level and at higher levels smacks of a kind of enthusiastic mania common to American Evangelical promotions this was especially relevant and prominent in the fact that some of the speakers felt the need to promote Agile to people who were principally at the conference because they were in Agile development. This latter point is lessened by people like myself who are investigating the whole area to see if the model has any validity in the work that we do.

One plus point is the fact that I gained notoriety because of the colour of my laptop 🙂 I have a red cover for a black Macbook which makes it look deep crimson as if bathed in blood with a shiny scarlet Apple logo 🙂

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London Perl Workshop 2007

This year Matt, Mark, Chris and Leigh were set to attend to represent Shadowcat and to give talks, demonstrations and to give out sponsorship items. Due to unavoidable complications Chris was unable to attend at the last minute but Matt, Mark and Leigh trolled along.

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Yet again we were back in the University of Westminster, Cavendish Campus for the LPW 2007, and once again Shadowcat were sponsoring part of the event. This year we were asked by Greg to provide some bottles of malt whisky (and a few SCSYS merchandise like the limited edition t-shirt) for some of the volunteers who help to make the LPW a successful event.

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The day started off in an almost usual manner with us not making enough allowance for transportation and turning up slightly late at the venue. thankfully we weren't the only ones and we managed to creep into the lecture theatre with the main talks having only started five minutes previously.
Matt did his Database Haters Anonymous talk, this time the technical challenge we had set ourselves this time was a new laptop (I don't know why but every time we do this we add a technical complication such as visual presentation, new laptops or untired distros, actuaslly I do know why, we're techies, we like to play with technology). The Laptop was only 'partially' Debian enabled (in that it had only been installed a day before and was not tweaked enough to have the correct settings for Matt – didn't even have his favourite x session) and whose Vista install seemed intent on slowing the computer to a near crawl.

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The talk though didn't suffer at all from that so Matt started pretty much on time and this seemed to be to his disadvantage as he lost some of the momentum from Vienna (Matt gave the Database Haters talk in Vienna to a near raptuous crowd, he started really late and then spurred on by having to rush produced a funny and passionate delivery). The Catalyst talk was his usual mix on the Beautiful and Unique Snowflakes theme and this went down well and actually benefited from him doing it a few times before even if he overran in the shortened time slot.

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The live build an API seemed to go like a souffle in a cupboard and was full of fluff. It was always going to fail spectacularly, but it didn't quite do that instead it gracefully fell over, if it were to be done again there would have to be some kind of conditions set upon it so that it failed in a nicer or more explosive manner. Matt did get some functionality though so at least showed his competency ;).
Once more the laptop gained notoriety with people asking Leigh about her pink cover and asking me if I had painted mine red.
The evening of the day ended in typical fashion at the public house, some of the sponsors had paid for a round of drinks and finger food for the attendees at the George and Dragon near to Warren Street station. After this we went to a sushi and karoke bar wth Greg who had just been made the new leader of the London PM group.

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