Skype and Growl

How often when watching a presentation, have you seen the little pop-ups telling you so-and-so went on or off-line?
Well, that is because the person was probably using Growl, and forgot to sign out of skype. I think that this is due to the fact that the owner of the laptop has *two* places to turn off and/or tune notification – in both Skype and Growl.

Speaking of Growl, turns out they have finally started to charge for the software, but only via Apple’s App store (means using iTunes, which I never do).
As the earlier version had been release under an open source license, someone has tidied it up and fixed some Lion specific bugs, and put it out there for the world. You can find it here

Web development:

As part of my new job I have been on a bit of a learning sprint around HTML and CSS.
I understood the basics, but having no reason to have to experiment with things had not tested that knowledge. Other people had always stepped up much faster, and I always enjoy watching others work, and saw no reason to compete with people

CSS – Fundamentals

If it starts with a dot is a class i.e it is something which might occur multiple times on a page.
If it starts with a hash/pound it is an ID, i.e. something which can occur only once on a page

To get things set correctly use either Opera, Chrome or Firebug (for Firefox and Safari).
Opera and Chrome are easier as they have the option to right click on anything and “Inspect Element”. Once the inspector window is open, you can change or add CSS properties and see what it does to the web page. This is very useful.

Testing Web pages in IE on Apple Macs

Oh, and speaking of useful, when doing web-developement, it turns out that there are still people using IE.
Minor problem if you work on a Apple Mac, as there is no version available.
Luckily, Microsoft makes some Virtual-PC images available for zero cost specifically for this purpose. But, you can’t run Virtual-PC on a Mac, but you can run VMware Fusion or VirtualBox. VirtualBox currently being cost free, is often preferred, but VirtualBox can not read/start these images.
After much searching, I found a post that describes how to convert Virtual-PC images to VirtualBox ones. It does this via a shell script that does all of the heavy lifting for you.
My testing has so far been limited to starting the VM, and it does boot, and you can click round in it, but as it only has 256MB RAM allocated, it is s-l-o-w

So it’s been a while I guess

Finally got round to breaking the blogging log-jam, with this one.
For beer lovers in Finland there is only one event to go to – the Small Breweries, Big Beers event!
This year I visited on the Friday and it was a very pleasant afternoon, standing in the sun enjoying a number of fine ales and porters, whilst catching up on my podcast listening.
The food selection had improved over previous years, with more stands, each with more selections (including one selling salmon with a number of different flavours).
I bumped into an old friend at the event and spent an interesting time catching up on the events of common friends.
As it was getting late I ended with the “suicide porter” (or it’s name was something like that) that was 12%, but surprisingly good. Often at those sort of strengths, the flavour gets completely drowned out and the beer becomes really sweet and not very nice.

For some reason best known to themselves, this year the Syystober event was moved to be at the same time as the Night of the Arts and a food festival.
Not a great idea in my mind. Too many people, and the food thing did not seem to know what it was; local producers selling to the public or an industry meetup and smooze-fest. Some of the stands being more brochure-ware and displays, whilst others were selling their goods (the picture is from one of the food stands that was selling real food).
This combination (along with poor stall placement and layout), makes for a not enjoyable time. At least there were plenty of sampler trays out
Syystober is not as good as it is held in partnership with Koff, and they rent/sell one litre steins as well as the regular pint glasses. However, they are not selling the smaller 0.2 litre sampling size!
But still worth attending, if you have nothing better on!

So yesterday the first un-sauna took place here in Helsinki.

Sami from HUB Helsinki had decided to take the un-conference idea and add a Finnish twist to it.
The idea being to do short discussions between the “rounds” of sauna.

Even though only 3 of us turned up, as one of the ideas behind un-events is that “the people who turn up are the correct people” it was still a fun event.
During the discussions some interesting ideas were generated (mostly for a potential HUB Helsinki un-conference that is in the planning stages currently).

There was some idea to do this again i August. As this covers E of my favorite activities (suauna, interesting conversations and some beer) I plan to be there.

Mämmi beer from Laitilan Wirvoitusjuomatehdas
Mämmi is a traditional easter dish made of rye, molasses and water. Like many things in Finland the description does not sound that great, but try it and you might like it.
The beer did not have a particularly strong flavour to me, something similar to a stout. But I do like the Laitilan brewerie’s packaging.

Easter beer from Vakka-Suomen Panimo
That is at least my translation of the label. A nice beer.

midvinter
From Sweden. Light, not too much body (I find winter beers are normally stonger and “fuller” than this), but pleasant all the same.

Next up an import from the UK. This one I got from Alko (as it is 7.1%), you can actually taste and smell the rum influence on the beer. Again, I would probably would not drink too many of these in an evening (though this time more due to the alcoholic strength rather than the flavour).

I then followed this with a nice scottish beer from the Caledonian Brewary. THis brewary is one of the ones I have actually had a tour round a number of years ago.

Two that stuck out for me were; feminism (there are more women involved than thought & some advice on how to get more) and Open farming (the open source tractor in action video is rather cool)

The Qi Hardware folks seem to have a solution searching for a problem, but the hardware itself is very cool tech. The FAQ provides a good overview.

I also learnt of the Touch Book. An ARM based netbook with huge bttery life, detachable keyboard and touch screen.

The saturday night conversation about maths (and mutilple infinities!) ensured a complete fun weekend.

I started with a couple of export only beers from the Ridgeway Brewary.

A nice stout, that tasted very nice. Was a rather strong beer.

On the recommendation of the barman, I took an IPA from the local brewary and it was very refreshing.
I then took their porter, again, very pleasant.

My view is that what happens at unconferences, is more about people communicating as peers together, even when it is a more classic presentation style, rather than the traditional conference format where it is more a single person at the front attempting to distribute their wisdom.

But the killer difference for me is that at BarCamps there are intermediate level people teaching beginners or learning from one another.
At a traditional conference the “guru” will often attempt to please both types of audience (beginner & intermediate), and thus often fail to please both . I find that by teaching people who know less than you, you will often find the gaps in your knowledge & understanding, and thus progress towards mastery faster.

But the reason I keep coming back to these type of events is the sheare randomness of what happens at them.
The core principales of BarCamp type events Seems to cause people with a commaon characteristic of having a willingness and desire to share to come togeather. This in turn, leads to oppertunites to be exposed to new things. Emma Persky touched upon this in a recent post where she points out that not everything happening at a BarCamp is about technology, in fact the most memorable/remarkable sessions are often the ones no-one expects.

Posted by Wordmobi

The food was provided by Eat&Joy Maatilatori, it certainly looked good (not just standard Makkara!)

Seemed to be something like a 65-35 split men to women (is this higher than at other beer events?), seemed similar to similar to the small breweries event.
There was also a luxury toilet truck for your convenience.

Syystober toilet truck

The music got a little loud after 20:00, but that seems the norm nowadays (turn it up, cos the kids want it loud?)