Will Knott

Barcamp Cork III was on last weekend. Gordon Murray, Ciara Feely, Ciara Crossan did a brillian job, and the conversations alone are a good reason to go. the Talks are the icing on the cake. I did get there, and had a great time (take a look at Martha Rotter’s review for a better idea).

Why was I late?

Well.

Or was it something else? You decide.

Given the day that’s in it. Just remember to vote.

Photo taken on the Cork City Photowalk in September

Given the song, I had to do this. The underside of the Cork Boardwalk just across from the Boardwalk Bar and Grill on the September Cork Photowalk.

I uploaded the photo sideways first time. It actually looks “not wrong”, which says something about the shadow in the water. By the way, am I the only one thinking that its weird to have a swimming pool on the other side of that wall?

Nothing to do with Google Wave (due out tomorrow in a wider beta than before) but a bow wave. Or a stern wave. Not sure how the name works.

Taken on the speedboat part of the Cork Photowalk (and yes it was fun).

There is only one advantage to joining a Photowalk late, you join by a different route, and you have slightly different photographs from everyone else. Thanks for setting everything up Donncha!

And this is the sunniest photograph I have (the full set is viewable here) of the overcast day.

A Sunflower snapped outside a florist on a side street between South Mall and Oliver Plunkett Street as I made my way to the Boardwalk.

Donncha is settup up another photowalk in Cork, this time on Sunday September 26 2009 (I’m including the year as this blog is now 6 years old. There is a lot of archive, and years need to be considered now).

I missed the last photowalk due to a family emergency, but I really want to get to this one. I also need time to find out what is on my camera’s memory card and upload more.

And given the fact that Cork is “De Capital”, I couldn’t resist this shot. Oddly, its more Waterford. Oh well.

Jason Roe is doing it again.

I mentioned one of his BTW (Blogger, Tweet-up, Whatever) events before, and I think this s his fourth.

The idea is that us lot shouldn’t only communicate behind screens, since Ireland isn’t that big a place. So meet up and actually hold someones hand. Or at least give a real wave rather than a “*wave*”

The new BTW is going to be in the Kudos bar is the Clarion Hotel in the ISFC, Dublin on September 3rd at 7pm. That’s room for 150 people.

Register on his site, then come over and say “hello” in person.

Will

Saturday July 18 is World Wide Photowalk day. Thousands of images will be taken on the day and uploaded to Flickr with an overall winner chosen by photographer Scott Kelby.

Now I’m uploading to Pix.ie, so I won’t be in the contest part, but I will be wandering the streets of Cork wielding a camera. Its not just Cork, there are photowalks taking place in Cashel, Tipperary, Dublin, Galway, Limerick City and Adare in County Limerick,

Some of these are booked up (the maximum on a photowalk is being limited to 50. (Try herding a group of ADD afflicted photographers dawdling with a camera in one hand and traffic rushing towards them. The 50 limit is probably a touch much). But if your nearest one is full, you can set up your own (New York has at least five at the moment.)

Then again, meeting a bunch of fellow photographers (or messers with cameras) and wandering around with them is a lot of fun. You’ll pick up things. You’ll also discover views of your city or town that you haven’t considered before.

To be seen by the organisers upload your photos and tag them with “skpwalkcork” (or skpwalkdublin or what ever is listed in the instructions for your intended photowalk. The SK stands for Scott Kelby.

Because you never know what you might see on the streets.

Will Knott

My schedule looks full at the moment. It happens, a rush of meet-up (usually unrelated to each other), yet most of these meet-ups are to do with the Irish blogging community (and yes there is an Irish Blogging community). The one exception is an effort to get a maker community working in Dublin.

Tonight has the BTW, a Blogger – Twitter – Whatever meet-up in The Porterhouse Central put together by Jason Roe.

Why do people do this. Organize meetings? Meet complete strangers even if there is a common interest between you? Actually look forward to meeting these strangers.

Well I wonder if neuroscience and survival instinct has something to do with it. In 1994 Ronny Eriksson proposed that our autonomic nervous system, our physical basis for feeling anything is divided in to four functions. The 4 Fs; Fighting, Fleeing, Feeding and Fu… er… mating.

There is one problem with this basis. If those were the roots of our instincts, then humanity wouldn’t have survived past one generation. Why? Well mating might happen, but without something else then the subsequent children would simply be left on their own.

For a group to survive there has to be another F. Fostering. Friendship. Family. Call it what you will but a need to reach out and nurturer in some way.

A need to meet others, meet-up is part of our hard-wiring. Kindness is somewhere in there. We are more likely to offer assistance to our own. The kindness of strangers is rare (it happens). Social media has had a strange side effect. We “know” complete strangers. Or at least think we know.

• “You can steel your heart against any kind of trouble, any kind of horror, but the simple act of kindness from a complete stranger will unstitch you” –The mother of Chris Abani who talks about humanity at TED.

We know the passions of strangers (or at least their thoughts) due to their blogs. Thanks to the likes of LinkedIn and FaceBook (and so many others) we know who their friends are. Thanks to Twitter we know that they are doing now.

Do we “know” them? Sort of. Pen pals have known each other for years. But social media makes, almost necessitates a community. And in a vacuum, it will create a community (yeah, I’m stretching here).

But that fifth F. Fostering/Family/Friendship. So much of our lives are founded on that principle. How come it is still left off that list?

See you at the BTW then?
Will Knott

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Every so often you discover that some programmers are cool.

I don’t mean in the really skilled (can write a million euro application in 10 lines of code) but actually cool.

For example Luis be Bethencourt Guimerá one of the presenters at OSSBarcamp. No only is he a talented coder and software designer (who worked on the forthcoming Ubuntu release), but he also wrote his own VJ software (being released in the Jaunty Jackalope release of Ubuntu Studio) and digital DJ software, complete with intuitive interface, to help his gigging around the world.

That is cool! I’ll cover more on this later.

This OSS Barcamp was less like most other Barcamps I’ve been to in that the schedule was locked down in advance. It made an interesting change, but it didn’t stave off everyone’s technical difficulties.

OSS Barcamp has its worthy side too. Éibhear Ó hAnluain took the opportunity of a number of skilled and focused minds to look at “How to present a political party’s FLOSS-friendly IT policy to the electorate” or rather, what are the benefits to the country for using free and open source software. What I loved about this talk was actually Enrico Zini and the impact that open source software had on the Italian political scene and its civil service.

The lightening talks were fun, I missed part of James Larkin’s “Intro to CSS Frameworks”, but there should be a video of his talk (and I’m sure he’ll release his slides). One other thing which stood out is the effort to translate or localize Ubuntu to Irish. If you are a native speaker, talk to them.

I’m also fascinated by the formation of TÓG, hackerspaces in Dublin. In the same way that co-working has benefits, I can see similar benefits with co-hacking. And folks, this is the old style of hacking as in making things work, work beter, or creating something new out of other products. Not cracking which is breaking in to things. Think more of an organised “voiding your warranty”.

Due to the lighting talks I ended up missing David Coallier’s “Get Ready for web 3.0 talk”

Now, back to Luis.

First off watch this video.

Some RSS readers may need to click through to see the video

Looks pretty good. Not too fancy and suits the song.

Now just think that this video was created with

• one $160.00 disposable pocket video camera
• one batch of Free Software, most of which is in Studio Ubuntu
• two hours of shooting
• four hours of production

Cheap? And good looking too.

And then there is “Big Buck Bunny” created by the open source Blender tool. Now it took a long time to put together, but the Peach Movie Project Team include tutorials on how they did it.

Just remember kids; software is an art as well as a science. And artist in one field tends to have skills in other fileds.

Take care, and enjoy the short movie below,

Some RSS readers may need to click through to see the video

Thanks to Laura Czajkowski and Jaime Hemmett for putting the whole day together.

Will Knott