Ask Later #1

Last night was our first technology-themed 20x20 talk night (20 slides, 20 seconds each).  Well done to Steve for getting it off the ground by organising the room and presiding over the slide collecting.  The final line-up was as follows:

• Sean Varney spoke about data capture for film special effects and the progression from scanning 3D models and objects to scanning whole sets and people.
• I spoke about a few things that are connected by some of my favourite books.  Slides to follow.
• Robert McKinnon spoke about topic maps and how del.icio.us and flickr are sneaking them in the back door.
• Alex McLean spoke about live-coding and his new project, a domain specific language for live-coding audio, written in Haskell.
• Steve Coast counterbalanced all the positive vibes with a talk about negative things.
• Matthew Westcott rocked the house with his poignant tale of home-grown Ruby OCR code for hacking an online Sudoku puzzle.
• Paul Hammond talked about the effect of constraints on creativity and productivity, by way of Scrum, Ubuntu and Ruby on Rails.
• Jon Crowcroft gave us 9 (count them) levels of indirection, and wondered what would happen if football teams were programming languages.
• Simon Willison tried (and, I think, succeeded) to explain the whats, whys and hows of closures in Javascript.
• Yoz Grahame talked about the joys of cloning applications, by way of Ning, Second Life and LambdaMOO.  With bunnies.
• Natalie Downe spoke about usability testing at torchbox, and some of the recent lessons learned.
• Muki Haklay spoke about usability testing for online mapping sites, and gave some pointers for the future.
• Tom Armitage reprised his talk from Reboot 8, making the case for telling stories with social software.

As we waited for people to arrive, Paul Mison played a bit of live Electroplankton on his Nintendo DS on the big screen, which worked really well (naturally, since it's designed for performance).  I think we had about 30-40 people, plus speakers, and hopefully people enjoyed it enough that they'll come along again.  We'll be starting a mailing list soon, so leave a comment here if you'd like to be notified when it's ready.

NB:- though originally publicised as Techa Kucha Night, we changed the name to Ask Later.