Homecamp

March 4th, 2009 Uncategorized

The date for the second homecamp has been announced, Saturday 25th April 2009, 10am until 6pm, at Bash Creations, 65-71 Scrutton Street, London, EC2A 4PJ.

So what is homecamp I hear you ask, well …

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From the homecamp website:

“Home Camp is an unconference about using technology to monitor and automate the home for greener resource use and to save costs. This is about low energy devices and servers, reducing your electricity bills, monitoring your mouse traps, home automation, monitoring your water usage, using solar power. This is a hack day.”

For more information, the homecamp blog can be found here and a link to the first event is here.

The second homecamp promises to be great, don’t miss it!

Recent Reading

March 2nd, 2009 Uncategorized

I not a prolific reader by any stretch of the imagination, in fact the opposite is true, but one of my new years resolutions was to make a conscious effort to read more. Here is a short list of the books I’ve read in January and February. I’m starting to pick up the pace now and I’m really enjoying reading again.

1. Agile Project Management with Scrum (Microsoft Professional) by Ken Schwaber
   Good book on SCRUM and Agile principles. The pace of the book seemed just right and there’s enough substance there to make you want to go back and skim read it again.
2. Test Driven Development: By Example – by Kent Beck
   Not a bad book but not great. Tries to introduce the reader to the methods involved with Test Driven Development (TTD) by using very simple examples. Unfortunately if you have any experience with this methodology already (which is where I’m coming from), at least the first half of the book is useless and the second half doesn’t introduce much. Good for a introduction, nothing more.
3. Eat That Frog!: Get More of the Important Things Done, Today! by Brian Tracy
   I like to read these organizational, somewhat motivational books to see if I can glean any useful information from them. Unfortunately this had very little.
4. Painless Project Management with FogBugz by Mike Gunderloy
   We use Fogbugz at work, which, despite the steep fee you have to pay for it, is actually not a bad piece of software. This book is the definitive guide to everything you need to know about the tool and puts a project management spin on it. Good read if you use Fogbugz.
5. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions by Dan Ariely
   Not bad. Over-hyped and of dubious use but worth a read.
6. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt (Author), Stephen J. Dubner
   This surprisingly covers a lot of ground (the exact same examples in some cases) that Predictably Irrational does although this seems to do it better. A good read and some thought provoking material.
7. Hot, Flat and Crowded: Why the World Needs a Green Revolution – and How We Can Renew Our Global Future by Thomas L. Friedman
   Best of the bunch of books I’ve read this year. If you can look past the constant use of buzz words by Thomas L. Friedman and dig deeper into the meaning behind what he is saying, the subject material is fascinating.

BathCamp #2 – Arduino

March 2nd, 2009 Uncategorized

BathCamp number 2 is happening in only two days. This time the topics are on the subjects of Arduino and the excellent Current Cost units (which can be seen in action on this very site here).

Ben Tomlinson, Creative Director of London agency Ico Design will be hosting the Arduino talk and Dale Lane will be talking about Current Cost.

This promises to be a great night, see you there.