Now, don’t get excited, I’m not going to name names or make private email conversations public, the people involved know who they are and have to live with it. This isn’t about settling scores or winning battles, it’s simply about revealing the info they tried to blackmail me with, so they no longer have any power and so I can go back to trying to make a difference. Doing it this way means the organisations I back can decide whether they want me involved or not. In return for keeping the details private, I’m hoping those involved let it lie and not turn this into another leg of an ongoing battle between fans who should be working together.

So, what’s my dirty little secret? Well, whilst I remained publicly very very neutral on the subject of protests (until by blog post calling for them to stop, which wasn’t particular critical of the protests that had gone before), initially I was privately quite supportive of Glen’s efforts (back when it was just Glen). I genuinely believed my main involvement was to ensure they were well organised and peaceful (i.e. not a repeat of the seasons before’s protests), but once the accusations started flying I went back and re-read all my initial emails and yes, much to my own surprise, I was quite supportive and even gave encouragement.

People accused me of being before behind the protests (I wasn’t) and of trying to undermine the protests (I wasn’t), I did initially think fan pressure would result in Kean being replaced with a better manager, but I soon realised (as I detailed in my last blog post) that other than bringing our plight to everyone’s attention (which it needed doing) our unique predicament meant they’d never succeed in their initial aims. I took abuse from both sides on this, I had people connected with the club accusing me of being behind the protest and I had protesters claiming I wasn’t welcome as I was “anti protest”. Funny old world isn’t it.

So, there it is. I was initially quite supportive. Not much to blackmail me over was it?

However, now that’s out there, it does mean I can get back involved with various Rovers groups without fear of my previous connection being used again them (if they want me).

Given the chance, would I do things differently? Of course I would, I now know who to trust and who not, who is genuinely fighting for a cause and who is just fighting, who wants what’s best for the club and who has other motives. But hindsight is a wonderful thing. I made some bad calls, I’m far from blameless and because of this whole episode I’ve lost a lot a genuine friendship. But I still stand my ground and I will continue to do what I think it best for the club and I reserve the right to change my mind as the situation and information available changes.

Why now? Well, now is the time for us to be working together, fighting for the same cause, rather than trying to damage each other’s efforts.

My rationale for that is nothing to do with supporting the team, many of the protesters are the most ardent supporters I know. It has nothing to do with giving the owners or manager another chance, both I feel have gone far too far to ever be worthy of any redemption.

However, we have to take stock of what we actually want. “Venky’s Out” as a sole aim is stupid, if we don’t have some kind of owner, we’re in administration, simple as that. So the real aim is “Venky’s Out and replaced with a better alternative”. So, we’re now looking at attracting new owners. The same is true of the manager and those parts of the club management team people feel are detrimental to the club. Getting rid of them isn’t enough, we need to replace them with better.

So, how do we attract such people? We’ve got to become an attractive proposition. If Rovers were a normal business, then a significantly low price would be sufficient, but that doesn’t work in football, everyone knows it’s a money pit, so we have to become attractive in other ways.

We don’t have a lot to start with, we’ve never been a press favourite (despite the traditional easy-sell of “plucky underdog fighting above it’s weight”), we’ve gone from having a highly respected senior management team to becoming the industry joke (something I blame on the owners management and communication style and a small number of people that influence them, NOT the vast majority of club staff who stayed) and we’ve got fans, who have (I acknowledge, unfairly) been portrayed in the media as vitriolic troublemakers who have unfairly targeted a manager and his family (few outside Rovers know the truth about that), then made two seemingly innocent brothers scared to visit their own club.

The fans love to talk about it being their club. Well, we need to act like it, we need to put our club in the shop window and make us an appealing proposition as possible. WE have to sell the club.

Now, in the early days the protests served a purpose, they brought attention to our plight. From then on it was a gamble, they’d either force Venky’s into finding a buyer as quick as possible and shift the club for a bargain price, or they’d force them into digging their heals in and watch the club die, rather than fund it. Nobody expected the fans would lose that gamble, but it seems we did. Hindsight’s a wonderful thing, but if I’d had trusted what I knew of Indian business culture and did the research on Madame vs PETA a little earlier, I could have predicted the result, but I have to admit it didn’t dawn on me until long after the damage had been done. (Edit – Additional: I acknowledge there could have been a third option, that re cause the owner to “man up” an re-engage with the club/fans)

Now, I don’t for a second expect that if we promised to give up the protests and gave the owners an easy ride then the owners would suddenly start communicating, put the money into club they promised and we’d see the brothers at games again. We’ve gone way past that. The Rao’s are a lost cause, we need to stop focusing on getting them to sell, nothing we can do will influence this. Instead we need everything possible to convince potential buyers that they’ll get our full backing and we won’t suddenly break out the yellow and black banners the first time we hit a bit of a rough patch.

With that in mind I started a thread on BRFCS asking people to pledge what they’d do if we got new owners, but we also need more ideas of things we can do. But most of all we need to get smart with the PR, we need to promote all the things that are great with club, we need to celebrate our heritage, we need to shout about those things that still aren’t broken but most of all we need to stop wasting time and energy protesting to people who have proved they’d rather let the club die than give in and turn all the energy, organisation and enthusiasm into actually promoting the club to the press and the world at large. We need to show what is left that is good about the club, in the best light possible.

Yes the club should be doing this, but for whatever reason, Ewood has become almost as silent as the owners, so WE must take up the challenge.

It’s also a campaign EVERYONE can get behind. The protests have divided the fan base, not on their intended aims, but on whether the ends justify them means. Now is the time to move, to ignore the owners (as they are now doing to us) and reclaim our club, get Ewood bouncing again for US not them. Make it somewhere we’re proud of being associated with, not embarrassed with.

It’s simply a message to the players.

You’ve probably noticed a certain amount of discontent amongst the fans at the moment, you’ve possibly heard about fans vocalising their dissatisfaction both in the national press and via a protest march before the Arsenal game. Whilst I have not been involved with these protests I do understand the frustration that has lead to them, but one thing I think the vast majority of fans want to be absolutely clear about is this is simply an issue with the manager and his exceptionally poor results on the pitch, NOT the players. Most fans, if not all, will acknowledge we now have a very strong squad capable of great things, however a significant section of the fans feel that Steve Kean is not the man to drive you to them (no pun intended).

So, I urge you all this weekend, if Ewood is a little more hostile than normal, if there is booing around the ground, if you hear calls for Kean Out, this ISN’T aimed at the players. I’ve yet to find a single person who blames our current league position of the team itself. We all know we’ve got a talented squad capable of far more than a single point at this stage. You, the players, continue to have the fans full support and we feel it’s important you know this, even if some people’s frustration with the manager does spill over during the game this weekend.

Come On You Blues.

Glenn Pegden

Many readers will realise that I’m one of the admins on BRFCS.com, but as the site is remaining neutral on the issue of the protest, I felt it only right I post this on my personal website instead, for fear of it being misconstrued as and official BRFCS statement

This post is (c) 2011 G. Pegden and may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior permission

The good news is, in an attempt to grow the consultancy side of the business, we’re hosting a number of small group, low cost, training sessions, on everything from PCI-DSS compliance to brand security, content monetization to conversion optimization. But most importantly, I get to take off my sales hat and actually get involved with the teaching.

I’ve been keeping my hand in a little by talking at events like Barcamps and Northern Bloggers, but this’ll be my first time doing it for paying people in a couple of years and I’m very very excited.

My first one is “Brand Security”, it’s basic online security aimed at people responsible for things like WordPress websites, twitter accounts and facebook fan pages of other companies (i.e. digital agencies and web design studios), who don’t have much of a background in IT security and we’ll be talking about things like hardening WordPress, XSS attacks, pass phrase management (especially between multiple users), threat modelling, as well as how to clean up after you are compromised.

If you want to come along, it’s £185 for a 1/2 day course, held at Calls Wharf in the centre of Leeds on 28th Sept. More info at http://brandsec.codingfutures.co.uk/ . I have to admit, I’m really really excited about training again!

This post has come about because almost every day, somebody asks on Warrior Forum (a hang out of online marketers and bedroom entrepreneurs) “What’s the best Membership Plugin to get“. Now I could just do a review site, but I won’t partly because loads already exist, partly because I sell membership plugins so I’m biased, but mainly because IT’S THE WRONG QUESTION TO ASK.

Asking “What Membership Plugin should I get” is like asking “What car should I buy”, the only useful answer is “it depends what you need”.

Even worse, people respond to the question with information they believe is correct, but a little logical analysis shows that in almost every case, it can’t answer correctly. Unless you’re conducting a controlled study of ALL the alternatives, what most people do is ask for some suggestions, try the top few suggestions and pick the first one that meets their personal requirements. Is this the best ? Almost certainly not, it’s just the first one that didn’t suck for them. Sure, people will be vocal about the ones they didn’t like (and with good reason) but the ones they didn’t try don’t even get considered. You soon end up with a vicious circle of the popular ones being classed as best, rather than the best ones becoming most popular. Ultimately nobody likes to think they didn’t make the best decision, so their choice is obviously the best choice.

This results of this vicious circle is bland, middle of the road, offerings like WishList Member being constantly reported as the best when often, it’s nothing of the sort. It’s simply a case of “it did what I expected and I don’t hate it”. For almost every situation there are “better” alternatives, but most people haven’t tried them.

However, this can work to your advantage. Selling membership online is now hugely competitive and in a market you should be striving to stand out in, if all your competitors are using a product that is a long well behind it’s lesser known competition, you immediately have a BIG advantage.

So, instead of telling what what plugin to buy (and if you’ve read this far, you’ll know that that can’t shouldn’t be done) I figured I’d write a guide to finding the right membership plugin for YOU, to save me making the same points over and over again on Warriors Forum and twitter.

So, how to find the right membership plugin.

Here are the key steps

• Work out your requirements. No two people want the same thing from their membership site, what is an essential feature for one person is unnecessary for another. Knowing exactly what you need will save you lots of time and effort later. Features you have to consider include which payment systems you need to integrate with, how many membership levels you need, wether you intend to upsell people from one level to another, what kind of promotion you are going to do for your membership, what your content is (text, pdfs, downloadable file, video, music etc), how many users you are expecting, do you need WordPress multi-site support, do you need multi-language support etc. Write down a list and keep referring back to it, don’t be drawn in by the bright lights only to realise list you’re missing a vital feature
• Ignore cost, think about ROI (Return on Investment) Some people mistakenly think the most expensive is the best, others prefer the cheap option (why pay more when I don’t have to) but normally, you’re running a membership site to make money, so if it doesn’t make the cost of the perfect membership plugin back, then you’re doing it wrong. After the content, it’s the most important part of the site (it takes the money after all) so don’t scrimp. Get the RIGHT one and ignore the cost (within reason) you’ll soon make your initial outlay back. Do however check to see whether you’re paying a one off fee or an an annual price
• Draw up a list of possible plugins and test them all Look through all the options of all possibilities, rule out those that don’t meet your requirements, ask for advice but don’t take “best” too seriously, but do take seriously any very negative feedback (also watch out for review sites, many are simply affiliate sites designed to promote specific plugins). Once you have a list, test them all! Don’t stop at the first one that’s OK, it could well be that the next one is better. Also check the advertised version includes all the things you expect, one major player expects you to join their club (additional monthly fee) to get access to features that others expect in the core (drip feeding, expiring posts etc).
• Look behind the plugin Don’t just look at the features, look at how the company deals with their customers, how long have they been in business, do they have a physical address, how big is their team etc. If something goes wrong with your plugin whilst they are taking a gap year travelling around the world or worse if it’s a one man band that has suddenly got a day job and can’t really support his product any more, it’s YOUR livelihood at stake! WordPress (and PHP in general) is great for individuals throwing together complex solutions really quickly, but the problem is individuals aren’t great for relying on for long term support.

Follow these simple steps and hopefully you’ll stay one step ahead of the saps that have fallen for “The Emperors New Clothes” by being lazy and buying inferior or less suitable product, simply because everyone else did.

In the interests of full disclosure, I work for Coding Futures who as well as being a kick-ass development agency specialising in payment flow systems, also happen to develop Your Members which whilst excellent, well priced and boasting many unique features, may not be the right choice for you.

One analogy always made with forums is the pub, but one part that never fits the analogy is in a pub situation, as the size of the group chatting grows, it eventually splinters into subgroups, often aligned upon common interests or demographics, so each conversation is kept between a manageable size of participants. However on a forum, even though these groups can be artificially created (breaking discussions down by subject for example) the problem is the users with sufficient time can still join in (and even dominate) every conversation. Imagine in the pub situation if the “pub bore” (see the Fast Show’s Billy Bleech for what I mean ) could be involved with every single conversation, all at once, he’d love it, everyone else would hate it.

We’d spent ages thinking of ways of filtering out “the pub bore”, we discussed reputation indexes (something I explored in some detail at an excellent Knight-Mozilla event aimed at bringing technologists and journalists together) and user feedback systems (such as slashdot’s meta moderation and karma systems) but none of them seem to actually seemed to achieve what we were after.

Why? We realised that one man’s pub bore is another man’s oracle. A combination of many months of watching large groups interact socialy (both at football events and local geek events) along with a chance re-reading of Anthropologist Desmond Morris’ fantastic late 70s book The Soccer Tribe which discusses tribalism in football (it’s a must read for any football fan), lead us to realise that one of the fundamental beliefs of forums is wrong. Cliques are NOT a bad thing.

Actually, that’s not strictly true, but small semi-exclusive groups are the natural result of conversation as the number of participants grows. Fighting against this means that only the most vocal still have a voice.

So, for our entry at LeedsHack 2011, we set about working out how to nurture and manage these groups, deciding how to group people together whilst keeping out people the group may not want and given the conditions of LeedHack (you have 24hr to go from idea to competed code) we had to do it quickly. Thankfully BRFCS had been running a simple feedback system where users could vote up or vote down posts, for a long time, which gave us a great dataset to play with.

With the help of Dave “Stig” Priestly we took apart the data to see if we seeded groups with a few key members who shared similar views could we devise an algorithm that would allow like minded people (i.e. people who had similar views on the posts they had voted up and down, as well as the group’s view of their own posts) and amazingly in just a few hours, we did and it worked really really well. In our 24hrs at LeedsHack, the three of us came up with a hook for the popular IP.Board forum software that allowed the admin to create “Tribes”, seed them with a few key members, then allow people to check which Tribes they can join and join them up if they want to.

The idea is now to set up a small number of these Tribes on BRFCS and see how it goes.

It’s still early days and we’re still collecting data, but it does seem we’ve come up with a system that could revolutionise how internet forums work, only time will tell.

Polling Tellers are normally the first people you see when you get to a polling station, they will normally ask you for your voter number, write it down, then point to inside where seeming the the process is repeated. What a lot of people don’t realise is these people are not part of the polling team and you have no legal obligation to speak to them. What they do is examine the numbers given to spot whether people they people they believe they know the voting preferences of (e.g. party members) have voted yet. I have no issue with what they do (in fact, anything that encourages anyone to vote is a good thing) but I take exception to the fact that in a lot of cases they masquerade as officials and rely on people’s ignorance of their purpose to obtain the data.

Well, whilst sitting in a very quiet polling station from 7am to 10pm (yep, the poor buggers generally do a 16hr day, then a lot head off to do the count afterwards too, plus the hourly pay is rubbish) I worked out how we could get rid of them.

They collect data, they want to know who has voted and who hasn’t, they only value they have is in the data they collect, so the answer is to poison the data to make it worthless. Now firstly I must stress these are people OUTSIDE the actual room where the voting is done, doing what I propose to an actual polling station officer or other electoral official is FRAUD and may result in JAIL. But, the people outside, have no official status and you are under no obligation to provide them with any info, or if you do provide them with info, you’re under no obligation to be accurate.

So, what I propose is as many people as possible request access to your constituency’s electoral register (normally held at the town hall), it’s your right to access it for free (though you will probably need an appointment), then on it, read the electoral number for the MPs standing, publicize them as much as possible and even write them on your polling card (despite what people think, the card isn’t required to vote, it’s simply a reminder, just giving the polling officer you name and address is enough), so when the teller asks you for your electoral number, you can simply read off the corresponding number for the MP they represent.

The end result? The main thing their data will tell them is that the MP they represent has just committed large scale electoral fraud (which obviously they haven’t, but their data will show they have voted multiple times and at the wrong polling stations) and hopefully, as their data is flawed, the political parties will stop using them.

There are also some more practical and less fun things you can do than data poisoning. Firstly, if you felt intimidated or they in any way impeded your entry into the polling station, INFORM THE POLLING OFFICER, who can have them removed, in fact, the official polling station handbook says this about tellers

Tellers

The Presiding Officer should check on tellers’
activities from time to time and make sure that
they do not block the entrance or hinder voters
from entering the polling station

So, if you see them breaking any of these rules, inform the polling officer who can have them removed.

More proactive people may wish to make up notices explaining that people in this area of the building are not official and you are under no obligation to surrender any information to them, then politely ask the Polling Officer if they object to you displaying the signs in the areas the tellers are frequenting.

More ideas welcome

The line-up of talks I chose was excellent. It started with @mkjones on Theme and Template sites, it was probably a good thing there were so many questions from the floor, as I didn’t get to ask his opinions on theme licensing (although it was touched on in the talk) and my bugbear of WP themes containing code (making them exceptionally dangerous beasts for none-technical users) although it did give me the inspiration to finish the Warcraft theme we did for RoA which did all kinds of cool stuff like retrieving info from Blizzard’s website, showed up coming raids etc.

Second on the list was @tomnomnom ‘s excellent demo of an “what if I do this …. ” type project where he used php to read the input from a set of RockBand drums, resulting in a ascii version of the game. He was even brave enough to live code part of it. A great presentation and quite witty too.

Third was Tim (@tnash) giving a great talk on airport security and how to speed the process up, much of which focused on how to avoid being singled out (answer, don’t look so dammed nervous, so it was lots of common sense tips on preparation to avoid getting flustered) and some interesting anecdotes on his time in the forces. It was particulary well done as he threw it on the board as a last minute idea as the board looked a little empty and winged the entire lot.

After a lunch break with an excellent choice of lovely pizza, I headed to a talk on the 7 deadly sins of presenting, which whilst not really teaching me anything new, was, unsurprisingly, very well presented. I was told the presenter (Darren?) did a talk earlier on Time Travel that was excellent and I rather regret missing it.

That was followed by a round table discussion lead by @dchetwynd on organising geek events. This is a topic particular close to my heart as whilst I haven’t organised a geek event since the first UK 2600 meets outside of London, in Manchester around 1990, I’ve organised plenty of none-geek events and I’m very much the type of person TO organise them. But mainly I wanted to get across my position as somebody who felt very much an outsider at seemly exceptionally cliquey geek events and also that one of the BIG failings I see of geek events in the UK is they suffer from a lack of advertising and you only get to know about them if you know people going. It seems I’m not alone, everyone else seemed to suffer similar problems and acknowledged the BarCamp Barnsley itself suffered this (which may have explained the low turnout and high percentage of first timers), they also acknowledge that many of these events are often cliques of existing friends who would probably welcome new input, yet still feel hard to approach. Sadly my usual “if you don’t fix it, you can’t expect anyone else to” attitude got the better of me and I have an idea to partly rectify this.

From here is was time to do a presentation myself and Tim had quickly thrown together on Friday afternoon on monetizing content. Our planned “good cop, bad cop” tag-teaming presentation style seemed to work quite well, but sadly the talk before ran over and we had to rush it rather a lot and couldn’t execute our plan to identify potential testers (be them content providers or developers) for cashApe, but hopefully we encouraged a few people consider selling their content rather than just giving it away. I suspect it’s a presentation we may refine and try again in the future. Oh and in case you we’re wondering which cop I was, you this image on right should give you a clue (one advantage of playing the evil internet marketer was I actually got to talk about dirty subjects like actually making money …. oh and I got to plug our products if only for comedic value).

The remainder of the day was spent talking to @martin88 (plus his dad), @jonnyauk, @mkjones, @davidbatty, @rebecca_parker, @proactivepaul, @tnash, @carolynlyn and others about everything from the WordCamp Leeds that never was, Werewolf, Membership Software, beer and lost mobile phone chargers. Hopefully I’ve convinced @DavidBatty to try something other than WishList, given @lukeb3000 some ideas on monetizing a hyperlocal site, recruited @mkjones for some Leeds geek events and convinced @jonnyauk that he should organise BarCamp Birmingham!

So, quick summary, it didn’t feel like your average BarCamp, but that’s no bad thing. Met some great people, learnt some stuff and had a pretty good day out. Now, if only I could convince somebody to bring back BarCamp Leeds from the ashes.

(much more after the jump)

Unlike Blackpool, BarCamp London was a two day event, with attendees are simply expected to camp out overnight in the venue. Having been pretty ill the week before and having to catch the 5:05am train to get there, this was the aspect that worried me most, I expected to be shattered before I arrived, I imagined a night sleeping under my ski jacket in a classroom wasn’t to help my tiredness much.

Having made it out of bed on time (and after making an educated guess on how the trains once free wifi worked, so they kept offering me another free 15 minutes) after a quick dabble on twitter, I learned my soon-to-be werewolf-nemesis @mheap (Michael) was in the next carriage and when he headed down to introduce himself I realised he’d been on one of the other teams at LeedsHack the week before. I spent most of the journey down planning my talk for the weekend, a look back at old school (1978-1990) online social media which would include a good healthy advert for Monochrome (something we’d talked about doing on Mono for some time). After I arrived and killed a little time in a local McD’s (the coffee is ok and the wifi is free) I arrived (bumping into Tim and Todd along the way) at the venue (which was just across the road from where I’d been to OrgCon a few months earlier) just before it started.

The first difference to the Blackpool BarCamp was obvious, it was the scale. The level of organisation was stunning, Kevin (who I’ve met on several occasions due to the work I do with Tim) and Christiano (whom I’d met briefly the week before at LeedsHack … I had to present my our none-working project to him) seemed to have a army for organised and willing helpers. I’ve been to expensive professionally run conferences that don’t come close to the level of professionalism. So, having donned my self designed Spreadshirts T-Shirt (what a brilliant idea that was, it was great to see just how creative some people had been) I inspected the swag. Now being a free conference that already had a self-designed t-shirt included, it would have been forgivable if the “swag” was just a bunch of flyers for the sponsors, but it certainly wasn’t. A metal drinking flask from Adobe (a great idea to limit the wastage from people using desposable cups) a set of Werewolf cards from Global Personals (more on Werewolf later), a sim with £5 of credit from GiffGaff, some super strength coffee from Starbucks (not that is was needed) and some pens and bits and bats and a bag for life type thing from Minute Box to keep it all in.

So, at the welcome meeting I spot quite a few faces I recognise from LeedsHack, including Dom with wearing the an awesome khaki-with-sparkly-rainbow-lettering T-Shirts and marveled at some of the witty, geeky and just plain clever T-Shirts people had designed.

Saturday went by in a blur. I remember the Tea, coffee and soft drinks were constantly available, chocholate at crisps appeared at breaks, Kevin and co would interrupt sessions to launch free chocolate to anyone who wanted it, there were some excellent sandwiches around lunch time, cans of pop too (in case, like me, you’d od’d on the free coffee), we couldn’t have been any better looked after. I went to a wide range of talks, from venture capital, to wifi security, dealing with developers to organising geek meetups and Todd’s HTML 5 talk, but one of my favourites was on hackers working in harmony with journalists. Given the way Kamy, Philip (and even BPF) have recently been working with the journos that hang around BRFCS (Alan Nixon, Andy Cryer and the nameless one) and the fact we’re happy for journos from other sources lurk on there (several have tipped us off, but don’t want the user base knowing who they are) I was able to hold it up as an example of the two working in harmony (I know our forums are more crowd sourcing than hacking, but it the same idea), I really enjoyed that session and spent the best part of an hour over lunch talking to people about it.

As the evening descended, I took the chance to chill a little and work on my talk (which I’d decided to do Sunday) although I could see the Xbox Kinect that had been set up looked great, a world apart from the Wii. Sadly around now I got distracted and entirely missed the Dom vs the World quiz that Tom Scott had setup, which I think was a studio audience (BarCamp) vs geeks on the internet quiz. I need to check out the video to see what I missed, but I’m pretty sure it’s something I’d have loved.

Then the PayPal sponsored free bar opened, initially limited to two beers (to ensure fair supply), I downed a couple of real ales (one of Marston’s that wasn’t Pedigree and Wainright’s bottled, both great) I sat and chewed the cud with Todd (and for a while, fellow Monospod Jodi), then we were told we could have a couple more beers (bud and nastro Azuro this time as the real ale had gone) and then a couple more, then Todd came back with a awesome concoction, a mojito with such strong (in a good way) fresh mint in it, to our beer soaked brains it tasted liked alcholic liqud donner kebab ! (Ok, it didn’t, it tasted like the mint sauce you get on kebabs). With the boxing over (we’d tried and failed to find somewhere online to watch it before it finished), the bar closing (but another couple of beers for the road) we accepted Lalita‘s invitation to play Werewolf, something that I was entirely none-plussed about, but I know Todd wanted to try.

Now, I’ve played a varient of this game before, and didn’t really get into it, but I know believe it’s because I played with the wrong people. On the surface it’s a simple group game with some simple rules, but in reality it’s all the analysis (both tactics and tells) of poker, but where you’re positively encouraged to discuss your thoughts on the legitimacy of other players claims. I soon realised, the actual stratergies were quite trivial, but 90% of the game was about bluff, counter bluff and people’s ability to “read” their fellow players. After a couple of rounds where Todd and I were forced out early (something both helpful and tactical to do to new players, as it allows them to watch the full game and have access to all the information) when then had a couple fo big games. I thought I’d got a game nailed, but sadly despite me being in a position of having pretty much all the information and not having to lie about it Micheal played a master stroke of deception and still managed to convince everyone I was lying. I’m glad I gave it a second go, I’d discounted it as dull and sad the first time, but this time round I found it to be rather fun.

So, at around 2am (I think), we called it a night I huddled up under my coat using my rucksack for a pillow (being one of the few people not to bring a camp mat and sleeping bag) ready for sunday.

I awoke feeling surprisingly spritely, had a quick washdown and change of clothes in the gents, a lovely croissant and pain au chocolcate courtesy of ProActive and was ready for the day. I skipped the first session and setup my laptop for my talk during the second slot of the day (which was no end of faff, having to return to windows to do it to get my iClickr working)

I think the talk went ok, 10-15 people (although Jodi and Dave are already Monospods and Todd and Tim have already listened to me witter on about it enough) as I was running short of time I did less on Mono than I expected (and didn’t do the pre-Mono stuff as much as I wanted), but there were at least 3 people who wanted to talk about it afterwards, somebody already trying to document the history of social networking (although after swapping tweets, it’s obvious she’s focused on the more modern stuff, whilst I pretty much ignored it), a lady who was very familiar with the 90s Uni social networking sceen, especialy moos (lamda moo in partcular) and Alec Muffitt. Now, I’d seen Alec helping Glyn Wintle on the excellent (well, excellently entertaining) wifi hacking talk and thought there was something familiar about him, I’d chatted briefly on Saturday night and spotted his name and some time later it twigged who he was, back in the early 90s, when I was most into computer security, he’d written THE password cracker, the tool everyone used, so when he started asking questions about Mono (and was obviously aware of both it and Abs) I was a little start struck.

With my talk out of the way, I headed to something on how the porn industry has always been a driver of technology (sadly I unintentionally missed Tim’s talk for this) , one on delivering quality support, then a excellent talk on how a very large organization fell victim to malicous flash advert sending it’s visitors to a scareware app and just how business like the scammers were. A this point our lunch was late, something that actually started trending on twitter for London, but it worked our perfectly for me, as it ment I could go an watch Alonso lose the F1 championship (didn’t care who won as long as Alonso didn’t), more excellent food by the way.

Then a double session from Glynn and Alec on generic computer security issues, which again was hugely entertaining, gave me a little food for thought and most importantly seems to have rekindled my intrest in computer security, it seems it’s a subject Todd is now desperate to learn more about too.

After that it was type for the wrap up, a long list of very very very well deserved “thank you”s, and then what I can only describe as crowd sourced tidying, where the 100 or so still left (about of a peak attendance of Saturday of around 250) swarmed through every room we’d been using (about 10 in total) and tidied them to the point where you’d never known we’d been there, it was like a locust swarm in reverse.

So, an absoluetly awesome weekend, I learnt loads, met lots of very intresting people and made some contacts that I feel will pay real dividends in the future, I would have paid quite a lot of money for an experience like that, which is testament to the size of the debt of gratitude I owe Kevin, Christiano and the crew (and of course all the sponsors) as the entire thing was free! I didn’t spend a single penny despite eating and drinking more than I should.

Bring on BarCamp London 9 !

There was a lot that surprised me not least the amount of free stuff, constant tea and coffee, a wide selection of dainty sandwiches and chips for lunch, a self serve cooked breakfast this morning and pasta with potatoes salad (I think, my memory is fading already) yesterday evening were all put on by the hotel. 11pm yesterday night 30 or so pizzas arrived, and we had two full kegs of real ale (from my favourite Leeds drinking establishment, Mr Foleys) and a huge selection of soft drinks, crisps and chocolate. Mostly surprisingly, nothing ever seemed to be in short supply, I don’t recall *anything* running out and nobody stockpiling free stuff just because it was free. There was also free swag from the sponsors too (including tshirts, sim cards, stickers and sweets) and again, nobody grabbed armfuls and there was plenty left.

I’ve met our host Dom a few times in passing , but don’t really know him, but after this weekend I know one thing, he knows how to put on an event. From the opening introduction onwards, he come across as witty, friendly and a little cheeky, but as the weekend went on, it’s obvious that him and his team of helpers are extremely organised and were never seen to be manically firefighting like you see at some events. From an attendees point of view at least,  everything went flawlessly with Dom playing jovial host masterly.

So, the hack. Toby and I discounted the sponsor challenges, a dozen of our own lesser ideas, a few good ideas from others and went with an idea inspired by a sandwich delivery guy and tweaked by ourselves. We called the idea “Call When Close” and seemed to fit our requirements of being something Toby and I should capable of, whilst using a bunch of technologies we don’t really know and wanted to learn. The concept is that when you’re going to visit somebody (be it just a trip to visit a friend or a multidrop delivery driver)  you’re often expected to give the person your visiting a call when you’re close .. which is silly …. as you’re driving. So the idea was a site where you could configure your intended journey and people could subscribe to it and receive an alert when you were a configured time away. During the journey, a web page designed to be accessed from mobile devices would log progress to the desination and recalculate the ETA.

Being both new to hack days, fairly unfamiliar with collaborative development and possibly a bit over excited by it all, we made a few schoolboys errors.  Firstly, as we agreed to start any work at opposite end of the project (me on the journey configuration and subscription stuff as well as the twitter integration, Toby on the mobile stuff and the templating) we didn’t consider any kind of source control or revision control system, opting instead to just get coding. Secondly we didn’t really think about the design very much (other than a brief 5 minutes of “it needs these things”) especially some intrinsic limitations of the tech we were using, finally we didn’t really work to kind of coding guidelines or do any kind of unit testing, we just wrote stuff and I have to admit, as time became a factor, I’ve written some of the sloppiest code I’ve written in years.

Things started quite well, I was getting to grips with OAuth and the twitter API (which I’d used in a small project before) and learning about the directions part of the google MAP APIs, although I was slowed a little as in the spirit of learning new stuff, I took up Toby’s suggestion of using PDO to access the database in favour of my usual choice of mysqli.  I’d even decided to be helpful and build a class of lots of handy methods for interacting with twitter and google maps that Toby could use (this would later be our undoing). By about 11pm we’d progressed well, but still had lots of work to do, so stuffed full of pizza and me having had two or three pints of Guzzler we decided we were close to that point where we should stop for the evening, or we’d start causing more problems that we solved and called a midnight deadline. I don’t know if it was the fact I was shattered or if the Guzzler had taken effect, but just before midnight I decided it was the time I decided to entirely refactor the main class. So, by 1:20am (ish), we had everything working again and retired for the evening. Sure I’d missed the football as despite taking my TV Card, 100m of UHF cable I was unable to watch final score as I’d accidentally picked up a wifi aerial instead of a TV one, but that aside, it was a good day.

It was amazing to consider at this point that around half the room were still happy working (and a few playing minecraft and giant-screen wii that had been rigged up for those who wanted a break)  it was also testament to just how safe and trusting an environment it seemed to be, that I thought nothing of leaving both my laptops on the table, unguarded until we returned on Sunday morning

So, after a restless night at home (not least because my cat wanted to spend 1 of the 5hrs I had to sleep by wailing repeatedly) by 8am, we’re were back in the City Inn for day 2 of LeedsHack and everyone were treated to an excellent (almost) full English breakfast … again, more than enough to go around. However, no amount of coffee and fried pig could actually make me feel than anything other a zombie. We coded through the morning and despite going slower than expected by 10am we actually had a working project. Then the problems started, I’d starting planning the demo I’d do and suddenly the very first thing I’d written wasn’t working, suddenly Google didn’t want to tell me how long it would take to get from London to Leeds. A little investigation and it seemed we’d made too many calls to google’s API and were we blocked until the next day.  We then twigged that having Toby’s mobile page calling my google map class was a bad idea, rather than each phone racking up it’s own calls to google’s API, they were all adding to the website’s count and it was doing it repeatedly, often only seconds apart. Ooops.

Now beginning to panic a little as we couldn’t demo the project, I decided to start faking up the data and somehow managed to break the twitter updates part too. So both our private demo to the judges and the public demo to the other teams (the later we didn’t even bothering connecting up a laptop for) were a damp squib, with us just explaining what *was* happening at 10am. It was fun writing it, but it was painful not to have anything to show at the end.

It was great to see the other projects demos some where technically brilliant (such  as the Lua interpreter written entirely in JavaScript) some amazingly fun (the lightscribe pen that “spoke” animal sounds as your wrote them), some making clever use the sponsors data (some great ones made use of the BMI API) though sadly a couple of sponsor challenges didn’t have much take up.

As well as hosting the presentations, Dom also hosted the prizes and amusingly he’s raided the local poundland to make sure everyone got a prize (in a weird coincidence that he’d never have known, we won 2 TV aerials, something I have killed for the day before) but the “real” prizes went to some damned impressive projects.

So, I’m now back at home, looking back on a great weekend were I learnt a lot and met a lot of interesting people, looking forward to next weekend at BarCamp London, which is a similar crowd of people, but more talking and less coding … but sadly no chance of nipping home for a few hours kip. All is all, I enjoyed it all and I’m already keeping my eye open for the next hack day, hopefully next time I’ll write something that works.