Fundraising Begins

Some of you may be aware that I, and a number of colleagues, contribute to a community-based ticketing system called Virtual Box Office.

Today we've launched a small fundraising campaign to help construct finalise a seating allocation system for our sector - schools, educational institutions, community, not-for-profit and non-professional performing art organisations.

If you're interested in helping, please check out the campaign on the right!

ATDT038850000 No Carrier. Or BBS:The Documentary

No Carrier.

The bane of our lives for many a year in the 70's, 80's and early 90's.

ATM0 was probably one of the most commonly typed set of characters during this time in the small hours of the night, as modem speakers around the world were disabled to allow quiet connectivity without disturbing parents, significant others or siblings.   Staring for hours into monochrome monitors waiting for character after character to appear was the unspoken past-time of millions of hobbyists and future-technologists.

Whilst most students in high schools were studying French, German or other 'useful' language, a select few were memorizing the Hays Command Set - a set of commands still in use today used to control the modems that connected us to the world, albeit rather slowly.

I remember eagerly, and somewhat impatiently, waiting each day after school for 6pm to tick over - the time when long-distance calling became cheaper than during the day - allowing me to dial into a number of bulletin board systems to check out the latest news, games and connect to FidoNET for what was the early form of email.

I spent perhaps close to a year of tinkering during the latter years of high school building a UUCP transport system to rapidly (as rapidly as 300 baud is) download my 'mail'.  The software I used? UCSD Pascal on my trusty Apple ][e - which still works to this day!  I wonder if there are any FidoNet nodes still active... I digress!

BBS: The Documentary

BBS: The Documentary is a 8-part documentary containing over 200 interviews with BBS owners, hobbyists and cultural icons throughout this exciting era.

From the DVD's blurb:  "Long before the Internet escaped from the lab, connected the planet and redefined what it meant to use a computer...
....there was a brave and pioneering band of computer users who spent their time, money and sanity setting up their home computers and phone lines to welcome anyone who called. By using a modem, anyone else who knew the phone number of these computers could connect to them, leave messages, send and recieve files.... and millions did."

The interviews in the DVD are fascinating, and portray a world that was arguably the foundation for today's social networking boom on the Intranet.

The guys still have stock left - so get in quick to grab a copy before they run out!

Triumph of the Nerds

Whilst cleaning out a dusty cupboard, I found an old VHS copy of "Triumph of the Nerds", a documentary by Robert X Cringley first shown in 1996.   Curious as to how the documentary stands up today, and the players who were changing the world over a decade and a half ago, I dusted off the old VHS player and ripped the tape into a more modern format watched the documentary.

Triumph of the Nerds

The three-part series runs for just over 2 and a half hours, and portrays the early days of Microsoft, Apple, Xerox PARC, MITS and many other pioneering companies.

Where are they now?  Obviously the first two are still doing reasonably well (!), but PARC still exists as a niche research facility, and MITS was sold in 1976 after creating an almost-overnight industry with the Altair 8800.

Altair 8800 Computer with 8 circuit boards installed.

In the interests of keeping the history of our industry alive, grab a copy of the documentary on DVD.

Whilst you're at it, pick one up for me too, so I can finally retire the VHS player in the cupboard.

Good, Fast, Cheap. Or how to build using the best of all three.

Do you design a web site today based on budget, a need for ease-of-use, or performance?

There is an old adage that you can only have two of those features for any product, service of activity.

Anything can be built on a finite budget, but typically quality and performance are sacrificed as developers traditional have a lack of quality tools to work with due to lack of capital.

Beautiful looking web sites are relatively easy to create, using flash and the myriad  of design tools on the market (Adobe CS, Microsoft Expression, and more), but performance is often sacrified by the high bit-count required to serve media rich content.

Performance is easy to achieve, even with rapidly scaling web sites, simply by avoiding media rich content, with the downside being the inevitable plainness of the site.

However today, with RAD (rapid application development) frameworks such as Telerik, we can achieve all three aspects of development with little in the way of compromise.

I'm building a few web sites utilising these sorts of tools - specifically Telerik AJAX RadControls. Why?  The framework has equivalents for Silverlight and Windows Phone  (aka "Mango").  We're huge fans of this framework, and whilst this may sound like an advert, we're just hoping to spread the word.

A few nights at the Chelsea

Before it closed for renovations in August, I was lucky enough to stay at the bohemian, boutique Hotel Chelsea, on West 22rd Street in Manhattan.

Officially there for business meetings, I had a chance to check out the priceless art that hangs on the walls throughout the hotel.

The Hotel Chelsea, also known as the Chelsea Hotel, or simply the Chelsea, is a historic New York City hotel and landmark, known primarily for its history of notable residents. The hotel has been the home of numerous writers, musicians, artists, and actors, including Bob Dylan, Virgil Thomson, Charles Bukowski, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, Jobriath, and Larry Rivers.

The landing outside my room, with a rare original painting by Vali Myers

Was it luck or fate that the reason I chose to stay at the Chelsea was Vali Myers' own recollection of it when meeting her in 1993, only to find myself on the same floor as one of her paintings?

Learn more about the renovations and changes at the hotel here http://www.chelseahotelblog.com/