Having spent a good many years in Oxford I can safely say that whilst I was aware of the Oxford Geek Nights I never actually found the time to visit one, something that I had long regretted. OGN #10 was my exception. I turned up to the Jericho Tavern nice and early because I had a sneaky feeling that it was going to be busy and I was proved right very quickly as the place filled rapidly to what I hear was pretty close to the fire regulation capacity of the upstairs area with most people not getting a seat. Apparently the overcrowding was due to a big push for the night in .NET Magazine.

Oxford Geek Night 10 looking very crowded. Photo by garrettc

The two 15 minute keynotes for the evening were Elliot Jay Stocks with a talk on “The Trouble with Type” and Sylwia Presley with a talk on “Twitter Ethics”.

Elliot Jay Stocks went first and critisised the powerfully misguiding font selection dialog in Adobe Dreamweaver which seems to allow you to select almost any font you have on your computer. Sadly, as we know, It doesn’t work like that so instead he went on to cover two approaches to font-embedding. The @font-face CSS declaration which is supported in most but not all new browsers (FF3.1, Opera 10, Modern WebKit based ones). The problem with this is that it doesn’t protect the font in any way such that the font can be downloaded using the URL found in the source (which is a problem if you’ve paid for a licensed font). The other problem is that IE doesn’t support it, instead choosing to use their own Font-Embedding technique which does allow .eot fonts to be protected and for different levels of embedding permissions. EJS went on to recommend that people use a mixture of the two however I’d guess that using a licensed commercial font with @font-face (and thus unprotected) probably puts you up against the providers license terms (and possibly legal team?). My take-away from this talk was that if you’re using commercial fonts there isn’t a perfect solution yet so possibly best to stick with sIFR.

The next talk was by Sylwia Presley about Twitter Ethics in which she drew from variety of different people to try to work out some of the Ethics and Etiquette behind the tool. Sylwia did an admirable job of explaining some of the conventions of Twitter but seemed to lose the crowd for the first 5 minutes as she explained what Twitter was and what it was used for (I suspect 99-100% of the crowd were already Tweeting). The key take away from this talk seemed to be that spamming links to your own blog or to your company website will quickly get you blocked by any followers that you did have. She also mentioned the upcoming Twestival which is a World Wide event on the 11th February attempting to gather Twitterers for the purposes of raising money for charity and having fun.

After a short break and a chat we resumed for 3 5-Minute Microslots.

• Drew McClellan gave us a rundown on the various ways of using the CSS rgb() and rgba() declarations using a rather entertaining example on Bagpuss. rgba is a CSS3 Declaration which allows you to set the Alpha channel of a colour. This has many advantages over setting the opacity in situations where you don’t want the whole element to have it’s opacity set.  
• Bruce Lawson gave a short and to the point talk on BS 8878 which is a draft website accessibility standard. The talk did not cover the ins and outs of the spec, as would have been tough in 5 minutes, but was informative on the subject of why it is relevant and why we should strive to adhere to it.
• Peet Morris then gave a short talk titled “Microserfs”, the main point of which got a little lost in the chaos but, which was a thoroughly entertaining to the Developers in the room. Peet was one of the original MS Developers on the Windows 3.x project and had some interesting (and funny) experiences to impart to us. Peet overran by about 5 minutes but thankfully noone interupted as he hadn’t really gotten to the “meat” of the presentation by the end of the first 5!

After another short break and a pint on Google (who sponsor the event) we had another 3 Microslots lasting 5 minutes each.

•  Tom Dyson of Torchbox gave a very interesting talk on Dynamic Demand and his new website caniturniton.com which interprets the frequency of the national grid and assumes it’s load, telling you whether you can safely turn on your kettle. This would have been most welcome at Homecamp where we were looking for an API for this data. Tom also made an appeal for more people to try to get involved with the creation on an XMPP service for this which a device like an Arduino could use to dynamically turn home appliances on and off as a result. I should also thank Tom for introducing me to LetsTurnThisF***ingWebsiteYellow.com which is the best single serving site I’ve seen in a while!
• David Sheldon of music streaming site We7.com then gave a talk on Tomcat and scaling it past one machine. This was a good talk to attend as a nice overall introduction to scaling websites past one machine and whilst I don’t use Apache Tomcat myself, the concepts that he explained could be used for other environments too. I also had the pleasure of meeting David in the bar queue and he was good enough to show me some very interesting Android applications running on his G1 but that’s something for another post. 
• Tim Davies gave the last talk on the evening on Social Media and the Youth. This contained some sneaky user interface tweaks which developers can use to highlight responsible behaviour by young people using Social networks. 

As more people left the event early (some before the main keynotes has finished) it became much easier to move around the event and talk to people as well as to find a seat. If the Oxford Geek Night continues to grow then I suspect that they will need a larger venue very soon.With so many people attending it seemed harder to introduce yourself to people but I met lots of interesting people and it was good to have a geek-gossip about various things. Thank-you to Torchbox, Google, Moo and Pearson Education for their sponsorship of the event and to the organisers.