North West technology experts waive fees to offer ‘micro-consultancy’ session for Decision Makers in the North West’s voluntary sector.

Guy D is organising an interesting consultancy-on-the-hoof event called Speak To Geek, where non-profits get a tame panel (in theory) of eight live geeks to poke questions at, about how they might create a web site, or engage new volunteers or use social media to find new sponsors etc. 

If you are non-profit and need some advice or ideas that a geek ( and better ) may be able to help with, go sign up for Speak to a Geek now! It’s next FRIDAY!

… or is that I’m not listening? You tell me…

One of the most important features of open source software, is not the fact that you can fix bugs yourself, or the fact that it’s free, it’s the incredible educational good it effortlessly spreads. It was whilst I was looking at someone else’s Django code that I discovered this…

from django.db import models
from django.contrib.contenttypes.models import ContentType
from django.contrib.contenttypes.generic import GenericForeignKey

class MyListingItem(models.Model):
content_type	= models.ForeignKey(ContentType)
object			= GenericForeignKey()
object_id		= models.IntegerField()

… I’ve been trying to find a way to do this for years. I mistakenly thought that SQL was “a bit broke” because it didn’t naturally do this. What this does is let you build a list of any old objects so that you can easily have different methods for each object types. It’s effectively storing objects in an object-oriented way rather than relating objects in a relational database way. So in a TumbleLog I might store Delicious items, Tweets, Blog Posts etc. and each would have their own methods for being fetched, displayed etc. This, to me, is much more natural and sensible than the way I’ve been doing it.

If you know what I’m talking about you probably already know about this. If you haven’t a clue what I’m talking about it really doesn’t matter except to say, it’s amazing how you can literally labour under a small misapprehension for years that sends you miles off track… or is it just me (and how would I know?).

Django | 34. Generic relations | Django Documentation

It took some dragging myself out of bed to get to BarCamp Leeds 2008 but it was definitely more than worth it because the free beer actually arrived this time. It got off to a brave start with Dom defending the very name of SEO.

There seemed to be a definite musical theme to BarCamp with great demo of the music sequencing software that doesn’t fry your head like Cubase and the rest called Ableton Live. Ableton is kinda loops-oriented but as the name suggests, is geared towards live performances.

Ian Forrester demoed the Pacemaker (YouTube), which he described as an iPod killer in that it’s a portable music player but one with which you can mix and DJ your tracks. You have to go and see/hear it.

After blogging about being so disappointed at the media consumption emphasis of the iPhone, something that gives you something to do, something to be creative with, an experience to get lost in… seeing devices like the Pacemaker is really encouraging. I’m not a big fan of dance music, I’ve never quite got DJ-ing, but Ian got me hooked just because of the creative aspect to what he was doing. Great stuff.

The ukulele made an appearance in the bafflingly excellent Ukepedia project. The premise is simple… Wikipedia articles sung to ukulele. Pure genius that raises all sorts of complications about licenscing (another common theme to BarCamp).

Dave Verwer gave an excellent peep into how to create an iPhone app, creating a HashTagWatcher app in seconds, which became instant audience participation as those present started “joining in”… you had to be there. It was fab.

As ever, it was a totally inspirational event on so many levels, my only disappointment being the sessions I missed due to not being able to be in four places at one time. Maybe Imran will pull his finger out and get a cloning booth sorted by the time BarCampLeed09 rolls round.

So Doug says…

I hate it when you are working your arse off on a project and being fairly obsessive, like I can be, and there you are actually creating sites, coding in your sleep… and it’s just not RESTful.

… and we all fell about laughing, wondering if he’d carefully planned the gag or not.