I have been quite busy over the last little while between moving flat, finishing university, looking for a job and other things and as such I have not had the time I would have liked (as well as the energy) to write a couple of the posts I have in mind although there are some drafts now kicking around I am working on.

In the mean time I have been invited to join the Scottish Developers committee and as of yesterday I have taken over the role of convener for the Dundee (well, soon to be Tayside) branch of the user group. I am very happy to be asked to fill this position and I look forward to getting started.

Thanks again to Colin and the rest of the committee for the opportunity.

Ok, so I am a little late to the party for announcing it but just in case you don’t already know, DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper! (DDD) Day Belfast is now accepting session submissions.

The event will be held on Saturday, 4th April 2009 however a venue is yet to be announced.

• http://developerdeveloperdeveloper.com/belfast/

If Northern Ireland is a bit too far afield for you, DDD Scotland will be held in Glasgow at Glasgow Caledonian University on Saturday, 2nd May 2009. Call for speakers is still open until the end of January.

• http://developerdayscotland.com/main/Default.aspx

Well, although it is half way though January, Happy New Year. I have not been posting as much as I would like but that should get turned around soon.

Today saw my first game of Warhammer 40k in 2009 and it very painfully showed me that some of the changes in 5th edition have made Tyranids even harder to play (automatically passing morale checks in a lost combat now kills hormaganuts very effectively, more so than 4th edition), still was a good game and I have some new tricks up my sleeve for next time. For the record: I hate Tau!

Geekery out of the way, time for some more, er, geekery. I will be giving two talks on jQuery in the coming months which may be of interest to those either in the Tayside area of Scotland or those willing to travel to Edinburgh. These will be my first public talks outside of university and I am excited to see how they turn out since interest thus far has been quite good.

Abstract

A new client-side framework has been taking the internet by storm, many have already been mesmerised by the power of such a small javascript library. And “what is the name of this fantastic framework?” I hear you ask, “jQuery” is my reply.

jQuery is a robust javascript framework with a very small footprint (15kb minified and GZipped) which makes the complicated aspects of javascript very simple. From traversing the Document Object Model to complex AJAX functionality, jQuery can do it all.

In this session I will introduce you to the basics of jQuery, showing you, through code, how to select and manipulate elements on the page, attach functions to events, implement ajax and more! This is the perfect opportunity to learn about jQuery and how it can make the life of web developer so much easier, allowing you to focus more on building your application!

Both talks are the same, An Introduction To jQuery, however there are two different venues and dates.

• Queen Mother Building at the University of Dundee on Wednesday 4th February 2009
• Microsoft Offices in Edinburgh on Wednesday 8th April 2009
  

As with other Scottish Developers events, both sessions are completely free and all are encouraged to come along. If interested, it you be greatly appreciated if you could register for the events using the links above to give us an idea of number.

For those of you who do not already know, Developer Day Scotland 2 is now in planning (has been since last week, I have just been slow to post) and is now looking for speakers. As you can probably see from the banner on the right, the date for the event is the 2nd of May 2009.

What is Developer Day Scotland?

Developer Day Scotland (DDS) is a community event, run by community for community, which is based upon the highly successful Developer! Developer! Developer! (DDD) community conference events. – Developer Day Scotland website (http://www.developerdayscotland.com/)

Industry professionals (and students) come from all over scotland to attend sessions presented by members of the Scottish development community. These sessions span numerous areas including C#, Visual Studio, ASP.NET, Web Development and Internationalisation.

What happens next?

At present a call for speakers has gone out so if you have a talk you think you would like to submit then now is the time. For details on how to submit a session, visit the Developer Day Scotland website.

After sessions have been submitted voting will open to the public allowing the community to decide what they would like to see most at the event, this will dictate the agenda for the day and will narrow down the number of sessions.

Finally, the only thing left to do is attend the event. If your session is selected then you should be preparing your talk, presentation slides and code demos. If you are simply planning on attending then the only thing you need to worry about is writing the date down in your diary

These events are made a success by community participation and the fantasic support of the sponsors who make all of this possible at a price everyone can afford: FREE. So what do you have to lose?

Update: What I did forget to post was when the day will actually being, well I will let someone else show you: http://www.labnol.org/software/download/download-firefox-3-exact-time-world-map/3595/ (Digital Inspiration)

It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was all hyped about the new features that Firefox 2 brought to the internet, seeing how much of an improvement it was over Firefox 1.5 and now, here we are again with Firefox 3.

Well after 5 betas, 2 Release Candiates Firefox 3 is finally going live and this time the Mozilla team want to set a new Guiness World Record by having the most amount of downloads within a 24 hour period.

So, if you use firefox and want to see the new browser but didn’t want to get a pre-release copy, now is your chance, and what better way to do it than help break a world record!

Good look to the Mozilla guys for this one and thanks for making Firefox what it is!

Update: Some how I now have a twitter account, i’m saying nothing on how that happened.

First, sorry for the lack of updates and also the fact the blog had to be rolled back, there was a problem during an upgrade and the database decided to throw a wobbler so I had to restore from backup. I am also in the middle of my 3rd year degree examinations (3 down 1 to go) so time has been pretty scarce of late.

I start my position at NCR on the 19th and between now and then I seem to have been filling up a rather busy schedule between both work and social life. I guess I want to make the most of my last few days of “freedom” before my summer of corporate life begins.

Anyway, one of my lighter items is tomorrow. I will be attending Developer Day Scotland at Glasgow Caledonian University which has been very kindly organised by Colin Mackay. The event will see speakers from across Scotland talking on a variety of .NET and SQL Server related topics.

Barry Carr (a ex-colegue of mine) will be delivering his talk on Regular Expression (which I have actually yet to witness and I wonder if the Macbook will be aiding him this time) and another North East Scotland .NET founder Gary Short who will be presenting on The Web Client Software Factory. I will also be attending Tom Wardill’s talk on the ASP.NET MVC Framework which is of great interest to me since I have been doing quite a bit of work with the framework and I do like the features it brings to the ASP.NET dinner table.

So it’s late and I have some last minute things to catch up on before I rest, I just wanted to post this last minute item so that when I return and do a write up it wont be so out of the blue.

Anyone attending tomorrow I will possibly see there.