NorthCast: Podcast - The Web Podcast By Northern Folk!

003: New Gear, No Beer!

NorthCrew (thecrew@northcrew.co.uk) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 09:42:10 GMT

Welcome and Introduction

Sound Quality

We introduce the first Northcast with a brand new recording system, having just bought it 20 minutes before the show.

Local News

Christian Heillman At Geekup

Our video of Christian Heillman was downloaded over a thousand times and northcast as a whole has done over 1TB of bandwidth over the past week and a bit

The End Open Coffee Manchester

We discuss the end of open coffee manchester, the different crowds and attendace figures, Dom's love of the pastiries at OC Leeds, OC Sheffiled, Ryan's love of pushing knobs (on our northcrew equiptment),

Local Social Recipe Site

NoshNinja's is by a Leeds based designer, bringing food creation to the web 2.0 world, with tagging, comments, rss AND shineyness... all it needs is some AJAX!!

Barcamp Manchester

After taking home an xbox from barcamp manchester, we were left with almost 8 hours of footage to get out.. we go over our highlights and our "controversial" talk.

Also We Mention "Gravy In Yer Servers", PeterC's Header dedicated to northpack and the northpack header.

Northpacks New Features

Where to begin, Archives, Search, Twitter Updates, Detaile Statistics On NorthPack Traffic to your website, all for free and usable now

Global News

Google Buys Doubleclick

The team discuss the implecations of google owning...well pretty much everything, the ongoing Yahoo! and! Microsoft! deal! and say goodbye to Ask.com

IE8, FF3 and other "smaller" browsers

It's all going on this summer with the browser wars back in action.

Events

We wrap up the event's coming soon, no point writing this really most of them will have gone if you don't listen as soon as we release it :)...

northpack.co.uk has a nice list of events..

002: BarCamps, BarCamps, Everywhere

NorthCrew (thecrew@northcrew.co.uk) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 15:17:39 GMT

Local News

Brightbox reduce their prices

Rails hosting company and friends of NorthCast have reduced their prices, we give a brief overview of ther new plans, but visit www.brightbox.co.uk for the latest details.

Dom tries Ruby

After attending the "Leeds Ruby Thing", Dom has been inspired to give Ruby a whirl and has been playing with tryruby.hobix.com which lets you play with teh ruby command prompt in your browser.
Stanton also recommends the Learning Rails Podcast (www.buildingwebapps.com/podcasts) if anyone wants to listen to a podcast taking you on a guided tour of the ruby world

Introduction to Drupal

James Panton and Chris Mayden from menusandblocks.co.uk are running a Drupal introduction on April 9th. If you book before March 2nd you get 10% discount on the normal £250 ticket price.

Buy.at gets bought.at AOL

Premium (originally Northern) affiliate company Buy.at has been bought out by AOL, will this be a good move for the company, or will it cause problems? Dom gives an in-depth explanation and analysis using a fishcake analogy. yes. a fishcake analogy.

World Wide News

Microsoft! Attempts! To! Buy! Yahoo!

So it's already been talked bout for a whole week, but it's still a will they/won't they game.

Amazon buys Audible

In a master stroke, Amazon has purchased the definitive audiobook site on the web. We fawn over the audible service while discussing the virtues of audiobooks vs. "real" books. We agree that

Events

BarCamp Manchester
1sth March - MEN Media HQ
It's getting close, and the tickets sold out very quickly, the NorthCrew will be there recording coverage, so make sure to head back to NorthCast to catch up on what happened!

BarCamp Sheffied 2
Marth 16th > 17th - PlusNet offices
The dates have been confirmed!

BarCamp North East
Date and Venue TBC
Still in the early stages, but keep an eye on the wiki!

An Evening with Clive Grinyer
Old Broadcasting House
Due to Clive breaking his leg, this event has been cancelled :(

GeekUp : Yahoo! UI, javascript evolved
20th Febuary - Old Broadcasting House

Drupal North West User Group
20th February - Manchester Digital Development Agency

Open Coffee & Co-working
4th March - Old Broadcasting House

NorthCrew Developments

We give a brief overview of what we've been working on over the past couple of weeks for NorthCast and NorthPack.

001: Official Launch

NorthCrew (thecrew@northcrew.co.uk) — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 11:51:03 GMT

Welcome and Introductions

Proud to present our first official podcast!
Ryan introduces himself and his co-hosts Paul and Dom.
Apologies for the sound quality, which will be improving very soon.

Local News

Brightbox

Brightbox provides Rails hosting (in case you didn't know, like Ryan) and Jeremy Javis got in touch to tell us that they have started a partnership with Fiveruns which is:

"FiveRuns' RM-Manage is the first and only Rails application monitoring product to instrument and monitor all aspects of the Rails framework and its supporting infrastructure resources." - Brightbox

App In A Box

Tom Scott has released "App In A Box" which is a facebook application that allows you to quickly and easily make your own facebook applications.

World Wide News

We skim over the death of Netscape and the report that Internet Explorer 8 passes the ACID2 test.

End of Support for Netscape Web Browsers

IE8 Passes ACID2

We rant about the Opera complaint to the European Commission and how we think it's pointless and merely a publicity stunt on Opera's part.

Site Promotion

NorthCrew

We talk about our new team the NorthCrew, comprising of Ryan Taylor, Dom Hodgson, Paul Stanton and Deb Bassett.

http://www.northcrew.co.uk

NorthCast

We talk about NorthCast which you probably already know about. We also talk about Richard Garside's work on the podcast player which will be appearing on the site soon, allowing time comments on the podcast. We also have a new video camera so expect video content soon.

NorthPack

We talk about our ambitious new project NorthPack, introducing our main feature, the meta-blog. Register your RSS feed and join the community.

http://www.northpack.co.uk

Events

Flickr Meetup - Manchester
January 17th - One Piccadilly Gardens
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/396280/

NW Start-Up 2.0 - Manchester
January 17th - KPMG
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/268519/

NorthCast PreShow 002: Christmas Special

NorthCrew (thecrew@northcrew.co.uk) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 09:41:02 GMT

Welcome and Introductions

Our second (beta) podcast, our final podcast of the year, and our christmas special all rolled into one!
We're glad that we made it to 2 episodes, and we have international listeners!
Paul introduces the hosts for the cast, Ryan, Dom, and himself
Dom introduces our fourth member, Deb, who's busy locked in a room coding Ruby (well someone's got to i suppose) for some other things we have planned in our bid for world domination.

News

Rails 2.0 milestone release

Deb sends us her notable news story of the week, and gives us a "top 5 list" covering the important points in this release, which we all vaguely try to understand.

Summer Migrations
Happier Fixtures
More REST
Cleaner Rails Environment
Security Improvements

http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2007/12/7/rails-2-0-it-s-done

Drew Curtis of Fark.com attempts to trademark "Not Safe For Work"

Frivolous? very. Publicity stunt? quite possibly... but it gives Stanton the cracking idea to trademark "The Hodge" for the 50p's worth of licencing fees.

http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=77338491

Apple Store coming to Leeds?

Not confirmed, but the Headrow Shopping Center is showing an Apple Store on their remoddeling mockups. What does this mean for the current city-based reseller (KRCS)?

We may do a video cast for the opening... stay tuned.

We don't have anything against Mac's, just Mac Evangelists.

http://www.homeofmuppets.com/muppets/moblog_view2.php?file=1197211848_dsc02126.jpg

https://www.krcs.co.uk/pages/applecentre_leeds

Google "Android" OS

Will it take off? Is Symbian scared? Should they be?

We discuss how the Google OS may change the current mobile landscape, and wonder if the mobile providers will embrace the OS, or lock it down to maintain their revenue streams.

Could an advertising based mobile phone service, with location-aware services result in the abolition of contract/handset/call charges?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7082414.stm

http://www.engadget.com/2007/08/28/google-is-working-on-a-mobile-os-and-its-due-out-shortly/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(mobile_phone_platform)

Why Dom Hates the iPhone

Dom rants against the current trend of sites providing "iPhone only" pages, while Paul counters that it was Apple's fault for restricting third party apps for so long.

Google Charts

Google open up their new Charts API, letting developers generate nice looking charts for their own applications.

Will it last? or will Google pull the plug at some point? and how can then monetize the service?

http://code.google.com/apis/chart/

Past Events

Dom attended (and recorded) the "Evening with Rory McLeish" at Old Broadcasting House, an interactive designer who's worked on a number of high profile projects in the movie world.

We were invited to the "North West Startup" due to our *celeb* status, but unfortunatley couldn't attend due to a double booking, but please feel free to invite us to your future events! press@northcast.co.uk

Upcoming Events

Geekup Christmas Meal - Manchester
December 18th - Velvet Bar & Restaurant
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/290569/

Geekup Pub Crawl - Leeds
December 19th - Start at The Lounge
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/322577/

Christmas Day - Everywhere
December 25th - Your House
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/384763

Comments, RSS, Here Comes Another Bubble and Bloopers (keep listening!)

NorthCast PreShow 001: Welcome to NorthCast

NorthCrew (thecrew@northcrew.co.uk) — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 09:51:35 GMT

Welcome and Introductions

What is NorthCast?
Ryan's Introduction
- Ryan works as a designer for a Leeds College, and also dabbles in development
Paul's Introduction
- Paul is a designerSLASHdeveloper for a large Leeds University
Dom's Introduction
- Dom is an SEO specialist, with the largest collection of Nintendo T-Shirts known to man
Northcast will be bi-weekly (once a fortnight, not twice a week) unless we become popular
We will be covering the northern gatherings, GeekUp, OpenCoffee, BarCamps etc
Interviews with people in the community, as long as they have something interesting to talk about!

News

LogMeIn Revamp

LogMeIn have revamped their interface and remote working service, it's gone all 'Vistafied', Ryan gives us a quick rundown of some of their new features and performance improvements.

http://www.logmein.com

UltraVNC

Dom recommends UltraVNC as a completely free alternative to LogMeIn

http://www.uvnc.com

Facebook faces UK data probe.

Dom refers to an interesting GeekUp mailing list post which made Channel4 and theregister, where it's discovered that it's damn near impossible to *really* delete your private data from facebook. We also point out that Facebook now has a UK office, so is required to comply with UK data protection laws.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/20/facebook_uk_data_protection/

Is privacy dead?

We also discuss the privacy implications of the Beacon code for Facebook Applications, just how annoying facebook applications can be, and does your facebook profile affect your employability?

http://www.facebook.com/business/?beacon

The 'Friends Off'

The guys compare the length of their Facebook friends lists...

Upcoming (and others) moving data overseas

A big no-no for us!

http://upcoming.org

MoooooonPiiiiiiggggggg!

We (somehow) segue into talking about this hilarious piece of TV advertising, and wonder wether the company will recoup the costs of the advert?

http://youtube.com/watch?v=MEBy67ZUrxQ

Firefox 3 Beta 1

Paul and Ryan argue with Dom about why this is an important step in browser development, also discussing the new features such as memory leak fixes, full page zoom, moving to the Gecko 1.9 rendering engine (which now passes the Acid2 test), and wether these steps will force Microsoft to make any changes to the IE rendering engine instead of just giving the interface a coat of paint.

Dom also describes how the increased security through stopbadware.org in FF3 caused problems after his server was compromised recently.

http:// www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-beta.html

http://www.webstandards.org/action/acid2/

http://www.stopbadware.org

Asus EEE PC

After playing with one at the last GeekUp, we all agree that these are a fantastic little device, but might wait until the 2nd gen (rumoured to be 8gig HD & 10" screen) machines to appear before investing.

http://eeepc.asus.com

Evil Knievel is dead

Ok, so nothing to do with Northern Tech, but we find out while we're recording the podcast.

http://www.evelknievel.com/

Events

OpenCoffee Leeds
Tuesday 4th December @ 10am
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/310850/

Leeds Group Flickr Shoot
Saturday 8th December
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/317634/

GeekUp
Christmas Meal Manchester
Tuesday 18th December
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/290569/

GeekUp Pub
Crawl Leeds
Wednesday 19th December
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/322577/