Paul Grenyer

By Ian Whates ISBN: 978-1907519536 One of the things that I love about sci-fi is that you can never, ever be sure that someone is dead, even if they are shot through the head. When one of the leading characters in this book betrays the others and shoots one of the other leading characters I’m not ashamed to say it broke my heart. Strangely enough though, it all worked out in the end. A lot of The Noise Revealed is set in virtually. All the characters and scenes there, with the significant exception of Tanya, were boring and I could never wait to get back to the other thread of the story. Ian Whates clearly knows very little about how computer software actually works, so when he was describing the characters trying track down pieces of code to work out what was happening it rang so untrue that it really irritated me. And when he described how the virus was attacking the software it was worse. That aside I loved this book even more than the Noise Within. I could really...

On Tuesday 17th of July (2012) I and at least one other from SyncNorwich will be attending eXtreme Tuesday Club (XTC), the London based group that inspired Agile East Anglia and later SyncNorwich.  You can also follow XTC on twitter @extremetuesday . It would be great if more people could join us, especially from Norfolk and Suffolk. We’ll be arriving at Liverpool street at 17.19 and returning at 21.30. Please sign up on the XTC site on the day if you’re coming.

Today I attended the UK MongoDB conference presented by 10gen at the Mermaid Conference Center at Blackfriars in London. This is the first time I've been to a true commercial conference as opposed to independent developer conferences such as ACCU and Agile Cambridge . I signed up to come several months ago when I was thinking about using MongoDB for a project. Since then it's become less attractive as I couldn't see an application for it that wouldn't have needed a relational database as well. Convincing clients that MongoDB is a good idea is one thing, but convincing them that they need a relational database too just doesn't seem feasible. I came anyway as I was still interested and I'm glad I did. The Mermaid Conference Centre is nice enough, but a real rabbit warren where they seem to need about a dozen ushers just to show you where do go. The lunch was excellent. Better than the normal finger food buffets at other conferences. If cost wasn...

I am not a football fan. 25 men running around a field just doesn’t interest me. Today a colleague was trying to explain to me what football is and it made me giggle: OK.   I can see I need to explain. Picture this.   A lot of [overpaid people with bad attitude] run around some grass, kicking a plastic pig’s bladder, and trying to get it through some sticks. Another couple of guys run around blowing whistles and waving flags. Many people go along and/or watch on television, become unnecessarily excited, and shout things at the [overpaid people with bad attitude], in a display of primitive tribal behaviour. Then at the end, one lot jump over the moon, and the other are sick like parrots (that’s the foreign food kicking in – they’re all teetotal, after all). The ones who’ve been sick consider themselves ritually humiliated, so they got home and grumble for several years. England’s “team” includes a troll with bad attitude, but he can’t take part right...

Tonight I was back at the Garden House for the final Norwich Developers Community event. It was an Android presentation given by Steve Pengilley . Of course Norwich Developers Community has already been renamed SyncNorwich , so really it's an underground event! Even so there were a good ten of us there tonight. For a first time speaker, Steve is superbly confident. I suspect it’s because he’s a teacher! He started off by walking us through the Eclipse install of the necessities for Android phone development and described the virtual tools used to test for lots of different Android phones. He was ably demonstrating in depth knowledge of the development environment and had clearly spent a lot of time researching best practice. I love seeing applications developed from scratch, from a completely blank IDE, so I wasn't disappointed when Steve created a brand new application called SyncNorwich! It turned out to be an application that uses GPS to find your locati...

Thursday, July 5, 2012 6:30 PM to 9:30 PM Blurtit Offices, Seymour House, Muspole St, Norwich, NR3 1DJ Sign up We’ve got a great evening in store to mark the start of SyncNorwich, following our merger of Norwich Startups with Norwich Developers Community and Agile East Anglia! The event will very kindly be hosted by our good friends at BlurtIt.com here in Norwich on Thursday 5th July. Not only are they opening their doors for us, they’re also throwing in some beer for good measure! Great stuff. To kick things off, we’ll be hearing from Colm McMullan . Colm is a one man startup – and thinks you are too. He built the Total Football and Stats Zone apps which merge his passion for football and software products and has grown them from an expensive hobby to a viable business. Stats Zone was commended by Apple in their “Rewind 2011" list of best apps last year and in The Sunday Times Top 500 App List, one of only thirteen sports apps included. We’re also in discussion with another s...

Last night was a very special night. It was the final and best Agile East Anglia event for the foreseeable future. It took place in a new venue, the Hog in Amour and for the first time we had the presentation and were able to socialise in the same room. This seemed to go down very well with the 30 or so attendees who had come from as far away as Cambridge and Ipswich. We had a simply incredible speaker Liz Keogh speak about Behavior Driven Development (BDD). Ifftner Solutions have a writeup of the content here and Smart421 have another here . Liz’s style is very engaging and extremely charismatic.  I am hoping she’ll come back and speak for SyncNorwich . Liz's slides are available here . During the presentation Liz mentioned some books you should read:  Waltzing with Bears The Mythical Man Month The Goal Managing the Design Factory As well as the usual and greatly appreciated venue and drinks sponsorship from Smart421, 3sixty provided £30 of John Lew...

Title: Android 101 Speaker: Stephen Pengilley Date: Wednesday 13 June 2012 Time: 6.30pm Venue: The Garden House , Norwich My good friend and fellow SyncNorwich organiser Stephen Pengilley is giving a presentation on Android development: Recommended Prerequisites for developing Creating a project AndroidManifest.xml XML Layout files Location services Activity Life-cycle

The trailer for Prometheus was brilliant. The film itself was ok. Finally a film with a story. It took a good 45 minutes to get going and it’s only a 2 hour film. Then it got a bit too quick and a lot of events didn’t seem to match up. I still don’t understand how a live Alien can go undetected in a space ship’s medical bay or how minor blows to the head through containment suits can kill two crew members. I am going to have to watch it again, probably many times, to understand what’s going on, but that’s a good thing! There were a lot of unanswered questions at the end, but I suspect that’s intended or things that I’ve missed. Exactly what was going on in the opening sequence and why is still a complete mystery to me. The references to the previous Alien films are brilliant and really made the film for me. The evil robots are back, but this time they don’t look like Winona Ryder. You should go and see this film. It definitely is the film of the year so far. And m...

The tech community in Norwich is growing. Three local groups, Agile East Anglia, Norwich Startup and Norwich Developers Community are getting together to for one larger group SyncNorwich , with a focus on networking, development, Agile and start-ups. The first SyncNorwich event is on 5 th July. Full details are on the SyncNorwich website. This group is going to be big and very big for Norwich. Make sure you’re part of it. Come along on the 5 th July to find out more.