Whatever the reason only two weeks before the event is not enough time to find a suitable replacement so we have had to cancel the event. Myself and Dom are still commited to HackNorth and plan on finding a venue to run it in the new year.

We want to apologise to people who have tickets and who have paid trainfares we are as you can imagine utterly gutted!

The website will be updated shortly with

Dear All,

Earlier today we were told by the venue owners AQL that the venue for HackNorth would not be ready in time to host the event.
This close to the event starting we are utterly devastated as we do not believe we will be able to find a venue that can hold 200+ with WiFi in time and so have had to cancel the event.

At this point we want to thank the amazing sponsors, Yahoo Developer Network, Sun StartUps, Paypal, Haribo, Yorkshire Forward, 4IP, BBC Backstage and eBuyer who have been amazing
We plan to source a new venue and look to plan HackNorth 2 for early next year so don't despair HackNorth will happen just with a little delay. For people who have gotten tickets fear not they are safe and should you wish to come next year will be valid. For those who have booked trains etc we are so sorry that we had to cancel so late in the day but it really is beyond our control.

While we would be happy to run such an event in an unfinished space we did need it to have basic requirements such as sanitation that could stand up to 200 people use over 24 hours.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to ask

Cheers
Tim and Dom

Morte info on Doms post HackNorth Cancelled

Think Visibility

Think Visibility is a conference unlike any other its informal style but high calibre speaker list plus low price makes it a real winner doubled with it being in Leeds and not London its no wonder its so popular. This time around I had a slightly larger role over 2 days rather then just the day itself and while I was feeling under the weather it was unrelated to the conference.

I really wish I could have seen all the talks, and hopefully will when the DVD comes out (barring a couple) but the two that I did get to see bits from which really stood out were Fiona from Simple Usability eye tracking talk and Karyn from Tinderbox on Business bloging talk.

Behaviour Modelling Seminar

For Think Visibility attendees on the Friday before, you may well have seen me pushing this on the blog and twitter but the seminar went really well. It was very much an experiment to see if the format and content would work and the feedback was positive. Hopefully the attendees learnt a lot and indeed so did I.

The "Secret Panel"

Image Credit: sk8geek

Originally envisioned as QI meets the house party the lunch time panel was scaled down due to my other commitments and the previous days seminar. Instead I moderated a panel consisting of ChrisG, Al Carlton, Kieron "share my playlist" Donoghue and Dom Hodgson. The original brief was to make it fun but interesting and I think we did so with a range of audience questions.

Link Worth

My main talk of the day was on the value of links, not in terms of link building but actual metric values. Which covered some basic ideas for valuing individual links on various factors including some future where search engines could be working in particular through page segementation. While a few complaints were made that I declared relevancy to be irrelevant (apparently it was sensationalist and contreversial me I thought it was a rather obvious given) the talk did seem to go down well with people asking questions after.

Sadly due to feeling unwell I wasn't really able to mingle much and went and hid in my room for most of Drink Visibility which from the tales sounds awesome. Overall the event was a success I think with people seeming to be enjoying and learning at the same time and hopefully will see everyone at think Visibility 3 in March 2010!

Charity Hack 09

So this weekend I went along to CharityHack a Hack Day sponsored by Paypal in their headquaters down in London and it was great. Now to be fair I could be saying that because I'm writing this while wearing a black warm fleece provided by them but I think I would be saying it regardless!

Photo by cyberdees - I managed to lose my Netbook Charger but thankfully a replacement was found

Sadly the turn out developers wise was a little underwealming but in many ways that was better because teams inter mingled and the atmosphere was great. The guys from Paypal kept everyone fed and watered, the office has what appears to be a seemingly endless vending machine which never ran out of coke.

While the name gives it away CharityHack was all about coming up with ideas and applications for charities and given Just Giving, Mission Fish and Paypal all released new APIs most hacks submitted were donation based ideas using one of the apis. Our hack which won the overall "grand" prize (a trip to Paypal Innovate) was a First Person Shooter game where users donate to the charity of the person who "frags" them. Run out of money the system kicks you off the server. It was quite addictive so much so that at 4am when the development team went to bed our "beta testers" will still providing valuable data. You can see the complete winning list on Paypals Lets Talk site.
Photo by cyberdees
The team consisted of Tim, Dom, Kevin, Leeky and Tom

The weekend was probably one of the smoothest running hackdays ever and kudos to John for managing to unblock a gazzilion ports on the network even if he did have to wake rather important execs up to do it. Likewise Alison spent the day running around and generally keeping us all fed. I'm looking forward to next years!

On the 3rd and 4th of October to be precise!

Myself and Dom "The Hodge" Hodgson are planning on inviting you to the first HackNorth, we have managed to convince the guys at AQL to lend us an amazing building for a weekend and we along with a team of volunteers will be on hand supplying food, drink and generally preventing total anarchy. For those unfamiliar with a hack day they are a 24 hour code/design marathon you turn up, team up and build something for the betterment of mankind or to make drinking beer that bit more fun your choice! Prices will be awarded in a range of categories by the judging panel of our "experts".

Why run HackNorth?

Dom and I have been planning to run a hack event for sometime and while both of us have organised marshalled events (Bar camps, rock concerts, conferences) this will be the first time either of us has taken on a 24 hour event with such a large number of people it will no doubt stress us both out, potentially ruin our friendship all so you guys can have the best time possible. Oh did I mention it's a free event

HackNorth Registration?

so get yourself over to the site and sign up to the mailing list to be notified of when tickets become available.

You can also follow myself, Dom and HackNorth on twitter should you feel so inclined.

In fact this was enough to inspire a hack, we do ID3, it was interesting the BBC had decided to put Binary data inside Binary Data (i.e images) rather then concentrated on additional contextual data in there enhanced podcasts but that doesn't mean other people have to.

So why the silence...

Well it worked not the hack my hat tip to Shaun who coded amazingly well considering at one point we were talking about the intricacies of binary extraction using nothing more then hand gestures and some very dodgy diagrams. No the silence was caused by the fact I came back and thought about where the id3 data was being kept and how the headers worked.

So there you have it success has made me silent but to give people a hint imagine how many badly formed html pages Google must see every day yet still manages to rank?

Last years HackDay was great fun and this year I plan to be there for both days! It's strange but I have spoken at conferences and attended dozen more but these days I am much more drawn to "unconferences" away from the selling and "business networking" back to the whole point of conferences to meet up, share ideas. Though I suggest the getting drunk and having a great time also helps.

This years Mashed will therefore be great but to assist I have come up with things to bring or do prior to arrival!

Bring an umbrella

And a spare battery, and some water proofs...

Turn Left at the station...

Obvious you would think but Alexander palace is at the top of the hill, as funny as it seemed at the time I now feel sorry for the navigationally challenged people who headed down the hill!
On that note, those travelling down via GNER (or east what ever they are now) the WiFi is now free to plebs so you can remain connected more or less the whole trip, if you spot me on the train do come and say hello though bring coffee as well!

Learn Werewolf

Geeks in a room what do you expect to happen...

Preplan your project

Oh I almost forgot the whole point of Mashed (formally hackday) is to come along have fun and play around with all the APIs and other fun stuff out there. Since their is a slot on the Sunday to show off you might want to be thinking about your project now...

...yeah I thought that might be your answer!

Bring a camera, phone or other multimedia capture device

The nice thing about these conferences is everyone is taking snaps and communicating on so many levels (yes including that one) and it would be a shame to miss out. Something to think about the £500 DSLR camera might not like being in such an environment also the lighting (you thought I meant lightning) will be a little on the dark side, and high powered flashes are considered bad manners particularly given last years flashes.

IRC client ready and rolling

Organise your IRC client early on, as much of the humour and discussion occurs online as off even though it's all in one room!

Mac, PC, Linux

It's a tough call, which laptop to bring, last year I went with the Acer and just Windows and consequently had all the traditional problems, this year I think I will be bringing a Linux laptop along, if anyone needs it I have a spare Pcmcia wireless card which will be in my bag so just holla if you need it.

Find me and say Hi!

Seriously if your going, come say Hi to me, I will be easy to spot and it would be good to meet up, if there are any SEOs going or planning hacks for Mashed let me know!

So that's it, just under a month, let me know if your coming?