Show and Tell 12

We hosted our 12th Show and Tell in our office, with 7 people in attendance and 5 people sharing the things they’ve been working on.

James M kicked off proceedings.

AIS on SDR

James talked about the success he’d had in extracting messages from some AIS data he recorded while crossing the Solent. Having extracted the messages he was able massage the data and eventually draw it on a Google Map. James has written this all up in more detail on the AIS on SDR wiki.

Tax implications of salary vs dividend

James demonstrated a Google Spreadsheet he created to calculate the tax implications of paying ourselves using a mix of salary and dividend. He’s made it available as a public spreadsheet so that other people can use it. I was fascinated by quite how complicated the rules are, and how little clear information there appears to be about them.

Google Apps Scripting

James’s third offering was a Google Apps script he created to automatically save an email attachment to Google Drive. I was interested to see how easy it appears to be to script these sort of things: Authorising the script to operate on your Google services is handled automatically so you just need to focus on the code to do what you want. I was also interested to learn that you can schedule your scripts to run at regular intervals.

Mailing list software

James A demonstrated some work he’s been doing on some mailing list software. Born out of some frustrations with Mailman, James has been exploring a number of ideas that he thinks could be really useful. I’m not really aware that there have been many developments in the mailing list software space and I think James could be on to something here. Hopefully he’ll continue to work on it!

Daniel Dennett and Unlimited Register Machines

Tom H began by talking about philosopher Daniel Dennett’s book, Intuition pumps and other tools for thinking. Tom focussed on a chapter that talks about using unlimited register machines and talked us through a URM he’s built in Clojure. While I didn’t fully understand the code Tom was showing, I was left wanting to learn more about Daniel Dennett’s work.

Organising LRUG

Murray showed us how he currently uses Gmail labels to organise LRUG talks. He was looking for a way of saving a search that combined multiple labels. No one seemed to know how to do it within Gmail but it was pointed out that he could simply bookmark the search URL. There was some discussion of using another tool, like Trello or even Vestibule, but Murray wasn’t convinced that the additional overhead would be of enough benefit to warrant the change.

Codon

Tom S finished up by talking through the process of updating his company website - Codon. The website had grown somewhat organically and Tom decided it was time for a bit of a tidy up. Tom focussed on the content while Nat handled the job of making it look good. There was some interesting discussion of the use of “we” versus “I” on the site. Tom explained that he spent quite a while thinking about what to use. Having looked at what other people say he eventually decided to go with “we”.

Show and Tell 13

As always, do get in touch if you’re interested in joining us for the next Show and Tell.

Until next time.

– Chris