Category Archives: Events

Events.

Spitfires over Southampton

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This weekend five spitfires flew a tour around southamption and the surrounding area to celebrate the 70th aniverssary of the first flight of the iconic plane. Hursley has some great history related to the Spitfire. Before IBM bought Hursley park it was a development centre for amongst other things the Supermarine design team.

The Spitfire F.MK.24 was developed by the Supermarine design team at Hursley Park. In December 1940, after the devastating Blitz bombings, the control centre of the Spitfire programme was relocated to Hursley House, where it continued its operations and development.
More story here

The fly past in formation was great, but even more exciting was some practicing on Saturday where we heard the distinctive sound of Spitfires over our house, and saw them pulling some turns and generally enjoying themselves.

Spitfires

formation flying

Geeks in Florida

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A lot of the work I do within Hursley’s Emerging Technology group is around advanced collaboration. With industry taking blogs, wikis, instant messaging and social networking seriously, it’s an area where expertise has become more and more in demand. One of the big collaboration events that takes place is Lotusphere in Orlando, Florida, which kicks off today.

Last year I was there to demonstrate some of the social network visualisation and analysis applications we’d developed in the lab. I’m not there this year, but I’m still planning on keeping up to date with events. Kelly Samardak is there and her Lotusphere Blog will no doubt present a different and much more interesting and personal spin on what’s going on there. Don’t expect any corporate waffle from Kelly, but she works in an IBM team that has done a lot of our best collaboration work so is in the best place to get the inside story.

I know there’s going to be a few very interesting annoucements, so it’s something worth keeping an eye on.

IBM Battle of the Bands

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IBM has a “Battle of the Bands” competition going on at the moment. Using our internal podcasting system, people working in IBM, who also have some musical talent can submit their performances. Everyone then gets to vote for which band/singer they liked best. I’ve been amazed at the quality of the musicians working their day job at IBM. A lot of the bands are quite serious and sell/perform their music regularly and have their work professionally recorded.

A couple of the favourite IBM bands I’ve heard so far are: Seven Ender and Lisa Swain.

Game On in 48 hours

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At http://lucidion.uwcs.co.uk/gce/2005/ you will find the entries that several teams from Warwick university made in a 48 hour codathon. The aim was to produce a decent quality game in 48 hours straight one weekend. I was asked to be a judge as our university relations (hi Yvonne) looked me up our internal directory and found I had been a serious gamer for many year and some experience in creating games quickly. It might be worth mentioning that there is a good book on amazon “Got Game: How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping Business Forever ” for those people that maybe dont take gaming seriously.

Anyway, the games, and my ramblings on the games can be found all at the URL above. Enjoy

Dont forget to look at gametomorrow where we discuss the future of this type of entertainment

Ian Hughes (Emerging Technology Hursley)

NLP witchcraft or obvious?

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I got interested in ‘pop’ psychology in college. It was primarily through doing some AI work, and also trying to figure out how to model behaviour in games. Both of these were sidelines. However, having seen Derren Brown do his mind tricks on the TV, part NLP part magic, it struck me that it was a useful set of things to be armed with should someone try and ‘manipulate’ me. e.g. customers, managers, salesmen. I did my usual thing of buying a book, and not quite reading it all the way through. However, some of the basics did start to gel. e.g. When people are explaining things, some of them use words like I hear, to the tune of etc, other use images, I see where you are coming from, it looks bad, and others use ‘feel’. If someone who sees things, talks to someone who hears things, there is a disjoint. So NLP is about adjusting to empathize, or abuse the differences. There is way more to it than that. Natural communicators adjust to these sorts of things automatically. It can be taught, but its a practiced art. Anyway it will be interesting to see what Hursley Lab people, many from a development background make of this information. Something that is more akin to sales school that a deep technical audience

Ian Hughes – ( Consulting IT Specialist Emerging Technology Services, IBM Hursley)

Geek Rockets

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We don’t spend all our time sat behind computers coding away, we do that a lot, but we also take time out to have some fun. The Emerging Technology Services group in Hursley is full of budding rocket scientists, so when it came time to do a team building event, rocketeering seemed a good fit.

The group busily spent the previous week in their workshops, sheds or at the dining room tables constructing rockets. The rules were simple. They had to be self propelled and the only fuels allowed were baking soda, vinegar, air and water. Most people went for air and water rockets, but I went for a vinegar and baking soda powered device. The buzz created in the corridors was pretty impressive, even before we had arrived at launch day.

my rocket

Thursday arrived and finally it was time to put our rocket science to the test. After a few beers and a barbecue there was a safety briefing and then we took turns to launch from a local pub (which has a very big field). Andy and Chris were the most successful rocket builders and had clearly spent a lot of time in research and development phases. Andy even managed to clear the field completely.

chris\' rocket

It definitely worked as a team building event. We had a good time, nobody got injured, I nearly became IBM’s first person in orbit, but apart from that it did help the team get closer together.

– Darren Shaw (Emerging Technology Services, IBM Hursley)