2012 should have been the year that Open Source Scotland was added to that list, but unfortunately events conspired against its organiser, Kevinjohn Gallagher, to prematurely put a stop to OSS2012.  Kevinjohn recounts in his own blog, the reasons that necessitated the cancellation.

A few weeks after hearing that OSS2012 had been cancelled, I overheard Juozas “Joe” Kaziukėnas and Michael Maclean discussing an idea on Twitter,  to organise an alternative web conference.  I knew that I wanted to help in any way I could to make their plan a success.  Shortly after, Dale Harvey and Paul Dragoonis were on board.  With the help of collaborative tools such as HackPad and Trello, and more traditional email and Google Groups we quickly agreed on a fitting name for the conference, and launched a web site to promote it.  Whisky Web was born.

Our goal is to organise an affordable, fun, language- and platform-agnostic conference that is focused on the Web.  With just a month left until the big day, we’ve still got a lot of work to do, but all concerned are confident that we will succeed in organising an awesome conference to put Edinburgh, and indeed Scotland, firmly on the tech conference map.

We’ve been fortunate enough to receive generous sponsorship from such big names as Engine Yard / Orchestra and Ibuildings, not to mention a master-class in whisky courtesy of @WhiskyCraig from Bruichladdich.  We would of course gladly accept further sponsorship; despite our goal of minimising costs there are necessarily going to be certain unavoidable costs that must be met.  Whisky Web is formally sponsored/organised by Joe’s company, Web Species.  More details, including our list of speakers, can be found on the Whisky Web site.

The event spans two days in Scotland’s capital on the 13th and 14th of April.  The first day will see a two-track schedule of speakers presenting at The Hub.  We’ll end the day with the aforementioned introduction to Scotch whisky, and I’m sure there will be more partying in to the night.  Day two will involve a hackathon event at Edinbrugh’s exclusive Our Dynamic Earth exhibition and conference centre at the other end of the historic Royal Mile.  The precise details and schedule for the second day are still being discussed, but it will definitely involve socialising with like-minded people and hacking some code on a few open source projects.

We are very pleased with the progress made thus far, and look forward to providing all of our delegates with a conference experience they won’t forget.  However, I’d be remiss were I not to point out that from inception to execution Whisky Web will have been organised in just four short months.  Should the conference be as successful as we hope then we fully expect to offer a bigger and better Whisky Web in future years.

So, if you haven’t bought a ticket yet and want to see what Edinburgh and the Scottish web community has to offer, don’t hesitate; act now and get your ticket while they’re still available, at the attractive price of just £50!

I thoroughly enjoyed the day, which got under way with an opening by Alan and the host for the day, Christian Heilmann.  The presentations were all of an extremely high standard, and I took something away from each of them.  Perhaps however because of my preference for getting my hands dirty with PHP and tinkering with Linux gubbins I found some of the talks a little high-level and abstract.  That should nevertheless detract from the outstanding talks and the wonderful day I had.  I do believe though that I may have got more out of the day were I more of a freelance front-end developer.  I’m impatiently waiting for next year’s conference, which can’t come soon enough!

With an overarching theme of back-to-basics, Steve Marshall kicked things off with a very interesting discussion about keeping things as simple as they need to be.  From getting lead astray by cognitive biases to avoiding over complicating and thinking too far ahead Steve hammered home the point that if we don’t take that next step, we’ll get nowhere fast.

Steve was followed by Rachel Andrew who discussed choosing the right CMS.  Everyone has their own set of favourite applications, and this applies equally to web applications.  However, when developing a stand-alone CMS, or deploying one as part of a larger system, it pays to choose the right tool for the job.  Sometimes a simple solution is what is required, other times something more ‘enterprise’ will be required.  Ultimately though, the choice should enable the user to publish their content without hindering them.  The content should be front-and-centre, with the CMS seamlessly facilitating publication of great content.

The next talk before lunch was given by Glasgow developer Jack Osbourne, one of the contributors to HTML5 Doctor.  Jack offered a whistle-stop tour through the key new elements defined by the HTML5 specification, given as a novel ‘live’ presentation where each element was demoed in place as part of the HTML5 rendered slides.

After lunch, the wonderfully entertaining Remy Sharp kicked the afternoon off with a presentation that by his own admission, was a little out of his comfort zone.  Rather than what one might expect from Remy; a rather technical discussion about JavaScript and it’s proper application, he shared his personal workflow for fulfilling specifications.  It wasn’t what I had expected but I really enjoyed it!  It’s always interesting to see how other people work, and to learn from those who are clearly successful!

Next up was Mike Rundle; clearly a passionate designer/developer particularly with respect to all things Apple!  Mike’s presentation elaborated on why the Mac design works so well.  He explored Apple’s use of real world textures and their use application of consistent light sources to create a consistent, polished interface.  Not usually my cup of tea; I’ve never really been the creative type.  An interested talk nonetheless.

The final presentation of the day came courtesy of James Edwards who discussed the issue of whether the use of AJAX had become any more ‘accessible’ over the last five years. The conclusion was a resounding ‘meh’. However, some problems can be mitigated by employing the WAI-ARIA spec to aid those viewing the web using technologies other than the traditional web browser. What followed was a slightly tangential discussion of using ARIA attributes to customise web forms to make them more useful for those experiencing the web through less traditional methods. Quite a technical discussion on a subject that isn’t well understood by most.  An excellent talk!

In summary, although not a particular creative type I found this conference enjoyable and informative and commend Alan and his minions who made it all possible.  If there were some slightly more technically oriented topics in future, that would be a big plus for me.  A massive thank you to the speakers who took the time to head north of the border.  I’m genuinely excited by the future of The Highland Fling and look forward to next year’s conference.

First, we get a list of all the currently installed PHP packages:

sudo dpkg -l | grep php > /tmp/php.packages

Next we remove the currently installed PHP packages:

sudo apt-get remove --purge $(dpkg -l | grep php)

Now we need to create an alternative sources list:

sed s/lucid/karmic/g /etc/apt/sources.list |\
sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/karmic.list

Having done that, we need to generate an aptitude preferences file for PHP:

awk '{print "Package: " $0; print "Pin: release a=karmic\nPin-Priority: 991\n"}' /tmp/php.packages |\
sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/php

This preferences file tells aptitude that for each listed package, we want to pin down the installation candidate to that from the Karmic repositories. We can now install the packages that we previously removed, but this time the versions from the Karmic repositories:

sudo apt-get update && apt-get install $(cat /tmp/php.packages | tr "\n" " ")

A quick restart of Apache and everything seems to be working with the older version of PHP!