Werk it

You may have heard of Co Working Belfast. Co Working is a concept that's been successfully piloted in many cities the world over and now Belfast has its equivalent. What it's lacked for a long time is a premises but it seems that the search is at an end.

I'll let Andy and David have the fanfare and make the big announcement in the coming weeks but in the meantime here's a taster of what's in store...


Coworking Viewing from Andy McMillan on Vimeo.

Cloud Around Folks, No Pushing

It's a big week of change down here in the No More Art HQ. Anyone who knows us knows that we've always been very committed to the idea of keeping all of our business local including our website hosting. It's something we've been intensely proud of being able to do over the last few years, and we feel like we've been able to give our clients a great localised service.

However with the new possibilities presented by cloud computing we're having a rethink and have just taken the plunge into trying out Amazon Web Services. Within a few minutes we'd created our server in the cloud, and within an hour we had it configured. A few more tweaks and tucks and we'll be ready to roll out there in the big scary electric cloud of computer land. And to our joy we then realised that our little slice of the cloud exists in a datacentre in Dublin, so not quite in Belfast, but it's not Dubai!

So far the speed is phenomenal and the costs looks to be excellent also. In fact the costs look to be a fraction of any quote we were able to get from local companies to host our own hardware, maybe that's something local hosting companies should seek to address.

One thing learnt thus far is don't shut your server down, it deletes it! Scary moment until you realise you can boot up a new virtual machine in a few minutes and carry on.

Ah cloud computing. Where you been all our life?

Imagine Create 2009

We've been approached to harp on at length about two of our most favourite things in Derry this Friday. If you're up in North West country and wish to listen to us harp, the details are below.

Imagine Create 2009 Music and E-Media Panel

Title A New Model for Music – the music industry and the use of electronic media in promotion, distribution and sales

Date 3 April 2009

Time 12:00 – 14:00

Location City Factory Theatre, Patrick St., Derry

Panel

Keith Cullen (Setanta Records)
Andrew Ferris (Smalltown America)
Nick Fitzsimmons (Penny Distribution)
Melanie Foster (Mastercuts)
Martin Neill (No More Art)

Themes During the 2 hours of this panel discussion there will be 2 main themes:

Theme 1: The Music Industry Past, Present and Future
Theme 2: The Use of New Media in the Music Industry

Schedule
1. Introduction to the panellists by host (Tony Talbot) (5 mins)
2. Presentation by individual panellists on Theme 1 (5 mins each)
3. Group discussion on Theme 1 (15 mins)
4. Audience Q&A on Theme 1 (10 mins)
5. Presentation by individual panellists on Theme 2 (5 mins each)
6. Group discussion on Theme 2 (15 mins)
7. Audience Q&A on Theme 2 (15 mins)

This event will also see the debut of our Gay for Andrew Ferris t-shirt range, available only in XL for us big lads. See you there...

Killing is our business, and business is good...

A while back we wrote about the very timely demise of our old and sick friend Internet Explorer 6. Really it's been hobbling along for a long time, spilling beautiful website's guts all over the web and refusing to clean up the mess like some CSS serial killer.

Well the good folks over at .net magazine have taken this heartfelt prayer to a very welcome conclusion and got together to create Bring Down IE6, a website dedicated to offing this sorry browser quickly and letting us all get on with building a better web. We couldn't be more supportive and we'll be proudly displaying the logo and link on our homepage for all to see.

You should do the same. Instructions for doing so are on the Bring Down IE6 site. And there' s source code too for displaying a warning to your users who are still using IE6, to help them clamber out of their self imposed half arsed web.

As the site says together we will win...

Digital Circle

Thanks to everyone who nominated me and subsequently voted for me, I've been elected on to the committee of the Digital Circle, an umbrella body for the digital media sector in Northern Ireland.

Along with Davy Sims, Andy McMillan, Adrian Lennon and Aidan McGrath I will be decamping to the Malone Road tomorrow to get the Digital Circle ball rolling, exciting times.

Thank you to everyone who nominated and then voted for me, it's very flattering to be appointed to such an important position and especially so given the competition for places. If you've anything you'd like me to take forward simply holler, I'll do my damnedest.

Marty

DC

It's all DC at the minute, being that my misses is in Washington and I'm having a few feral moments trying to keep on top of things at home and in the office. If you're reading this dear, I unappreciate you hugely. The proposed http://intothewild.nomoreart.com has only been stopped by the threat of job losses, I kid you not.

In other stuff DC (tenuous but hey, it's all fun) I've been kindly nominated for a position on the Digital Circle steering committee and voting is now underway. Digital Circle members can read up on the nominees here and vote for their chosen folk here...

And no we didn't vote for ourselves either so if we win it's 'cos we're great!

Measuring Success is like Measuring a Spoon with a fork...

From here on in I'll measure my success by the length of time it's been since I set foot in a dole office.

48 minutes and counting...