Following on from my last 2 tools you need to use: Google Reader and Delicious. There is a massively hyped tool which I can heartedly recommend.

Twitter is an opt-in version of IRC. Think about that for a second. Now imagine the IRC chat room has people you respect (for me Charlie Brooker, Stephen Fry and Martin Fowler), and you can hear their thoughts. If there’s anything we have learnt about the Internet over the last 2 years it’s that stalking is at an all time high. It’s also becoming mainstream.

I was very sceptical about Twitter. Seeing it as a way for people I sort of know spamming me with fascinating anecdotes about getting pished with their mates the other night. But it’s quite simple, just keep it professional and only listen to people you know and/or respect. If your life is all about High School Musical then you can listen to the ramblings of the stars from the show. If you are deeply into software development, then all of your heroes are already on board.

I think to get the most out of Twitter you need to either have the iPhone/Android/Blackberry application, or not have it unblocked at your work. But it really is a genuinely interesting new source of information I check multiple times a day along with my SMS, email and rss feeds. I feel more connected and as the circulation figures for gossip magazines will tell you, people love being a little too intimate.

Feel free to follow me!

This week has been a great week for hearing about new tech. On Tuesday I did a presentation at work about Hudson and Sonar. Hudson is a CI server and Sonar is a great way to track metrics on your codebase.

On Wednesday I went along to the Java User Group Scotland and checked out a great talk done by Selcuk Bozdag on Flex development. Flex allows you to make pretty cool Flash based applications which can talk to remote services. It isn’t tied to Java like I originally thought. There’s an awful lot of out of the box charting and video tools which seem useful.

On Saturday I went along to the Microsoft sponsored Developer Day event. They had 4 different tracts offering mainly .NET and MS SQL Server talks. I enjoyed listening to the Virtulisation and Ruby on .NET talks especially. I then managed to find some Perl/Flex developers I could talk loudly about the evil that is IE6 to restore the balance.

While at the conference I was approached by some guys from the disposable memory project who were at my talk the previous week at the Glasgow Techmeetup. They handed me a modded film based camera with instructions to hand it to someone else after a single usage and after all the exposures were used the last person would hand it back to someone else. Hopefully I’ll get to see what this led to!

Just a quick note to say that the Techmeetup group, which is well established in Edinburgh already, are meeting in Glasgow tonight and I think Kevin and I will be doing out Greenmap talk. I think this could be the first meeting in Glasgow too. About 70 folk turn up for the Edinburgh one so it should be good.

7pm in Room M329, James Weir Building, 75 Montrose Street, Glasgow.

Recently I’ve became fascinated by Whisky. Last year I went on a micro-brewery tour at West in Glasgow. In that case it’s beer, but Whisky is distilled beer so it’s the same ingredients and they share part of the same process. On my recent trip to Skye I went around the Talisker distillery and was very taken by the Whisky experience.

The Whisky flavour chart (PDF) was what really appealed to the inner information geek within me. As soon as you can identify the flavour types along with their associated areas you get a much better picture of the brands on offer.

This set me off on a mission to experience all the different tastes that this nation provides. It really is a crime that my previous experience was with blended whiskies intended for cocktails!

I’ve collated information I’ve found online and created a whisky tasting guide.

I will be speaking at Scotland on Rails in late March. My talk with Kevin McDonagh will be about how to create a community based open source project with an active community. I’d say go buy tickets but it’s sold out already!

After my talk is over I’ll put it up online. But for now I’ve put up a page about the project for those interested in what I’ve been doing with 1.5 years of Thursday.