Wine and social software

After attending FOWA day 1, I swung across town to Spitalfields and small establishment therein called Bedales. Bedales is not like your average bar or pub, infact it is just like walking into a an old wine merchants, they even have those one of those old ladders on tracks to reach the higher bottles of fine wines they purvey. But no this isn't just a wine merchant, one can choose a bottle or 5 to sup with friends at the provided tables and benches. I will warn you, however, That this quirky establishment does not possess a public toilet, instead one has to pick up a key and go around the corner for quick relief. Don't however let this put you off, the wine choice is excellent and all round its a really social place to gather and chat with a few sherbets as our Dennis would say!

My reason for visiting this establishment was to meet our Accman and catch up whilst he was in town. I was greeted on arrival not only be Dennis but also by the 'Governor' and our own UK A-lister Hugh - Gaping Void - Macleod, back from his recent whirlwind tour of Tesco's UK with Stormhoek. It turns out that Hugh seems to be relocating south to the Nottinghill area of town, leaving his northern ancestral home in Carlisle, that could be most interesting for the London scene. In addition there were a couple IBM'ers (among others) Roo Reynolds and Andy Piper, this proved to be the start of a great conversation about what IBM has been up to both internally and externally moving forward around social software. Our conversation covered internal wikis and also the IBM alphaWorks project called QEDWiki. QEDWiki is of course right up Folknology's street, a wiki with plug-ins that lets you assemble mashups on the fly, very very cool. This is already on my list of products to examine, it was cool to get the internal IBM take on such emerging products. The fact that both of these IBM ers have their own blogs rather than internal ones, (and also there own flicker cards in addition to the Blue ones) this still indicates that IBM has much to do before it fully embraces the 'new social way' but moves really are afoot with these guys.

I found conversation with Hugh fascinating and now understand what a huge character this guy really is in real life, he really doesn't hold back just lets you know how it is and I really like that. I am looking forward to seeing Hugh around town in the future. I am still contemplating some of his points as I write this.

This was also a great opportunity to chat with James so as we quaffed fine wine we got into a great discussion around scripting languages and what the enterprise and businesses should be adopting to get some of those agile juices flowing. Mention of the 'Next Big Lanuguage' (see also the NBL matrix) led to discussion around what a vendor like IBM should support in development languages moving forward. My argument centered around Groovy being a great enterprise scripting language due to it's JVM and Java underpinnings, particularly in IBM's case given their historically championing of Java as a business platform underlining there own offerings. James countered by defending IBM's recent adoption of scripting languages in general like PHP and more recently Ruby. I just wonder how much this might be about hoping that some of Ruby's glow might rub of on IBM rather than solving there platform issues. he also indicating the there was much more optimisation in the pipeline for JRuby on the JVM in future. Although I couldn't disagree with IBM decision to adopt these scripting languages, having used them ourselves, what I find difficult to imagine is how the current crop of business I.T. developers centered around Java and IBM's historical offerings, are going to make of the transition. I feel that Groovy (with Grails) makes that much easier for the installed base, as it allows one to continue writing java whilst you learn the new ways of dynamic scripting. It also allows you to easily leverage you existing java legacy. I am looking forward to many more of these conversations with the James especially around opensource et al so watch this space...

Then of course there was Dennis, he was the original reason for me being there and it was great to catch up. Dennis finally let me into he's 'Evil Plan' and indicated it was coming to fruition, I am so pleased about this, Dennis works so hard on these things and gives so much out, it's great to see him getting something back. Dennis Like all of us we has family, mortgages etc.. to support. The commitment D is getting will help tide him over the next 12 or so months along with his other ongoing plans, well done mate you deserve it.

All in all it was a great evening and I wouldn't have missed it for the world, if you ever in need of a sherbert or two in the spitalfields area pop into Bedales and check it out.

Oh and PS they don't have wifi, just wine, shelves and shelves full of it.. ;)

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