[oats-sig] new opportunities

Great to have you both on board...  (-:

Hopefully, at Mats, says, this could become part of the next phase for OATS
- I've always struggled with being able to 'think up' projects in a sense
and would prefer them to come from users (one of the original aims of OATS).
Although I can always give advice/ideas. Because of this, I've never
advertised OATs massively to coders (e.g. through WCIT volunteer program) -
however hopefully things will just evolve (and seem to be) nicely in this
respect. There may be other opportunities afoot at the moment that ACE and
Steve are involved with, I'm sure they'll report back when things are
finalised with this.

As for introduction - I'm Simon, I'm 30, have brown hair and like cycling
and climbing! I head the Barnsley AT team [1] and have worked in this field
since graduating.  As well as working with clients through the team, I also
contribute to research projects in collaboration with Sheffield uni, e.g
[2]. I'm involved with RAATE and CM conferences and have setup the Assistech
WIKI [3] which has thoroughly not taken off in the field (yet)!!! If you are
that interested, I've a boring personal site that I need to re-write [4].
Er, and I've been involved with OATS since the beginning I think.

RE PIC stuff - I used to develop in this, and there could probably be some
nice open-hardware projects (e.g. switch input modules for
conditioning/integrating) to be had.  I've even got an ICEemulator and
digital scope to loan if need's be. For hard-core embedded stuff, the
project I am working on [2] is using the balloon board [5], which looks
amazing.

TaTa for now.

Cheers.

Simon

[1] : <http://www.barnsleyrd.nhs.uk/mpce.asp?parent=9&cat=9&grp=9&pg=72>
[2] : <http://www.shef.ac.uk/cast/projects/specs>
[3] : <http://www.assistech.org.uk/>
[4] : <http://www.sjinterface.co.uk>
[5] : <http://balloonboard.org/>

-----Original Message-----
From: oats-sig-bounces at lists.becta.org.uk
[mailto:oats-sig-bounces at lists.becta.org.uk] On Behalf Of stephen emslie
Sent: Tuesday, September 25, 2007 10:49 PM
To: OATs Project Special Interest Group
Subject: Re: [oats-sig] new opportunities

First off, I'm really impressed that you can do all this stuff, including a
warbling email! I'd be interested to hear what sort of tools do you use to
make it all possible if you don't mind sharing.

I doubt that you'll have any trouble learning python if you've worked with
c++ before. Its a concise yet expressive language and is pretty easy to pick
up. There is an excellent tutorial
(http://docs.python.org/tut/tut.html) that will give you the tour or the
interpreter and the usual stuff as well as some of the great built-in
modules. After that I can recommend checking out some of the great blogs
(http://planet.python.org/). They're generally friendly people too.

Stephen Emslie

On 9/25/07, Tom Nabarro <whizz2000 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> thank you for the replies, sounds like a friendly bunch.  In terms of 
> what I'm interested in, I'm not really sure as this is quite different 
> from what I'm used to, plus everything is a bit strange following the 
> accident.  My background was in remote management (ipmi) and low-level 
> C++ programming, sockets, MFC, server troubleshooting and server 
> management and I've written the odd Linux script for server management
configuration.
>
> Obviously anything related to any of the above I would possibly be 
> able to help with, recently I've been looking into speech recognition 
> software, and as I have Dragon NaturallySpeaking preferred and can't 
> afford the upgrade to professional ($500), I have been looking at 
> NatPython/NatLink/Vocla for Advanced Scripting possibilities, and this
will involve learning Python.
>
> I have not been previously acquainted with Python, and have not been 
> involved in web services development, excuse  my ignorance but I don't 
> know anything about SVG's, Ally API's.  I will  have to read up on these
areas.
> I have been looking at oatsoft, but this is a large area and it is all 
> new to me.I will try to learn about jambu, and set up a LINUX server I 
> haveto try it out on.
>
> Sorry for the long warbling post, it won't happen again thanks again 
> Tom
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Can you see your house from the sky? Try Live Search Maps 
> http://maps.live.com
>
>
>

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