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Just a reminder that the t-shirt competition deadline is just a week away!

In case you missed our original announcement here's the details again:
The design for our present and most excellent Backstage t-shirt came from the Backstage community and we'd love it if you put your thinking caps on again and came up with a stunning, geeky new logo to represent us. The reward will be the kudos of having your design on our next run of t-shirts and possibly some stickers and other schwag too!
The criteria for judging entries is:
A strong, imaginative design which:
· is modern
· embodies the spirit of backstage: geeky, open, fun and cool
· is simple and can be reproduced easily on print/TV/online
· is in CMYK or B/W and should not be more than two block colours
· is in 300dpi print resolution and in 72dpi screen resolution
The deadline for entries is Sunday 30th November and we're aiming to announce the result by Friday 5th December.
For details about entering, please read the .

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• - What's this?

Tsk, where's the year gone already? Anyway, it's time to reserve your Backstage Christmas Party ticket!
This year we're splitting into two parties, Ian will be hosting one in and I'll be hosting the other in , (simultaneously no less!) on Saturday 13th December.
There will be much merriment and maybe even a bit of geeky mischief, as well as fun and surprises :-D
We really hope you can make it - don't miss out, book your place now!

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• - What's this?

This IM bot comes from a ´óÏó´«Ã½ member of staff ...

I have been playing with , , and the various client libraries, specifically the rather wonderfully simple and .

It all started because I was doing a integration job with a at , and was getting frustrated with the fact that it is still not super simple to update my location. It struck me as I stared at my desktop, that I always have running. Wouldn't it be great if I had a Fireeagle contact that I could just tell my location, and it would go off and update, letting me know when they're done. Now that part is midway done (post to come), but before I started that, I wanted to research more the workings of a , a computer program that pretends to be a human and can answer basic commands. They have been around for a long time, I remember playing with an a while back, getting it to display the last commit messages from .

So that research turned into a ´óÏó´«Ã½ Programmes bot. As I worked on ´óÏó´«Ã½ Programmes, I have good knowledge of the site and the data within, and building a bot that integrated with that data seemed a good example of using the restful API available.

If you just want to try this thing out, here are the details of what you need to do.

1. You need a or Jabber compatible IM account


2. You need a enabled client, I've listed a few:
   
   
   
   • Linx: , GTalk
   
   
   • Mac: , Adium,
   
   
   • Win: Psi, ,
   
   
   
   


3. You need to add a new contact: im.bbcprogrammes@gmail.com

This should be it. You should have a new contact appear in your list (They have a ´óÏó´«Ã½ logo as an avatar). You can now begin a conversation with this contact. It's probably best to start with: HELP

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• - What's this?

Some of the the efforts of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ in Ubuntu 8.10 which was released on 30th October, to make a range of non-DRM content a. So we decided to catch up with one of the man behind the project, George Wright who is Portofolio Manager at Research and Innovaton. If Flash isn't your style we have the same video in , and . Each file is about 60-90meg big.

For those who prefer to read, George wrote a nice comment on this blog which we've copied.