After a general catch-up on what everyone's doing and introductions from a graduate new comer (Nick Irvine) - we launched in talking about robotics including:

• Automated Kiwifruit picking robots.
• Fruit laser bar coding and it's lack of uptake so far.
• The possibility of per-ordered fruit i.e. you identify how you want your fruit, and it's picked at the precise moment when it fits the consumers needs.
• The user of heuristic markings for fingerprinting of individual fruit (ie. the Idea that nature, by design, provides unique identifier for each piece of fruit, or that we could mark a fruit for identification that wasn't detectable/displeasing to the human eye.
• Smart cars, self navigating cars, convoy or drafting applications for self-navigating cars and how these systems would deal with disconnections or extraordinary circumstances.

As an offshoot of self driving cars peter talked a little bit about Scribe (or livescribe - pens that record what you write and say - in unison - and allow playback or online publishing ) - and the future of pen based capture devices and note taking ie. evernote etc.

We talked around Multi-dimensional separation of concerns, and the idea of having both distinct dimensions (that may not be based on a single physical AOP approach) and modules of concerns, and the challenges/opportunities/solutions these "hypermodules" could provide to every day business problems - this also hi lighted the pitfalls of existing AOP approaches which often let you assemble incompatible/incorrect sets of concerns, which modules could help prevent...

I talked briefly around REST and the concept of a generic RESTful application development platform that I've been prototyping lately (like dream, but a little more resource and query oriented, and of course with OAuth support OOTB) rather then re purposing an MVC framework or using WCF (which also feels like a bad fit) or ADO.Net Data Services.

Last of all we talked about Mass Transit just as we were breaking up - Jamie noted he'd been working on a similar project (but for java?) while at Auckland Uni.  Perhaps I'll have a more in-depth report on it next time as I'm currently experimenting with it at the moment when I get time.

Thanks all for coming - write-up's of the previous chats can be found on the wiki.