The Creation Engine No. 2

There was a slide in the early talks that Cory Ondrejka used to give about Second Life about alien abductions in Second Life.

This week I experienced two remarkable combinations of music and the moving image.

A week ago over 5000 people streamed through the foyer of the Brighton Dome to see and build hundreds of amazing things at the first Brighton Mini Maker Faire.

The Brighton Digital Festival continued this weekend with BarCamp Brighton 6 which was super interesting and lots of fun as always.

One of the events that kicked off Brighton Digital Festival was dConstruct, the always thought provoking conference run by clearleft.

Over the last couple of years I’ve found myself using python decorators to annotate handlers for web requests more and more, both when using Django and with micro-frameworks like mnml and newf.

Back in 2005, while I was working on Second Life in Nottingham, before Linden Lab Brighton existed, I ran a workshop as part of the Screenplay “Boss Frenzy!”

After months of rumours it’s finally here, so what is Google+ like?

100 robots first album, “Attack!”

The slides and video of my talk at AsyncJS on Thursday are now online.

Jamie has just uploaded the movie of my talk “The Why and How of Automated Testing with Python and Django” which I gave at BrightonPy a week ago (and this time it really is a movie, clocking in at a feature length 1 hr and 35 minutes).

In June 2004, not long after Cory had introduced me to Second Life, version 1.4 was released which added Custom Character Animations.

Since leaving Linden Lab I have been talking to a number of people about doing freelance consulting and development work while I get my start-up off the ground and last week got round to setting up a UK limited company so that people will actually be able…

Almost exactly 6 years ago, the incredible Cory Ondrejka and I met for the first time in real life (having previously blogged together on Terra Nova) at the Austin Game Conference 2004, where we got on like a house on fire.

On Friday I jumped on the train to London to attend Playful 2010, a one day conference put on by mudlark of World of Love fame.

Rock Band does a great job of inspiring people to play music, can you develop a game that inspires composition?

My recent experiments in to using Procssing.js and HTML5 audio to generate multimedia web applications didn’t get very far.

While goofing around asking UK indie game developers for their top 5 games of all time at World of Love, I was very pleased to hear that the amazing ZX spectrum strategy game Chaos featured in multiple lists.

Thanks to a tip off from David Hayward, I managed to snag a last minute ticket for the World Of Love independent games conference organized by Pixel Lab, sponsored by Preloaded and hosted by Channel 4.

I’ve been morbidly fascinated by the Rich Internet Application technology blood bath for a while now: Whirled,Metaplace and others tried to stuff virtual worlds in to web pages using Flash, Second Life stuffed Flash in to virtual worlds via Webkit, Unity…

Always Watching is now available to download from iTunes, amazon, 7digital, juno download and songrilla — buy it now!

A couple of years ago, Aleks Krotoski and a group of friends spanning the web, games and technology fields decided to bring the FOOCamp and BarCamp model of unconferences to the world of games and invited me along.

On May 17th, the first 100 robots single, Always Watching, will be released online via Amazon, iTunes, emusic, Rhapsody, napster, spotify and many more digital outlets.

Somehow, 100 robots have ended up playing 2 different Battle of the Band competitions on consecutive nights in Brighton: at The Providence on April 2nd and The Lectern on April 3rd.

A video of my FOSDEM talk about Mono in Second Life and our plans for the future of scripting is now online (the slides are also available here ): Watching back, I was surprised to hear myself say “Hooray!”

Last weekend I went to the 10th Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting in Brussels.

(100 robots images by Steve Marshall ) Ever since playing with iPhones as music interfaces with the London Community iPhone OSCestra at Open Hack London in May I’ve been wondering how I could use my iPhone as a controller in my rock/electronic band 100 ro…

On Friday I jumped on the train to London to attend the first scalecampuk, an unconference about scalability, at the Guardian offices.

Incredibly, 100 robots have 4 gigs lined up in the next 3 weeks: tomorrow we’re playing at an electro/rock night at The Freebutt with Bang Bang Eche, Son of Robot and labasheeda, then next Thursday we’re playing at a more hip hop themed night at The Hope …

Last week I took some time off to spend with Luke and Natty during half term and we spent Wednesday having a lovely time finishing off a game we started a couple of months ago: Bouncaline.

We’ve just about finished setting up the 100 robots gear at BarCamp Brighton 4 in a derelict building that’s going to make the gig feel like an illegal rave.

As usual I headed down to the Metropole on the sea front last week to attend the annual Develop conference in Brighton.

On Friday evening while mulling over potentially interesting hacks to build at Open Hack London I remembered an idea I’d had a while ago: there are now loads of interesting ways to use iphones as music interfaces and the iphone to hacker ratio at hack days

It was incredibly satisfying to be able to go back to Lang.NET 3 years on to be able to say that we actually managed to make all the crazy plans we had for Mono in 2006 work.

I may not have blogged much recently, but I’ve been hard at work writing new songs about the financial meltdown, the surveilance state, gene therapy cures for hiv, anger and guilt for the new band I’ve put together with Max Williams and Aleks Krotoski: 100

Since moving to Brighton 18 months ago I’ve been pretty busy finding my feet, moving house twice, sorting out schools and setting up Linden Lab Brighton, so I haven’t had as much time to make music as I’d have liked.

When I heard that the theme for the Linden Lab Christmas party was going to be steam punk, I knew I had to go as Babbage Linden.

The core of m0cxx0r is the creation of an object that records method calls and compares them to expectations.

It’s that time of year again where people start asking what I’d like for Christmas and I start wondering what they’d like in return.

I’ve just been at a really interesting cafe scientifique in Brighton where Philip ‘Critical Mass’ Ball talked about using physics to model the behavior of people en mass.

In order for m0cxx0r to be useful for writing tests at Linden Lab, it needs to work on all of the platforms that we target with C++ applications, so today I tried building and running m0cxx0r on Windows.

A few weeks ago at JAOO I felt insanely jealous while watching Erik Doernenburg demo Mockito: I wanted dynamic mock objects in C++.

Was without a doubt the phrase I heard most often yesterday, especially if you include variants like “Not Like Second Life”, “A bit like Second Life” and “Unlike Second Life”.

Last week I was invited to talk at JAOO Denmark.

A couple of weeks ago the great and the good of web development descended on Brighton for the wonderful clearleft produced dconstruct conference and once again I’m glad I went along.

It was immensely satisfying to see Bruce Sterling commenting on Carbon Goggles in his Beyond The Beyond blog for wired last week, not only because I’m a big admirer of his work, but because his 4 year old Spime neologism came up in the original discussions

At the recommendation of John and Alice I took a break from Develop Online to listen to Jon Blow‘s talk at Games:Edu this week and was totally blown away.

Second Life has benefited greatly from growing in popularity alongside video sharing services.

There were a number of great projects at Mashed that I wanted to blog about.

2 years ago at Euro FOO 2006 who commented that climate change would be much easier to deal with if we could see carbon dioxide.