Nov. 18, 2009
So long, and thanks for all the fishez

A building with inflatable tentacles coming out of the windows

Name                Chris McCormick
Registration Number xxxxx
Destination         Fremantle
Number of Boxes     2

Box - 1

Number Description                                     Purchased Value
8      Books                                           UK        40
15     Books                                           Australia 20
2      Art prints                                      UK        75
4      Clothes                                         Australia 10
2      Vinyl beanbag covers                            UK        50
1      Pack of business cards                          Australia 0
1      Clock                                           UK        14
1      Air mattress pump (electric)                    UK        5
1      Midi controller (electronic musical instrument) Australia 75
1      Blanket                                         UK        4
1      Drum machine (electronic musical instrument)    UK        50

Box - 2

Number Description                                     Purchased Value
2      Books                                           Australia 10
2      Handbags                                        UK        20
9      Pairs of shoes                                  Australia 60
20     Clothes                                         Australia 20
1      Hat                                             UK        4
2      Plastic toy pidgeon                             UK        5
4      Vinyl records (bowie)                           UK        4
10     Photos (personal)                               UK        0
5      Theatre programmes (personal)                   UK        0
10     Fridge magnets (personal)                       Australia 0
16     Birthday/Christmas/Anniversary cards (personal) UK        0

A statue of a video game character

So long, London. Until next time!

Oct. 30, 2009
South and Flot and other friends

Here are some maddest of props for two great little bits of software we've been using for RjDj work lately, and which might not be that well known yet.

Flot

Flot is a really nice little jQuery library which does exactly what it says on the box: draws charts. It strikes a very nice balance between smart, easy defaults, and being customisable.

http://code.google.com/p/flot/

South

South helps you with database migrations in Django. Database migrations are where you have made your models and deployed them live on the server, including having your SQL tables created, but now you want to change something. People who are used to the flexbility of Python find this situation frustrating. Instead of having to manually write SQL to upgrade your tables to match your new models, South will magically do the hard work for you. What's more is it will have that work represented as Python code which you can customise, modify, and version in your repository. Once again it strikes that balance between doing the right thing and being customisable.

http://south.aeracode.org/

Honorable mention

The rest of our web stack looks like this: Debian GNU/Linux, lighthttpd, python, django, lame, oggdec, postgresql, mysql, wordpress, phpbb3, boto, and we use bzr for versioning.

Together these make as nice and friendly a collection of Free Software as there ever was. Thanks, Free Software makers! You rule.

Oct. 22, 2009
Openlab OpenNight tonight

Openlab OpenNight flyer

Thursday 22nd of October, 2009 @ 7:30pm

The Roebuck Pub (SE1 4YG)

  • Rob Munro
  • Jonny Stutters
  • Ryan Jordan
  • Chris McCormick
  • Cane Toad Orchestra

I'm probably going to play a set with my Garage Acid Lab Pd patches, if I can get it together in time.

Oct. 18, 2009
Infinite8BitPlatformer news

Three bits of news to do with Infinite 8Bit Platformer.

  • I finally found some time and motivation to work a little bit on it. I made some icons to replace the ugly text buttons and had to write an image based radio-button class to support that. Here's a half-size screenshot of the new icons:

Infinite 8Bit Platformer

  • I've decided to release the source code to the game under a GPL license. Some of the library code which I've used in other projects will be released under an LGPL license. You can find bzr repositories of both codebases here.

  • I am looking for contributors to help me bring the game to completion along the lines of my massively-multiplayer-user-created-content-platformer vision. If you're interested in joining the effort, email me and I'll put you on the dev mailing list we have going. Feel free to check out the code, look at the TODO list and start hacking. Patches welcome!

I really need to do a lot more work on the website, like integrating a forum, blog feeds, and authentication. Next thing in the TODO list is a save button for saving the level you are working on. Should be pretty easy so I'm going to use it to try and stay engaged with the codebase.

Oct. 14, 2009
Susan Blackmore on replicators

I find this model of reality, with the view that we are part of a nested chain of incresingly complex replicators, tremendously persuasive.