Oooops I did it again, many of you have hear the story of the infamious sparky the laptop, the only laptop in history to have almost committed a darwin award on it’s owner,
Sparky the Harddisk
July 8th, 2009Virgin Media are throttling me… ugg then they stopped yey
June 23rd, 2009Best Practises – Thoughts, Purposes and Benefits/Disadvantages – Testing (part 2 of 3)
June 21st, 2009on a train back to london, from the ed film festival, and i feel rejuviated i’ve regained some of my mojo after the hard slog of vr, time to talk about testing (for the record probably my personal weakiest best practise).
Testing
I’ll be talking a bit about testing, i’ll go through what i think the purpose and spirit of testing is, what’s it’s advantages/disadvantages, and then finally give a general overview of it.
Through out the 3 part brain dump on best practises i’m intending to try and stay constructive and positive, this is the one i may drop some hints of the inner scars i have on this particular one, sorry guys here we go…
Best Practises – Thoughts, Purposes and Benefits/Disadvantages – Documentation (part 1 of 3)
June 13th, 2009Hi guys,
I’ve been thinking up some ideas of recent about how we (eg myself and the department) do code, it’s part of a planned initiative to do best practises and stuff, rarararra
In my opinion there’s simple stuff like use version control, don’t use eval and such, but there are sort of lower down, plain coding competency,
It’s not really best practise just really stupid not to do it, best practise to me is three tricky issues, documentation, code testing, and peer coding practises (by which i mean peer programming, peer code reviewing, peer branch/merge control techniques etc)
Hacking Highscore boards, it not big or clever, but it is fun
June 12th, 2009Normally I’m quite a nice bloke and play games without cheats, but some times a game breaks me and i need to prove i can beat it,
so i go into tamperdata and give myself some silly score – 69/666, etc
here’s one i did now, (I blame low blood sugar levels or something)
whoope! – radio vis mark 2 is up and live!
June 1st, 2009after 7 extremely hard weeks, and one of the more stressful dress rehearsals of a my career with the 5live team , watching mark kermode, and the shorter bloke from the peep show appear on the radio vis client was amazing,
Visualising radio mark 2 has launched, it’s a bbc experiment to see what can be done to engage with audiences more, personally i like to think of it as web red button, it’s only a trial but the tech is there to do some really cool experiences,
wanta show the wikipedia entry of outcast as their playing, sure….
wanta show a rss feed of premier league goals, sure…
wanta build a module to dynamicly parse the football press acc ’s feed and push it into the client, sure… will cost a bit though
wanta show the music video, sure… though the trust would probably never allow it
it’s a modular system easily expandable to test out how to do this thing, and it’s great, but only the start, only a fraction of the potiental has been reached, the ux ain’t perfect yet, and is even a little confused in places, are the audience passive or active, should we be pushing or should they be choosing, the important thing is the base tech is here now, with it’s extendable api mark 3 could really be something special, and i mean that, we just need the courage to build ontop of it,
today’s launch was no less amazing, alot of flash/ruby/monterosa tech went into this thing,
sage stats, rss feeds, webcams, sms messages, vcs feeds, drm(evil…. but necessary oh i feel so dirty), json, nuts, bolts, and even a few big name celebs
it’s going to be a fun few weeks
started today it, it’s to be repeated for the 5live simon mayo show 1pm to 4pm, monday to friday for the next few weeks, then expanding further into other networks
http://bbcami.s3.amazonaws.com/live_5live.html
for those of a geeky persuasion here’s the debug link (no secret easter eggs i’m afraid but it shows you a bit more about hows it’s been made)
http://bbcami.s3.amazonaws.com/live_debug_5live.html
ondemand links (of questionable if strongly debated quality) will be on the website soon
i can honestly say, with the restrictions, time-restraints, set-backs, this is one of the proudest products i’ve made, hope anyone watching it enjoys it, will probably do a bbc radio labs blog posting about the vis radio client/console at some point its a ugly disgusting, thing of beauty , most of the credit of which has to go to the the mark 1 team,
cheers
Zap
updated to include the<censored>radio blog post</censored>
Weddings and Geeks
May 2nd, 2009
Helen and Rob at their Wedding, plus the flower i managed to catch, which kinda annoyed the girls....oops
Just been at my friends helen and rob’s weddings it was lovely, a truely beatiful event which was magically and special, these are the first of my friends my age to get married, and it seems everyone else is doing it too, with another 2 planned for the summer, and everyone else having babies aside!
So without going into my singlehood, and all my friends being couples etc etc, and the fact i caught the flowers at the end of the wedding, and the amazing goth wedding band… blah blah blah
I spoke to a guy who explained the 3 actionscript languages in the best way ever…. no really
Zap -the Warrior
April 8th, 2009my settings from this game









