The Creation Engine No. 2

BL:AM

Jim Purbrick — Sat, 07 Oct 2023 19:00:00 +0100

After The Spirit of Gravity in February I ended up talking to Jason Hotchkiss and Jo Summers. I knew Jason from a Build Brighton guitar pedal workshop years ago and as a sound artist from Sound Plotting, but Jo knew Jason as the game developer who made 1D Pong. After …

How (Not) to Build a Metaverse

Jim Purbrick — Wed, 05 Oct 2022 22:27:00 +0100

Earlier in the year I helped Josh Sanburn and his team put together a podcast series on building Second Life for the Wall Street Journal called “How To Build a Metaverse” which I’m now really enjoying. It’s great to hear all of the amazing stories about the origin …

Virtual Worlds, Real People

Jim Purbrick — Thu, 17 Mar 2022 12:00:00 +0000

Last week I gave a lab talk to my former research colleagues at the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham about the work I’ve been doing since leaving the lab over 20 years ago. Rather than talk about technology I focussed on the lessons that todays efforts …

Virtual Objects You Can Touch

Jim Purbrick — Thu, 26 Aug 2021 14:26:00 +0100

Now that Horizon Workrooms has launched I’m very happy to be able to write about the functionality that I found most exciting while building the experience: the mapping of virtual objects to their real world counterparts.

Typically augmented and mixed reality experiences overlay real world objects with virtual annotations …

The Art Of Social VR

Jim Purbrick — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 23:25:00 +0000

The recording of my recent Stereopsia 2020 talk about the art of designing social VR experiences is now online. The talk summarises a lot of material covered in more depth in my posts on The Conversation Around Content, A Tall Dark Stranger and Small Places Loosely Joined, so if please …

A Past And Present Future Of Work

Jim Purbrick — Wed, 30 Sep 2020 16:51:00 +0100

Over the last few years I’ve spent a lot of time helping people new to virtual worlds learn how they work. Over the last few weeks I’ve been sharing a series of short posts on some of the high level concepts I covered which will hopefully be useful …

Small Places Loosely Joined

Jim Purbrick — Wed, 23 Sep 2020 16:51:00 +0100

Over the last few years I’ve spent a lot of time helping people new to virtual worlds learn how they work. Over the next few weeks I’m sharing a series of short posts on some of the high level concepts I covered which will hopefully be useful to …

A Tall Dark Stranger

Jim Purbrick — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 21:51:00 +0100

Over the past few years I’ve spent a lot of time helping people new to virtual worlds understand how they work. Over the next few weeks I’m going to share a series of short posts on some of the high level concepts I covered which will hopefully be …

The Conversation Around Content

Jim Purbrick — Wed, 09 Sep 2020 21:51:00 +0100

Over the last few years I’ve spent a lot of time helping people new to virtual worlds learn how they work. Over the next few weeks I’m going to share a series of short posts on some of the high level concepts I covered which will hopefully be …

HTTPS

Jim Purbrick — Tue, 08 Sep 2020 17:41:00 +0100

Before my recent post about leaving Facebook, it had been a while since I’d updated The Creation Engine and it turned out I had some housekeeping to do. After pushing the Pelican output to https://github.com/jimpurbrick/jimpurbrick.github.com I got a mail from GitHub saying that …

0 to 1

Jim Purbrick — Thu, 20 Aug 2020 14:09:00 +0100

8 years ago London was hosting the Olympics and I met Philip Su for the first time at Browns in Covent Garden to talk about the engineering office Facebook was planning to open in London. By the end of this year Facebook London will have thousands of people working in …

This blog is 10

Jim Purbrick — Mon, 02 Jul 2018 20:12:00 +0100

Just over ten years ago I set up The Creation Engine No. 2 after previously blogging on the original Linden Lab hosted Creation Engine and before that on Terra Nova. So, while I’ve been blogging for almost 14 years, 10 years of The Creation Engine No. 2 seems like …

Replicated Redux: The Movie

Jim Purbrick — Tue, 22 May 2018 11:30:00 +0100

The recording of my recent React Europe talk about Replicated Redux is now online and I’ve written several other posts describing designing, testing and generalising the library if you would like to know more about the details. If you’d like to play the web version of pairs or …

Replaying Replicated Redux

Jim Purbrick — Fri, 10 Nov 2017 22:56:00 +0000

While property based tests proved to be a powerful tool for finding and fixing problems with ReactVR pairs, the limitations of the simplistic clientPredictionConstistenty mechanism remained.

It’s easy to think of applications where one order of a sequence of actions is valid, but another order is invalid. Imagine an …

Building Safety in to Social VR

Jim Purbrick — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 23:07:00 +0100

Last year I hosted a panel on creating a safe environment for people in VR with Tony Sheng and Darshan Shankar at OC3. I commented at the time that the discussion reminded me of the story of LambdaMOO becoming a self-governing community told by Julian Dibbell in My Tiny Life …

Testing Replicated Redux

Jim Purbrick — Mon, 31 Jul 2017 20:29:00 +0100

Opening a couple of browser windows and clicking around was more than sufficient for testing the initial version of ReactVR pairs. Implementing a simple middleware to log actions took advantage of the Redux approach of reifying events to allow a glance at the console to reveal precisely which sequence of …

ReactVR Redux Revisited

Jim Purbrick — Tue, 04 Jul 2017 20:29:00 +0100

There were a couple of aspects of my previous experiments building networked ReactVR experiences with Redux that were unsatisfactory: there wasn’t a clean separation between the application logic and network code and, while the example exploited idempotency to reduce latency for some actions, actions which could generate conflicts used …

Generation JPod

Jim Purbrick — Sat, 03 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0100

I’ve just got back from Kaş where I spent a lovely few days celebrating Pinar and Simon’s wedding and while there spent a few hours reading Now We Are 40: a thoughtful and entertaining look at everything from house music to house prices from the perspective of Generation …

2² Decades

Jim Purbrick — Thu, 20 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0100

Several years ago when we were in 100 robots together, Max was celebrating his 40th birthday. When I said that mine would be in 2017, it felt like an impossibly far future date, but, after what feels like the blink of an eye, here we are.

Along with many other …

VR Redux

Jim Purbrick — Wed, 04 Jan 2017 20:20:00 +0000

Mike and I have been talking about how to easily build simple networked social applications with ReactVR for a while, so I spent some time hacking over the Christmas break to see if I could build a ReactVR version of the pairs game in Oculus Rooms. Pairs is simple and …

Creating A Safe Environment For People In VR

Jim Purbrick — Mon, 31 Oct 2016 23:28:00 +0000

I was very happy that Oculus found time at OC3 to host a panel on creating a safe environment for people in VR. As social VR becomes more popular over the next few years it will quickly have to learn how to keep people safe together in shared environments. Some …

crestexplorer

Jim Purbrick — Sun, 21 Aug 2016 21:48:00 +0100

At the 3rd Party Dev State of the Union at EVE Fanfest 2016 earlier this year, CCP FoxFour drew my attention to a limitation of the current approach used by crestmatic to generate CREST documentation: it only discovers resources always reachable from the API root from the perspective of the …

Strange Tales From Other Worlds

Jim Purbrick — Tue, 10 May 2016 00:00:00 +0100

At the end of last year, Michael Brunton-Spall and Jon Topper asked me if I would like to give the opening keynote at Scale Summit as I had “lots of experience scaling weird things”, by which they meant Second Life and EVE Online. I immediately thought of The Corn Field …

Towards A Generic Media Type System

Jim Purbrick — Sun, 17 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0100

The early days of RESTful hypermedia API design tends to involve lots of homogeneous collections. In the case of CREST vnd.ccp.eve.Api-v1 pointed to the logged in vnd.ccp.eve.ccp.Capsuleer-v1 which pointed to a vnd.eve.ccp.CharacterCollection-v1 of contacts which pointed to many vnd.ccp …

#recordstoreday

Jim Purbrick — Fri, 15 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0100

3 weeks ago I spent a few hours with photoshop working on the Story Bird logo that Linda made a while ago to make it suitable for print. 2 weeks ago I spent a few hours researching the best way to convert the 24 bit 48 Khz Story Bird mixes …

#bandcampday

Jim Purbrick — Sat, 26 Mar 2016 18:59:00 +0000

I love record shops. Whenever I had pocket money it would go on Metallica and Nirvana CDs bought from Our Price or black t-shirts to match. When I lived in Nottingham I bought Boards Of Canada CDs from the same Selectadisc that my Dad bought a rare Fairport Convention single …

crestmatic

Jim Purbrick — Sun, 03 Jan 2016 23:13:00 +0000

A year ago I gave a talk at EVE Vegas about building RESTful CREST applications. My #1 recommendation was to specify representations in requests, but that’s hard to do when there is little documentation on which representations are available and what they contain.

Fortunately CREST is self describing: send …

Free Tests For Everyone!

Jim Purbrick — Thu, 11 Jun 2015 17:00:00 +0100

Modern software development is sometimes colourfully described as being similar to firing tracer bullets at a target. Rather than spending time doing a lot of research, design and specification up front, the smallest, simplest version of the software is built and the feedback gathered from its use is used to …

Investing In Testing

Jim Purbrick — Wed, 10 Jun 2015 20:22:00 +0100

Last year I was talking to an engineer at Droidcon London who was working on an Android app with 100% test coverage. I immediately asked whether he thought 100% test coverage was worthwhile: many software engineering teams strive to achieve 100% test coverage, but few succeed because it’s an …

buckd

Jim Purbrick — Mon, 18 Aug 2014 21:13:00 +0100

One of the things I’ve been working on since joining Facebook is Buck, an open source Android & Java build tool which is significantly faster than many other Java build tools for a number of reasons.

As well as being fast, Buck gains a lot of power and flexibility by …

Organisational Structures

Jim Purbrick — Thu, 20 Mar 2014 23:00:00 +0000

There have been a number of blog posts recently about exciting new organisational structures. As Cory points out “Every early stage company thinks it has reinvented management”: a very dangerous belief when betting on a new organisational structure can be much riskier than betting on the wrong product.

It starts …

Beyond Time Dilation?

Jim Purbrick — Wed, 29 Jan 2014 06:38:00 +0000

EVE online is a remarkable game. On Monday over 2000 people spent over 20 hours destroying virtual spaceships worth 200,000 USD in real money in what was the likely the largest battle in a video game ever. That EVE is capaple of supporting such large engagements is an amazing …

Osprey Therian

Jim Purbrick — Sun, 15 Dec 2013 23:50:00 +0000

In mid-2004 I first started exploring Second Life. Version 1.4 had just been released and Philip Rosedale had said in the press release “My fantasy is to be Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, and now I can. I’d pay $10 for her yellow jumpsuit and sword moves and …

Parse By The Sea

Jim Purbrick — Sat, 19 Oct 2013 18:37:00 +0100

A few weeks ago Facebook London hosted the Parse By The Sea hackathon at the Brighton Dome as part of the Brighton Digital Festival. The idea was to take one of our internal hackathons on the road and invite members of the public to join us, turning a hackathon in …

Facebook Hackathons

Jim Purbrick — Mon, 16 Sep 2013 21:50:00 +0100

I’ve been a big fan of hackathons since one of the first Yahoo! Hack Days I attended at Alexandra Palace was struck by lightning. The lightning caused the fire alarms to go off which opened the roof to let the torrential rain pour on to hundreds of geeks and …

Brighton Digital Festival

Jim Purbrick — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 13:49:00 +0100

The Brighton Digital Festival starts this week and I’m very happy to be helping out with Facebook London‘s contributions: Parse By The Sea, a mobile app Hackathon featuring Parse on the 26th of September, and helping to Connect The Brighton Digital Festival by sponsoring Metranet to provide high …

Final Score

Jim Purbrick — Thu, 04 Jul 2013 22:11:00 +0100

Using Reader on my HTC Wizard on the loo was probably responsible for my biggest increase in clue ever.

Goodbye Reader, you’ll be missed.

Pelican Powered

Jim Purbrick — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 19:13:00 +0100

Almost exactly 5 years ago I set up The Creation Engine No. 2 as a Byteflow blog running on Django when the original Creation Engine blog hosted by Linden Lab stopped being a suitable place for my thoughts on technology as a platform for creativity.

Byteflow and Django served me …

One Universe, Many Scales

Jim Purbrick — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 23:19:00 +0000

One epic meta-game design I first remember talking about a decade ago while working on Warhammer Online is the multi-scale online game: a system of interconnected games in which you choose to be a solo operative, work in a small group, or command epic forces or huge space fleets and …

Creatarr

Jim Purbrick — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 15:28:00 +0000

cc image by vdu, j4mie

One of the things I’ve been tinkering with since leaving Linden Lab is Creatarr: a creative, collaborative social game. Creatarr’s goal is to bring some of the magical collaborative creation found in Second Life to a wider audience and to push creativity in …

Following In My Father’s Footsteps

Jim Purbrick — Mon, 12 Nov 2012 19:28:00 +0000

From 2 years before I was born, until just before I started working on Second Life at Linden Lab, my Dad worked at an innovative technology company with a large consumer photography business: Kodak. From January next year I’ll be working at an innovative technology company with a large …

Caching Shared, Private Data With Ningx

Jim Purbrick — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 20:23:00 +0000

As with many other social services, a large amount of the data in EVE Online and Dust 514‘s New Eden universe is shared between subsets of users. Some corporation data should only be accessible to the corporation’s members, market prices should only be accessible to capsuleers and infantry …

Adding Vary Header Support To Nginx

Jim Purbrick — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 17:12:00 +0100

Although Nginx supports proxy caching it doesn’t provide support for the HTTP Vary header out of the box. This is a problem if you want to use Nginx to proxy different versions of the same URI which Vary on Content-Language or proxy different representations of a RESTful resource specified …

Load Balancing Stateful Services With Nginx

Jim Purbrick — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 05:49:00 +0100

The EVE online network architecture uses stateful proxy servers which manage sessions for players connected to the cluster via the EVE client. The client sends requests to the proxy which are forwarded on to sol servers maintaining the game state and the sols send notifications to the proxy which are …

Brighton Mini Maker Faire: The Movie

Jim Purbrick — Thu, 24 May 2012 14:08:00 +0100

A great video of the Brighton Mini Maker Faire last year by Andrew Sleigh showing the making of You’re The Boss 2. Applications for this year’s Maker Faire are now open and I can’t wait to see what everyone comes up with this year!

Super Hyperpolyglot

Jim Purbrick — Sat, 05 May 2012 19:03:00 +0100

A few years ago nearly all the code I wrote was in C++, but increasingly I’m finding myself writing in a variety of mostly C-style languages and having to perform crunching mental gear changes as I switch between them.

In the interests of making these language switches less painful …

100 robots Vs The Audience

Jim Purbrick — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 16:44:00 +0000

A couple of years ago I had great fun putting together the London Geek Community iPhone OSCestra at Open Hack London and I’ve been controlling Ableton Live with iPhone tapped to my guitar as part of 100 robots for a couple of years now so when @andybudd suggested I …

100 robots Attack!

Jim Purbrick — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 15:06:00 +0000

Lots of exciting 100 robots news! Our debut album, Attack!, has been professionally mastered by Chris at Melograf Mastering who has done an amazing job and made the album sound incredible. The new version is already available at bandcamp and will be available on itunes, amazon and many other download …

The JavaScript Jungle

Jim Purbrick — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 02:47:00 +0100

There was a slide in the early talks that Cory Ondrejka used to give about Second Life about alien abductions in Second Life. One of the most exciting moments in Second Life for the early Lindens was when a resident constructed a UFO and flew around the world abducting other …

Data Is Not Art

Jim Purbrick — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 00:11:00 +0100

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

Natures 3B from Quayola on Vimeo.

This evening I watched Nature — Mira Calix and Quayola’s audio visual piece which took video footage of flowers blowing in the wind and used motion tracking technology to generate music …

You’re The Boss 2

Jim Purbrick — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 22:53:00 +0100

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. Luke and I went along with 2 laptops, a scanner and a pile of pens, paper, glue and scissors to make …

From Magic Circles To Magic Portals

Jim Purbrick — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 21:18:00 +0100

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

I was a bit worried that my Terra Nova style talk on the philosophy of games, virtual worlds and magic circles would be too esoteric, but the room was …

dConstructing Augmented Reality

Jim Purbrick — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 15:45:00 +0100

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

As usual I found most of the sessions interesting, but not always relevant as there’s a heavy design rather than development focus. The most relevant talk this year was …

Introspecting Python Decorators

Jim Purbrick — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 17:05:00 +0100

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.

Where the same functionality is required for all handlers, or the required functionality can be determined from …

You’re The Boss Lives!

Jim Purbrick — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 18:21:00 +0100

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!” day at the Radiator Festival which allowed children to collaboratively create a computer game by drawing or making bosses with collage.

Dozens …

Google+ First Thoughts

Jim Purbrick — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 04:55:00 +0100

After months of rumours it’s finally here, so what is Google+ like? My first thoughts are that it’s super slick and that Circles definitely makes it different, but I’m not sure better.

Limiting the distribution of shared information will likely also limit the growth of the network …

“100 robots attack!” Album Out Now!

Jim Purbrick — Thu, 19 May 2011 09:30:00 +0100

100 robots first album, “Attack!” is now finished and available to download now from bandcamp. I’m so glad that it is done and very proud of the result. It’s the first album I’ve made since 2005 and the first I’ve produced using Ableton Live, which once …

21st Century JavaScript

Jim Purbrick — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 14:05:00 +0000

The slides and video of my talk at AsyncJS on Thursday are now online. The video is pretty murky, but the sound has come out fine and you can see enough of the slides to be able to follow along at home. The talk focuses on ways to bring useful …

The Why and How of Automated Testing with Python and Django

Jim Purbrick — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 09:54:00 +0000

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). The audio on …

Goodbye Babbage Linden, Hello Doc Boffin

Jim Purbrick — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 14:04:00 +0100

In June 2004, not long after Cory had introduced me to Second Life, version 1.4 was released which added Custom Character Animations. In the accompanying press release Philip said “My fantasy is to be Uma Thurman in Kill Bill”, “I’d pay \$10 for her yellow jumpsuit and sword …

Spawning Django Blogs

Jim Purbrick — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 16:25:00 +0100

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 to pay me …

Another Age Must Be The Judge

Jim Purbrick — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 16:15:00 +0100

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. Several months later I joined Linden Lab and (as …

Meaningful Choices

Jim Purbrick — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 17:23:00 +0100

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. Despite billing itself as a day of cross “disciplinary frolicking” and featuring designers, podcasts, discussions of narrative, iphone augmented paper games and Disco Snake …

Disco Snake

Jim Purbrick — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 17:25:00 +0100

Rock Band does a great job of inspiring people to play music, can you develop a game that inspires composition? Lumines and Rez create music while you play, can you make games where music creation is the goal, not a side effect? Pictionary does a great job of using game …

HTML 5 Audio Redux

Jim Purbrick — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 12:01:00 +0100

My recent experiments in to using Procssing.js and HTML5 audio to generate multimedia web applications didn’t get very far. I first tried generating a new HTML 5 audio element for each audio event, which quickly caused the browser to grind to a halt, and my attempts to reuse …

Some Games Never Die

Jim Purbrick — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 01:30:00 +0100

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.

I love Chaos so much that I developed Law, a Chaos remake …

World of Love

Jim Purbrick — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 17:03:00 +0100

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’m glad I did.

The day kicked off with Chris Delay from introversion …

HTML 5 multimedia

Jim Purbrick — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 23:14:00 +0100

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 stuffed Mono in to a 3D engine …

Always Watching Out Now!

Jim Purbrick — Mon, 17 May 2010 10:14:00 +0100

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

If you’d like to remix the song or video, you can get the parts under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus Licence via BitTorrent.

Read more about the making of the track …

GameCamp 2

Jim Purbrick — Mon, 10 May 2010 20:56:00 +0100

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. I had a great time at the original GameCamp and missed it …

Always Watching The Watchers

Jim Purbrick — Sat, 01 May 2010 15:44:00 +0100

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.

Always Watching has been one of the most satisfying projects I’ve ever worked on. Using a commodity PC and the incredible Ableton Live …

Battle of the Battle of the Bands

Jim Purbrick — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 19:11:00 +0000

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.

So, which band is the best and which battle of the bands is better? Early indications favour The Providence …

FOSDEM X: The Movie

Jim Purbrick — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 22:06:00 +0000

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!”, “Shit” and “Crap” quite so often…

While you’re catching up on …

FOSDEM X

Jim Purbrick — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 13:52:00 +0000

Last weekend I went to the 10th Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting in Brussels. This year was the first time that FOSDEM had hosted a track on Mono, so I went along to find out what’s going on with Mono, tell the Mono folk what our plans …

An Open Source, Guitar Mounted, Multi Touch, Wireless, OSC Interface for Ableton Live

Jim Purbrick — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 10:58:00 +0000

(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 robots. The 100 robots set …

@scalecamp

Jim Purbrick — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 15:49:00 +0000

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

The sessions were all very interesting and mostly very relevant. I learned new things about XSS and CSRF and Django’s defences against them from Simon Willison, new …

4 Robot Attacks!

Jim Purbrick — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 18:06:00 +0000

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 …

Bouncaline

Jim Purbrick — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:28:00 +0000

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.

Luke has been interested in making games for a while: he made a level …

100 robots vs 100 geeks

Jim Purbrick — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 13:42:00 +0100

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. If you’re at BarCamp please come downstairs to hear us sing songs about the surveilance state, Twitter and …

Evolving Develop

Jim Purbrick — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 23:41:00 +0100

As usual I headed down to the Metropole on the sea front last week to attend the annual Develop conference in Brighton. Unusually, this time I was attending the Evolve day which shifts the focus from console development to online, mobile and social games, which I had helped create as …

The London Geek Community iPhone OSCestra

Jim Purbrick — Tue, 12 May 2009 00:34:00 +0100

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 tends to be …

Lang.NET 3 Years On

Jim Purbrick — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 11:12:00 +0100

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. My talk is now online here. Lots of people hadn’t seen …

100 Robots Vs 200 Zombies

Jim Purbrick — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 23:50:00 +0000

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 Robots. We’ll …

Music Again!

Jim Purbrick — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 20:42:00 +0000

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. It hasn’t helped that my brother …

Babbage Linden In Real Life

Jim Purbrick — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 14:03:00 +0000

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. Since 2005 my avatar in Second Life has sported a victorian suit from Neverland and a steam arm, originally from a Steambot avatar …

m0cxx0r And Return Types

Jim Purbrick — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 22:04:00 +0000

The core of m0cxx0r is the creation of an object that records method calls and compares them to expectations. This is done by using C++ placement new to create a VTableDonor object in allocated memory the same size as the object being mocked and then returning the memory as a …

New Widgets

Jim Purbrick — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 23:21:00 +0000

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. It’s just the sort of problem that should be solved with social software. Over the last few years I’ve had an …

Measurement vs Modelling

Jim Purbrick — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 00:37:00 +0000

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. When modeling people as particles you can create surprisingly realistic simulations of real behavior in corridors, traffic jams and panics. As …

m0cxx0r on Windows

Jim Purbrick — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 21:32:00 +0000

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.

Initially it looked good: m0cxx0r built in the default Visual Studio Debug …

m0cxx0r - Compiler Generated Mock Objects For C++

Jim Purbrick — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 23:45:00 +0000

A few weeks ago at JAOO I felt insanely jealous while watching Erik Doernenburg demo Mockito: I wanted dynamic mock objects in C++. It turns out that it’s really hard. However, after a few days hacking around I found that it’s not completely impossible. The results of my …

Like Second Life

Jim Purbrick — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 12:26:00 +0100

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”. Whatever else it’s achieved, Second Life has definitely become the frame of reference for the small and somewhat myopic …

Anything But Java

Jim Purbrick — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:28:00 +0100

Last week I was invited to talk at JAOO Denmark. Originally a Java conference, JAOO is now a very broad software development conference covering everything from agile to language design to distributed systems.

The stand out talk on the first day was Gregor Hohpe‘s Programming the Cloud which enumerated …

dConstructing dConstruct

Jim Purbrick — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:03:00 +0100

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.

Steven Johnson kicked off with a talk about how Dr. John Snow’s innovative data visualization of a …

On Lifecycles And Spimes

Jim Purbrick — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 23:22:00 +0100

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 about Carbon Goggles …

Jon Blow

Jim Purbrick — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:20:00 +0100

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.

Jon talked about whether games are poised to enter a golden age similar to films in the ‘30s, when …

Sharing Carbon Goggles Visualisations

Jim Purbrick — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 23:01:00 +0100

Second Life has benefited greatly from growing in popularity alongside video sharing services. Many people’s first glimpse of Second Life or a particular Second Life experience is through the lens of a YouTube video. When promoting real world brands in Second Life, videos of the Second Life experience that …

Mashed 08: T + 1 Week

Jim Purbrick — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 21:15:00 +0100

There were a number of great projects at Mashed that I wanted to blog about. Unfortunately, by the time I’d got round to setting up a blog I somewhat missed the boat. So, instead I’m going to revisit some of my favourite Mashed projects and see where they …

A Collaborative User Generated Ambient Augmented Virtual Reality Scientific Visualisation The Size Of Denmark

Jim Purbrick — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 19:57:00 +0100

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. The second was with Claus Dahl who observed that Second Life is a great platform to prototype large scale augmented reality applications as every object …

Hello World

Jim Purbrick — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 09:21:00 +0100

Well, not exactly. Having blogged previously on Terra Nova, the original Creation Engine and currently on the Official Second Life Blog, I’m not exactly stumbling blinking in to the blinding light of the blogosphere. Recently a number of things have come up that I’ve wanted to write more …