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 consumer photography business: Facebook.

Looking at the march of technology from the perspectives of these companies is amazing. I had a summer job building my first web application for Kodak while I was studying Computer Science in Nottingham and remember one of the researchers there joking that film needed to last a long time as a roll would often have pictures of christmas trees at either end with a summer holiday in the middle. Photography was so expensive that people would only take a few dozen pictures a year. Now we happily take a dozen pictures of our lunch, wouldn’t consider buying a telephone without a built in multi-megapixel camera and people upload hundreds of millions of images to Facebook every day.

While the cost of creating photos has fallen to almost zero, their value hasn’t. Some of my most enjoyable moments recently have been looking at and commenting on the latest pictures of my brand new nephew, Charlie, on Facebook and so it goes for Facebook’s other billion users. Photos that are now so cheap to create that Kodak has filed for chapter 11 protection become social objects that are so valuable that Facebook can host the photos for free and still make a good business from advertising around the conversation.

Working for Facebook might seem like a strange move after a decade working on 3D environments, but virtual worlds like Second Life and EVE are also social spaces, just with virtual nightclubs or space battles as the social objects. While 3D environments allow more immersion than Facebook, the price is a much higher barrier to entry. Although a few people from my family tried Second Life while I worked at Linden Lab: most of my family use Facebook already. My brother could create a gallery of pictures of my nephew in Second Life and we could meet there to talk about them, but then most of my nephew’s other aunts and uncles wouldn’t be able to join us. Ubiquity trumps immersion. Virtual worlds like Second Life still need their iPod moment if they’re going to cross the chasm from niche technology used by gamers, early adopters and academics to become a mainstream communication technology. Even though Second Life is free to use and paid for by the publishers of the 3D content, it’s still too hard to navigate for most people to use almost a decade after its launch.

Facebook is already used by a billion people to keep in touch, while still evolving and developing at an incredible pace. I’m going to help new uncles connect with new nephews around the world while working on new technologies, which I think is going to make Facebook a fun and rewarding place to work.

After that, who knows? My Dad’s working on some pretty amazing stuff these days: if I keep following in his footsteps and change keeps accelerating, the next thing is science fiction now, just as Second Life and Facebook were in 1975.

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 software engineering patterns to JavaScript, patterns that will be increasingly important as JavaScript applications become larger and more complex.

Thanks to Prem for inviting me to talk and to everyone who came along to the Async session for the fascinating discussion.

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.

Setting up a company is insanely easy these days: if you go to companies made simple it will cost you less than £17 and 10 minutes of form filling. Coming up with a name is harder, but within a couple of hours I found that 18dex was available as a .com TLD, twitter account and facebook username. Meaningful 5 character .coms are pretty tricky to come by these days, so I snapped it up and 18 Dexterity Ltd. was born — a pretty fantastically geeky name for an agile software engineering company I hope you’ll agree.

A few minutes later I had a holding page up for 18dex.com, but it looked pretty sad with no content, so I started thinking about setting it up as a blog. I have a stack of relevant software engineering posts on jimpurbrick.com from the last few years, but they are sandwiched between less relevant posts on 100robots, Second Life and various miscellany. I didn’t want to move the software engineering posts from jimpurbrick.com as they’re part of what I do and regularly updating a single blog is quite enough work. I also didn’t want to copy the posts from one blog to another as it would potentially end up with 2 independent comment threads on each blog. There would be no definitive version of a post, a blatant violation of Don’t Repeat Yourself.

Luckily Django includes a piece of machinery to deal with this problem in its sites framework, something I’ve been meaning to have a closer look at for some time. The sites machinery simply lets you associate a piece of content with a site and keeps track of the current site, allowing you to filter the content in the database to only show a subset on each site.

While the byteflow blog engine I use for jimpurbrick.com supports the sites framework, each post is associated with a single site via a ForeignKey. In order to allow posts to be shown on both jimpurbrick.com and 18dex.com I had to change that ForeignKey field to be a ManyToManyField: a single line change in the python code, but something that requires a little wrangling to massage the existing data to fit the new model.

I’ve been using the excellent South in all my recent projects to allow me to easily migrate data across django model changes. Although jimpurbrick.com dates from long before South was available I managed to convince south to manage the migration by dumping the blog_post table to json, dropping the table and recreating it with south, reloading the data and then letting south migrate the data to the new ManyToMany schema. While this was slightly more fiddly than it could have been it means that the blog app is now being managed by south, which will make future development on the blogs much easier.

Once I had migrated the data to the new model and associated the software engineering posts in jimpurbrick.com with both sites in the django admin interface all that remained was for me to clone the jimpurbrick.com directory with mercurial to create an 18dex.com directory and choose and tweak a byteflow theme for the new site.

Once again I’ve been very impressed with Django and Byteflow, which have proven to be incredibly powerful tools that are very easy to work with. In a few hours I was able to create professional and personal views on to my blogging which can be easily administered from a single interface and allow comment threads and users to easily flow between them. If you’re just interested in my software engineering posts, head over to 18dex.com, if you want to hear about music, Second Life and everything else I get up to, stay subscribed to jimpurbrick.com. If you notice anything broken on either blog, then please leave a comment to let me know.

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 talks, I recommend Miguel, Jeremie and Alan‘s talks from the Mono track. Unfortunately it doesn’t look like the very interesting talks on the XMPP track are available online, but I’m going to be catching up on lots of the talks I missed out on, including the key note talks on Saturday morning which I missed due to the very enjoyable beer event on Friday evening…

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 are for C# and fill in some gaps.

I started Saturday on the monitoring track which included a terrible talk about an interesting tool that I hadn’t heard of: SystemTap — a scriptable system monitoring tool designed to allow diagnosis of problems at run time on production servers without the usual instrument, compile, analyse loop. stap looks really interesting and useful as a tool for augmenting or replacing our current simulator performance tools.

After the stap talk I headed over to the XMPP track for the rest of the day and saw some great talks on BOSH, onsocialweb, pubsub, strophe.js, collecta and node.js. Federated, open social networks seem to be a big thing at the moment (@blaine was talking about them at @scalecampuk ) and there was lots of interest in using XMPP to build them as it already has standards for identity, presence, friends and events. Given that jabber and XMPP is a decade old it makes you wonder why the standards weren’t used the first time round. A possible reason is that XMPP doesn’t have it’s rails/django yet and still looks pretty clunky to work with although Strophe.js may help. Another reason may be that XMPP hasn’t been the web up until now, although BOSH may be the bridge that’s needed there.

While everyone else was thinking about using XMPP to build Twitter and Facebook I started thinking about what an open, federated virtual world platform built on XMPP might look like. I wasn’t the only one. The realXtend folks turned up to show off their latest new from the ground up viewer which uses XMPP and jingle for voice and IM integration and were obviously thinking along the same lines. As realXtend seem to be moving away from SL tech now, expect an XMPP based back end from them soon…

I spent Sunday camped out in the Mono room which was interesting from a cultural point of view. Miguel de Icaza seems to have completed his transition from champion to enemy of freedom in the open source community’s eyes. Last time he was at FOSDEM he was accused of talking about “Coca Cola” when showing off the closed source Unity engine that uses Mono, so stayed strictly to open technologies in his talk this year. Luckily, due to Microsoft’s Community Promise and open sourcing of the DLR, IronPython and IronRuby, that includes a lot of the .NET platform and gave him lots to talk about. Most of the legitimate worries of patents around Mono have been resolved, but talking about C# and the CLI at FOSDEM still requires a poster asking people to leave their religion at the door, apparently.

In my Second Life talk, I gave a summary of the interesting things we did to get LSL on Mono working in 2008 and then outlined our plans for C# in the future including lots of question marks around how we’re currently planning to implement them. Lots of my questions were answered after the talk and it turns out that the Unity developers are wrestling with the same problems at the moment, so we should be able to work together over the next few months to make a lot of progress.

Overall FOSDEM was hugely informative and enjoyable and I have a big shopping list of exciting new technologies to play with over the next few months. Hopefully the Mono room will become a regular fixture and we’ll be able to head back next year.

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 things about messaging, pubsub, queues and data stores (process 1 message at a time, use message hospitals, send URLs to unavailable data that can be polled for with JavaScript and that just check memcache entries) lots about Varnish ) and it’s use at Wikia from Artur Bergman (Wikia runs off 18 apaches and 8 varnishes with 60GB of RAM and SSDs to serve 25 million pages and 950Mbps at peak, Varnish is generally better than squid ), but you need a modern kernel).

Lots of the talks were about moving storage, caching and queuing out of the application and just writing a small piece of business logic to tie them together. Against this background Alex Evans’ talk about the back end for Media Molecule’s Little Big Planet stood out like a sore thumb. Having not enjoyed using a Java web stack, Alex has just rewritten the whole of the back end as proprietary technology as a single binary in order to know the code from end to end. While it may be true that having custom physics or rendering middleware might distinguish Little Big Planet from other games, I can’t believe that custom technology to serve HTTP requests is going to be a competitive advantage. I hope Alex’s good ideas become Redis contributions rather than a maintenance nightmare and barrier to agility.

The lightning talks were also very good. Simon’s “ScaleFail” talk about the Guardian MP expenses app was hilarious (lesson: do load testing) and Gareth’s talk about Dumbo (a Python Hadoop client) was very useful.

At times it felt like the talks were suited to an ops audience, but “Dev’s should know about this!” was a regular refrain. Don’t worry: I listened and learned a lot. Thanks to everyone who made it a great day.

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 for the You’re The Boss game at the Radiator festival in Nottingham in 2006 — when he was 3!

More recently Luke started designing a game that I was helping him put together in Game Maker. He drew lots of backgrounds and characters that we scanned in and there were vague ideas about treasure hunting game play, but it felt a bit like Luke was biting off more than he could chew.

So, when Luke and Natty inherited a trampoline over the summer I suggested that we build a bouncing game and we started building it with Scratch, an educational programming environment that I’d been meaning to experiment with since seeing that it had been ported to Second Life.

Scratch has a very simple model based on plugging together blocks that is similar to the Lego Mindstorms environment. Luke quickly got the hang of it and built a significant portion of the logic with just a few leading questions. Like Mindstorms and LSL it uses multiple flows of control within the same scripted object for complex behaviour, which can take some getting used to when making an object that simultaneously waits to be touched and for a timer, for example.

In some respects I wish Scratch was a little purer — although message passing concurrency is possible, it’s very easy to share state between objects — something we shouldn’t be encouraging the programmers of tomorrow to do. It’s also harder to do multiple levels or screens than with Game Maker, but given Luke’s propensity to lose himself in Zelda style epics, the tight focus might help learn the basics of logic.

Overall it’s a delightfully easy and rewarding environment to use. After spending a couple of hours finishing the logic, we went in to the garden to take pictures of the trampoline and Luke and Natty striking poses for the animations and quickly got them imported in to Scratch along with some very cute drawings and sound effects by Luke.

Scratch also makes it very easy to share your work on the web, allowing Luke to proudly show off his handy work to his Grandparents over the weekend and for me to proudly share the game with you here. I hope you enjoy Bouncaline!

Use the left and right arrow keys to move and try to collect the food.Learn more about this project

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 Amazon wish list which suffices for books, music and software, but doesn’t allow me to add fun things like board games, sensors and [lego] (http://shop.lego.com/Default.aspx).

I’ve thought about building a wish list service that worked against any web store a few times and was talking to my old friend Tom about this problem at the weekend when he came to stay with his lovely new daughter Beth. We both agreed that someone must have built it already and so it goes: boxedup provides you with browser buttons that allow you to easily add any product any where on the web to a social wish list service. It also supports the other essential feature — allowing your friends to reserve items in a way that’s visible to them, but invisible to you, so everything stays a surprise until the big day.

I’ve added a boxedup widget to the side bar so you can see what interesting schwag I’ve uncovered from across the web in a wonderland style. While I was at it I added a friendfeed widget so you can see what I’m reading, bookmarking and uploading in a simon willison/boingboing style too.

Now I just need to get everyone I know to set up a boxedup list too and my Christmas shopping will do itself.

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 cholera epidemic and the wisdom of dead crowds helped convince people of the water borne nature of the disease. It was an interesting story, but it mostly ended up being a plug for his book and geoblogging aggregator outside.in.

Next up, Aleks Krotoski talked about how games had spent decades creating incredibly compelling user experiences in silos without much contact with each other the academic HCI community or the web. Meanwhile the web is very interested in creating similarly sticky experiences using virtual rewards to encourage participation. Aleks’ conclusion was that the two communities should talk and I agree.

Daniel Burka talked about similar themes in his talk about the evolution of Digg. The most interesting anecdotes where about how top diggers started off as a good incentive, but became a disincentive when new users saw how unachievable the scores had become and how the recommendation engine is now a good way to encourage some of Digg’s passive audience to get involved.

Matt Jones and Matt Bidaulph talked about their successful Silicon Roundabout startup dopplr. Jones talked about visual design and delighters which sounded a lot like Alek’s virtual rewards in games. SL uber-hacker Bidaulph talked made another gaming analogy, talking about how embedding dopplr in other sites and vice versa achieves a similar seamless experience to streaming maps in games: removing the load screens and jumps that used to bedevil console games and still are the normal experience when using the web. He also talked about the importance of using message queues and asynchronicity in services like dopplr which pull information from across the web.

Joshua Porter‘s talk on Leveraging Cognitive Bias in Social Design was the stand out talk for me. He talked about exploiting people’s tendency to pattern match to generalise isolated positive case studies on web sites and on framing account creation as something to do to avoid losing features rather than something that gains features as a way to play on the tendency to value losses greater than gains. His description of the how the 9x mismatch between customers (who over value the application they already have by 3 times) and developers (who over value the application they have developed by 3 times) creates a huge barrier to application adoption was particularly interesting.

Tantek Celik‘s talk about using hCard and rel=me links to create portable, auto-updating social network profiles and data to reduce the fatigue induced by inviting all of your friends to many social networks was the most practical session of the day. I’m going to try playing around with rel=me links and Google’s social graph API here soon.

Jeremy Keith gave a grandiose talk to end the day which wove together psychohistory from Asimov’s Foundation Series with Critical Mass and The Wisdom of Crowds to talk about how network effects and power law distributions cause some social software to explode in popularity while others wither, but that despite The Tipping Point being sold in business sections as a how-to book, it is fundamentally a retrospective and that predicting or engineering tipping points or network effects is notoriously hard. It was a great talk and the conclusion that social software is more of a lottery than a science is valid, but still: you have to be [in it to win it] (http://secondlife.com).