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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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!

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …