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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …