The Creation Engine No. 2
This blog is 10
Mon 02 July 2018 by Jim PurbrickJust 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 a good excuse to look back at the last decade of blogging.
Behind the scenes the technology behind The Creation Engine No. 2 has changed a lot. Originally hosted as a Django site on Byteflow, I converted the blog to a static site generated by Pelican and hosted by github almost exactly 5 years ago. I wrote a post at the time detailing the move, which I finally published on its 5th birthday after rediscovering it today. Despite the big changes behind the scenes, github’s support for custom domains and Pelican’s support for RSS import meant that the only externally visible changes to The Creation Engine No. 2 were cosmetic. All the RSS feeds and links to the site were unaffected, which is great because Cool URIs don’t change.
While the technology has changed a lot, the content continues to mostly be a hack diary describing the various contributions I’ve made to projects like the EVE CREST API, nailgun, buck, infer and ReactVR. I write these posts as documentation in case I have to solve similar problems in future, but it’s also great when they’re useful to others, so I’m very happy to see that my recent set of posts about using ReactVR with Redux have been my most popular posts to date.
I don’t attend as many conferences now as I did while I was working at Linden Lab, but the various conference write up posts serve a similar purpose: reminding me about the talks and speakers I’ve seen and hopefully also pointing others to useful information. Social media is now more effective for letting people know about future events, so I rarely use The Creation Engine to announce upcoming events, but still think its a useful place to collect longform thoughts about past events and links to recordings.
One post which doesn’t fit in to the above catatories is my review of Now We Are 40 and thoughts on growing up with the web. Part of the reason I posted it here is because I could. I don’t need someone to speak for me or my generation, I can do it myself. I’m very grateful that I’ve been able to share my thoughts with the world for the last decade and very happy that a lot of people have found them useful.
Happy birthday to The Creation Engine No. 2. Here’s to the next 10.
crestexplorer
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 …
read morecrestmatic
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 …
read moreFinal Score
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.
read morePelican Powered
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 …
read moreOne Universe, Many Scales
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 …
read moreCreatarr
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 …
read moreAdding Vary Header Support To Nginx
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 …
read moreLoad Balancing Stateful Services With Nginx
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 …
read moredConstructing Augmented Reality
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 …
read moreIntrospecting Python Decorators
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 …
read moreMeaningful Choices
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 …
read moreHTML 5 multimedia
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 …
read more@scalecamp
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 …
read moreLike Second Life
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 …
read moredConstructing dConstruct
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 …
read moreHello World
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 …
read more