Data Is Not Art
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...
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The JavaScript Jungle
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...
View Article100 robots Attack!
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...
View Article100 robots Vs The Audience
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...
View ArticleSuper Hyperpolyglot
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...
View ArticleBrighton Mini Maker Faire: The Movie
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...
View ArticleLoad 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...
View ArticleAdding 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...
View ArticleCaching Shared, Private Data With Ningx
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...
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Following In My Father’s Footsteps
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....
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Creatarr
cc image by vdu, j4mieOne 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...
View ArticleOne 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...
View ArticlePelican 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...
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Final 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.
View ArticleBrighton Digital Festival
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...
View ArticleFacebook Hackathons
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...
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Parse By The Sea
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...
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Osprey Therian
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...
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Beyond Time Dilation?
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...
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Organisational Structures
There have been a number of blogposts recently about exciting new organisational structures. As Corypoints out“Every early stage company thinks it has reinvented management”: a very dangerous belief...
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buckd
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...
View ArticleInvesting In Testing
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...
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Free Tests For Everyone!
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...
View Articlecrestmatic
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...
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#bandcampday
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...
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#recordstoreday
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...
View ArticleTowards A Generic Media Type System
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...
View ArticleStrange Tales From Other Worlds
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...
View Articlecrestexplorer
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:...
View ArticleCreating A Safe Environment For People In VR
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...
View ArticleVR Redux
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...
View Article2² Decades
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...
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Generation JPod
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...
View ArticleReactVR Redux Revisited
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...
View ArticleTesting Replicated Redux
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...
View ArticleBuilding Safety in to Social VR
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...
View ArticleReplaying Replicated Redux
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...
View ArticleReplicated Redux: The Movie
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...
View ArticleThis blog is 10
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...
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0 to 1
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...
View ArticleHTTPS
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...
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The Conversation Around Content
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...
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A Tall Dark Stranger
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...
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Small Places Loosely Joined
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...
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A Past And Present Future Of Work
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...
View ArticleThe Art Of Social VR
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...
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Virtual Objects You Can Touch
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...
View ArticleVirtual Worlds, Real People
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...
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How (Not) to Build a Metaverse
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....
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BL:AM
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...
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