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"In this post I present the development model that I’ve introduced for all of my projects (both at work and private) about a year ago, and which has turned out to be very successful. I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while now, but I’ve never really found the time to do so thoroughly, until now. I won’t talk about any of the projects’ details, merely about the branching strategy and release management." It's a detailed strategy, but well thought-through; I'm certainly going to bear some of this in mind in future (and, indeed, the way the release branches are handled is familiar).
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More brilliant data-analysis and writing from OkTrends – perhaps my favourite data-blog out there, and one of my favourite discoveries in 2010 so far.
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"I suppose there are multitudes of people to be 'drawn' by promising to show them what the city of a hundred years hence will be like. It was, I thought, an unresponsive audience, and I heard no comments. I could not tell from their bearing whether they believed that Metropolis was really a possible forecast or no. I do not know whether they thought that the film was hopelessly silly or the future of mankind hopelessly silly. But it must have been one thing or the other." He did not like it too much.
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"Unless your surname's Coren you're going to need some help getting into the journalism industry." Great advertising from the Press Gazette
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"Players stand in front of a green screen while the game films them and creates a music video background while they sing. Their performance is then emailed to them or burnt onto a DVD players can take home." Awesome. Unfortunately, the project has been canned. Still, it's worth watching the slightly cringey videos of the developers playing it, because it's a nifty bit of code.
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"It all boils down to a Ruby script that runs on OS X only and uses OS X’s really awesome typography and subpixel antialiased font rendering. Why not tap into this to make those headline graphics? With Rubycocoa you can easily whip up a small app that draws some text, and save it into a PNG file." Um, blimey.
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Icebergs and Shorelines; I love the Icebergs series particularly. What a rich page for a gallery.
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"3. Take Notice: Be curious. Catch sight of the beautiful. Remark on the unusual. Notice the changing seasons. Savour the moment, whether you are on a train, eating lunch or talking to friends. Be aware of the world around you and what you are feeling. Reflecting on your experiences will help you appreciate what matters to you." All very good advice – and, frankly, what I knew already – but this one felt particularly appropriate, given Noticings.
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This is a pretty good guide – made sense, got me up and running fast, and nice and clearly written.
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"In a sense, a child, by definition, shrinks Scribblenauts’ scope: the game’s potential solutions are necessarily limited by vocabulary, so players with a smaller vocabulary have fewer options open to them. But, free of the dry, efficient logic of adulthood, a child’s imagination also opens the game up in ways beyond most adults’ reach." Simon makes a strong point about Scribblenauts.
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"We write and listen and play music in a cultural environment in which there's intense excitement and anxiety around the idea of music as a social object, not just a commercial one… in order to understand better the ways in which songs are becoming lines in listeners' conversations, we need different ways of thinking about how they've played that role for musicians too." Tom Ewing on music as fanfiction.
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"After she left, the school began to switch away from Acorn computers to Windows PCs, and computing at school became less and less about actually wrangling the machines for their own sake: programming went away, to be replaced by word processing and the other kinds of useful activities which I'm sure helped a lot of pupils gain the kind of computer literacy they needed for the real world, but it wasn't the kind of computer literacy I needed. I needed the more abstract, joyful, engagement with computers that Sister Celsus provided, and which could only have been provided at the end of the 80s." A lovely post for Ada Lovelace Day from Matt.
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"In this series I showcase a number of portraits of musicians made out of recycled cassette tape with original cassette. Also included are portraits made from old film and reels." Just gorgeous.
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"You know the [dark days] when all the MBAs left, and the people who loved the Web went on building it — building meaningful, crazy, artistic cool stuff, and the ethos of the social web war born, back before that meant more then widget crazy/Facebook-tulip-bloom-madness. Yeah, that sure sucked."
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"…doing strategy happily is probably more important than doing it quickly or slowly."
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Ooh – a decent search tool for cc'd Flickr images.
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"This would be something different though potentially – not buying into a product design as a brand, but more like micro-investing in a product at it’s conception. Almost like a distributed commission of something that you’ve followed the progress of like a work of art."
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"Director of Community Heather Champ doesn't just guard the pool and blow the occasional whistle; it's a far more delicate, and revealing, dance that keeps the user population here happy, healthy and growing." A nice SFGate piece that at least acknowledges the complexities of community management.
Barcleona, now online
02 November 2006
Montserrat
Originally uploaded by Tom Armitage.
So I finally finished processing all my photographs from Barcelona (or, at least, the 1/4 good enough to make it online). They’re available in this photoset at Flickr. Really pleased with many of these, even though they’re not at all popular on Flickr itself. Probably something to do with my inability to join a bazillion groups.
Now, onto the next set of photographs from two months ago that need uploading…
More photos from Etech
26 March 2006
Julian Bleecker (landscape)
Originally uploaded by Tom Armitage.
I’m slowly getting my pictures from ETech online; the last batch left will be of my time in San Diego after the conference. These ones are slightly better than the ones I uploaded first – in part, because I’ve processed them a bit more. This is one of my favourites – of Julian Bleecker – from the afternoon where we took break on the pool deck. Fun.
Web apps – the wrap-up
09 February 2006
Well, that was pretty great. Tom‘s talk was pretty staggering – lots of ideas I’ve been following over the past year or two all coalescing together into one big lump. Very excited by that; really need to sit down and think it over when I’ve got some space. Cal, Joshua, and Ryan were all also excellent; Ryan’s talk especially, given its real-world, raw-data approach. Lots to think about.
I pointed out on the (slightly sarcastic) IRC back channel that it’s not necessarily the individual facts coming out that mattered – many people knew them already (like “don’t forget to cache”, etc) – but the context, the stories, the examples that wrap around them. Context is so important, and the summit put masses into context in a really exciting way. Shame there wasn’t more networking, but I had a good night afterwards, and it was nice to see a few old familiar faces, like Meg and Cal again, as well as meeting Rod for the first time.
My photos from the event are now online. Pretty pleased with the way they came out, given how far I was away from the stage, and how (relatively) slow my lens was.