My Writings. My Thoughts.
Young Rewired State
// August 24th, 2009 // 3 Comments » // Events
This weekend, around 50 or so teenagers gathered at Google’s London HQ for an event hosted by Rewired State – an organization dedicated to making better government websites using data they provide through APIs and the like. The task for the weekend? To build an uber-cool app from government data or anything else you can find, then present it to a panel of people from the government and other, well-respected, organisations. The entire weekend was free and I got accommodation and a train ticket down to London and back too!
The train journey to London was awesome – first time I’ve taken the train anywhere far away. Preston to London in something amazing like 2 hours and 10 mins. Tube, of course, was busy as usual (not to mention half-closed… as usual) but it’s quite exciting getting it everywhere.
Google’s offices were located in Belgrave House, a fancy new office building a stone’s throw away from Victoria station, and inside you could find sofas, deckchairs and bean-bags galore (: Tons of free chocolate and drinks and crisps and sandwiches and Google Cupcakes too!
Right, back to the hacking. The morning started off by discussing ideas. I was interested in doing something transportey so I went and discussed ideas with other people interested in the same. There, I met up with Horatio Caine who wanted to make a real-time bus info website for use on mobiles etc. (Currently this isn’t available on the TfL website.) We started work, and later was introduced to James and Lawrence, who arrived later on in the day and decided to work with us too.
We soon had our idea being developed – called, quite jokingly, TFHell – we scraped bus route information and generated the times ourselves, as a proof-of-concept of what could be done quite easily, if Transport for London would release their data on buses like many other councils have around the country. Take a look at Oxford’s Buses for example.
The final day, we narrowly missed launching a demo for our presentation, so we had to work with screenshots of our mockups for our pitch. Since we lacked a demo, this made our project look like it had just been mocked-up for the presentation, and so it didn’t really reflect the effort gone into the project generating the random times etc. However, we won the award for “most likely to be bought by Google”, and now have a cool demo online you can check out here.
The project that won “best in show” was SchoolRoutr 2.0 Beta, an ingenious app which could find the safest route to school from your house, routing around crime locations mentioned in news articles. This was developed by Stephen Mount.
It was quite sad to see the weekend come to a close, it was so cool being in Google and with loads of other people all focused on developing awesome new ideas. In the case of TFHell, I hope we can lobby Transport for London to release the data they have on live buses, and then we can take it further to do a proper launch. Thanks to everyone who came to the weekend, organised it, and to the judges for giving our project an award. (:
There is also talk of another Hack the Government day next May. I’ve pencilled that one into my calendar!
Guitar Hero Zombies?
// August 20th, 2009 // No Comments » // Gaming, Music
If you’re a fan of the Nazi Zombies game mode for Call of Duty: World at War, you might know who Kevin Sherwood and Elena Siegman are. No? Well, they are the awesome people who produced the zombie songs used in the trailers and hidden inside all the DLC zombie maps. Kevin (who goes by the Twitter username @newdnewbs) has launched a joint campaign with WeTheGamerz to try and get the three zombie songs so far into the next Guitar Hero game. Now that would be cool 
I’ve heard there’s a website on the way soon in support of the idea – I recommend you keep your eyes on http://www.zombiesongs.com/ and also @ZombieHeros for updates.
Jordan
WordCamp UK 2009
// July 21st, 2009 // No Comments » // Events, Technology
Well I’ve just about recovered from a superb weekend down in sunny Cardiff for WordCamp UK. It was interesting, to say the least, and I met up with loads of amazing people who I have a lot of respect for in the industry!
Having booked the hotel at the last minute, I headed down early Saturday morning, made it down in about four hours. The morning started with a quick introduction session, going around the 130 people in the room, each giving quick overview of themselves and something they do with WordPress. I thought this worked really well and showed off the many interests and uses people have for WordPress. Surprisingly, it seemed that over half of the room make some living from WordPress too.
One of the notable sessions I attended was Jonny Allbut’s presentation about the WordPress site development process. It was really interesting and quite detailed, and named quite a few useful plugins. Another interesting session was Simon Dickson’s talk on WordPress being used in the government, and the controversy surrounding the launch of Number10.gov.uk on WordPress.
The evening social on the Saturday was really good. It was great to chat with people and I could put names to faces of people I’ve known for quite a while on Twitter and the like! I also had some time to chat with Matt Mullenweg, who was really interesting and called me a ‘natural’ with David Coveney’s camera
There was quite a bit of heated discussion in the wrap-up session when it was suggested that an enterprise-aimed event along the lines of WordCamp should also be run. Personally I don’t like the idea that much because I fear of it alienating the community and taking away the community spirit from WordPress.
However, on the whole, the weekend was a great success and I am looking forward to WordCamp UK 2010, which has been penned in at 17th-18th July 2010. However, I’m sure I’ll see a lot of you around before then, if not in conversation online! Thanks to everyone who organized, presented at, and attended the event!
Jordan
UPDATE: Can’t believe I forgot about the highlight of the weekend – the free bricks mints given out by the hotel. Oh we had a lot of fun with those
Conferences, Conferences, Conferences!
// July 2nd, 2009 // No Comments » // Events
If you hadn’t guessed already… I’m gonna give a quick mention to two conferences coming up:
First off, WordCamp UK is taking place in Cardiff in less than a month’s time! I’m going and I’m rather excited about it – I was planning on going last year but didn’t quite get round to it. There are still a few tickets left I believe and they are well worth it. It’s a 2-day conference with Matt Mullenweg making an appearance too.
Secondly, the PHPNW’09 conference has just opened for ticket sales – it will be held on 10th October 2009 at the Manchester Conference Centre near Manchester Piccadilly station. There is also a Call for Papers and local members of the community are encouraged to give speaking a try. I really enjoyed last year’s conference!
Just thought I’d give a quick shout out! Will you be attending?
eXpansys
// June 25th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology
I’m really ticked off right now. I should be writing a post about how I’ve installed OS X on an Acer Aspire A150 but instead the damn netbook hasn’t even arrived. On Sunday, I ordered a Acer Aspire A150 netbook from Amazon, apparently via eXpansys, and opted for the £5.50 “Express Delivery” option. I thought it’d be great – here by Wednesday or so and I could start playing around with it.
On Tuesday I got an email from Amazon telling me my order had been dispatched. Apparrently I could expect it either yesterday or today. However now I’ve just got an email from eXpansys saying the netbook won’t even be dispatched until tomorrow, quoting “overwhelming demand” for the problem. I’ve never known “Express Delivery” on a small item to take 6 days! Oh, and the only thing I’ll be getting back is a £5 voucher to use on eXpansys’ website. Oh great. I’ll save it for something I could do without for a few weeks.
Ideally I’d like my delivery charge refunded – this is scandalous and even though Amazon say it shipped yesterday and should be here today at the latest, it’s not even been dispatched.
Well I know who I won’t be buying from in future.
Cool Artists You May Never Have Heard Of
// June 24th, 2009 // 2 Comments » // Music
So, I’m a big fan of music, and quite a big fan of some stuff which isn’t entirely mainstream (or that popular nowadays). I’d like to list a few artists I reckon you should check out which you may or may not have heard of, but who I think are quite good for particular reasons (:
Foals
I love Foals a lot, their music is just really inspirational and unique that I love listening to it. It’s described as “math rock” by Wikipedia and the guitar in it is great. Take a listen on Spotify.
Modest Mouse
These guys have been round for a long while but still seem to be on the indie scene. I think some of their songs are really good but I have to agree with someone’s comment last week that their songs can be a tad bit depressing (: Anyhow, I think they’re worth the listen, and they’ve released a ton of albums over the years so there’s tons to listen to! Spotify them.
Maxeen
Yeah, these guys broke up a few years ago, but their debut (and only) album, Hello Echo, has some really cool alt-rock songs on it. If you’re into alt-rock, I recommend you give it a listen! Here’s the link.
Ben Folds Five
I have to say that I think Ben Folds is an amazing piano player and singer, and some of his songs he performed with his group are good, namely One Angry Dwarf and 200 Solemn Faces and I like Jackson Cannery a lot also. Give them a listen too.
Paramore
Hmm I’m on the fence with these. I quite like Misery Business but some of the other songs seem a little Avril Lavigne-ish and a bit too American (: Nevertheless, they’re worth a listen for a song or two!
ELO
I know this one just throws the post title completely out the window… but I really do like their music even if they were rather popular in their hayday. Evil Woman is probably my favourite, the beginning piano part is fantastic. Check it out.
Any other good artists do you think are worth a listen to? I’m quite interested in finding out some more artists, especially those who are quite ‘unknown’ but have an awful lot of potential. Drop a comment
EDIT: As zerojay pointed out on Twitter, I can’t exactly call much of this music mainstream. But it’s still cool music anyhow and I don’t know a ton of people who know these artists.
Nazi Zombies!
// June 20th, 2009 // No Comments » // Gaming
I first off must admit that if this bonus game mode did not exist, I would have sold my copy of Call of Duty: World at War yonks ago. The game itself isn’t something I enjoyed playing – the online annoys me so much and the campaign missions are almost impossible to complete on Veteran… however the bonus Nazi Zombies game mode is so addictive to play that it has effectively saved my copy of the game from being on Game’s pre-owned shelf.
The game mode itself is simple: you’re stranded in a building and you need to stop the zombies from getting in. If they kill you, you can be revived. If you’re all killed, the game ends. However, you can earn points by killing zombies, which you must spend on new weapons, perks and rooms to keep yourself alive and see whether you can get to the next level. The game never ends, it becomes harder each level and soon you’ll find that the zombies quadruple in number and gradually become immune to your weapons.
I really don’t know why it’s so addictive, but it is. My highscore on the original map is to level 14, however I’m sure with a bit of effort I can beat that! Treyarch, the makers of the game (not to be confused with Infinity Ward, who make its predecessor Call of Duty 4 and the upcoming Modern Warfare 2), realised that the mode was taking the gaming world by storm, and so they made it available to everyone – previously you could only play it if you completed the game. They also added a new zombie map called Verrukt, an abandoned German asylum, as part of their best-selling Map Pack 1. Nazi Zombies must be now one of the most popular online co-op game modes of any Xbox 360 game.
And I'm Back!
// June 20th, 2009 // No Comments » // Events, Myself, Technology
After a little bit of downtime (you can blame some bloody Turkish hackers for that), my blog is back on new servers. Everything pretty much was salvaged but I wanted to move it somewhere where security might be a bit tighter so it’s now sitting on what is hopefully a rather secure VPS!
I am hoping to post more often on here now – I get so many ideas for posts and by the time I get round to writing them, I think to myself that the idea has probably been and gone, and that I’ve probably missed the boat with it. Maybe that won’t happen so much in future.
I would like to write more about some of the music I’ve been listening to recently as I’m quite a big fan of indie artists and move through different groups quite quickly. I’m also willing to take some suggestions of new bands to try!
Well it’s 1:30am now and I’m falling asleep. Before I go, just want to send some link-love over to Francis’ new blog – A General Repository. He’s jumped aboard the WordPress bandwagon now and I’m looking forward to reading some of his upcoming posts! Check it out at http://ageneralrepository.wordpress.com/
Jordan
Tuesday by the Boatyard
// May 27th, 2009 // No Comments » // Featured
Yesterday I headed off with Beth and Josh down the Leeds & Liverpool Canal (and the River Douglas) and we took a load of pictures with our SLRs. I’m sticking all mine up on Flickr (I think Beth will be doing that too) and they’re already looking rather good. Looking forward to doing it again sometime (:
Burnout Paradise Island
// May 24th, 2009 // No Comments » // Gaming
I can safely say that Criterion seem to be the only part of EA that I can tolerate, the rest resorting to shoddy DLC practices! However a lot of Criterion’s DLC for Burnout Paradise has actually been free, and the paid-for downloadable content they released has actually been worth it for the most parts. Burnout Paradise has been a game I’ve thoroughly enjoyed playing over the last year and a half, but I’m actually quite ashamed to say I haven’t fully completed it (:
However, the most anticipated DLC for the game has long been the Island. In fact, it was one of the first pieces of DLC to be announced, albeit the last to be released. On Friday they released a trailer which looks immense, and also gave us the release date of June 9th 11th!
Are there any games due for release soon which could be worth buying? (either console) Last game I bought was Saints Row 2 about a month and a half ago, but that is a fantastic game nevertheless.
Update: Got the release date wrong. It is actually June 11th (not the 9th). Apologies! (: