Imaginary Roots

Twipestry

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 12:39:41 America/Los_Angeles

Wow, long time, no update, sorry! Expect a full update soon, but for now, here's a project I've been working on over the last few days. It's a Twitter mashup called Twipestry (Twitter + Tapestry), which produces a patchwork of images based on keywords extracted from tweets. It's quite good fun! Enjo...

Resonance

Tue, 3 Mar 2009 09:11:55 America/Los_Angeles

Dave Ellis, a friend and band mate of mine, has just posted this video of me recording a guitar solo for one of his solo projects. Enjoy! ...

Africa Laughing?

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 16:22:34 America/Los_Angeles

Has anyone else noticed the laughing over the drum intro to Africa by Toto? I heard it on my way home today, I had headphones in and the surroundings were very quiet, which helped pick out the rather quiet second or two of laughter during the first few bars. A quick Google search revealed no-one els...

Cat or Cactus?!

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 18:04:14 America/Los_Angeles

I've just launched this new mini-site, which is a Flash game I've been developing for a while. It's a simple premise: you're given a picture and you decide whether it is a Cat or a Cactus. Simples! And yes, it's meant to look and sound as silly as it looks and sounds. http://catorcactus.imaginaryro...

So cool!

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 20:29:09 America/Los_Angeles

Check this out! http://legoofdoom.blogspot.com/...

Portfolio

Sun, 8 Feb 2009 18:31:28 America/Los_Angeles

I've updated the portfolio page, not with adding any more project (just yet, a couple are on the horizon...), but by infusing it with some cool Javascript and AJAX. The script is all inobtrusive, so it should work for people without Javascript, but obviously they'll be missing out. My only issue wit...

Curse of the Warwick Start-Up

Wed, 4 Feb 2009 15:31:21 America/Los_Angeles

Strangely remiscent of what happened last summer, a Warwick Start-Up has been just about beaten to the post today. LasYou, which claims to present you with a map showing the location of all your friends who have the mobile application installed, will be launching today, as well as Google Latitude, w...

On Design and Being Annoyed

Wed, 4 Feb 2009 10:42:57 America/Los_Angeles

Sometimes, people really annoy me. This time, it's a small subset of student "designers" who produce promotional material for societies. Our student's union has a very active set of societies, and as a result campus is generally always littered with posters advertising socials, events and various ot...

Tomb Raider: Underworld

Sun, 1 Feb 2009 16:42:38 America/Los_Angeles

After about a month of gameplay, I've completed Tomb Raider: Underworld. This is quite a milestone for me, since it's the first (real) game I've completed in quite a long time, and I believe is the first in the Tomb Raider series I've completed since the very first one - although I haven't played th...

Ch-ch-changes

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 19:40:22 America/Los_Angeles

I recently decided to take quite a bold move and change my computing setup. For about 3 years I've used two computers, my MacBook Pro for work on the move and an iMac for work at home. Increasingly, I found I did most of my work on my laptop, since I didn't have to worry about transferring files if ...

On Work and Music

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:45:45 America/Los_Angeles

Wow, I've kind of neglected this haven't I? Sorry! I've been really busy recently with my project. I've been having loads of issues with Seg Faults and Memory Leaks and the like taking up pretty much all my time. I'll post up a lovely debrief once it's all over and done with. There's about 5 weeks ...

Partial LaTeX Word Count + TextMate

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:09:21 America/Los_Angeles

Long time no post, sorry! Here's just a quick one. I've been working on some essays and reports for uni in LaTeX, and the criteria for the work is usually that it is within a certain word limit, discounting titles, appendices, references etc. So I thought the easiest way to do this would be to have...

Guitar Pro

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 09:57:42 America/Los_Angeles

I've been using Guitar Pro for quite a while now, a good couple of years, and have had very few issues with it. That is, before last night. I tabbed out a section I'd written for Drongo, and all was good. Because of compatibility/different software issues, when I send things round to the band, I sen...

NSFileBrowser

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 16:18:53 America/Los_Angeles

I've been working for the last couple of days on a project for my band Drongo Sealion Magic. We use a lot of samples in our music, all of which we store as MP3s on a laptop, and we wanted a simple playing mechanism which was more responsive than something like QT or iTunes. Unfortunately, we didn't ...

Scrabble is Big!

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 11:20:56 America/Los_Angeles

I ran some simulations over the weekend, and I've found some interesting statistics I thought I'd share with you. After 10,000 simulated games, the average number of moves per game was 23, and the average number of choices per move (i.e. the number of moves you could actually make at each move) is ...

Coincidence Averted?

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 21:58:55 America/Los_Angeles

So the problem appears to be solved. The issue was that on waking from sleep, the laptop would crash. Then, when trying to start it up again, it would not even get as far as the Apple logo screen before failing. The solution to this was to hold the power button until the light flashed and a high pic...

Coincidence

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 21:11:20 America/Los_Angeles

Tomorrow, Apple are set to be launching new MacBooks and MacBook Pros. Today, my MacBook Pro broke. I think the gods at Apple are trying to tell me something......

Specification

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 13:02:47 America/Los_Angeles

One deadline out of the way! We had to hand in the specification last Thursday, and so here's a bit of an update on where I am with the project. Firstly, the goals of the project. Mainly, this is going to be a reasearch project, and so I will be looking a lot into the existing methodologies in comp...

jPod

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 00:51:43 America/Los_Angeles

I just finished watching the TV series of jPod. I absolutely loved the book, and have read it many times over. The TV show, whilst a bit rocky to begin with, turned out to be FANTASTIC. AND THEN THEY CANCELLED IT. The last episode ends SO abruptly, it hurts. I don't know if all the cliffhangers were...

iPod Touch First Impressions

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 15:40:27 America/Los_Angeles

Yesterday I received my 8GB iPod Touch - which I was very excited about! I wanted an iPhone (obviously...) but O2 wouldn't let me upgrade. Since we're thinking of going into the iPhone App business, I thought I'd get a Touch to tide me over until my contract runs out next year. So what do I think o...

Adrian Belew

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 11:13:30 America/Los_Angeles

...is my latest musical obsession. This man has done everything! I've been a huge Krimson fan for a long time, but have never ventured into the Belew stuff until now. I ordered Side Four (his latest live album with the Power Trio - more on them later) and it arrived today (complete with US Customs l...

SQL and Normalisation

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 17:46:55 America/Los_Angeles

I was just having a discussion with a co-worker about some SQL they were doing. They had 3 tables, which looked something like this: user( user_id, ... ); pages( page_id, ... ); comments( comment_id, user_id, page_id, ... ); So that people can comment on both users and pages. The user_id and pag...

Cuppuccino Part 2

Mon, 8 Sep 2008 11:39:20 America/Los_Angeles

I spent some of this weekend playing with Cappuccino, the new Javascript Web App framework from 280North. And I must say, I really like it. It's basically an attempt at a web port of the Cocoa framework, and to bridge the gap a bit more between the two it has it's own language, Objective-J, which i...

Cuppuccino

Fri, 5 Sep 2008 15:02:29 America/Los_Angeles

http://cappuccino.org/ I've been excited about this for a while, and now it's here! I'm still very excited - can't wait to get my hands in there and build something with it....

Lessons Learnt, Part 1

Wed, 3 Sep 2008 14:28:19 America/Los_Angeles

As I mentioned yesterday, we killed our startup. I've been thinking a lot about the things I've learnt from the experience, and after yesterday's post about starting work immediately, something else has come to mind. I'll be the first to admint that I'm not a great graphic designer - though I do en...

Death of a Start Up

Tue, 2 Sep 2008 12:53:21 America/Los_Angeles

Advice: if you get a good idea, DROP EVERYTHING. Do it. Do it now. Don't sex, sleep, eat, drink, dream until it's done. Why? Because the moment you think of the idea the window of opportunity starts to close. Unfortunately for us, the window closed just as we were thinking about leaving private beta...

OS X Mouse Following Issues

Mon, 1 Sep 2008 12:36:37 America/Los_Angeles

I've found a problem on my iMac which is a bit odd. OS X doesn't seem to be able to trace my mouse movements. This manifests itself in a number of issues, some of which are outlines below: The dock doesn't magnify When a select a menu, and then hover over the options, the options don't turn blue...

Coda

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:12:51 America/Los_Angeles

You may know that I'm a Mac user, and that for my web development I use Coda, which I believe to be the best web development IDE available. I believed this even though it had quite a few niggling flaws and some features I would have loved to see. Yesterday, they added one of them - Subversion, built...

Home Recording Plus Valve Amp

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:30:15 America/Los_Angeles

For a long time we've been saying we would record Drongo Sealion Magic, which was a band we put together earlier this year. Due to the complexity of the song, we thought it would be best to record the parts at home in our own time. I did, however, really want to use my Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier, wh...

Bug bug buggy

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:26:18 America/Los_Angeles

Those of you that know me will know I very rarely play games. I bought a PS2 last year and hardly used it. I do, however, have a strange obsession with the Tony Hawks series. I was massively obsessed with the original when it first came out, but never got any of the others until I got the PS2 last y...

Imaginary Roots Lives!

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 16:30:04 America/Los_Angeles

So I'd been putting off renewing the domain because it doesn't expire until September. I came to renew it today and found that I couldn't! GoDaddy were wating to expire it, and wouldn't let me renew it. Apparently, with .co.uk domains, if you don't renew them before 20 days BEFORE the expiration dat...

Nom nom nom

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 09:58:53 America/Los_Angeles

http://www.one-77.com/ I wonder how much my kidneys are worth......

MeejaCake

Sun, 3 Aug 2008 10:02:13 America/Los_Angeles

http://www.meejacake.com Watch this space....

Historical Interest?

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 09:36:23 America/Los_Angeles

In my random net based trvellings yesterday I came across this site - the UK Delorean Owners Club. Why? Why not? Anyway, this site tells us that, when importing a Delorean into the UK, HM Customs treat it as an 'item of historical interest', and so you pay less tax. How cool is that! Maybe it's the...

Cuil vs Google

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 11:55:35 America/Los_Angeles

I've just spent a short while playing with Cuil, the new search engine that's supposed to be both bigger and better than Google. The main thing they tout is a bigger web page index than Google. This may well be true, but it would appear that the index may contain many more pages which have little re...

100 Users!

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 23:47:32 America/Los_Angeles

We've just reached 100 users on the Blaccu Weather Report Facebook App! How cool is that? I honestly didn't think anyone would use it when I made it, so it's really cool that people are actually adding it. Thanks guys! In other news, I've set up an RSS feed for this blog, incase any of you out ther...

Mondrian

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:07:35 America/Los_Angeles

I've just put up a new project I've been working on for a while (almost a year, infact...). It's a small Flash app which randomly generates and then lets you edit a picture in the style of Piet Mondrian and his famous compositions. At some point in the near future I hope to add in the functionality ...

New Design

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 12:44:36 America/Los_Angeles

As you can probably tell, I've put a new design up. It's been long overdue, and I'm really pleased with this. Nice and simple. This has been done to coincide with the incorporation of Imaginary Roots, so we're now officially Imaginary Roots Ltd - how exciting is that? Hope you enjoy the new design!...

FB: Updating the Profile Box

Tue, 8 Jul 2008 14:29:28 America/Los_Angeles

Further to my previous post regarding updating the user's profile box on a Facebook application, I found this site which shows you how to update everyone's profile content in one go. Of course, this means its Asynchronous, which isn't exactly what we want, but it appears this is the best Facebook al...

Blaccu Weather Report Part Trois

Thu, 3 Jul 2008 13:29:15 America/Los_Angeles

I've made the facebook app - you can sign up to it here. It's pretty basic at the moment, and I need to do a lot of research into how to get the weather to properly update on the profile page, but it works alright for now. The main issue is with automatic updates on the profile page. As far as I can...

Ta-Da List

Wed, 2 Jul 2008 15:39:17 America/Los_Angeles

For a long time I've been looking for a simple To-Do list thing for my desktop. I've used Task Paper, and wasn't too impressed. What I really wanted was Ta-Da list for the desktop, so I thought I would make a dashboard widget for it. Especially since this would involve making an API for it, which wo...

Blaccu Weather Report Part Deux

Tue, 1 Jul 2008 22:52:19 America/Los_Angeles

I've just spent some time re-doing the Blaccu Weather Report. It now uses the Google Weather API (details of which can be found here), which, although is much neater than the Yahoo! one, doesn't have a defined set of return states, which made generating the Oli phrases a tad more difficult. I've gon...

Blaccu Weather Report

Tue, 1 Jul 2008 10:42:00 America/Los_Angeles

A year ago (almost to the day, I think) I built the Blaccu Weather Report for a laugh. I looked at its analytics today, and although it's not getting much traffic, it turns out that it's number 1 on Google for "oli williams family guy", and is on the first page when you search for "oli williams" by ...

Is Scrabble Greedy?

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:03:44 America/Los_Angeles

I was killing some time playing Scrabulous, and I started thinking about strategies. I don't really regard Scrabble as being a particularly strategy based game, but there is a certain element of it to the game - and that strategy can help you win. So this lead me to think: Is the best strategy to...

IE Italics and Floats: What were you thinking?

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:19:57 America/Los_Angeles

I just came across the most ridiculous big ever. I had a page which had a number of similar blocks: each had an image floated left and some text next to it. One of the blocks of text had some italic text in it, specified by an tag. For some reason, the whole block of these was rendered be...

Installing src.rpm files

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 16:47:12 America/Los_Angeles
So I'm a bit of a Linux n00b. I can find my way around the system, but I don't have vast expanses of knowledge regarding how to use it properly like a normal Computer Scientist should. So Google normally helps me out when I'm trying to do bits of server admin at work. Unfortunately, this is one thin...

Portfolio Update

Sun, 5 Aug 2007 19:18:10 America/Los_Angeles
I have added another website onto my portfolio - a little fun one I made just to entertain myself and a handful of other people. If you've seen Family Guy, you will probably get it. Essentially, it tells you the current weather of the city you're in, but in the style of Oli Williams and his Blacc...

Hello!

Sat, 4 Aug 2007 12:56:00 America/Los_Angeles
First post! Exciting, no? So this is my blog. Hopefully I'm going to fill it with lovely things that I find interesting, things I find whilst I'm at uni or at work, or out and about generally. Normally, these things will be quite geeky, such is my nature. Hopefully, some of you will find it inter...