Random Thoughts

Magnetic Scrolls: A Interview with Michael Bywater

Steve Lacey — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 23:17:27 -0800

Here's a little gem I just found on the interwebs: an interview with Michael Bywater. Michael is an astounding wordsmith; writer of my favourite columns in Punch and allegedly slept with my boss. Not my current boss, mind you.

Some gems:

My main memories are of course of Anita. And her bull terrier, Murdoch. And of the chaotic offices in the ancient and haunted part of London called The Borough, a warren of streets and alleys on the south side of London Bridge...

and...

Even things like Myst - which, hell, was just a droopy post-hippie HyperCard stack with a rather good music loop -- were way below the level of Magnetic Scrolls or Infocom in narrative terms. So the era came to an end.

My time at Magnetic Scrolls was a wonderful time of my life and I enjoyed every moment of it. Hopefully this article will give you some sense of what it was like for the non-engineering folks who passed our way.

Read it over here.

Bringing Nothing To The Party

Steve Lacey — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 22:59:51 -0800

Paul Carr's wonderful tell-all book Bringing Nothing To The Party is now available as a free ebook.

You can read about the process about bringing it out as a free ebook at techcrunch, download it directly here, or read it online via Google Docs...

It's a great story about startup culture in the UK and the jounalist's involvement in it.

Taken directly from the Amazon editorial review:

Bringing Nothing To The Party, is the bizarre, hilarious and nauseatingly true story of a unique group of hard-partying high-achieving young entrepreneurs and one man's attempts to join them, whatever the cost.

As a journalist covering the first dot.com boom, Paul Carr spent his life meeting the world's most successful young Internet entrepreneurs. And in doing so he came to count many of them amongst his closest friends.

These friendships meant he was not only able to attend their press conferences and speak at their events, but also get invited to their ultra-exclusive networking events in London and New York, get drunk at their New Year parties in their luxury penthouse apartments and tag along when they threw impromptu parties at strip clubs after raising tens of millions of pounds in funding.

In 'Bringing Nothing to the Party', Paul uses his unparalleled (and totally uncensored) access to tell the real story of a unique group of hard-partying, high-achieving young entrepreneurs - and his attempts to join them, whatever the cost.

Recommended.

Congrats Didi!

Steve Lacey — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 23:54:49 -0800

Not only is Didi one of the smartest people it's been my fortune to know (we went to college together), he now heads the "Greek Ministry of Finance General Secretariat of Information Systems".

And he's posting government tech issues out in the open.

Professor to Greece's CIO. Wow, what a job change :-)

I Am Not A Number!

Steve Lacey — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:58:32 -0800

Why had I not heard of this before!

The Prisoner, one of the best TV series of all time has been remade and starts a week from Sunday on AMC.

Sadly, I just noted that Patrick McGoohan, the original Number Six, died earlier this year.

As a kid, I visited Portmerion a number of times. I loved the series - I have various books and photo books, I've have had posters on the walls of my office (when I had an office...), etc...

I can't wait!

Be seeing you...

StackOverflow DevDays

Steve Lacey — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 10:59:51 -0800

Right now I'm at Benaroya Hall for StackOverflow's DevDays. So far it's pretty good. Joel started off the day with a great talk, followed by Scott Hanselman.

Scott (a great speaker btw), was demoing ASP.Net MVC - very impressive. He also noted that beta 2 of Visual Studio 10 just went live for download.

After Scott finished his talk it was announced that Microsoft would upgrade everyone's laptop memory to the maximum out in the lobby. They have boxes of RAM and a load of screwdrivers.

And not only for Windows laptops. They have memory for Macs too - a very nice gesture.

However, it did strike me as amusing that not minutes after announcing Visual Studio 10 beta 2, Microsoft was offering to upgrade the memory in everyones laptops...

Anyhow, up next is Rory Blyth on iPhone development...

Lisp in Javascript

Steve Lacey — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 16:58:27 -0800

I just posted a little lisp implementation, written in javascript. This has been hanging around for a long time (I wrote it almost two years ago), so it was finally time to get it out there.

This was an interesting exercise and is almost guaranteed not to be bug-free...

You can find it over on github.

Note that this uses the wonderful parser generator by Jan Max Meyer to generate the actual parser.

C++ FTW!

Steve Lacey — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:36:50 -0800

In an attempt to start posting on this blog again rather than everywhere else (friendfeed, twitter, facebook, etc...), I present you with the following:

Enjoy.

Too Fast

Steve Lacey — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 01:44:01 -0800

It's amazing how quickly we go from here...

To here...

Sometimes life just needs to slow down.

Hey! I Wrote That!

Steve Lacey — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 00:06:14 -0800

Now that it's shipped you can see a little bit of what I've been working on.

All that operator stuff? Ahem, me :-) Enjoy.

Actually though, most of what I've been working on is behind the scenes and hard to actually point to, but the operator stuff? Yup, me.

Google really is cool. I've been working on backend infrastructure stuff, but had the idea to take advantage of some of it and add the operator stuff to the docs UI - the team that owned the docs UI loved the idea, so I built it and out it goes. This is just a little part of what they're up to. As the docs blog post says, expect more soon.

Google Seattle/Kirkland Is Hiring!

Steve Lacey — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 22:59:28 -0800

Well, we've always been hiring, but we're kicking it into high gear right now. We're looking for dev and test, so if you're interested send me some email (or give me a call).

Google Seattle/Kirkland. (Btw, I took most of the photos on that site...)

However, if you're a "sourcer" or "representing a high quality candidate", please don't call me :-)

My Daughter Owns Me

Steve Lacey — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 21:34:17 -0800

When my daughter (my little three year old baby) got home, she informed me that she had a learnt, in her words, Taekwondo, at daycare today.

So not only does she totally own me already (she's a girl, she's my daughter, aka a dangerous combination), she's also going to be able to totally kick my ass.

Sigh. Daughters. They rock :-)

Augmented Reality

Steve Lacey — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:43:10 -0800

Pretty interesting. Students at Georgia Tech created a game that maps a 3D view onto whatever the camera in the phone-like device is seeing.

ARhrrrr is an augmented reality shooter for mobile camera-phones. The phone provides a window into a 3d town overrun with zombies. Point the camera at our special game map to mix virtual and real world content. Civilians are trapped in the town, and must escape before the zombies eat them! From your vantage point in a helicopter overhead, you must shoot the zombies to clear the path for the civilians to get out. Watch out though as the zombies will fight back, throwing bloody organs to bring down your copter. Move the phone quickly to dodge them. You can also use Skittles as tangible inputs to the game, placing one on the board and shooting it to trigger an explosion.

They produced a nice video too...

Sweet idea.

Ignore Everybody

Steve Lacey — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 23:19:48 -0800

A few weeks ago, Hugh MacLeod, whose blog Gaping Void is a never-ending source of inspiration announced that his book Ignore Everybody was available for pre-order on Amazon.

Naturally I went ahead and ordered it.

A few days later he announced on his Crazy, Deranged Fools email list that he'd send a signed copy to the first thousand people who'd pre-ordered the book.

Genius.

Today my signed copy arrived and my other copy will find it's way into the hands of someone else who needs some inspiration. Or a kick in the arse. One of the two.

Anyhow, the book rocks! I started reading it this evening and was very happy to see that chapter seven starts with my favourite piece of Hugh's writing...

Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.

Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the "creative bug" is just a wee voice telling you, "I'd like my crayons back, please."

It inspired me.

So I went ahead and mashed me up some Hugh to create my own cube grenade. You can find Hugh's original here.

It'll be going up in the office tomorrow.

Thanks Hugh (and I hope you don't mind ;-)

What Would You Like Me To Write About?

Steve Lacey — Fri, 22 May 2009 10:25:25 -0800

Having thought about my last post for a bit I thought I'd ask you, dear reader, what would you like me to write about?

And at the same time I get to try out the nifty Google Docs Forms thingy. All responses end up in my spreadsheet and won't be shared with anyone (until I write about it, that is).

Let me know!

I'm Such A Laggard

Steve Lacey — Fri, 22 May 2009 00:32:58 -0800

Why has this blog been so infrequently updated?

Many reasons really, but mostly because I'm hellishly busy at work and probably 80% of the content that I'd post here is now ending up on FriendFeed.

I should probably add the little FriendFeed widget here so you can see what I'm up to over there...

Anyhow, every now and again, long form blog post ideas keep popping into my head, so I've been keeping track of them and hope to find some time to do some serious writing soon.

I promise...

And yes, there will be kid related posts. Did I tell you about the phenomenally smelly poop my daughter produced this evening? I'm so proud.

It's My Birthday!

Steve Lacey — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 23:20:39 -0800

I'm 41.

How the hell did that happen?!

Tick tock.

A Fun Afternoon And A Podcast Appearance

Steve Lacey — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 23:18:18 -0800

This afternoon was a fun one. This kids and I headed out to Seattle to check out the dinosaurs at the Burke Museum in Seattle (sadly, no photos allowed... grrr...) and then the the Center for Wooden Boats.

When we got back and the kids were chilling with their mate SpongeBob, I hopped online and had a quick scan of FriendFeed. I notice that Phil, recently back in the UK from SXSW tweeted that Paul Nicholls (aka podcastpaul) was doing his weekly podcast live on UStream.

Interesting side note - Phil and I did a podcast together a fair while ago.

But I digress.

I popped over to UStream and got a really nice welcome in the chat from Paul. We hadn't connected for a couple of years since my podcast habit lapsed and Britcaster went the way of the dodo.

Anyhow, he suggested that I pop onto Skype for a quick live chat on his podcast!

Oddly, I didn't have Skype installed anywhere anymore, but the download and install was quick and painless on the Mac. Handily I also had a USB headset floating around and as quick as a flash I was on a podcast for the first time in over two years!

Sweet! It was a particularly nice moment as Paul's podcast is one of the very few that I listen to regularly.

Time to get podcasting again!

So head over to Paul's site, and check it out!

Rock And Roll!

Steve Lacey — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 23:05:47 -0800

We just spent a very fun evening at Andy and Jo's place. Eight adults, seven kids, pizza, beer and Rock Band!

The hightlight - Dad on guitar, daughter on drums.

Rock on!

Thanks to my darling wife for capturing the image...

Watchmen

Steve Lacey — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 21:09:36 -0800

I was planning on waiting to go and see Watchmen with some friends, but I had a confession to make to them today - I had gone to see the movie at 9pm in Bellevue last night.

It rocked.

Hard.

The reviews have been pretty mixed. But me, a diehard Watchmen fan, enjoyed every minute. The time just flew by.

It was a perfect rendition of a masterpiece comic-book work - the characters (especially Dr. Manhattan and Rorschach) were just as I imagined them 21 years ago when I first read the book.

Anyhow, just go and see it.

Here's a little taste:

Btw, the star of the film (well, according to most of the whispering and tittering that was going on in the theatre) seemed to be Dr. Manhattan's, err, appendage. It seemed like it appeared in almost every scene.

The End Of An Era - Flight Sim Is No More

Steve Lacey — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 20:05:56 -0800

It really does appear that Microsoft has shutdown the ACES game studio and axed the entire staff. A lot of my friends are now looking for something else to do...

Microsoft Flight Simulator is dead.

Redmond, Washington-based ACES Studio, the Microsoft-owned internal group behind the venerable Microsoft Flight Simulator series, has been heavily affected by Microsoft's ongoing job cuts.

Development sources have told Gamasutra that a large portion of the dev house's staff has been let go - with multiple reports indicating that the entire Flight Simulator team has been axed.

It started unfolding earlier today when some collegues mentioned that the Microsoft cuts had started. I went to check out techmeme and noticed that all lot of the action seemed to be focussed around the Entertainment & Devices division. And then, little by little, it all started unfolding on Facebook...

The studio has gone. The products are no more.

I feel a little stunned, but can't imagine what the folks who were working in the studio up until this morning are feeling. There were people on the team that have worked on FlightSim since it's subLOGIC days. Did you know that FlightSim is (or rather was) Microsoft's oldest product, in continual development (for the PC) from 1982 through to today?

The community seems to have noticed and popular sites such as AVSim and Sim Outhouse are waking up to the new reality. Hundreds of thousands of people just had their hobby put on hold.

So what now for Flight Simulation? I guess it's a good day for X-Plane, though I think I'd really like to see FlightGear, an OpenSource flight simulator, ahem, take off...