Posts from June 2000

30th June, 10:29 am

For the adults among you, check out pornolize, an amusing little app for transforming web pages.

I was most amused by the contextual humor about PHP and, in the same vein, this customer review on amazon.

In the world of blogs, my picture, "Birth of the world", made it into the scribbles section on katie's site. My day is complete :)

26th June, 11:46 am

Warrens blog is really interesting. I've learnt things I didn't know and I've known him well for some time. Great thing this web.

Major coffee incident: After the weekends appauling chocolate-in-vending-machine shortage, normality had returned. Or so we thought. A possibly facist regieme (probably led by rebecca) has employed a spoon segregation ruling for the internal coffee facilities. More news to come when we get a digital camera. And hopefully less non-sensical words, ho hum.

I was surprised to find that my GQ (geek quotient) is 128, putting me in the top 10% of geek world wide. As if i didn't know that! My geekcode, for those intrested in such things, is on the about me page.

Expect some groovy stuff to appear on the site and in my portfolio in the not-so-distant future. More on that soon.

One of my quotes made it onto grendel's site. My day's work is done.... :)

24th June, 10:01 am

Names are, for reasons that may never become apparent, today's theme. I got sent some run-of-the-mill links to name generators this morning. You too can find out your very own bond-girl name and glam name. I know you want to. Not sure if this is cool or not, but someone I don't really know, but often see has changed his name. Not just a little change, but a whole new name. He was called Oliver Ayre, but he's now Zander Holland. Ineteresting. He legally changed it via deedpoll. Stranger things have happened.

I got so bored of having to manually do lettering for the web that I built my own font. Pixel[6], as it is so cunningly named (go on, you can work it out), can be downloaded for free here. All I ask is that you email me to tell me if you use it.

One of my bestest friends, warren, has started his own weblog site. Check it out. That's enough for today, I'm going home.

23rd June, 9:52 am

So, what news? Mark has finally bought the ultimate vanity item, peronalised plates. But not just any plates. Mark has bought "perlguy" plates. Very cool.

According to the bbc's news release there's going to be a huge £8 investment in BBC Online. That's right, eight whole pounds. This was (unfortunately) corrected shortly afterwards, but was captured for prosperity.

Mat has finally convinced bol.com to send him the 7 seven CDs he ordered at 49p each, by threatening to go to the press. Good show. I think that if a website screws up like that, then they have to oblige their promises and deliver the goods. Bol don't even have a disclaimer to cover such things. Mac warehouse are following in bol's footsteps and offering a mac trackball for £0. Get them while they're cheap, er, free.

On my voyage through the world of blog, there are many noteable sites. It takes alot to actually stick out and portrait of a katie does. Intelligent, informed and honest. Cute too.

Lastly, i got an email from jason today. My life is complete. Or at least my day is :). See ya.

20th June, 10:58 am

Well, I haven't posted for ages. This is for a number of reasons. I didn't post on Thursday because nothing had happened. I didn't post on Friday, Saturday or Sunday because I wasn't online (gasp). I didn't post yesterday because I forgot. So here I am. We've got a lot to catch up on.

Friday's plans to spend the day in London were largly thwarted by Chris when he had to do some emergency cover work in the morning (which I foolishly agreed to help with). Nevertheless, we made it to see Counting Crows at Wembley arena. Of the three times I've seen them this year, this was the best gig by far. They even played my favourite track, Kid Things, the hidden track from their latest album. Great stuff.

Saturday saw me buying a new stereo on impulse. Although I have an extensive CD collection, I have never, to date, owned a CD player. I chilled on down to my local Dixons, before realising that Dixons isn't the best place to buy anything. After a quick re-think, I headed to Tempo in the retail park. After much deliberation (and haggling) I bought a nice little Sony thing. I'm very pleased with it so far and it's great (that is, after my girlfriend figured out how to turn it on).

On Sunday night, we ventured out for dinner, to a Mongolian resturant in town. I'd been there once before but none of my friends had. It was some of the nicest food I've had and it's likely i'll describe it to you in the weeks ahead. Suficed to say that we'll all be returning there again. I'd give you the URL, but they don't have a site (god forbid).

After playing about with file transfers and massive downloads, I finally burnt a linux Redhat CD on friday, ready for installation on the new linux box today. Grendal has now finished installing it and hopefully it will stand up to some rigerous HTTP testing, but that's a job for tomorrow. Today the new RAID tower arrived at work. 250GB of raw storage space. Hopefully it wont take 2 days (over 48 hours) to format like the last, ill fated one did). By the time you read this I hope most of my desktop crap will be living on the Barracudas across the room (high hopes). I have spent most of the day (at work) assembling furniture. Much fun. Don't you hate self-assembly furniture that doesn't have pre-drilled holes? I do.

Finally my package from Think Geek has arrived. I ordered it 18 days ago on express delivery (expense, expense) and it's only just turned up. I suspect that the evil facility in which our office is based has been harbouring it for some time though. Anyway, I've got my new mug (see pic) and T Shirt (which I shall be wearing tomorrow) as well as the O'Rilley mySQL book. Been wanting to read that. I'm thinking about adding a ThinkGeek 'new products' craplet to the site, using their XML product list. That's one for the weekend :::)

14th June, 12:00 pm

Jason Kottke, my hero, is talking about wireless Internet on his site, and how it'll all blow over. Many moons ago, I forecasted axactly the same for WAP (the wireless application protocol). As everyone in my office was running about babbling about WAP this and WAP that, I was sitting calmly, observing the 'bleeding egde' of technology. The fact WAP rhymes with crap didn't help. Then at a meeting with a big mobile company, the top executives declared that they were dropping WAP. Suprise suprise. Not.

My most recent musical purchase has been the special edition Hybrid Album, 'Wider Angle'. Talk about great! This is the best CD I own and that's saying something. To check out more about this band, check their label, ditinct'ive. Shame about the site...

See you later.

13th June, 11:21 am

Today is a day of flash (I can just feel it). Most of today's flash links come from graphics guru darkgarden. First up, the reason why we're going all flash is due to my recent intrest in elastic motion in flash/shockwave.

A great article on elastic motion and much can be found at director-online (here's the second part).

By popular demand, this posting carries a picture. When talking about flash design, we have to always refer back to the grand daddy of good flash, gabocorp. Or so I'm told, because they've been closed for 9 months and counting. Another of the standard 'good' flash sites can be found at dna design, but I can't compare to gabocorp since I've never seen it.

A really groovy site to check out, though still in dev, is the lexus is site.

What I found really interesting was the people out to prove that 'anythgin you can do, I can do better', with flash vs dhtml.

Check out the dhtml and flash versions of some little net toys.

That's all the links for today, save a quick mention for chocolate of the month. great stuff.

In the world of this site, I've opened the forums (at last) and added some more color schemes (by darkgarden). So go and chat till you drop. Or someothing. Catch you tommorrow.

12th June, 12:20 am

Sorry I haven't posted all weekend, but I've been working on the engine for my new game :). Since I'm at a loss for interesting links, I'll give you a brief whirlwind tour of my games building research.

To start with, I was toying with the idea of building my game as an addon for the superb dink smallwood (most info can be found on telefragged). I left this idea behind for a few reasons:

  1. The map editor wont work on win 2000 server
  2. It is quite restrictive in terms of map size

Next I truned to freely available game engines and came across the very odd morfit. What seemed at first to be great (supported every language I might want to use and had awards and such), truned out to be a bit of a scam. You had to display advertising in your game (of their chosing). To top this off, every game had to display their logo on the splash screen, display their loader app to load the world files and the graphics were crap and bitty with a pathetic frame rate (about 20fps on a PIII 700).

At this point I gave up and decided that if you need something doing, do it yourself. Knowing nothing about games programming (other than the stunningness of pants), I set out to learn. I downloaded the Microsoft DirectX SDK (which I moaned about last time) and tried to translate some code into my fave language, delphi.

Unfortunately, delphi 2 doesn't have native support for DirectX, so I needed the headers. I thought briefly about translating them myself, realised that was a silly idea, and started searching. To this end, I found the rather spiffing project jedi who are a bunch of people who translate headers for delphi. Armed with these files and having read all about the pythian project, I started coding.

Little did I know that it was actually harder than I thought to even get DirectX fired up, I searched again and came across the best site of the weekend, gamedev. Packed with resources which actually helped, I was soon on my way to creating a working demo.

Enough of games, with just enough time to moan (hehe). A few people have been visiting the site, and a few of these people have been voting in the polls, but no one has commented on the news. Is it me or something?

As for what the game is all about, you'll just have to be patient.

9th June, 10:31 am

I urge you all to check out benbrown, a particularly cool weblog I came across. Unlike most 'traditional' weblogs, filled with real life truma and thoughts, hi is entirly fictional. I love it.

Is it me, or it the current deepend site just crap? They may well have won loads of stuff at the bd&ad awards, but their own site sucks. Bring back the old work of HTML art, I say.

This site (far superior to deepend. or something), now how lovely interactive polls. Nice. Please follow the polls link in the hope that we can solve that age old dilema - which fish are best?

Last link for today is loobylu, a rather groovy personal site, with some of the nicest cartoon-olgy i've seen on the web recently.

Sorry, no pictures again today, but I'm hoping to spend the day in London next friday with my man Chris when we go to see Counting Crows (for the third time this year). We'll be taking lots of pictures on our fun day out, so expect some to appear here in about a week's time.

I've started work on the computer game project that I devised with my cousin, Squirrell. Still very hush-hush, but it looks like we might eventually get something working.

Feel free to ignore the following rant: The Microsoft DirectX SDK is a 128MB download, require 204MB to unzip, but only installs 103MB of files. Whyw why why why why? Microsoft deserve to be split into pieces [ or at least the person who made the installer does :::) ].

Talk to you all later - bye!

8th June, 10:20 am

Hurrah, it's the end of the day. With the end of the day comes the log entry. I'm still pretty impressed with the stapler today, but not enough to repost the picture.

In the world of the web it's been a fairly slow day. Last night I was introduced to the beakbeat era website (purveyeurs of fine music). I very much recommend buying their album, Ultra-Obscence, because it's just fantastic. You'll probably find it on amazon.

Fun of the day came from reading the landover baptist website, a not-so-serious religous-satire web site, which cleverly points out the ridiculousness of modern extremist religions. But who am I to judge.

I stumbled over netbaby world today. It's got that really neat k10k button feel. I started my own team, but I have utterly no idea why. If someone could please explain to me what it's all about, i'd really appriciate it: cal@iamcal.com.

Lastly comes refract-red. I still can't make my mind up as to whether it's any good, or just a plain wanabe-guru type arty site.

In terms of this site, you can now comment on my ramblings and a disscussion board may appear in the not-so-distant future. I'll also be beefing up the index with futher toys and annoyances. But hey, all will be revealed soon enough.

7th June, 9:52 am

Hey, I'm back.

My attention today has been largely drawn towards this strange contraption on my desk. It's a magical-stapling-device which uses it's battrey powered brain to detect when you put some paper in it. It springs into life and puts a staple through. Hey presto. Don't understand why it's so interesting, but I've delegated myself as office staple chief for the moment.

In the world of design and all things web, kottke.org has a link to wireframe, one of the nicest pieces of flash i've seen since mtv2. But it's all very familiar anyway. The image on the splash reminds me of plasticbag and even of the orginal iconfactory. The 'vague polygon' looks seems to be in at the moment (following the death of the horizontal stripes phase, pioneered well by neoplanet. Anyway, I digress.

I'm still extremely keen on the 'chunkiness' (or 4 pixel border) of mozilla, which I recently found matched at devshed. devshed also seems to be quite usful from a resource point of view. Maybe I'll stop using WebMonkey. I'm obviously joking.

5th June, 7:44 am

Hard at work at the digital rockface. Or something. Not much has changed, as far as looks are concerned, but the backend is starting to come together nicely.

The admin interface is still lacking anything more than the new section though, so I'm still fighting with phpMyAdmin to get any other updates in.

Looking at sites like kottke.org and hapta.com has really inspired me to get this site complete and to have something to show for the work I've been doing.

In other news (that sounds so dumb), My perl books have arrived from Amazon.com and are extremely good. Larry Wall is a genius. But anyway...

3rd June, 10:44 am

I've created the news system. Nothing more to say right now, but rest assured that I will try to update this news section as often as possible.

About

This is the personal website of Cal Henderson, Slack co-founder & CTO.

I give occasional talks, write code and sometimes articles.

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