Hacker Origin Story, Raspberry Pi, and the ZX Spectrum One of the fun things about working for Google is that from time to time interesting people come into the office to give talks. We had Richard Dawkins a few weeks ago, who gave an interesting if… uncompromising talk. Yesterday we had one of the founders of the Raspberry Pi
Blogger New (ish) Year, New (ish) Blog 2011 was an interesting year for me. A lot changed. I turned 30. After 10 years of residency I moved away from Edinburgh, a city I love dearly, and took a job in London. With Google [/blog/tags/google]. As a result, I no longer work with Autonomous Underwater Vehicles
Procedural Landscape Generation Simplifying the Landscape At the end of the last post [/2010/10/22/now-in-eye-popping-3d] I wrote about the actual implementation of my Clockwork Aphid project, I said the next step was going to be display simplification. At that point I'd generated a few landscapes which were just starting barely starting to
Procedural Landscape Generation Revisiting the Language Issue Some time ago, I wrote a series [/2010/10/09/youre-speaking-my-language-baby-part-1-introduction] of [/2010/10/10/youre-speaking-my-language-baby-part-2-java] posts [/2010/10/11/youre-speaking-my-language-baby-part-3-c] about [/2010/10/12/youre-speaking-my-language-baby-part-4-objective-c] language [/2010/10/13/youre-speaking-my-language-baby-part-5-conclusion] choice for my Clockwork Aphid project. In the end I decided to start the project in Java, this being
Hacker Dogfood, Nom Nom Nom Dog food, the common noun, is reasonably self explanatory (pro tip: it's food for dogs). Dogfood the verb or dogfooding the verbal noun, though, might require a little bit of explanation. At the root of it is this: if you make dog food, you should feed it to
Hacker Full Nerd II: Nerd Harder It seems that people really enjoyed my post about the computer history museum [/2011/06/03/in-which-i-go-full-nerd-2]. At the time I wrote it, I was worried that it might constitute just a little bit too much nerd, so I held back on my initial impulse to put in more pictures
Hacker A Different Kind of Tourism If a person were to walk from downtown Mountain View (in so far as Mountain View has a town to be down of) to the Computer History Museum, and then kept going, they might find themselves wandering into Shoreline Business Park. This is where you would find the silicon in
Hacker ...In Which I Go Full Nerd Jet lag is a funny thing. Right now it actually seems to be working in my favour; it's managed to knock a couple of bad habits out of me. Specifically, these happen to be the not entirely unrelated habits of going to bed too late (then making it
Hacker This Morning. You're going to have to wait a little while longer for the Computer History Museum, Silicon Valley Wandering and San Francisco based updates I had in mind, since I still haven't found a good way of adding the images I wanted to. In the meantime, I
Hacker Fourteen Days in the Valley I can see the mountains, but I suppose that's only to be expected. I am in Mountain View, after all. As of today, I'm in Silicon Valley for my "noogler training," something which most companies would just refer to as an induction. At Google,
Hacker Day One This is going to be short. Suffice to say: almost everything you've heard about working for Google is true. That being the case, there is no slide in my office. I'm told they have them in Mountain View and Zurich, however, and I'll apparently
Hacker s/@seebyte\.com/@google\.com/g Yes. That's right. I did it. I used a sed [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sed] expression as post title. I've been very quiet as of late, though in my defence I've been very busy for a few months. In the middle of that
Procedural Landscape Generation Features So, in my last post [/2011/03/14/brave-new-worlds] I remarked that for procedurally generated landscapes to be interesting, they would need features. But what sort of features was I talking about? Population centres, in particular, tend to to be found close to certain kinds of... things. The first of
Hacker The Day Job Part 2: Let's get SAUC-E! If you know when I started my PhD you'll be aware that it took quite some time for me to finish it. There are various reasons for this. One is that I spent quite a bit of time working and getting industrial experience during it. The other is
Procedural Landscape Generation The Elephant in the Room Since I haven't been able to do any actual work on my Clockwork Aphid project as of late, I suppose I may as well talk about the background behind it a little more. Those who talk about it the most are the ones doing it the least, and
Hacker The Day Job: Autonomous Underwater Vehicles If you're reading this blog and don't actually know me in the real world then you might be wondering "who actually is this guy?" and possibly even "what is it that he actually does, aside from starting to talk about procedural landscape generation,
Hacker The Boardroom That important thing I was talking about before [/2010/11/03/a-short-note-regarding-the-deafening-silence]? It was my PhD viva, and it happened last Friday. Remember, remember, the fifth of November, indeed. It's possibile that given time I'll look back upon it as a positive experience (as many others
Blogger A Short Note Regarding the Deafening Silence For a while there it really looked as though I was on top of this whole blogging lark, didn't it? The problem is that writing this blog (and to an even greater extent, working on the Clockwork Aphid project) doesn't feel like procrastinating. It feels like
Hacker What todo? The return train ride after a visit to my parents' house is, if anything, more pleasant that the outward journey. This is not least, of course, because it ends in Edinburgh, rather than Doncaster*. Be that as it may, this is perhaps a good time to pick up the
Procedural Landscape Generation Fractal Errata Some of the particularly sharp/anal ones amongst you might have noticed that while the technique for generating fractal lanscapes I previously described [/2010/10/19/youre-speaking-my-landscape-baby] works (and works well), it's not 100% correct. Specifically, the fact that it uses the the same scaling factor for nodes
Procedural Landscape Generation Now In Eye Popping 3D! It took a little bit of fighting with bugs that weren't showing up in the 2D view, and a bit of time to figure out what was going on with the lighting system in JME [http://www.jmonkeyengine.org/], but I finally got the 3D display of the
Procedural Landscape Generation Some Random Landscapes I don't have any 3D views of the fractal landscapes I've been making [/2010/10/19/youre-speaking-my-landscape-baby] to show you yet, as I'm still working through the different implementation options. I did get a little distracted with the 2D views of the landscape this
Procedural Landscape Generation You're Speaking My Landscape, Baby. No, that isn't a typo... but yes, it is a bad play on words. That's the bad news. The good news: finally! A Clockwork Aphid implementation post! If you're building something which relates in some way to virtual worlds, then the first thing you&
Procedural Landscape Generation Language Post Mortem and Some Other Notes A couple nuggets of knowledge came out of my "You're Speaking My Language, Baby" series of posts, so I though I'd just take a quick moment to talk about them. The first two are perhaps the most obvious by far. Firstly: if you actually
Procedural Landscape Generation You're Speaking my Language, Baby. Part 5: Conclusion So... what's the conclusion? It mostly comes back to the fact that I'm doing this mainly for fun (though you may have trouble believing it). That being the case I'm going to start working in Java. In fact I already have started working in
