Chaos’n'Coffee

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Why procrastinating is bad

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bru

3 monthes and 4 weeks ago

in Chaos

. 2 Comments

A week or so ago, I noticed Emily Chang twittering about the rebirth of Game Never Ending.

For those of you who wonder, gne was the massive multiplayer game from which, in a sense, Flickr then evolved.

Excited by the chance to play it again, I dashed at the site, and had a nice (if short) evening session, making a mental note of writing more on the subject.
No notes, screenshots or anything else was taken.

Well, bad, bad idea… this is GNE’s site now:

“GNE is a shared temporary hallucination”

Fair enough :)

Have a look at Andy Baio’s coverage for screenshot and a video of the endgame.

Juno made me feel good

Published

bru

4 monthes ago

in Coffee

. 1 Comment

Watched Juno last night.

You know what? I loved it.

Well done, better played.
Nice story, maybe a bit on the optimistic side…

…but hey, what’s wrong with that?

Relief

Published

bru

4 monthes and 2 weeks ago

in Chaos

. 2 Comments

Yesterday night at 2am, the project that has been keeping me quite busy in the past monthes has hit the (soft) launch.
It’s been an incredible learning exercise, for the mind, the body and the heart.

Now let me finish the working week, pass out for 24 hours straight, and then I’ll try to go back to write something more meaningful.

Out of the screen

Published

bru

4 monthes and 3 weeks ago

in Chaos and London

. 0 Comments

Saturday and sunday I managed to get “out of the screen”, even though still geeking out at the Arduino workshop.
I discovered a new and fun way of approaching electronics, same as juggling has been a gateway to physics in the past.

For those of you who wonder, Arduino is a open electronic prototyping platform, that comes with a pretty simple programming environment, plenty of code and experiments to get your hands dirty and a very active practitioner community to support your efforts and achievements. Just have a look at youtube and get inspired!

Now I have the tools to make some of those physical computing related pet projects happen… will I have the will, and time, too? :)

Kudos to Alex, Nick and Brock. They’ve been amazing. And the class was quite challenging and fun too, an experience I can’t help but recommend. Oh, you can have an idea of what’s all about from the flickr group.

wee-e-e-e-e-e-eek

Published

bru

4 monthes and 4 weeks ago

in Coffee

. 1 Comment

True, I said one week out :)

I’ve been spending a couple of weeks (almost non stop) kindly hosted by a client’s office in order to facilitate the launch of their new project.
Apparently there’ll be more (support, documentation, handover, other than the fun bug-squashing) so until the end of the month you’ll find me in the Fleet Street area more than in SE1.
Interesting discovering of the past week: the Leon Gobi.

I also realized that I didn’t write a word about the week spent in Italy.
I was at a Barcamp in Turin where I did a presentation about webdesign-meet-gamedesign (here my slides, in Italian), and at the girlgeekdinner in Milan (where I wasn’t the only UK based guest, as Sarah Blow, Maz Hardey and Amanda Lorenzani were also there).

The other surprise from my trip I wanted to write about is OpenSpime: almost by chance, stepping by Leandro’s, I had the chance to see a live preview of the first prototype, amazing. Good luck with the tour now, and call me in for the next brainstorm :P

To understand OpenSpime in a nutshell, watch this interview to David Orban on YDN:

One week out

Published

bru

5 monthes and 2 weeks ago

in Chaos

. 0 Comments

Another intense week is over. Apparently.
Tomorrow morning I’ll jump on a plain, waste some carbon and go back to Italy for a week, where I plan to attend the Barcamp in Turin and (if I can find a way to sneak in) the girlgeekdinner in Milan (oh there will be other international guests this time!). After last year’s barcamp boom, eventually Italy seems to be discovering alternative meetup formats, as the aforementioned geekdinner and the minibar (first one held in Milan last week), and I’d like to keep up with the buzz.

About the barcamp, I’ll probably do a presentation together with Kurai about where game design meets web design. If it turns out well I’ll try to translate the slides and write about it.
Another option could be an overview of the social graph conversation (with openID, OAuth, DiSO as the main buzzwords).

I’ll be back in March and looking forward the Arduino workshop by Tinker.it

Italian newspaper apologizes for missing links to UGC source (yay!)

Published

bru

6 monthes and 1 week ago

in asides

. 2 Comments

In this post on the newspaper blog, Marco Pratellesi, chief editor at Corriere della Sera, apologizes for having published the gallery of the mysterious digital artist Paulthewineguy without link nor references. Babysteps, yet steps they are.

How to loose a game user

Published

bru

6 monthes and 2 weeks ago

in Chaos and asides

. 5 Comments

From Tateru Nino’s blog:

Sorry, Portal. For nearly a half hour, you asked for wit and ingenuity. Then right near the end you started asking for reflexes. Sorry, I don’t actually have any of those.

Guess I won’t be able to finish the story. A shame.

Switching metaphor or required skillset half-way through a game (or story, or application, or whatever media experience imho) seems like an excellent way to loose audience.

Hands on experimentation

Published

bru

6 monthes and 2 weeks ago

in Coffee and London

. 1 Comment

I decided to start trying to bring some of my culture to London, other than just absorbing its own. First stop: home made pasta :)

Details soon.

A conversation with MattB

Published

bru

6 monthes and 3 weeks ago

in Coffee

. 0 Comments

Last week I participated in a conversation with Matt Biddulph (Dopplr’s CTO) here in London. Since it was set-up as an interview to allow Feba to gather material for her thesis, I joined in with a few questions and here you’ll find my personal highlights about it (for detailed notes, see Feba’s posts).

Together with us there were also Alexandra and Massimo of Tinker.it, who contributed some good inspiration, but I’ll keep this for a future post, with a that it would be nice to attend one of the forthcoming Arduino for Beginners workshops…

But without further ado, let’s go back to the notes:

Bits of dopplr history

Dopplr was built by people who had a day job. Most of the thinking, early design and even a working prototype was built over a weekend.

The renting of the place was the only “cost” dopplr had sustain that far.

Dopplr releases are named after the next conference. That keeps the team on the edge, makes a good milestone date and automatically gives you a good time when to announce new features. Everybody loves announcement and “early access” at conferences

Dopplr and open source

The value of software companies is shifting from the code itself to the data. Google could proably let his search algorithm out in the open for free and yet not fear any real competition, because G has ten years of “history” behind it. Besides, everyone who worked in a fairly sized enterprise knows that software is always far too patchy, undocumented and/or business specific to be easily reusable “as it is”.
Releasing bits of software not only lets you benefit somehow from the crowd as well as providing useful tools (and ideas even more often), but it acts as a statement, and lets you also somehow model the industry and market in the way you believe in. Think OpenID.

Advices for young European Enterpreneurs

. Do something you know

. Do something you’re gonna use/need yourself.

. Do not spend months dreaming, just do it. You can start with a mashup that increase the value of what exist yet. And so, if you have to fail, fail early.

. Stay in touch with SF: go there, participate in events, dinners, show your face around. Or, if you’re not in London, stay in touch with SF through London.

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