Last night I saw La Dispute and Le Pre Ou Je Suis Mort.
It was one of the best shows I’ve ever been to. Tiny, Crowed Venue, Me, Matt, Calum and Gaz at the front, everything about it was so sick.
Explanation time!
I’ve been hideously addicted to World of Warcraft since I last posted here. I started a guild called Internet Protocool with a few friends, and it kinda snowballed from there to being a full 25man raiding guild, leaving me with no time to do anything except play Warcraft, eat, and occasionally sleep.
I don’t regret spending so much time playing, I had a good time and met alot of really nice people; Shane, Jim, Gav, Kim, Hans & Susanne you will be missed.
Anyway, I thought I’d do a quick update on everything that has been happening recently.
I recently joined PPUK, and decided to get interested in politics, and I’ve picked Pirate Party UK to invest my time in, as their stance on copyright reform and surveillance is in line with my beliefs.
I’ve been following the party since they registered last year, and only decided to join now they are taking donations.
They’ve got 10 candidates running in the general election on the 6th of May, so if you’re in any of these constituencies, please get involved and support your candidates.
The party is also currently fund-raising and taking donations to support our candidates so if you can spare some money, and feel strongly about the issues involved go here and either donate, or become a member. At the time of writing we’ve raised £4000/£10000
It’s in your best interest to do so!
I guess I better finish off those posters from last year. 
If you haven’t already guessed I turned down my place at UACB I was offered last year, due to it not being a particularly interesting course and having to pay for it.
I applied at several universities this year for degree courses, and got accepted onto Web Design at UWE and Digital Media at Portsmouth University.
So if all goes well I’ll be heading off to one of those soon.
Uh, I reached 86,000 plays on last.fm recently I guess that’s cool.
Coheed and Cambria‘s new album leaked recently – I got the opportunity to hear it, and it sounds like it’s shaping up to be an awesome record. The levels on this release are not great, the vocals don’t seem as defined as in other albums but I bet it’ll be fixed for when it’s released officially.
Below is track 2 of the album, which I assume is the single. It’s pretty cool.
I might as well plug Chris Watts’ new musical endeavour, a solo acoustic project. Ex-Son of a Fox vocalist has fun with guitars and his brothers.
Obviously by now everyone has heard of The Midnight Beast but their new video is genius. “Lez be friends”
Anyway, with that I’ve run out of interesting stuff to post.
It’s good to be back.
When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.Then they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.Then they came for the trade unionists,
I did not protest;
I was not a trade unionist.Then they came for the Jews,
I did not speak out;
I was not a Jew.When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out for me.
- Martin Niemöller
This rewrite of the original poem by Martin Niemöller is particularly relevant these days.
Oh also, if you’re as pissed as me about the BNP’s seats in the EU, go sign this pointless internet petition.
Recently my friends--- band has come to and end. I took a few photos of them at their shows, and some just for a laugh. I especially enjoy the Marianne Harris Piss-takes.
Here’s my testament to them.
The Problem
Back in 2005/6 myself and Sam Gower, founded Group-13.com a software development team. We were fed up of how social networking was done on the web, and wanted to use the recent advancements in Web 2.0 to create a social network that wasn’t absolutely terrible. At the time, for a non-university student the only viable options for social networking were myspace, and bebo both which were horrific for anyone older than 13 years old, or any programmer or designer.
Myspace
Messily coded, horribly designed and always broken. “Tom” kept adding features to an unstable website, and something was ALWAYS broken.
The only thing that was good about this website was that it wasn’t bebo. The “profile” customisation wasn’t so much customisation, more like “copy paste HTML from 1000′s of websites, and add glitter text.”
This site seemed to be used mainly by older/alternative people, mainly because the music section of the website is used by almost every band in the world to promote their music.
“I preferred bebo because myspace had all the stupid, annoying code things, for like.. layouts and stuff”
Kizzie Hall – Bebo and Facebook user.
Bebo
For code and design this site seemed a bit more organized, all of the site followed a consistent theme, and there was an “easy” way to customize your profile. You were able to pick from thousands of user generated themes, and could create your own by uploading images to replace the original ones. However this site was still full of glitter text and “WHAT MY LITTLE PONY ARE YOU?” quizzes.
As a whole the users of bebo seemed to be the more than 90% “Chavs” and people that were put off by myspace’s complexity.
“I don’t even know why anyone uses bebo any more. I always get emails from it but I just ignore them since they are all from fake people anyway, it’s always spam”
Tom Barnes formally from myspace, now from facebook.
The Solution
In comes G-13, we set up a consistently designed, functional, secure social networking site using OpenID, AJAX and other relativity new web technologies to create something that was fresh, attractive and simple to use.
Originally Codenamed “Olympus” we aimed really high with what we wanted to do – many of the features we had working in an early alpha state have recently been implemented into Facebook and Myspace. Most notably “facebook chat”. Another concept we were using is the 2 bar system, a menu at the top and information and chats on the bottom bar.
Used concepts
I wanted to talk about some of the stuff we wanted out of a social network in 2005, and how it has ended up on the web today. The concepts we had below were all part of our much larger plan for world domination.
recently added to Windows Live Messenger, Favourite contacts allowed you to group your friends into groups like “Family”, “Friends” “Other” etc, but you could pick contacts out of those groups to appear in a group that is always at the top of your contacts list called “Favourites” so they are easy to contact at all times.
Similar to services like del.icio.us and magnolia, Olympus would allow you to have a “stream” of bookmarks, that friends could see, along with private bookmarks to allow you to transport your bookmarks to any computer you used.
Unused concepts
I’m going to write a little bit about some things myself and Sam designed/planned on doing with Novus.
By this point the codename for our social network had changed to Novus, this was due to the imminent release of PHPbb 3 also named Olympus. Anyway, onto the concepts.
The idea behind this was to add a playlist to the bottom bar of the website, for example next to facebook chat, with a playlist, and all the other features you’d want from a music player. The idea was to allow you to add tracks to a playlist from bands profiles, like how youtube allows you to create playlists, but it would allow you to continue to use the site without having to stop listening to whatever band you liked. Other sites that follow a similar concept have started up, Last.fm and Pandora, along with Spotify, but not what we had in mind at the time.
The creation of external applications was going to have very strict rules on what could, and couldn’t be added to the site. This was to stop all of the spam, and the “WHAT MY LITTLE PONY ARE YOU?” quizzes. There was also going to be applications created by us, as sort of “addons” to the website, thinks like calculators, clocks, etc.
A useful homepage, which allowed to to add your own “widgets” to it. RSS Feeds and the like. The best description of this would be a kind of iGoogle and Facebook home mashup.
 |
|
The Kids Can Eat a Bag of Dicks by A Wilhelm Scream from Ruiner 0 days ago |
