Hi, I’m Simon Madine and I make digital toys and write guides on web development.
I'm a senior web dev on Nokia Maps in Berlin.
All too often, I have ideas which might make a cool website or iPhone app or whatever and I know I just don't have the time to build them. I'm going to post them here in the hope that someone else might find a use for them. These ideas might already be in existence, of course. I'm not claiming they are unique in any way (although some might be).
You are free to take these ideas and do whatever you like with them. Of course, if they become amazingly successful, I could do with a bigger TV...
If you wake up every morning and think, "My t-shirts are so dull, I wish I had interesting clothes...", you need to have a look at my online shop.
It's also very filling. I visited a friend from Edinburgh today who's over here helping her mum pack and they made this excellent dinner.
I think he's turning Japanese - or is that a song? Happy Christmas Simon!
Just in time for www.frasr.com
I'll get time over the next few weeks for a test drive.
Fanbloodytastic!
Merry Christmas Charlie Brown.
Looking a bit like an extra from 'My Name is Earl' in the convict shot. Cool.
There is a little smirk in the second shot isn't there?
Have good one...
ROFL! Especially the Christmas hat one - although you may have allowed a hint of a flicker of a smile to show...
What a nutter!!
Have a Merry Christmas - and you are sure your pictures are not real????
Can I have some of what you had then, it's a long time since I couldn't remember what I did last night!!
Happy holidays .............
Merry Christmas to you Simon, you do have a bit of a Japanese look these days...
See you in 2008!
Lx
Buddahs Belly Full of Goodness!
Too much Saki me thinks Simon. Have a good one. Mrs C x
That's just how I remember you Si.
Happy Christmas.
PS The webbies chose your Christmas Pressie on my morning off. Honest.
Got ya mail, thx,
merry christmas and a good "Rutsch" ;)
best wishes, cu
Merry Christmas to you too! All that hair – what's happened to you in the wilds of Tokyo city? Have a good commercial Christmas binge, see you in 2008!
Before I get any concerned e-mails, I haven't been arrested. I just thought this would be a funny card. I also don't look that rough. At least, I hope not. I've included a couple more recent photos in the pop-up in case you need proof.
Everything here's going well, my Japanese is coming along slowly but surely. I'm now getting private lessons twice a week to help overcome the fact that Japanese is really hard.
I think I must have made it to every area of Tokyo by now, I've been going to a different one each weekend but I still keep finding cool new stuff. I'm also deliberately not going near Akihabara at this time of year just in case I get tempted to buy a bunch of stuff as christmas presents to myself.
Just to keep up my current focus on extreme geekery, Dooze (formerly known as "s is small") is now available for download. It's kind of ended up as a CMS for people who could probably write their own if they wanted to but just haven't the time. It's still possible to install, customize and use it without knowing any PHP but there's a bunch more stuff you can do with it if you do.
Anyway, enjoy...
I've been playing with XUL for a couple of days now. Kind of interesting and kind of really confusing.
It looks like it could be really useful for making cross-platform applications and the way it works means that it's not a huge jump from HTML development to XUL layouts but getting plugins to work on OS X? Ugh.
The large number of folders called 'plugins' within the standard application structure definitely didn't help. At the moment, my application works but I have no idea why. It's probably a quantum thing, you can either know what it does or how it does it but not both.
Still, it's available for download on the (almost finished) MonkeyTV site. Now I just need to go through the process again for Windows...
A while back I decided to try and fully embrace 'The Mac Way' and use iTunes to listen to my music/update my iPod/browse podcasts/etc. So I fired it up, told it to catalogue my music collection and sat back hoping to be listening to Ben Folds within minutes.
Hmmmm...
It's now six weeks later and it finished processing about 10 minutes ago. During those 6 weeks, it was completely unusable while it tried to 'determine gapless playback information'. While it was waiting, I found out how you prevent it from doing this but that has to be done before you start.
Six weeks. Six. Weeks.
To be fair, it probably doesn't expect your music collection to be quite so large or – and this is where I think the problem is – live on a server on the other side of the world.
Still, it's done now. I just need to make sure I never add any more music ever.
A web page with two coloured squares for the user to click. They click on one then see how many other people clicked on it. That is all.
So, my latest little project, Monkey TV is about to shift from the aleph to the bet testing stage (Hebrew's much more fun than greek). The site's only been up in its current state for less than 3 days and already it's been hammered by hundreds of spam bots. Really, they're faster than google.
More info and cool stuff when I finish.
I did ask the web host to enable MultiViews but got the fully considered response "Erm...whu?". I've since moved the hosting but still not gotten round to doing it properly.
After an excessively long summer, it's finally beginning to cool down here. I can't believe I was getting a tan in November.
Of course, I'm now beginning to realise that this flat is built for the summer. Air conditioning, thin curtains, no heaters... but I shan't complain. I survived typhoon season unscathed and there are a lot fewer cockraches around at this time of year...
It's BIG!!!
That's it, I've decided. On the whole, earthquakes are a bad idea. Not that I've experienced any particularly bad ones while I've been here – the biggest being a 5.2 about 70 miles north-east – but the ones I have had have been...unsettling.
A particularly strange thing happens when I'm on Skype to someone during an earthquake, though. Due to the computer being on the desk, the desk being in the room and the whole room moving as one, it appears on the other end that I start swaying slightly for no apparent reason.
I have prepared myself a little emergency bag, though, just in case there's a big one. It's got spare socks, my solar charger and – when I'm not using it – my Nintendo DS. At least if there's a disaster, I'll still be able to play Mario Kart.
Hope you played with Apache multilingual content negotiation...
Something very similar seems to have already been done as an iPhone game now.
This is a very simple game mechanic which can be applied to multi-touch interfaces as well as keyboard and mouse interfaces.
Start off with a large blob floating in the middle of the screen. In physics terms, it's probably best thought of as looking down from above on a blob of liquid sitting on a teflon surface. While there is only a single blob on the screen, no points are earned. Using multi-touch, blobs can be separated by pressing on two separate points on the blob and pulling apart. On-screen, move the mouse pointer to where you want one finger to press then hold down shift (left or right), the pointer then splits in two, one stays where it was pinned and the other moves with the mouse. You can then click to hold down your second finger and pull apart.
Once the blob has been separated, the timer starts counting up points. The two blobs can now be let go and will float around the space freely, bouncing off the walls. If they touch, they will join again and the points will stop increasing. The player can grab hold of any blob at any time and hold it still so technically, they could just hold the two blobs apart and slowly rack up points. However, each of these blobs can also be pulled apart into two smaller blobs and for each extra blob on the screen, the score is multiplied. As before, if any two blobs touch, they join together and the multiplier decreases.
Blobs don't have to be the same size when pulled apart, holding two points near each other on the same side of the centre of the blob and pulling the outermost will pull out a smaller blob. This could be quickly repeated to create several tiny blobs which would be difficult to control but quickly increase score.
An alternative game mode can be introduced by having an increasing counter included in the game as well. After you have started scoring points, it will start counting up. If the counter catches up to your score at any point the game is over. The rate of increase can itself also increase as the game progresses
Wow!
Great DOF. Love the blurred background.
Cool shot!
BWTT actually.
Ooh, I love those bits.
She's trying to remember your face so she can hunt you down and kill you.
This is the website for the German Church in Edinburgh. The most fun bit was making it do everything in two languages. I set them up with a set of Google Calendars so they can update service and event information and itll automatically be pulled into the events pages on the site.
The Visitor Studies Group website was my first big Drupal project. Along the way, I think I must have rewritten the drupal source-code at least twice before I ended up with a tiny handful of theming functions. I think drupal might just be too smart for its own good...
Awesomest Web Producer
I like this shot. Nice framing.
If you press the bath button does it magically make a bath appear??
Soooo many people...
Surely you were standing on a box right?
It definitely looks that way but nope, just standing straight. I did start the day hunched over a bit but after a while there's no point, you just have to rejoice in the ability to see people's bald spots...
Are you like a giant? lilliputian ...
And you thought us Germans were excessive!!
Kawaii desu ka, kowai desu ka?! Either way, it's very cool!
Shame...but hey, you have a flat in Tokyo!!
Looks like a very nice neighbourhood :D
The reason I finally got round to finishing my site is that I built a neat little CMS temporarily called 's is small' and wanted to do something interesting with it. It doesn't really do anything that other CMSs don't, I just felt like making it.
It does, however, have some fairly cool things built in:
Of course, the next thing I need to do is make a site for the CMS itself and let other people have a go at it.
I've finally gotten round to making my own site.
Nothing specifically Japanese, it just looks cool
Difficult to get the scale of this. Big. And Yellow. And probably dangerous.
And this is the beginning of the most amazing sunset I've seen since arriving. I like the view from my window.
My Desk with MacBook Pro, Mighty Mouse and Oolong Cha.
Shibuya's busy at night time.
And just to show that it really is the view from my office, here's me...
The view from my office door down towards reception in the Ark Mori Building.
Or 'Ginger Pork'. I'm not intending to just upload lots of photos of my dinner but some of it does look nice.
They finally rereleased the prepay Metro and Tokyu line I.C. card yesterday after running out of them in April. So I got one.
It's like I'm some kind of local.
"Hey, do you need a ticket?"
"No, I have my prepay metro card"
:)
Turns out September is carnival season here in Tokyo. This was just a little procession making its way around Ueno.
Had to jostle my way past a few dozen other guys taking photos of the girls in front. Didn't they realise I was taking these photos for posterity, not for the girls in the tiny bikinis?
Part of the carnival procession.
Biiiiig monkey.
Another of those incredibly shiny buildings...
In the continuing effort to prove to various people I am eating well while over here, this is my dinner. Tonkatsu, ramen and a chickeny broth.
Tasty it was, too.
Spent the afternoon reading a book on Japanese verbs while getting cooled occasionally by the mist coming off this fountain. It looked really cool with the sun going down behind it but I couldn't quite capture it the way I wanted.
Nice little street somewhere in Setagaya.
No idea what was going on today but there was a queue of several hundred people to get into Krispy Kreme in Shinjuku today. The queue went round the corner, across a bridge and continued back for a couple of hundred metres.
I didn't realise doughnuts were so popular...
Another one from my window. Didn't bother messing around with it in Photoshop, this is just how it was taken.
And here's the view 10 minutes ago from my room. Pretty cool. Guess this is what the sky looks like after a typhoon.
It just started raining so I thought I'd take some shots. It's properly chucking it down. This is the roof of the building opposite.
Don't have a clue what they're called but they're big and shiny.
They could be Big Telephone Things, I guess.
This is half-way through my commute from the office back to my apartment. Get off one exceptionally busy train, through the exceptionally busy square, onto a slightly less busy train.
I'm fairly sure the woman on the left posed as soon as got my camera out.
Standing outside the Tokyo Regional Government buildings looking towards the Imperial Palace. The government buildings themselves were quite impressive but I didn't want to risk upsetting the stern-looking guards standing outside them by taking any photos in their direction.
Just some traffic on my street at night time.
Of course, with Japan's tendency to have all the cabling overhead (as opposed to the UK's underground cabling), it does mean that this is right outside my window. I could touch it if I were so inclined. And it's dripping wet.
I'm not 100% sure if this is a good thing..
Yeah, I know, Edinburgh gets it fair share of rain, too. But this is like switching on a shower. And then all of a sudden it stops. Kind of like switching off a shower...
One of those bits that joins cable to other cables.
Extremely big and quite odd archway heading out of Shinagawa Station's East exit.
Even though I was running late, while wandering across Kounan-Ohashi, I had to take a photo of Yurikamome, A great big round-in-a-circle motorway on/off ramp. It heads onto Rainbow Bridge but I couldn't get any decent shots of that, it's too big.
Same motorway ramp as before, this time from underneath.
Right before the storm clouds opened, the sky got extremely dark. But, as the sky behind me was still blue, this building's reflective windows stood out quite well.
More of an instructional shot than anything arty. This is taken at eye-level.
Note to self: Duck.
The grey strip is a handy bit of rubber some kind soul put there to make sure it's not as painful walking into the door as it could have been.
And this is the exceptionally tall building I work in. It's very very tall.
View from the left window of the office.
View from the right window of the office
And this is just to prove that I'm not just eating noodles and tuna.
Beef, Ginger, Garlic, Shoyu, Mirin
And into the pan you go...
And now for dinner...umai desu...
It's too small to show anything other than the bottom of the desk. No, really.
I have no idea. Tried my best to figure out what this box was for. I know that if I press a random sequence of buttons, hot water comes out of the shower. But if I press another random sequence of buttons, I get a voice telling me I've done something wrong. But I'm not sure what...
Just my shower curtain.
Tasty, tasty noodles. Looked all around the flat but couldn't find any chopsticks. Oh well.
It's probably not a good thing when your food has 'Unidentified' written on it...
The floor of my bedroom. That is all. Instead of tatami, it's floorboards and instead of a futon, it's a bed. Not as much traditional japanese styling as I'd have hoped for but, hey...
There was some bizarre Bazaar on in the park. Couldn't quite figure out what was going on but I did manage to get this photo of a Sun. It's either cute or scary. I'm not sure which yet.
First thing I did after moving into my apartment was have a little wander around the park next door. It's very nice.
That big crossing in Shibuya. With all those people. And a picture of Cameron Diaz.
It's tiny. This photo's taken from the bedroom. You've got the oven, microwave, fridge, front door, several different recycling bins and some very complicated insructions on what and how to recycle.
And, of course, the TV showing anime on prime-time Saturday night. Now that, I like.
Simply put, a site where people can post tunes they've made using only the built-in samples from GarageBand. Also has a spin-off album.
ExampleSample:
