Hi, I’m Simon Madine and I make digital toys and write guides on web development.
I'm a senior web dev and evangelist for 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...
Merry Christmas to you Simon, you do have a bit of a Japanese look these days...
See you in 2008!
Lx
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 .............
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
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.
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!
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 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.
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.
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.
