Wednesday, 12 December 2007
Friday, 30 November 2007
Wednesday, 14 November 2007
Tuesday, 13 November 2007
LINQ & .NET 3.5
I'm the kind of guy who if he's got a hammer which is 20 yrs old but still serviceable I'll carry on using it. I know how to use it, I know it can do the job and I know how long it will take to hammer those damn nails in.
Tim, our new Technical Director is the kind of guy that reads 12 reviews of the new 'Supercore Hammer 2008 Samurai edition' before it's out, beta tests it for the manufacturers and sleeps in a tent on the street to make sure he can get one on the first day of release.
This is all a long winded way of saying it looks like with the arrival of Tim we'll be taking a massive leap forward - all the way from .NET 1.1 (released around 4/5 years ago) to .NET 3.5 - and it's not even released yet! Tim has been doing some testing of the new system (beta version) and is convinced it's a major development in the way we write code.
So look out world, Tim and LINQ (the data access part of .NET 3.5) are on their way. With the combination of that and the new application framework we have in development, our ability to turn around bespoke admin sites both quickly and precisely is going to be massively improved. Which means cheaper admin sites for all!!!
Things like this is exactly why getting Tim to be part of our company is so important. Passion breeds brilliance. And while I enjoy coding and I'm pretty good at it, Tim loves it. Moving to a new development platform as soon as it comes out is something I'd never do. I was happy with my hammer. Time to see what the Supercore Hammer 2008 Samurai Edition can do.
x
Tim, our new Technical Director is the kind of guy that reads 12 reviews of the new 'Supercore Hammer 2008 Samurai edition' before it's out, beta tests it for the manufacturers and sleeps in a tent on the street to make sure he can get one on the first day of release.
This is all a long winded way of saying it looks like with the arrival of Tim we'll be taking a massive leap forward - all the way from .NET 1.1 (released around 4/5 years ago) to .NET 3.5 - and it's not even released yet! Tim has been doing some testing of the new system (beta version) and is convinced it's a major development in the way we write code.
So look out world, Tim and LINQ (the data access part of .NET 3.5) are on their way. With the combination of that and the new application framework we have in development, our ability to turn around bespoke admin sites both quickly and precisely is going to be massively improved. Which means cheaper admin sites for all!!!
Things like this is exactly why getting Tim to be part of our company is so important. Passion breeds brilliance. And while I enjoy coding and I'm pretty good at it, Tim loves it. Moving to a new development platform as soon as it comes out is something I'd never do. I was happy with my hammer. Time to see what the Supercore Hammer 2008 Samurai Edition can do.
x
Sunday, 11 November 2007
Myspaz Alternative
VIRB
Check it out its sooo much cooler its well easy to customise (apparently) and when your looking at someones profile you can turn all the customization off if its garish as f*ck and theres different profile types you can choose and best of all its not the facebook plagiarizing out of control sprawling mess that is Myspace!!!!!!
Check it out its sooo much cooler its well easy to customise (apparently) and when your looking at someones profile you can turn all the customization off if its garish as f*ck and theres different profile types you can choose and best of all its not the facebook plagiarizing out of control sprawling mess that is Myspace!!!!!!
Thursday, 8 November 2007
Crazy b*stards
I just don't get the mentality it must take to be able to do this, but I admire it so much. Sit back and enjoy the ride...
Lush sites...
Check this out ... http://www.salomonsports.com/
I love it, so damn cool (the high bandwidth version). Really slick design, great functionality touches, all in all a great browsing experience.
Basically, please please God let a company with a £100k budget for something like this find us. I really love the saloman site(s) but I know we could do better if we had the budget...
The stuff of dreams I guess. But then 12 months ago we were dreaming about building the kind of sites we're building now.
Off to dream some more...
x
I love it, so damn cool (the high bandwidth version). Really slick design, great functionality touches, all in all a great browsing experience.
Basically, please please God let a company with a £100k budget for something like this find us. I really love the saloman site(s) but I know we could do better if we had the budget...
The stuff of dreams I guess. But then 12 months ago we were dreaming about building the kind of sites we're building now.
Off to dream some more...
x
Friday, 2 November 2007
Tim!!!
So after 2 and a bit years of trying to get my very good friend (well, brother really) Tim Jones to come and work with us, he's finally agreed!!!!
I first met Tim when I was working in London for CD9 - he was doing his "year in industry" and I had been doing the job for a couple of years, and for the first couple of months I knew more than he did. Didn't last long :) And further to him being a coding legend, we became great friends and really helped each other through some hard times.
So I'm so stupidly excited about all of it. Yeah, his salary is enough to give Ben minor heart palpitations but even at the rate he's getting paid, in reality he's a bargain.
Gonna mean a few changes, but Tim's job is ultimately going to be to decide our direction in how we do all things tech, to build and develop our framework (the code that all other web code is built upon) and to do any of the more complex coding that comes into the building. He really is the most talented coder I've ever worked with and more than that he brings a passion and desire to learn which truly humbles me. When you combine that with the fact that he's one of the gentlest, nicest guys you'd wish to meet it really is cause for celebration.
Further to that one of his "hobbies" is writing games engines. Some of the work I've seen him do is truly shocking in terms of you can't quite get around how someone can do this from their home PC...terrain engines, physics engines (with the help of his friend Jason, who is also a genius), and some mindblowing lighting effects - so we will be encouraging his development in this area as much as possible. Even if it never makes it into the "profitable" bracket of work, it would be a crime not to see where he can take this, especially considering all the other compatible talents we have in the company.
So that's it in short. Full time employee no 10 is coming and our business continues to develop and shift in ever more surprising and delightful ways. All we need to do now is find enough work to support Tim - but if that doesn't happen it's our failing not Tim's - he's good enough that we should be able to find more work than he can handle. Like everyone else in this company...
Joyous days x
I first met Tim when I was working in London for CD9 - he was doing his "year in industry" and I had been doing the job for a couple of years, and for the first couple of months I knew more than he did. Didn't last long :) And further to him being a coding legend, we became great friends and really helped each other through some hard times.
So I'm so stupidly excited about all of it. Yeah, his salary is enough to give Ben minor heart palpitations but even at the rate he's getting paid, in reality he's a bargain.
Gonna mean a few changes, but Tim's job is ultimately going to be to decide our direction in how we do all things tech, to build and develop our framework (the code that all other web code is built upon) and to do any of the more complex coding that comes into the building. He really is the most talented coder I've ever worked with and more than that he brings a passion and desire to learn which truly humbles me. When you combine that with the fact that he's one of the gentlest, nicest guys you'd wish to meet it really is cause for celebration.
Further to that one of his "hobbies" is writing games engines. Some of the work I've seen him do is truly shocking in terms of you can't quite get around how someone can do this from their home PC...terrain engines, physics engines (with the help of his friend Jason, who is also a genius), and some mindblowing lighting effects - so we will be encouraging his development in this area as much as possible. Even if it never makes it into the "profitable" bracket of work, it would be a crime not to see where he can take this, especially considering all the other compatible talents we have in the company.
So that's it in short. Full time employee no 10 is coming and our business continues to develop and shift in ever more surprising and delightful ways. All we need to do now is find enough work to support Tim - but if that doesn't happen it's our failing not Tim's - he's good enough that we should be able to find more work than he can handle. Like everyone else in this company...
Joyous days x
Thursday, 1 November 2007
Saturday, 27 October 2007
Self justification of costings for logos...
Si and I were walking back from the car today, after a ‘break’ talking about Logo Design.
It can be hard justifying the cost of some parts of what our company does sometimes. We talk about it a lot – I think in an effort to comfort each other over the guilt. A lot of our work, put in the simplest terms, consists of simply making things look better, and having fun while we do so. It’s hard to sometimes say “Well the thing with logos is that many of your customers may not even give it a second thought. It won’t have a direct and discreetly measurable affect on your business. In the chaotic nature of the world you could spent £400,000 and it could still have the adverse affect (like the Olympics logo – though it’s not directly measurable so we’ll never know). And yeah, you could get it done badly for £150. It’ll do the same thing, but, well, er, badly.
But our advice is to spend £10,000 with us and we’ll do it really well. Nah really mate…it’s a bargain. Just not a quantifiable one.”
Most design agencies that charge a lot of money for this kind of work will obviously say it makes a massive difference – that you can’t succeed with a bad logo, and that you need to communicate everything about your business in the first 0.3 seconds. But most of them also need to defend the huge amounts of money they get paid, for essentially doing something that, if done properly, is a massively creative and enjoyable.
So some days I’m not so sure if it’s a waste of money - or at least some days I can feel that it's hard to justify the large sums of money for that part of what we do. Other days I’m damn sure it’s the opposite, and the best values work we do. The way you present yourself affects so many things and can have benefits that you might not think about. Which brings me back round to the point (I knew I’d get there eventually…) One of Si’s points when we were talking is that he’s seen one of the logos he’s designed significantly change a company over the last year or so - not so much because of how it’s affected their clients, more how its affected the company’s owners and staff. (Though I'm assured it's gone done very well with clients as well.)
The logo and branding for that company is now everywhere – it surrounds the staff and is their stamp on the work they do, and it really does look great. And Si’s seen the company a lot over the past year, working with and for them, and he believes that it’s changed the attitude of the people who work there. That it’s given them a little more belief and changed how they perceive their own company, and that has undoubtedly help lead them to great results – more sales, growth, and an advancement of their ability to do a their jobs.
You can’t say for sure if the company would have done that without the new logo and branding. And you can’t say for sure if it made £10,000 worth of difference – though anyone who runs a business of any size knows how little money that really is in business terms. But the thing is they didn’t pay £10k, they paid a little over a tenth of that – and I’m positive that’s a gamble worth taking (admittedly they got an outstanding price due to the fact they’re business partners of ours - they should have paid a lot more).
I guess what I’m really saying is I can justify people giving us large amounts of money so we can carry on doing our massively creative and enjoyable jobs. At least to myself… :)
It can be hard justifying the cost of some parts of what our company does sometimes. We talk about it a lot – I think in an effort to comfort each other over the guilt. A lot of our work, put in the simplest terms, consists of simply making things look better, and having fun while we do so. It’s hard to sometimes say “Well the thing with logos is that many of your customers may not even give it a second thought. It won’t have a direct and discreetly measurable affect on your business. In the chaotic nature of the world you could spent £400,000 and it could still have the adverse affect (like the Olympics logo – though it’s not directly measurable so we’ll never know). And yeah, you could get it done badly for £150. It’ll do the same thing, but, well, er, badly.
But our advice is to spend £10,000 with us and we’ll do it really well. Nah really mate…it’s a bargain. Just not a quantifiable one.”
Most design agencies that charge a lot of money for this kind of work will obviously say it makes a massive difference – that you can’t succeed with a bad logo, and that you need to communicate everything about your business in the first 0.3 seconds. But most of them also need to defend the huge amounts of money they get paid, for essentially doing something that, if done properly, is a massively creative and enjoyable.
So some days I’m not so sure if it’s a waste of money - or at least some days I can feel that it's hard to justify the large sums of money for that part of what we do. Other days I’m damn sure it’s the opposite, and the best values work we do. The way you present yourself affects so many things and can have benefits that you might not think about. Which brings me back round to the point (I knew I’d get there eventually…) One of Si’s points when we were talking is that he’s seen one of the logos he’s designed significantly change a company over the last year or so - not so much because of how it’s affected their clients, more how its affected the company’s owners and staff. (Though I'm assured it's gone done very well with clients as well.)
The logo and branding for that company is now everywhere – it surrounds the staff and is their stamp on the work they do, and it really does look great. And Si’s seen the company a lot over the past year, working with and for them, and he believes that it’s changed the attitude of the people who work there. That it’s given them a little more belief and changed how they perceive their own company, and that has undoubtedly help lead them to great results – more sales, growth, and an advancement of their ability to do a their jobs.
You can’t say for sure if the company would have done that without the new logo and branding. And you can’t say for sure if it made £10,000 worth of difference – though anyone who runs a business of any size knows how little money that really is in business terms. But the thing is they didn’t pay £10k, they paid a little over a tenth of that – and I’m positive that’s a gamble worth taking (admittedly they got an outstanding price due to the fact they’re business partners of ours - they should have paid a lot more).
I guess what I’m really saying is I can justify people giving us large amounts of money so we can carry on doing our massively creative and enjoyable jobs. At least to myself… :)
Tuesday, 23 October 2007
Websites
My apologies for putting work stuff on here, but just in case anyone outside of the company ever does read this...
We put the Louhannah site live about 2 weeks ago...check it out http://www.louhannah.com
It's by far my favourite flash site we've produced so far. And amazingly Andy managed to build it so the site is updatable by the client using the pre-existing backend admin systems - even the photo gallery - the clever b*stard - it's as slick a front end as we've built so far.
Matt managed to build the whole bar in 3D (down to individual glasses and bottles in the bar, and putting the existing artwork on the walls) which enabled him to animate the fly-throughs...was extremely time consuming but well worth the finished result, and gives almost limitless in terms of future development of the site.
It was as far over budget as any project we've ever done. To the best of our calculations the client got over £9k of work for free. But it's a typical Sound In Theory project - done for the love of it, and over-delivery is inevitable in such cases. And if we never push boundaries how will we learn...?
I did jack on the site. Makes me even happier to see the result :) Very proud of the site - Matt & Andy (or Mandy for short) are a frighteningly talented team...
***wild applause for Mandy***
We put the Louhannah site live about 2 weeks ago...check it out http://www.louhannah.com
It's by far my favourite flash site we've produced so far. And amazingly Andy managed to build it so the site is updatable by the client using the pre-existing backend admin systems - even the photo gallery - the clever b*stard - it's as slick a front end as we've built so far.
Matt managed to build the whole bar in 3D (down to individual glasses and bottles in the bar, and putting the existing artwork on the walls) which enabled him to animate the fly-throughs...was extremely time consuming but well worth the finished result, and gives almost limitless in terms of future development of the site.
It was as far over budget as any project we've ever done. To the best of our calculations the client got over £9k of work for free. But it's a typical Sound In Theory project - done for the love of it, and over-delivery is inevitable in such cases. And if we never push boundaries how will we learn...?
I did jack on the site. Makes me even happier to see the result :) Very proud of the site - Matt & Andy (or Mandy for short) are a frighteningly talented team...
***wild applause for Mandy***
Monday, 22 October 2007
TXT vs The Cupboard
Screamin in the Angry Room VS expressing frustration in text form.
I is better at screamin than typing! although the blog would be more of a lasting memory. Is that a good thing!
Skills with the blog baynos. All I have to do now is:
1. Stop laughing at everyone elses blogs
2. Think of something to write
3. Remember we have a blog when I head for the cupboard
whatever next, a laser printer that dosent jam paper!
I is better at screamin than typing! although the blog would be more of a lasting memory. Is that a good thing!
Skills with the blog baynos. All I have to do now is:
1. Stop laughing at everyone elses blogs
2. Think of something to write
3. Remember we have a blog when I head for the cupboard
whatever next, a laser printer that dosent jam paper!
Thursday, 18 October 2007
GOLB_TIS
Wow, the much awaited SIT_BLOG. Now we can express ourselves in textual form, rather than going into the 'angry' room to squeal loudly to ourselves... Is that a good thing?
Wednesday, 17 October 2007
Blizzle ma nizzle
Yay blog blog blog blog blog...I've been pestering Dave for ages about making us a blog but turns out we couldve got one for free all along :)
So I look forward to posting much amounts of funny but pointless crap on here...perhaps even something work related from time to time.
Clearly I'll have to start now...
So I look forward to posting much amounts of funny but pointless crap on here...perhaps even something work related from time to time.
Clearly I'll have to start now...
The Company So Far...
So this is a blog huh?
Well, I've just been told by Matt (or DJ Flat / matt_the_flat / columbo) that my name (Dave) is too boring. I don't however care. It's choices like that which will ensure this blog isn't going to end up losing us too much business... :)
So we're a small visual design / software / photography / film and everything else we can get our hands on kind of a company. Nine people full time, and plenty of satellites to help us with our cause. I think it's going quite well, but you can never be sure what's going to happen tomorrow with this business.
We've got a pretty strange business model, which wouldn't make sense to many, but seems to be making for a happy and productive work environment. I take that for the greatest sign that we're doing something right. We don't make as much money as we could, but I don't think there's anyone in in the company who values money more than numerous other things like freedom and quality of the work they do.
Anyways, just wanted to make a blog...get some momentum and all that...
Well, I've just been told by Matt (or DJ Flat / matt_the_flat / columbo) that my name (Dave) is too boring. I don't however care. It's choices like that which will ensure this blog isn't going to end up losing us too much business... :)
So we're a small visual design / software / photography / film and everything else we can get our hands on kind of a company. Nine people full time, and plenty of satellites to help us with our cause. I think it's going quite well, but you can never be sure what's going to happen tomorrow with this business.
We've got a pretty strange business model, which wouldn't make sense to many, but seems to be making for a happy and productive work environment. I take that for the greatest sign that we're doing something right. We don't make as much money as we could, but I don't think there's anyone in in the company who values money more than numerous other things like freedom and quality of the work they do.
Anyways, just wanted to make a blog...get some momentum and all that...
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)