Hobbit IMAX

Dec 15, 2012

The Hobbit, in IMAX, was fantastic. Drain all bladders before taking your seat: there is something like 166 minutes of film, preceded by 30 minutes or more of trailer, ads, and the usually turgid mush about the mind-splittingly good technology that is going to make your experience unparalleled. 

Before we get into a brief description of the thing, I'd like to note that the Hobbit probably represents the only new estate in big budget blockbusters - all the trailers here were for reboots: Superman (again), Wizard of Oz (a sequel), Star Trek (OMFG again). 

This Hobbit screening was not only IMAX, it was 3D, which is generally of gimmicky quality. This, however, was very good - I couldn't suppress a flinch at an incoming spear during the Star Trek trailer, and there were times when it appeared you were looking through a hole in the wall of the cinema rather than at a screen. No doubt, the 48fps had something to do with this. Pan shots were very smooth and there definitely was a parallax-scrolling effect going on during the wide travel shots.

Top tips: Do not sit near the front. You will be too close to the screen and you won't be able to see the edges. Do not move your head around, the 3D effect appears to be delicate and even a moderate tilt will blur out parts of the picture. Do not bring excessively small humans, they have tiny internal waste storage spaces and may cause you to miss chunks of the movie when they need emptying. Do not bring a picky perfect recall of the book, loads of original material has been packed in to make a solid movie from what is really a short book constructed for the appreciation of young readers.

About twenty minutes from the end, the sound and picture streams de-synched at our showing, but by giving us free IMAX tickets for another show, the management of the cinema forestalled the impending torches and pitchforks mob. 

Take the top tips above and go see it.

Dear @monkchips

Feb 3, 2012

Dear @monkchips

Thank you for a exemplary conference experience at Monki Gras during a chilly and bright London January. You went deep on the craft theme and I think that resonated strongly with everyone there, because those people who were there loved and cared so much about what they do. That was the first thing that set it apart from ‘regular’ conferences.

Also there was beer, but not a surreptitious beer, not a beer that was pale and fizzy and gullished without pleasure by braying middle managers with grotesquely tumescent bellies and swollen man-boobs. This was a first-class beer that was knitted into the fabric of the conference and reflected the craft theme, that an attendee could openly savour in company in the noonday without fear of a judgement of functional alcoholism (to borrow a phrase from @jasonh). This was another welcome distancing from the mainstream, albeit I thought I had been mugged after checking my wallet post the Craft Beer Co. experience - though is the welcome price we pay for quality.

At this moment, in an echo of the event itself, I am writing this letter, drinking a craft pale ale in a craft beer pub that has newly opened across the road from my office, a whole 45 metres away from my desk. I feel that these echoes will continue to reverberate, perhaps to the detriment of my deadlines.

Let us return to the conference.

The food, made fresh in front of our eyes, the specially roasted coffee, the baskets of fucking fruit, all spoke to a care of consumption that really is usually ignored in favour of cost in our modern lives. Care and attention, @monkchips, care and attention to the smallest detail makes the picture whole and perfect.

In your carefully crafted environment, who could not be in a positive frame of mind, content and happy to be open and honest with their neighbor, even though they may be a temporary stranger? This brought the best out in the already well-qualified and excellent speakers, brought out the humour, brought out the honest expression normally present among a group of friends rather than between a conference speaker and conference attendees. I cannot speak for others - but forty minutes into the first day I was in the front row wishing I was up there giving a talk. What a crowd!

And your conference was filled with wonders - the .gov.uk affair was heart-stopping in its implications and amazing in the fact that it actually happened; - the data pretties entranced us and were in a second breath laid bare as shams if presented without context; - kittehs masqueraded, unchecked, as chikins; - the bombshell that companies get the UX they deserve was dropped; - machines with software that killed people were wheeled out; - the dysfunctions of technology executives were outed without ceremony; - the list could go on, if it weren’t for the line drawn under it by that 9.5 ABV beer, the name of which escapes me entirely.

This letter has just about reached its limit. Let me finish by mentioning that most important aspect of conference-going - personal relevance. I’m a technical co-founder, and my work life is trisected equally into states of euphoria, all-consuming flow and cold panic. At your conference, listening to the experiences and the judgements of those who have treaded this route before, I experienced an enormous feeling of validation - that I haven’t chosen the wrong technology stack; - that I’m not totally crazy for attempting to do what I am doing; - that these people have tried and succeeded and are not that different to me after all: and for that, especially that, I thank you and your team.

all the best Oisin

p.s also - phone is teh awesome :)

CoderDojo Dublin

Jan 22, 2012

There’s been some buzz about CoderDojo in the news recently. The CoderDojo was founded by James Whelton in 2011 to introduce kids to coding at an age when they are still in school, in an environment that supports learning. With support from Bill Liao, CoderDojos have sprung up in nine locations around Ireland.

This is relevant to my interests, and I wanted to see what the whole thing was about. To get in, you need a kid, so I brought the ten year old rugby fanatic that hangs around my house and eats the food. He chose the Programming Games with Python session - no doubt wanting to fulfill his dream of getting a decent rugby game on his iPod touch at some point.

Let me digress briefly on the subject of teaching kids how to manipulate computers with software code. We use physical tools to supplement our physical selves - pushing a nail into a piece of timber with your thumb is rarely successful. We need to use computational tools to supplement our own mental computing capabilities and allow us to enhance our reasoning processes. We are already equipped to pick up a hammer, see a nail and get a fair idea what to do next, but pick up an iPod Touch and put a rugby game on it? It’s not obvious how to get there, so instruction is required. And instruction needs to be imparted early, not because we want to make more developers, not because we want kids choosing a career in coding, but because we want to give them the tools they need in the 21st century to allow them to take advantage of every opportunity that comes their way.

Back to the dojo. Our host Eugene had his work cut out for him: 25 or more young humans, with vastly different capabilities in the area, short attention spans and different laptops all around. I decided take Mr. Rugby ahead with a copy of a simple Python text game involving choosing a cave and hoping the dragon therein doesn’t eat you, taken from the syllabus book.

The programming journey went like this - at each stage we thought of a goal and massaged the existing code and added new code to get to it. The kid did all the typing, saving, running, copying, pasting. I just pointed out now and then similar chunks of code that he could reuse and got him through any blocks.

• I say - let’s extend the game from a choice between two caves, to a choice between three.
• Kid says - let’s print out which cave was which at the end of the game, so you can see which was the right one.
• We discover that strings and integers were different :)
• We discover that when one chooses three random numbers in the range 1..3, there’s a good chance two will be the same, and it doesn’t make sense to have a bad dragon and a good dragon in the one cave - they are territorial.
• Kid surprises me by coming up with a simple but effective way to make sure that the numbers wouldn’t clash, and we implement it - without using the modulo operator

Then we were done with where we wanted to go. Eugene was taking the kids along, helping each individually if he need to do so, and going down the same path initially, making an extra cave in the game.

But our local journey hadn’t finished after all. The kid had decided that now it was time to do some visuals and had sketched out a picture with three caves with numbers over them. Here’s where having a software savvy dad and the internet is a win: we grabbed a free pixel art program, muddled out how to use it, and while he drew the screen, I frantically researched free Python game libraries.

Aside - before we got onto the visuals, I spotted a few areas in the code to put in a couple of for loops, and suggested we ‘tidy up’ the code a bit so that I could show these and explain them. Why? was the response, the thing worked didn’t it? The important thing at this point is to shrug and agree - the lad is not a professional coder, he doesn’t need to refactor, he just needs results. In fact the whole thing needs to be results-driven. This is why you use a tool - not because it’s lovely or elegant or makes you feel special, but because you have a job to sort out. Then you put the tool down. It’s only when you get trained in how tools work can you start making your own tools. cf. lightsabre etc

Eventually I stumbled over pygame, which turned out to be just the tool we needed. We made a plan to write a small programme to try it out, and there was palpable excitement when our extremely amateurish drawing of caves popped up, surmounted by a hand-scrawled Danger!! sign.

On the way home on the train, we designed an rugby-themed 8-bit scroller for the iPod Touch and set up the kid’s github account. When we arrived home the kid insisted, with uncharacteristic determination, that we finish the Dragon game - adding keyboard control, putting in dragon graphics, conveying the result visually. Next challenge: the rugby game. Yikes!

Very little of this article has been on the details of the CoderDojo, but you may have already realized how the CoderDojo was instrumental in making this tiny but important success work. It provided us (and I write ‘us’ deliberately) a place in which learning was the norm; it provided a place where myself and himself were on the same team working towards an external goal; it provided a place that wasn’t dominated by adults. And that last one is the key one I think.

Many thanks to Eugene and the team behind CoderDojo Dublin for their commitment and patience in putting the series together, they are providing an really valuable service, on their own time.