We Are Team Rubber

All hail the Ego Bentley Laptop, now I’m no techy genius, but I am a lover of nice, pretty things (and a reference to my name always helps), of which this is a perfect example. Outside it’s lush, inside however it’s pretty average with an unnamed AMD 64 chipset, 2GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive with a 12.1″ display. 

At $20k i wont be getting it in the near future, but it is something that would be perfect for tapping away on in a Starbucks with a skinny mocha light frappachino.

x

http://blog.laptopmag.com/worlds-most-expensive-laptop-the-ego-bentley

http://www.slipperybrick.com/tag/bentley/

As I strolled out this morning into my new leafy Bristol hood of wide roads, whistling milkmen and gorgous autumnal palettes, I took a little mo’ to mourn the end of the Brand podcast but also to think back to this time a year ago. Beyond me milky, wispy clouds streamed across a pure blue sky, the squirrels chatted and the magpies nodded their approval and I felt that little kick of adrenalin I now feel in the mornings, well slept, unhurried and knowing how my short stroll into work seems to become more immeasurably beautiful every day. As happens most mornings, I exchanged my hellos with the blind lady who I pass on the curve of the hill, just before the steady decline allows me to take in the Avon panorama. I wish she could see it too, but there is something in her hello which tells me she has.

I’m heading into an office where people take time to talk and understand each other, and, steady now, even enjoy each others’ company. Pressure is evenly distributed and shared, and managers actually have time to manage in the true sense. Issues are raised, discussed and solutions found, quickly but without the sense of panic that comes from endemic fingerpointing cultures to be found elsewhere. People understand, and more importantly, believe in their common goal as well as retaining their energy, commitment and creativity. An authentic office team spirit, who would have thought it?

Contrast this to London mornings of a year ago, mornings of sullen faces, stuffy hot air in enclosed spaces, a 2 mile journey somehow managing to take 65 minutes, people snapping at each other over the turn of a newspaper page, busdrivers wordlessly leaving you dampening in the grey drizzle, arriving in an office where the time/work/quality equation is never going to quite add up, where people are passing ships in the night and where you are just a face in the crowd.

And I think, well done, my son.

I saw this post and thought of the developers and their love of all things bacon;

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/10/24/from-the-makers-of-b.html

I’m sure I’m not the only one that’s got fed right up with having a functional plone test that doesn’t quite work right.  PDB to the rescue, you’d think, but you end up with errors like

(Pdb) admin.open("http://nohost/plone/@@")
*** HTTPError: HTTP Error 500: Internal Server Error

Well, thanks Python.  That’s grand.  I used to have lots of fun with a testbrowser visiting http://nohost/plone/error_log/manage_main and poring through HTML.  Not ideal.

So I’ve automated it, introducing teamrubber.pdberrorlog

The above example would then become:

(Pdb) import teamrubber.pdberrorlog
(Pdb) admin.open("http://nohost/plone/@@")
*** HTTPError: HTTP Error 500: Internal Server Error
(Pdb) errorlog
Error: 1221836644.810.255510740468 (TypeError : 'unicode' object is not callable)
(Pdb) errorlog 1221836644.810.255510740468
Traceback (innermost last):
Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 106, in publish
Module ZPublisher.BaseRequest, line 327, in traverse
Module Products.Five.traversable, line 118, in __bobo_traverse__
Module zope.app.traversing.adapters, line 124, in traverse
Module zope.app.traversing.adapters, line 163, in traversePathElement
Module zope.app.traversing.namespace, line 121, in namespaceLookup
Module zope.app.traversing.namespace, line 363, in traverse
Module zope.component, line 165, in queryMultiAdapter
Module zope.component.site, line 75, in queryMultiAdapter
Module zope.interface.adapter, line 475, in queryMultiAdapter
TypeError: 'unicode' object is not callable

It’s quite crude, but hopefully it will be useful to people.

After I completed my degree I was awarded a joint residency at The Pervasive Media Studio with my creative partner George Crabtree, following the likes of other Rubberees such as Rich Wilson, Ben Templeton and Daniel Course who now work in the Studio. ‘The Pervasive Media Studio brings together the computing, communication and creative industries to pioneer new forms of digital media, it is a collaboration led by HP Labs and Watershed, with support from the South West Regional Development Agency’ (taken from here).

Tonight the Studio presents ‘A Night at the Studio’, featuring a project showcase, launch of the website and the launch of the Interesting Games Festival. There will be a mobile game, designed by Mobile Pie, which will be played throughout the evening between canapés and wine scoffing. If anyone is interested they must RSVP to genevieve@pmstudio.co.uk with their name and telephone number.

The Interesting Games Festival begins tomorrow (Friday) with ‘Journey to the Middle of the Night‘, a giant chase game played across the city, where players evade the chasers, find the hidden checkpoints and make their way through a series of strange circumstances to reach the party at the end of the night. I am a Chaser and will be fully kitted out in day-glo 80’s sports wear, because, well, just because I can…..

Other games worth noting are;

Call and Return, a game where players (also known as Ludens) choose a toy to represent them in the game and are then set simple missions designed to re-frame spaces and de-familiarise everyday objects. A few people in the office are playing this at the moment and we are all egerly awaiting the posting of the first missions.

Rainbow Rain, three teams battle it out in a three way paint fight with only white boiler suits and umbrellas to protect themselves. The winning team is the one whose colour dominates the umbrellas and suits.

Girl Racer, a game where people race on a paper track with foot operated sewing machines.

The final game I will mention (there are loads more on the site….) is Korean Lazer Ball. Officially named the snappy but slightly long title of ‘OMMRPG’ or ‘Offline Multi-Mirror Reflector Positioning Game‘. In Korean Lazer Ball teams of lazer gladiators battle it out, scoring goals by bouncing the lazer beam from hand-held mirrors onto a super high-tech spot on the wall.

Team Rubber is entering a Team and is happy to announce that Heather, our Delib Project Manager who is away on Maternity leave at the moment, will be joining Jess (Seeding Superstar), Alex (Project Director Extraordinaire), Ant (King of CCS and skinning…no, not that sort of skinning) and Matt (Plythoplojax Master) to wave the Rubber flag. Jess and I will be cutting, sticking and pimping up the costumes tomorrow.

Have a good weekend

and

Happy Gaming

x

Some of us like to work at our desks, some of us prefer to move around. I’m in the second group. My desk is principally a place to keep things - mostly books I am reading, or will be reading. Books are good. So are Lego Technic sets, elephants and penguins. There are many things that can be improved by the introduction of Lego, elephants, or penguins.

2 weeks to prepare for the Tuesday 30th bake-off.

We’re looking for some seriously good cakes (or does this include ALL types of baked goods) here.

Results to be posted accordingly!

Rules:

- No Fake.

- No Bake, No Taste.

I’ve always been a big fan of human powered transport but I’ve recently switched my allegiances from my trusty skateboard to a shiny bike. I always used to think the skateboard ruled all as I carved down hills and smugly strolled up steep hills saving embarrassing sweaty arrivals at work and pubs.

Then I tried a mate’s bike and realised that:

1. I can get everywhere so much quicker (rain or shine) on a bike;
2. Bristol is great for cycling
3. you can get the Government to pay for some of your new bike.

Point 1 is clearly obvious as there are many restrictions on skateboarding, and walking is just slow and boring.

Point 2 is more currently relevant.  Bristol was voted the first cycling city in the UK recently by the all-knowing government, giving us some money to spend on making cycling better around the city and some essential feel good points.

But what can £100m buy you in the drive to improve cycling in a whole city?  Well maybe one of these cycle lifts would encourage some people to cycle, but they would probably stop soon after the lift or their bike broke down.  Instead, Bristol have asked the public what they think we should do.  A novel and inspired idea I feel and it looks like the growing consensus is “more cycle lanes” for all; another few debates there I think.

If anyone feels inspired to get a bike then point 3 is almost certainly relevant.  Already, three members of the Team Rubber family have used and (lawfully) abused the cyclescheme offering that the government has allowed.  It’s brilliant, you get a beautiful bike plus accessories at about 40% cheaper than in the shop, and you can pay it off monthly.  Just don’t fall off….

Charlie Cooper, a member of our multi-talented seeding squad also happens to be the UK Female Number 1 Rubiks Cube Solver extraordinaire.

Team Rubber Has Got Talent!

We employed a phone as a stopwatch to fend off speeding up/doctoring accusations!

Watch this and other quality video genius on our Rubber Republic Viral YouTube Channel

After watching a great Google Techtalk on using generative research for systems architecture (Digging Beyond User Preferences by Indi Young), I was inspired to spend some of my Sunday afternoon playing with Post-it notes while thinking over some work I’m doing on our ad network and viral seeding applications.

I’d like to point out that I’m not following her process exactly in the images below…

Here’s what you’ll need:

Three Colours of Post-It notes

A very large piece of paper on the wall, or a large whiteboard

Stage 1:

Come up with a full list of use cases for your application (you do know you’re user’s use cases don’t you?). Pick a colour of sticky note and write them all down.

Stage 2:

Organise all of the the use cases into similar conceptual ideas on upper half of the piece of paper, so if two people are looking for statistics on a particular item (but for different reasons) then those two use cases would be in the same column. Move the columns around so that they each type of user’s use cases are close together.

When you’re finished this stage, you should have a piece of paper that looks something like this:

Stage 3:

Now choose another colour of sticky note and write down the features that your application currently contains. Stick these below the “tower” of use cases which they specifically fix.

Finally, time to do some brain storming over new features if you are in the planning stage, and write theses on the final colour notes (or if you’re in the middle of implementing a feature then put this on the final colour sticky note). Add these in the same way as before.

The idea of this all is to try to draw your attention to which use cases are being fulfilled by the existing system, and which parts may been more thought in the future.

You can also group the columns by the type of user that has those use cases (not shown on the image above). For example, in the above image we actually have five different groupings of use cases, and I’m glad to say that the section that appears to not have features to support it (just left of centre), is the group with only one user, Me, so it’s probably the least important section of the system to get up and running - I have my own external tools to support them.