One of the reasons things have been quiet round here

There's lots of stuff happening round here, and of the big ones is that I've become the Technical Director (think CTO) for a startup called PitchSpace. You can hear our MD, the lovely James Cox, on today's Guardian Tech Weekly Podcast. The Guardian's Jemima Kiss also has an article about us up on the PDA blog about us. I'll be talking about what we're up to here and on the PitchSpace blog. It's going to be an interesting ride.

• 20.8.2008, 10.51
• File under: PitchSpace, PR, journalism, startup

Apparently I need to tell you that the feeds moved after all

For those of you who subscribe to the feeds...

It looks like a lot of feed readers don't follow permanent redirects sent by servers, and I changed the location of my feeds and used permanent redirects to tell your feed readers about the change, which I thought would make the transition seamless, and I would be able to bask in the glory of having done something right for a change...

Alas, this doesn't seem to be the case. Please update your feed readers. They should be able to automatically find the correct address if you visit http://reprocessed.org/. If not, then the new feed is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/reprocessed.

Thanks, and sorry for the hassle.

• 29.7.2008, 11.37
• File under: sysadmin, maintenance, mod_rewrite, Apache

Say hi to the new site

So, I've finally shipped a new version of reprocessed.org. It's essentially a prototype -- I did the least possible work to get something up and running, so there's a load of stuff missing (comments, primarily), but hopefully I've got a platform to build the fun and interesting things I've wanted to build but couldn't make Movable Type do (at least, do easily enough).

• 25.7.2008, 18.49
• File under: sysadmin, maintenance, Rails, Ruby, Ubuntu, software

Spring Awakening

I'm back in New York this week, and I went to see Spring Awakening at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre. I'm a huge fan of Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater's collaboration Phantom Moon, so I thought I'd see the show if I got the chance.

• 14.2.2008, 13.54
• File under: theatre, review, Duncan Sheik, Steven Sater, Broadway, musical

Off to New York

So, I'm going to be in New York from later on today, for a week working with a client on an exciting project. If anyone wants to talk software design, process, and practice, or about comics or whatever then cool. You can reach me by emailing matt at this domain. I'm meeting some of the NYC.rb folks at some point for beers, and I'm looking forward to finally making it to New York.

• 12.1.2008, 8.30
• File under: backstory

Web 2.0 Expo, Berlin

I'm heading to Berlin for O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Expo next week. I'll be speaking on a panel with Leisa Reichelt and Fred Oliveira: Moving from 1.0 to 2.0: Philosophies and Structures for Change. We're on at 9.00am on Tuesday 6 November. I'll be around for the whole 3 days of the main conference, and I'll be checking out the parallel web2open as well. I'm looking forward to it!

• 1.11.2007, 10.56
• File under: conference, O'Reilly, Web 2.0 Expo, Web 2.0 Expo, Berlin, public appearance

Hello, I must be going

I've been at the BBC for a little over three years, and I'm having a very good time. I've learned a phenomenal amount, worked with a slew of really great people, and now I help lead an excellent project team.

• 3.7.2007, 22.6
• File under: backstory

Come and work with us at the BBC

We have vacancies for developers at BBC Audio & Music Interactive at the moment. If you want to join a team building the data-driven future of the BBC's National Radio and Music presence in the interactive world (the Web, Mobile, DAB data services, Digital TV interactive services) then now's your chance.

• 17.5.2007, 16.34
• File under: BBC Audio & Music Interactive, job advert, help wanted

Bloodied but unbowed

So, the 'little' downtime has been most of a week, which kind of serves me right for buggering around with my server so much when I had other things to do.

• 28.3.2007, 20.41
• File under: maintenance

Shuffling the furniture

There will be some brief downtime later this week as I mess about with the server.

• 21.3.2007, 23.26
• File under: maintenance

Out in the cold

British Gas supply the gas to our lovely new flat (where by 'lovely' I mean 'building site'), via a pre-payment meter. This would be all well and good, except that tying a meter to a new pre-payment card so that a new customer (i.e. us) can use it requires a physical meter reset to be performed by an engineer. And not any old engineer, no. In fact, not even a British Gas engineer. Gas meters require a National Grid (née Transco) engineer to reset them. National Grid is the third-party supplier of gas infrastructure to British Gas.

• 27.11.2006, 16.58
• File under: British Gas, whingeing

Ten

In October 1996 I arrived at Reading University and discovered that I had a URL of my very own (the long defunct http://www.rdg.ac.uk/~shu96mp/). The rest, as they say, is history: Ten years of extremely irregular and infrequent posting of things on the web, five of those here at reprocessed.org. That's just the talking: this also marks six-and-some years as a web professional, as designer, markup monkey, back-end developer, information designer (architect, whatever), and all at once.

• 29.10.2006, 22.54
• File under: backstory

The flat

In a slightly terrifying development, Clare and I have bought a flat. It needs a lot of work (see what I mean), and we've been head scratching and drawing and changing our minds and getting quotes and yesterday the work started. We hired a steam wallpaper stripper and, um, stripped some wallpaper. So, maybe Tom did think of it first, but here's the Patterson home renovation team in full effect. Powered solely by Choco Leibniz. Time lapse by Gawker, naturally.

• 24.10.2006, 7.23
• File under: DIY, Patterson Heights, video, time lapse

Zoe for Google Doodler!

So, Google UK are holding a nationwide Doodle 4 Google competition for schoolkids to design a doodle to appear on the Google homepage.

• 2.10.2006, 19.23
• File under: plea for help

If it's making a funny noise, it's a bad sign

Two thursdays ago we were going to bed here at Patterson Acres, when we realised that the mail server that lives in the DIY server cabinet was making a funny noise.

• 26.9.2006, 19.32
• File under: DIY, IT infrastructure, server cabinet, bad idea, equipment failure

Everything I know about programming I learnt from typography

Here are the slides from my presentation at BarCamp London a few weekends ago. Sorry for the delay, I was hoping to secure permission to distribute the slides with one of the images I used at BarCamp, but I wasn't able to.

• 25.9.2006, 7.56
• File under: talk, presentation, slides, design theory, development, Norman Potter, Anthony Froshaug, Eric Evans

Back from Barcamp London

I'm freshly arrived home from Barcamp London, which was enormous fun.

• 3.9.2006, 18.59
• File under: BarCamp, BarCamp London

Hither & Yon

I've just returned from an excellent time at Greenbelt, which I'll post about soon. I'm away again for a couple of days (I'm writing this looking out over the North Sea), and I'll be at BarCamp London, where I'll be presenting some ideas about typography and hacking. Frankly, I'm having an unfeasibly good time this week.

• 30.8.2006, 19.47
• File under: backstory, plea for help

Getting Active Resource working in Edge Rails

I've wanted to have a look at Active Resource since it was announced, and now I need to look at it for work. It took me a while to get it working, so here is my learning.

• 1.8.2006, 21.28
• File under: Active Resource, Ruby on Rails, Rails, Ruby, guide, Edge Rails

Look, Ma, no email

My BT line has been down for 8 days now, and my email server lives in my flat at the end of an ADSL connection (from the lovely bytemark). Therefore emails you have sent me have not been received. As of the middle of last week I have a backup MX storing mails which I will be able to collect when ADSL returns. Emails between last sunday and last wednesday may well have vanished into the ether.

• 31.7.2006, 10.10
• File under: ADSL, BT, whingeing