Author Archives: Roo

One thousand paintings

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I recently discovered One thousand paintings, a project with the aim of selling 1000 paintings of the numbers 1 to 1000. The pricing model is quite interesting:

Generally, the value of a number is defined by the number itself, in the following way: value = 1000 – number. However, this is only the maximum price. Initially, a discount of 90% applies. This discount will decrease by an absolute 10% for every hundred paintings that are sold (for example, after 300 sold paintings, the discount will be 60%)

I thought the whole thing was quite cool. Having showed it to my wife (who is herself an artist), we quickly started looking for numbers that were still available. Many of the likely choices had already gone (including my preference, 404) but she pointed out that 365 was still up for grabs (yes, yes.. we should have got 366 as well, for leap years). Before long, we’d ordered it, happy to support a cool project and wondering where we’d hang our unique 12″ x 12″ painting.

It doesn’t seem so long ago that the Million Dollar Homepage was taking off. Ian, while wondering whether gullibility was a pre-requisite for early adopter status, bought an ad for eightbar, which I notice still manages to bring us in over 30 clicks per month. While these are undeniably different projects, it’s hard not to compare them.

When Mrs Roo and I bought 365, it was the 98th painting sold (handily just within the maximum discount). Today, having been linked from boing boing and other prominent blogs, he’s already sold 144 225 and rising very fast. Surely mainstream media attention can’t be far behind.

O’Reilly protecting the “Web 2.0” name

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A few of us were so busy drinking nice red wine and chatting about Web 2.0 yesterday that we didn’t notice O’Reilly attempting to protect the use of “Web 2.0” as a service mark and prevent its use in conjunction with a 3rd party conference.

Thus did controversy ensue.

I can’t help thinking that O’Reilly are victims of their own success here. Like it or not, “Web 2.0” has stuck pretty well as a term. Protecting their Web 2.0 conference while still hoping to keep it in popular use is going to be a difficult line to walk.

How is anyone else going to have conferences about what is, after all, a popular subject? Well, in this instance, O’Reilly are offering to let the “IT@Cork Web 2.0 conference” go ahead this time, but have requested that they agree not to use the name for future conference.

It seems Tim O’Reilly himself is on holiday. I wonder whether things will change when he returns.

Games within games: Tringo in Second Life

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As we all know by now, Second Life is less of a game and more of a virtual world with its own economy. Of course, inhabitants in a virtual world need virtual pastimes. A quick scan of today’s advertised events demonstrates that ‘Tringo’ and ‘Slingo’ are both more popular than ever.

Second Life events

While Slingo (imagine a slot machine merged with bingo) has long been a popular game on the internet, Tringo seems to be more specific to Second Life.

So what is it? Well, earlier today, Wired reported on the background and popularity of Tringo, which is an unlikely cross-breed of bingo and tetris. I won’t try to cover it in detail here (perhaps because I’m busy playing it in another window? I’ll let you guess) but there are plenty of excellent coverage of the game out there already. If you don’t fancy trying it in Second Life, you can always play it on the publisher’s website instead.

There are plenty of other games in Second Life besides Tringo. In fact, Linden Labs hosts an annual contest to develop compelling in-game games. (2005 winners, 2006 winners).

It will take some time before any of them overtake the *ingo games for raw popularity in Second Life though. As a sign of its success, and another excellent example of a real world crossover, I notice that Tringo has become a GameBoy Advance title too.

Tilting at ThinkPads

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The ThinkPad range of laptops is famous for being droppable, partly because they seem to be able to withstand frightening events. Many IBMers have stories of a friend who dropped, or drove over a ThinkPad. One or two even claim to have survived theirs being oven baked. Ever since the T42, many ThinkPads have been equipped with the Active Protection System, which “can detect sudden changes in motion and temporarily stop the hard drive”. A nice feature, and one that was crying out to be re-purposed for something a little more… well… fun.

When I heard that a colleague had already worked out how to get the values out of the on-board accelerometers, I knew that it needed a quick front-end to show off the movement. I whisked up something using Ajax techniques to get the readings into Firefox and update some SVG in a very simple web page. The demo, although somewhat basic, certainly shows how intuitive tilting a laptop can feel, and could easily form the basis of a simple game. Thanks to Darren, who filmed me showing it off on Friday, the results are now online.

I’m emerging

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For the past couple of years I’ve been working in the Pervasive Messaging Technologies team. This has been a great time for me, for so many reasons. The team is fantastic and my manager (who recently posted here himself) is not only a great boss but also a Master Inventor. What a title! It is refreshing, in a company where you can describe your cupboard as a TSU and most people will know what you’re talking about (and many will not assume you are joking), to work in Pervasive Messaging Technologies – one of the few departments which did not reduce itself to an acronym.

Recently, and very suddenly, I was invited to participate in a twelve month job-swap with Martin Gale from Emerging Technology Services. Despite being insanely happy where I was, it seemed to good an offer to pass up. Having moved in, met new friends and learned more about old friends, posted on the department’s wiki and blog and had a crack at a couple of rather fun demos (which I’ll to post more about one day) I’m now three weeks in. Here are some observations on the move.

  • ‘Upstairs’ in Pervasive Messaging, people went for coffee. ‘Downstairs’ in ETS people go for a tea. I assume this is because of the relative proximities of the coffee bar and the Cha Bar. I have finally discovered a taste for tea without sugar.
  • The S in ETS stands for Services, and being a services team has meant I get to see more customers in the flesh. This is a good thing by the way. Being close to our customers and personally understanding what they want and need is not only essential but fun. I’m averaging over one customer meeting per week already, and I’ve barely started yet.
  • The E and T stand for Emerging Technology. This means we’re interested in new, cutting edge, innovative things. And everyone really is interested in these things. People ‘get it’, where it can be anything from how to make this server perform better to why tagging is more powerful than catagorising and why AJAX, despite being an overused buzzword, is important and useful. Hobbies and work time overlap pleasingly in an environment where today’s part-time project could be part of tomorrow’s customer demo.

So I’m enjoying it. I feel at home. The only worry so far has been this falling clock.

Fortunately Ian and I were safely in the lab at the end of the hall, but the noise of crashing metal and breaking glass was impressive.

– Roo Reynolds (Emerging Technology Services, IBM Hursley)

Update: comments closed due to oddly high levels of spam on this particular post.

‘Gmail’ becomes ‘Google Mail’ for UK users

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Google recently announced that they are changing the service’s name here in the UK due to a trademark dispute. From today, all new invites sent to people in the UK will be for @googlemail.com (rather than @gmail.com) addresses. Nothing changes (so far) for existing users.

Gmail logo
The Gmail logo.

Google Mail
The new Google Mail logo.

Why is this happening? The dispute with gmail.co.uk has been rumbling away for a while, and this seems to be the result. Google are still contesting their right to use the Gmail name in the UK, only now it’s being done in court.

Let’s go karting

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Go-KartingDarren has already posted this week on how he and his department spent an afternoon launching rockets together.

Today, my team and I enjoyed similar team-building fun by going go-karting. I’m slightly bruised this evening (no accidents, but some of those corners were sharp), and we all had a lot of fun.


– Roo Reynolds (Pervasive Messaging Technologies, IBM Hursley)

You have (no) mail

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I’ve been a fan of David Allen’s system of Getting Things Done for a while, but have always had trouble keeping an empty inbox.
Until now…


Notes: empty.


Gmail: also empty.

What difference does this make to my life? Mainly just that I no longer struggle to distinguish actions from reference material. Previously, when my monolithic inbox got really bad I’d ‘mark as unread’ things I knew I still had to do, but deep down I knew the notion of new-and-unread and something-to-do were distinct, and that something was wrong. I’ve maintained two empty inboxes for a week now, and I see no reason not to be able to keep them that way.

When new email arrives it will either be junk, reference or an action.

  • Junk is the best, since it’s deleted on sight and takes no more of my time or energy.
  • Reference material goes into an ‘archive’ folder, which largely gets ignored until I need something. My archive is a (fairly coarse) hierarchy. I’m too lazy for anything too elaborate here, so I’ll probably end up relying on search tools to find things.
  • If it’s an action – an email containing something I have to do – I ask myself, “can I deal with this right now, in less than one minute?” and if I can I do it there and then. (the book suggests two minutes, but I find that something I think will take two minutes will end up taking five or ten). If it will take longer then it’s moved to an ‘actions’ folder for when I do have time do it.

If you’ve never heard of Getting Things Done, I’d recommend 43 Folders’ GTD introduction as a great place to start.

– Roo Reynolds (Pervasive Messaging Technologies, IBM Hursley)

Hursley House

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Hursley House

Darren’s lovely photo of Hursley House shows where we work. The view from the lawn really is impressive. Can’t see anyone playing frisbee in this shot, but I guess it was a bit late in the day for that.

I’ve never actually worked in the House itself; there are several more modern buildings behind it, and I’m currently in D-Block. It is very good to show off to visitors though, and an excellent location to host meetings.