MonkeyDispenser

Being self-employed, and in the fortunate position of being able to work from home quite a lot, I have often considered what other opportunities there are for working outside of the office. Working from home is fine especially if you have a dedicated office space (which for me is the loft). But what if you don’t have somewhere away from the other tenants of the house, or there are times when you just need to get out? Getting out can be important for home workers that don’t want to go out of their minds.
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Popularity: 19% [?]

Another major update to the site, this time involving the move across to using WordPress. When I first created the site (properly) I used it as a project for learning PHP as well as a few dynamic html techniques. The blog-type format was fun to write and taught me a lot of things that I now use in my day-to-day work on other projects.

But, in terms of a fully functional blog site I was never going to be able to reproduce something with this level of technical ability without some serious time commitments. And it’s not like anyone was going to pay me to do it either!

So far I’m very impressed with WordPress, and its plug-in framework means it can easily be expanded to suit other needs. I think that when I come across a client who wants a blog-style site then this is where I’ll be starting in future. It’s easy to set up, well supported and I can save the innovation for the unique features they require!

Popularity: 15% [?]

I think this is why I bought a Mac…

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Popularity: 10% [?]

Finally I took the decision to get a MacBook. I’ve been worried for a while that only having one machine could cause problems as a freelance software developer should that machine decide to go belly up.

Also I just wanted to expand my knowledge a little by moving across to a new platform, at least part time. This way I still have the security of my big-beast-of-a-Dell laptop whilst keeping my private life on the MacBook. Oh yes, I’m a sucker for iLife and I look forward to getting all of my music and photo’s onto it. Once I’ve fixed my network that is since I had to rebuild it just to get the Mac to use the wireless access. Apart from that everything just seems to work…so far.

The built in camera is a revelation. I wish I had more friends (or at least friends with Macs) so I could video conference!

Popularity: 23% [?]

Somehow I was talked into entering a competition after less than a year of training. Oh well, I suppose the easiest way to know how you’ll do in a fight is to actually be in a fight. We were quite lucky since Sensei Liam is big on competition and was prepared to do some proper kumite training for those of who are still at the ippon kumite stage of our Karate journey!
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Popularity: 10% [?]

Yet again my thanks to Amanda. Her talents are wasted documenting the stuff I’ve written and subjected her to over the years! I’ll miss you all…

Ode to Jason

Yet another rhyme for a similar reason,
Jason is going, it must be the season,
Or Indulge have put something strange in our lunches, Which makes people leave, that’s one of my hunches, Or could it be that Jason has taken offence, By the team’s constant ribbing, but that doesn’t make sense, Coz this team is renowned for its sensitive ways, Care and concern for each other fills our days…, So maybe it’s the fault of the vending machine, There are never any Doritos, that is so mean, Jason loves his Doritos, the additives keep him going, So Indulge or Doritos? There’s no way of knowing, What I do know is that Jason will be missed by the crew, And his unique style of management? Yes, that too, When asked what’s next on the plan, Jason replies “whatever you like”, Oh the no-pressure team leadership of easy going Mr Dyke!
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Popularity: 7% [?]

I’ve been playing with several areas on the site and trying to improve the way it looks and the way you move around it. One of my greatest finds recently has been Xara’s graphical software suite. I suggest trying out the demo’s as they produce some excellent software packages. I’ve been using Webstyle to create buttons effortlessly and what’s more they look good (as opposed to my own efforts!) I’ve only just got into Xara Xtreme but it is a great vector graphics drawing application. Their instructional videos are excellent. It’s everything I need without the expense of Photoshop.

Which leads me on to my next purchase, a Wacom Intuos graphics tablet. It’s only just arrived so I don’t know what it’s going to be like. It’s sat next to me at my desk right now, taunting me…

draw with me, draw with me…

I even added Google AdWords which you should be able to see to the right. I don’t expect to make any money from it, it just helps add some extra interest to the site and it’s another thing I can help people with in the future if they need it for their own sites. Just the fact it is relevant to my site content makes it an advertising medium I’m actually quite happy to have around.

Anyhow - time to get back to work.

Popularity: 12% [?]

This weekend was quite depressing as we suddenly realised one of our cats hadn’t been seen around the house since sometime late last week. When you have kids to deal with you kind of ignore the cats a bit too much so we felt a little guilty that we didn’t even know exactly how long she’d been gone for!

The one that disappeared was Larrs. She’s always come across as a dippy kitten - the blond of the cat world. In reality she’s 14 years old now so all sorts of worries started going through our minds and I think Celeste and I really feared the worst. If anyone was considered likely to disappear it was always her scrapping brother, Etta. But as an old man himself he really is slowing down these days.
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Popularity: 8% [?]

A rather grandly named piece of work I did as my dissertation for a Masters degree several years ago. During the course of the project I gathered together much information from the news groups and several game related sites. There were always lots of people around wanting information on the basics of path finding and I always promised I’d publish my work in the end as a sort of path finding primer.

Obviously I forgot.

But here it is about 7 years later than promised. As with most things I do get there eventually:

Artificial Intelligence Software Development Kit

The only thing I do ask if you go on to do something useful with this information is that you perhaps consider linking/referencing it/me. You never know, someone might find it useful and then go on to create the best thing in video-games since Doom. That would be a good thing.

You can probably ignore the details directly related to the software I wrote unless that kind of thing turns you on. If it does I have the code somewhere still so let me know if you want it rather than cutting and pasting from the documents. The first chapters should give you a fair bit of information on basic path finding though.

I’ve still to tidy up the web version over the next few days (make it look nicer, add a proper index page, etc.)

Popularity: 11% [?]