I used Google’s new Custom Search Engine tool to create a Django-specific search engine. This prioritises results from know Django sites, like the main site, the blogs of contributors and… this one! :-)

Djangoogle.

If you have any suggestions for sites to include, mail me.

Rich and I went to see Kraftwerk at I ♥ Techno this weekend. It was awesome. They had the robots, the glowing grid suits, the german accents, everything. The most impressive thing about their show¹ I think is the quality of the visuals. They have such a clear brand it’s not even true. Each song has a visual theme, often using lyrics displayed in huge pixelated text (by huge I mean like six inches a pixel). I thought it was cool. If you know it and like it too I recommend buying the Minimum Maximum box set for some lovely 12” photographs of their shows.

Tonight I was inspired by their set, I created a minimal track in Live. Nothing great, but I just bashed it out, which was fun. Then I wrote a sketch in Processing which draws and animates regular polygons. This was also a lot of fun. I was moderately successful with both projects in a short space of time because I’ve invested quite a bit of time thinking about basic music and computer graphics in the past. I have never reached great heights in either field, but I can knock out something basic quite easily now.

The music will need more forming (intro, bridge, etc) before it’s suitable to upload, but the sketch is pretty much done. I’ll try to put it up sometime tomorrow.

1. As opposed to the music, which is obviously awesome, greatest band ever and I don’t say that lightly.

Just bought a new Nokia N73. It’s not even activated yet and I’m sure it will be great when it is, but the hands free that it ships with is rubbish.

Ever since phones started having ambitions to be music players, their hands free kits have become dual-earpiece. This extra feature has a nasty side effect. They tangle instantly and forever more. Mine’s done it already. I actually just want to use it for making calls. So I picked up a traditional single-earpiece kind on eBay for all of a quid.

Louise and I dined at Pétrus last night to celebrate her birthday. Pétrus, a Michelin-starred Gordon Ramsay restaurant, is at the Berkeley Hotel in Knightsbridge. There were many courses, lovely surroundings, incredible food of course.

After they sneakily sprung me with a glass of champagne (doh!) they brought Foie Gras in wafers and tiny thin croutons with salt cod dip and parsley oil canapés. Then a choice of breads, the loveliest was the potato and honey bread.

Then starter, I had partridge on a bed of onions with tiny bits of bacon, mashed potato that must have been 75% butter and the jus from the meat. Now, I haven’t eaten much game, but usually it’s quite tough. This was only braised for the briefest time and it was succulent as anything.

Between starter and main they gave us a shot glass with an onion soup topped off with truffle foam. For the main I had Norfolk suckling pig cooked for twenty four hours, braised chicory, mushrooms, pomme pureé and the pork jus again. The meat was unbelievably tender and flavourful, and they including a few tiny belly cuts, the fine dining equivalent of crackling. Lip smacking.

Then they gave us a little pre-dessert apple ice, yoghurt and sauterne jelly. For desert I had almond panna cotta with vanilla poached pear and tonka bean ice cream. The ice cream arranged on top of the panna cotta in a perfect sphere. The pear, very thinly sliced, had a circular hole cut in it and was attached to the ice cream as a hat might be to a head. Caramel fronds curved up from plate to form a sort of sugar henge.

We finished it all off with a selection from the truffle trolley (the other type of truffle) and tea and coffee. A steal at all the money I ever had ever! :-)

Being an entrepreneurial developer has it’s upside! I found it! Aside from the obvious, that I haven’t found yet (hint exit strategy), you get invited to stuff!

Last night I went to Banner’s Inside The Bubble event. Hosted at the Serpentine Gallery’s cool bubble pavilion designed by Rem Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond. I ride past this building twice a day and I really want to go inside. It’s quite beautifully designed externally, but inside is a bit like a star trek set, plasticy, with cubes to sit on and canapés balanced on stacked translucent plastic rectables, the assembly bearing remarkable to the Tri-D chess from Star Trek.

Once inside, I met Sam Sethi, editor of TechCrunch UK and man about the internet and chatted with him and Simon Grice about MobMart. They were both nice guys and positive about what we’re doing. I chatted to another nice guy, Greg Plumbly, and drank some free drinks. But looking around, the whole thing felt wrong. There were canapés, there were free drinks, everyone was wearing suits. We were inside the bubble, it was the hype, I left before the talks started. Reading the site again, it seems the event was a (possibly successful) attempt to position Banner, part of WPP, as the go to people for Web 2.0 marketing. Nice play, but I wasn’t the target audience really.

Now I get invited to a wine tasting evening by MobMart’s IP lawyers! On a Tuesday night, it’s to celebrate the opening of their swanky new offices and the growth of their IP group. I am so there.

Been making it minimal with Live recently. The stimulus was to send a mix CD to minimallondon, but of course it would be a shame not to spread the love a bit further.

Download Make It Minimal mix (MP3).

Music includes a few bits off Marc Houle’s new Bay Of Figs LP, Troy Pierce, a bunch of Audion/Matthew Dear, Afternoon Coffee Boys, Plastikman/Hawtin, of course, Andre Kraml and a bunch of others.

We’re launching MobMart properly. To celebrate, from Monday we’re going to be picking the best item posted each day and give the seller £50!

During beta, selling is completely free. To sell, snap a picture, send it to 07720 11 00 22 and fill in the simple form that we’ll send back to your phone.

Paul Graham, in his essay Revenge of the Nerds, says:

When I see patterns in my programs, I consider it a sign of trouble. The shape of a program should reflect only the problem it needs to solve. Any other regularity in the code is a sign, to me at least, that I’m using abstractions that aren’t powerful enough — often that I’m generating by hand the expansions of some macro that I need to write.

This has really stuck in my head! I keep thinking it when I write code. It’s like a little angel sitting on my shoulder saying “No. No, Afternoon, abstract this, use a list comprehension, create a function, or a class, or a higher-order function, don’t just be lazy.” It’s a force for good.

If you ever want to get me involved in a discussion, or to agree to something, get me to ride to you and give me a milky cup of coffee.

I ride to work each day, about seven miles each way. I got in at 10:30 this morning (bit later than usual). I shower and get to work. The other people in my office are having a meeting, so coffee was prepared. After downing a cup of milky coffee and still coasting high on the endorphins from riding in the chill autumn morning and showering, I get really enthusiastic about stuff. It’s quite funny.