Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
Here is my user manual, as first discovered in Cassie Robinson.‘s blog post and written about in my new years resolutions for 2020. Everything is work in progress and I may move this to a page instead of a blog entry.
Last updated on 5/2/2023
Now moved here – https://cubicgarden.com/user-manual/
I thoughts it was about time I formalised this challenge a bit.
For a long while people have asked what is a cubicgarden? I have smiled and never let on. Then it got to a point years ago while in London when I said if someone can work it out I would buy them dinner (not anywhere stupidly expensive but a nice dinner in a good restaurant). However, if they lose the challenge they have to buy me dinner.
People have a year to work it out or forfeit a dinner with me.
I give out a couple clues which are…
If someone can name the game (not even find the actual cubicgarden) I would finally post the solution on my blog for all. I won’t accept auto-generated lists of games from the 80’s and 90’s, just in-case you were thinking being smart.
Its interesting that no search engine can find it or work out what it may be… Machine learning wouldn’t have a chance without intimate knowledge of me and my background.
So far a few people have taken up the challenge including Jon but failed to name that game. Maybe it should be something to put in my will?
Some people found this while digging around the web… I forgot I wrote it while at BarCampLiverpool…
Cubic Garden by Ian Forrester (105 words)
A cubic object is a mathematical thing while a garden is a natural thing which strikes as organic opposed to the sterile mathematical nature of cubic.
You can get cubic gardens but when saying “cubicgarden” it doesn’t strike up visions of a sweet garden. Even if you did, it wouldn’t be a cubic garden.
References to cubicgarden online point to a guy called Ian Forrester. What caused him to choose cubicgarden, a lot of people ask? Why not Qubic garden or even square garden?
In Donnie Darko one character says the most beautiful word in the dictionary is “Cellar door.” I would contest it’s “Cubicgarden”
Challenge is on…
I don’t think I will need to ever tell the story again… I’m coming up to my 2nd year since the brush with death, and I’m feeling great (although very tired right now). I was going to add to the end of my presentation, the story continues…
I just know someone/some people out there was inspired by such a personal story and if that helps, my job was done.
Updated…
Of course I didn’t say anything about the other speakers at TedXManchester…
Mary Anne Hobbs gave a fantastic talk with no slides and no real prompt, amazing stuff. Its actually funny because I felt like her talk fitted really well with my own although we were hours apart. Passion is infectious…
Tara Shears really made particle physics sound quite simple and Tom Bloxham was quite likeable in what he was saying. I had a little chat with him about the New Islington area before the event started and he wasn’t as defensive about it as I thought it would be. Maybe he hears it all the time. Martins 12min talk asking why there isn’t a startup hub in Manchester was interesting and got me thinking about my plans for Smlworld.
Dan O’Hara and Brendan Dawes were great as you’d expect… But a massive shout must go to Herb & Isabella for putting the whole thing together and picking such great speakers to talk…
#TranceManc is now transformed and happening…
Starting this Friday (8th July 2011) Arcadia bar will be transformed into a wonderland for House & Trance lovers… We have a licence till 2am in the morning! So do drop in from 8pm and…
Startup your night of bars, clubs and unrestrained debauchery in the best possible way…
Of course you can help us by downloading a flyer and printing it out, tweeting using the hashtag #startupbar or send people a link to the facebook event.
The concept is its a place to start your night although we wouldn’t mind if you want to stay for the cheap drinks and some excellent tunes and mixing in any bar inside Manchester. We’ve hacked the club experience on to the bar experience and ramped it up…
See you all there…?!
When I first moved to Manchester, I hoped to hear more trance… There wasn’t that much in London and to be honest London’s never really been a city for Trance. So with the move, the hope of trance. I mean all those great super clubs such as Gatecrasher, Cream, etc are from around the north of england.
But its not happen… I’ve been to a couple of nights run by Rong… but its gone quiet.
So in my usual way I don’t like to stand by and let it go. Instead I’ve setup my own night at Arcadia on Great Ancoats Street.
Of course its not just me, its Simon Lumb better known as Dirty Si is my partner in crime on this jump into the unknown. I’ve not played out for a while now but a long time ago I use to play regularly in Bristol but running your own night (even a bar night) is something else.
Others DJs are going to join us and we’re looking at going every week… Expect flyers, surprises and a full on promotion soon enough…. Now we just need a name for the night. I’m backing “Startup.”
During Christmas I thought I’d do some maintenance to blog because I’ve been meaning to clean up a few things for a while. I’m hosting with GoDaddy.com mainly because there cheap and there pretty hassle free.
I had my /wordpress blog which you might have seen stuff like this at. Then I also had storytlr at the root of the cubicgarden domain and a couple other blogs which I was testing things on like mydreamscape. So I deleted the couple of test wordpress blogs and started putting a axe through storytlr (which is a real shame but I could never get the cron to work). Then I noticed there was no blog in the management option for /wordpress. Which meant yes it was either lost somewhere in the management interface or it was gone….
I was generally pissed off with Godaddy for not making it clear which blog I was deleting. Worst of all, its all happening on bloody Christmas day, when I should be relaxing not wondering what happen to my bloody blog. I almost canceled my contract with Godaddy right there and then, I got a message from the Godaddy twitter account with some somewhat useful information.
So anyway although I wasn’t able to recover everything back to how it was before, I now have a new blog and lifestream.
I had a backup of my blog from Mid December and I’ve been using Disqus for comments so pretty much everything up till then was safe. All the blog entries I usually write in Blogilo, and I had a backup of all the recent entries. So it was just a matter of digging them out and publishing them again with the correct date stamp.
The first thing you will notice is that the /wordpress is now gone (yeh!) and the lifestream is now finally working (double yeh!).
But….
There is still a lot of work to do. I still need to design the bloody thing and this time I’m hoping to do a proper job. On top of that I’m going to sort out all the external links to my life all over the web, so there all linked here in some logical fashion.
I also need to link up ianforrester.org to my lifestream and add in lots of lovely embedded goodness into my pages.
It was certainly quite hairy at one point but it kind of worked out… Happy Christmas everyone…
Been meaning to write about Techmeme for a while now, specially after Tom Morris's thoughts on Techmeme.
See for some reason Techmeme really likes my blog entries. I can't work out why, but I seem to get ranked pretty high along the likes of the mainstream press sometimes. Generally I do use Techmeme for catching up on the latest news, and although Tom is right about the business focus. Its reasonably ok and saves me flicking through tons of blogs about the same story, when I just want the headline stories. I rated it very high in Particls (Touchstone) for this exact reason.
So if you've not noticed already, cubicgarden.com has been up and down like a yoyo on a broken string. This was not the fault of Hub.org, actually Apache 2.x has been running flawlessly through-out the troubles. Thats why you could see the 503 error and not a 404.
Without boring everyone to death, I'm running on a virtual server FreeBSD (thats right Marc?) in which I'm running Resin 3.x and Apache 2.x together connected via jk or something like that. I then use Apache for static files and Resin the Java container for dynamic applications. Currently I have Blojsom, Cocoon and ZK installed in the Java container.
So what was actually happening? Well Resin was running out of memory every few hours. But why? It seems there was a problem with the crazy amount of spam I getting on my pipeline blog and so Blojsom was trying to load most of them into memory for analysis or something. So I have deleted all comments and trackbacks from Flow currently and made it a read only place for now. I was going to use Akismet on it too but decided actually it was better as read only for now. Those really interested will email me and spammers can just die.
Hopefully now cubicgarden.com and all the other blogs hosted on the same install of blojsom will be more reliable and I won't get the floods of emails saying your site is down again. Thanks to everyone who did write. Honestly I would have done this much earlier if I was in my regular timezone.
In the long run, I'm considering putting geekdinner.co.uk on the same blojsom install, but I'm worried this will screw up the other geekdinners around the country. And geez, everyone just can't get enough of WordPress. By the way Photomatt is a very cool, down to earth guy and well worth talking to if you get a chance.
Its been all of about a week since I wrote anything. I've been quite busy but I've actually been working on this blog. I've changed the structured of the pages which does cause some problems with some of you using Internet Explorer but most of you are using the RSS/ATOM so its low on my list of changes. I've also finally sorted out most of the issues with why the site didn't validate. As you can see, it now validates. This won't always be the case, due to that well talked about entity problem in copy and pasted url's. I'm also going to try and use Microformats more than I have in the past. I've not dumped OPML for outlining but I like XOXO and am actively looking for a application which supports it for quick editing. In the past I was using JOE (java outline editor) which is great because it allows you to runs python scripts which can do many things. But its not had much updates as of late. So can anyone suggest a XOXO editor besides the javascript one. If not there are XSLs to convert between OPML and XOXO so I'm not that worried.
