Mighty Toast ^beta

My boss came up to me a few weeks ago and say, "Hey you're a skiing man, aren't you? Do you fancy being flown off to a ski resort to build a game to present to a bunch of female lifestyle and fashion journalists?". My answer of course, was "YES PLEASE!!"

Fishtank! is a fun little side technology demo I worked on as part of my job at HP Labs Bristol working on the mscape project.

The way it worked was that each delegate at the recent mscape fest 2007 conference carried a 2d barcode on their identity badge. You could then use one of the ipaq 6815 devices to scan the 2d barcode and choose a fish type, and a fish with that person's name appeared in a digital fishtank on a large-screen plasma display in the refreshment 'n' networking area of the conference. You could also feed the fish - which caused them to grow in size, or, by scanning a barcode again poison or 'lurve' the fish.

My first data-driven website was one I built for my sister lenka, an artist and filmmaker. She asked me to build a site to enable her to put up pictures and writeups of her artworks and films. To save time I had planned to use a pre-built template system such as plone.

However, being an artist she wanted complete control over how it looked and operated so I had to build a site from scratch in php. It was a good opportunity to learn how to use php, mysql, html, javascript and css all in one go.

Another requirement was that she should be able to add pictures and details for her projects herself, without me needing to edit the site manually. So I created a series of html forms that read and write to and from the database, which I ended up adapting for my own use on this site.

She's put up a lot of her work now, including her infamous 'Queda Quality Question Quickly Quickly Quiet' film - George Bush's 2001 state of the union address cut up and arranged into alphabetical order, as well as her award-winning 'People in Order' series for Channel 4.

www.lenkaclayton.co.uk

Chordulator is a PC program designed to help musicians with their chord sequences.

It came from some work I was doing with the playback of musical chords when the strings in standard chord notation was typed into a command line. E.g. you'd type Fm7 and the system would play back a F minor seventh chord. I expanded this into a little gui application where you can choose the chord root (A, B, C), whether it's major, minor, or suspended, and a bunch of other options, then you can play back that chord, see it laid out on a piano keyboard. You can also use a very basic sequencer to string together sequences of chords to start to get ideas for songs.

The final trick it does is to attempt to give guidance as to which chords might work after your currently selected chord.

LyricsGenerator is a little web project that me and my ex-housemate Will Voelcker (www.casualphysics.com) put together a while back

What it does is to write lyrics to songs for you by piecing together rhyming lines from a database of 6000 pop songs. You can use a simple song template or you can make up your own, specifying the rhyming pattern and/or number of syllables of each line.

Note that the directory is password protected - you can access it via.

username: please password: letmeplay