This site was built using Meteor, a very promising new javascript framework. It was a real pleasure to develop with, and if they deliver on the promise I think it could be revolutionary in the same RoR was when it first appeared. Shout out to amplify.js too!

The site is hosted on the free Meteor development hosting (thanks!), so I can’t vouch for it always being there, but if it is VOTE!!

Budding performers would be able to submit a performance of a given line in a play, and then the results published to a site which would let somebody view the whole play. I had great plans to let people see multiple performances of the same line and then vote on them, making it truly democratic. Currently I have opted for a more dictatorial approach, where each performance is moderated by the site administrator.

I built an unfinished proof of concept in Rails 3.2.something (only tested in Safari on the Mac – tough) and it’s available on my Github. Here’s a link to a demo site that may or may not be available. If it is available, by all means have a go! I realise that for most of you this will mean send me the Nyan Cat video, or a something unspeakably rude.

It’s an interesting concept, so if anyone wants to develop it further go ahead. Give me a shout if you do, and I’ll share the other thoughts I had for how it could work.

Right – onto the next side project. Using Meteor to answer the ‘Who is the greatest detective?’ question  once and for all…

Check out http://www.bingocardcreator.com/abingo for more.

This latest exercise is based around the idea of ‘Found Rhythms’. Here’s what I did:

• Cut a 2.5 inch hole through the middle of a magazine about surfing (chosen at random from the magazine shop. Doing this made me realise how great magazines are)
• Selected 10 of the clippings and scanned them in
• Created 10 pages, 5 inches x 5 inches, in my chosen page layout tool
• Copied the plot of the film ‘Point Break’ from Wikipedia (to keep with the theme)
• Laid out the images and text in a small book

The result: Found Rhythms (16.7 MB PDF – best viewed in 2-up page view)

As an added bonus, here’s my Spotify Point Break Soundtrack playlist to listen to, to complete the experience.
Ratt were actually a great band!
Kind of.

Playing with lines. It’s supposed to be rain.

So last week I decided to start another side project (of which all will be revealed if I ever complete it, as a teaser it has drama in it).

As any developer knows the first thing to do on a side project is to find some bleeding edge new technology, that may not actually work, to build it in. Following a couple of conversations with colleagues I went for the express web framework based on node.js.

Although I’ve been writing JavaScript for over 10 years, I had not used node.js at all, so there was a lot to learn.

This post is really just to share the excitement and enthusiasm I’ve got after setting everything up and starting to work. I’m using heroku for production hosting, and this article was a fantastic resource getting started. Installing node, npm (package management) and nvm (node version management) was straightforward (thanks in part to Homebrew).

Within about 3 hours I had a full development environment – package management, version control (Github, what else?), seamless development and production settings and a one line deploy. Using Foreman I also get a simple way to manage running multiple components.

Redis has also been a revelation, with this article about data types really helping me understand the possibilities.

I am too old now to not know there may be danger ahead, but I am hugely impressed with what I have seen so far.

As an aside I also have been looking at the various HTML5 templates out there. I was momentarily seduced by Twitter’s Bootstrap but the depth of knowledge and lack of intrusiveness in html5boilerplate was clearly the right thing to do for me. Bootstrap would be a great option if you are building something new and want a really quick interface to drop on it (and you don’t mind it looking and feeling a lot like Twitter).

Anyway – onwards to wireframing and design, and much respect for all the people who have been involved in creating these tools.

This is the part where I lie to myself and say I’ll blog more about it as I continue development.

Charles Dickens from Barnaby Rudge, describing the Gordon Riots in 1780.

We worked for a few hours in the afternoon, but didn’t really get much done. The wall under the paper was patched and fractured, but better than I had hoped. After we had tided the room I made coffee, decaffeinated because his blood pressure has been high since he retired. We drank the coffee in silence, and read our respective papers.

Around seven we went out for a meal. The restaurant was busy enough to be distracting. We discussed people I had known when I was younger and what had happened to them, and Dad told me about their fathers. He talked for a while about his business colleagues and his trips to Italy with work. He loved the food, and the people. I listened.

After an hour we had finished eating. Dad wanted to go to the pub over the road. It was quiet when we entered. At the bar he ordered a pint for himself, and a bottle of beer for me. We sat, and to break the silence I asked about Granddad.

His name was Tommy. I had only distant memories of him, he had died when I was seven or eight, and we had visited only rarely. He used to sit on a huge pile of cushions, and I wouldn’t get too close or he would grab me and tickle me half to death with his hugely strong hands. I knew he had been a miner and a boxer too, for a while. That was all I knew.

Dad told me four stories, though I had to press him for details. I wrote them all down the next day, as far as I could remember.

-

Nobby Clark

When my Dad was about twelve years old he beat up Nobby Clarks’ son. I couldn’t really find out why, though Dad suggested that the son had been calling him names. While Dad was talking about it I remembered him pointing out his school in the colliery village, a huge high walled building that looked like a prison. I could imagine my Dad and Nobby’s son outside the high wrought-iron gates pushing and hitting each other until one ran away with a bloody nose. My Dad headed home for his tea.

Nobby Clark and his son lived on the same street as Dad. He was the ‘street bully’. A huge red-faced man, much taken to drink, who could often be heard bellowing and shouting, known for beating his wife when he got home from the pub. As Dad walked up the road past Nobby’s house, Nobby burst out the front door in a fury. He must have been looking out the window, waiting. Before Dad could run Nobby caught him a blow across the head that sent him spinning. As he fell he found his feet and ran as fast as he could towards home. Nobby lumbered after him, cursing and swearing as he went.

When Dad got home Tommy was just sitting down for his tea. Dad burst into the front room out of breath. Tommy just looked at him and told him to sit down. You could hear Nobby shouting on his way up the street, but Tommy didn’t let Dad say anything. He just told him to sit down. Dad sat down.

A few seconds later there was a huge banging on the front door. Nobby was shouting and hitting the door with his fists. He was shouting ‘get out here you little bastard, get out here’. Dad looked across at Tommy. He quietly put his knife and fork down, stood up and walked to the door. He opened it and kept walking. As he walked he jabbed Nobby Clark sharply in the chest with his left fist, pushing him back each time. Although Nobby was over six feet tall, and Tommy only five foot eight or so, Tommy was a powerful man, fresh out of the army after the war. He stopped as Nobby backed off from the pavement onto the road. He said, ‘Nobby Clark, I’ve heard you shouting in your house, and I’ve seen you strutting about the place. I’ll tell you this – you touch my lad or my house again and you’ll have me to answer to’.

Dad stopped the story at this point, told me to go to the bar while he went to the toilet. When he got back I asked if Nobby had bothered him again. He said he hadn’t, ‘everybody knew Tommy, everyone knew who he was. He kept himself to himself your Granddad but everybody knew who he was.’

-

Two Sten Guns & a Mattress

On the 2nd of June 1940 Tommy was among the last of over three hundred and thirty thousand soldiers belonging to the British Expeditionary Force to be evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk.

He was a member of the 37th Royal Artillery (known as ‘The Broken Wheel’ Regiment). They had been posted to mainland Europe following the German invasion of Poland. My Dad didn’t know how long Tommy had been over there, though he knew he was a veteran by the time the war started. Tommy had been out in India for years.

The regiment had received the order to evacuate, and had to make their own way, on foot, across the fields and towns of France to Dunkirk, where the British fleet was waiting. They were instructed to leave whatever equipment they could not easily carry. Soldiers were worth more than weapons.

The young officer in charge was panicked. He came to the corner of a field, and he began to march diagonally across it. Tommy had to reach quickly forward to restrain him. You never walked across the fields, you walked around them, for fear of mines. He angrily shrugged off Tommy’s hand, but walked around the field.

As they got to the main road they could see the German soldiers approaching in the distance. The officer quickly sent a young Welsh soldier into an abandoned farmhouse with instructions to find a mattress. When the lad returned the officer handed Tommy two Sten guns. He told Tommy and young lad to use the mattress as cover and hold off the Germans as long as they could, then follow on when they had a chance.

Tommy had been fighting long enough to know this was a suicide mission. They propped the mattress up at the corner of the house, and watched as the rest of the regiment disappeared around the corner. Even before the last soldier had gone Tommy was already on his feet.

Tommy told the Welsh lad to come with him. They jogged after their regiment and quickly caught up with the soldiers at the back of the line. Nods and winks were exchanged as Tommy and the Welsh lad silently rejoined the evacuation. The other soldiers grouped together around them so the officer wouldn’t see if he chanced to turn around.

After another couple of hours they came in sight of the harbour. It must have been terrible. Luftwaffe planes were strafing lines of troops and vehicles, dogfighting with British planes and attacking the small ships engaged in taking waiting troops out to the deep water where the destroyers waited.

Behind the German’s grew closer, the distant rumble of trucks and gunfire coming closer with every second. Around them there were very few remaining British or French soldiers. Gradually the regiment broke into a run, desperate not to miss their last chance of escape.

Tommy must have seen men shot by the German fighters. He choose to run, bent almost double along the line of a wall going down towards the sea. After covering nearly a mile he arrived at the shore. There were no small boats left. The destroyer was out of the bay, in the deep water. Tommy threw away the gun and most of his gear, waded in and began to swim out to the huge battleship. Dad told me it was around half a mile, and that by the time Tommy swam out to the boat he couldn’t climb the rope lowered for him. A man climbed down and dragged him aboard. As soon as he recovered his breath he asked for a turn on the ship’s guns, to try and shoot down the fighters.

That’s the version Dad told me. When I was writing it it led me to recollect talking to my Granddad about the war when I was very young. I have a clear memory of him telling me about Dunkirk, about running through the machine gun fire to the beach, and then telling me that he climbed onto a small boat. He told me when he sat on the boat he kept feeling down for his legs, since he had heard that when they were blown off, you didn’t feel it.

-

Sergeant For a Day

There were only a couple of stories left to tell, and Dad struggled to remember the details. He went quiet for a while, and then asked if he had already told me about when Tommy was Sergeant for a day.

It was when he was posted over in India. A Welsh officer, a giant of a man, had made it his business to bully and intimidate the soldiers under him. There was little you could do as a private. The best course of action was to keep your head down, and not make yourself conspicuous. This Welsh officer had singled out Tommy, perhaps because of his boxing successes, and often ‘took the mick’.

During some battle or other Tommy had distinguished himself. His reward was to be promoted to Sergeant, which amongst other things gave him access to the officer’s mess. He received his promotion in the morning, took part in training, and then was expected in the mess for his first lunch as an officer. He walked into the mess, passing the Welshman standing by the door, who made the same kind of derogatory remark he had been coming out with since Tommy had started.

Tommy didn’t reply. He just turned around put his fists up, and knocked him out cold with one punch.

The same day Tommy was demoted back to Private, but the Welshman never bothered him again, and he got himself a bit of a reputation about the place.

-

The American

Dad and I sat and finished our drinks. He went to buy another round and when he came back sat down slowly.

There was another story, he said, about some black American soldier in the war. Not much to tell.

Tommy went into the bar in the army camp one night for a drink. At the time he had just won some boxing trophy and was known about the camp for the fight, which had been a hard battle.

He asked the barman for a beer, and stood and waited as it was poured out. While he was leaning on the bar, an American soldier came in and also asked the barman for a beer when he was ready. The barman glanced up and then looked back down at the drink he was pouring for Tommy.

“We don’t serve your kind in here”, the barman said, “black lads”.

Tommy leaned over the bar and grabbed the man by his collar, lifting him up to his toes.

“He’s had to deal with the same bullets we have. I’m buying him a bloody drink”.

The barman muttered some apology and poured the drink.

-

Dad finished his last beer quickly, and half of mine was still in the glass. Time to get back, he said, and we picked up our jackets and left.

On the walk home we didn’t say much. I asked Dad what I had got from his side of the family.

“You’ll go grey early like me,” he said,” and your temper. That’s the same as me and your Granddad. Your temper.”