migrant|roo

The World's First Race Across the Internet is over! It took an extra huge (have you had enough hyperbole yet?) effort from Mattias, Dezza, Igor, Greg and Mike and I over the past couple of weeks to pull this one out of the bag, and it's so hugely satisfying that people enjoyed it so much. FFS, I got 74 comments on a single post! All the well wishes and thanks is really appreciated by us all - it was brilliant watching the buzz around the race during the past week and I'm immensely proud to have been involved in building such a unique and fun piece of work.

Oh - have you checked to see if you made the top 500 on the Balloonacy Leaderboard?

So, with the past 3 months being so busy I can't believe it's the summer!

This weekend just gone I've finally got back into the kitchen, cooking:

• Asparagus with german smoked ham and chili and balsamic glaze
• Linguine with chorizo, king prawns, red onion, pepper and basil chili oil
• Barbecued mackrel with roasted Mediterranean vegetables

I've got heaps of nice photos of them, I'll be posting them on Friday or Saturday, hopefully whilst out in the garden in the sunshine drinking a cold one.

In the meantime, here are a couple of photos I've taken recently:

A project I've been closely involved with at POKE has just launched - we're all dead proud and hope you enjoy Balloonacy:

We're hosting a balloon race across The Internets, - if your balloon floats furthest (you'll be able to control and push your balloon along, too) you'll win a week in Ibiza with a gang of mates.

As well has having a balloon, you can also be part of the map itself by putting your blog or website forward. It doesn't cost anything, the race lasts 7 days and you should get heaps of visitors during that time :) The little racoon in the bottom right hand corner means this site's signed up!

So, on 23rd June when the race starts and thousands of animal balloons are floating across the internet, now you'll know why.

Play Balloonacy here

My employers, POKE, were kind enough to send me to FOWA 2007, a conference boldly titled "The Future of Web Apps".

The quality of the speakers and talks was nothing short of amazing. My head is full of ideas and inspiration after listening to the thoughts and musings of some of the leading minds in web development.

I'll do a full blog and summary of the conference as soon as I have some time (I'm going to Alton Towers tomorrow and need sleep), but here's a teaser:

Steve Souders, Chief Performance !Yahoo High Performance Websites

• Optimising the front-end is cheaper, faster and more effective at creating a more responsive application to the user as opposed to optimising the backend.
• Golden Rule, plus 14 "best practises". Most very quick and easy to implement, some can lead to drastic speed improvements for users

Dion Almears, Google/Ajaxian.com Offline Web Applications

This talk was awesome. Dion really knows his shit, and I was gripped with the plans for Gears and libraries built on top of it, and intruiged by the "sync" problem.

Matt Mullenweg Scaling

This was the most surprising talk. I've been a user of wordpress and a reader of photomatt for years, but I had no idea Matt was such a hardcore developer/architect. Loads of wisdom on "do" and "don't" to do with web architectures and a lovely outline of the "Mini-matt Cluser" - internet clouds and all.

Loved the notion of "being stateless" which allows much more instant expansion of the hardware architecture; for example instead of using sessions (which prevents distribution load/data) you could encrypt the username and password in a cookie and authenticate the user for every request. With the correct database architecture, the read on the username/password will be a primary key lookup (hint: FAST) so performance shouldn't be affected too much.

Very cool views on advertising too, and targeting only the users who will genuinely use (i.e., click) the advertising.

John Resig, Mozilla/jQuery Future of Firefox, Future of Javascript An awesome talk. Some really exciting new features in Firefox including SVG and Canvas 3D which lead to the craziest thing I saw all day: writing real C code in HTML. Yes, you heard me. Canvas 3D exposes the OpenGL C API which you can call/use directly from a web page. All proof on concept, and after being grilled about security in the Q&A session, notably tounge-in-cheek, but exciting none the less.

The new Javascript engine, Tamarin, looks exciting too with its support for Javacript 2.0. Real classes (yay, no more prototype chain hacking) and packages amongst the best.

Like I said, I'll do a full blog along with a proper brain dump of the ideas and opinions when I'm back tomorrow night.