Goodbye to Ingena

This post is a bit late, as it's been two weeks since my last day at Ingena, but it would be remiss of me to leave without posting something about it.

I'd been at Ingena for a year after their aquisition of DeadFish, where I'd worked for three years. I hope I managed to help transition DeadFish's bigger clients (Telstra, Telstra Wholesale) across successfully, as for me it was a small bit of sadness to no-longer be working with them. In my final months, I had a super rockin' time working onsite at Australia Post as the UI Designer on one of their bigger projects (it had been in development for two years without a UI Designer, so things needed a fair bit of fixing) - lots (LOTS) of presentations/workshops to run, amazing and fantastic developers to be yelled at by, and a finished product that everyone seemed pretty pleased with.

So I'm stoked that I end my Australian career on a high note, and look totally forward to even more fun at Google. I start there in October, and am currently taking my first real break since 2000; some small things about OO coding never really sat well with me (and no-one could answer my 'why' questions satisfactorily), so I'm going back and writing some stuff in straight C so that I'll hopefully gain an appreciation for what I'm missing. It's been great fun.

P.S. I miss the people at Ingena so much I'm going back tonight for BEER BEER BEER!

Lonely Planet Worldguide

Lonely Planet Worldguide has launched, and it's most extra-special to me because it is the first time there has been a public (as far as I know) and commercial use of Crumbler. Neato.

LHFire - Explosion Sprites for Games

When developing shootem-blammo games, one invariably finds that they need multi-frame explosion sprites but unlike stock audio, there's really not much out there, so until you can afford a professional studio to blow things up for you, there's LHFire, available on LordHavoc's Dark Places download page.

Boomboom.

It's a simple and powerful particle renderer that spits out lovely TGAs with the alpha channel intact. The image to the left is the sample 'spaceexplosion', and better looking images (from muzzleflashes to blood splats to hyperspace warps) are easily created with its inbuilt scripting language. Handy pants.

Jeff Han Rocks Me

The incredible work of Jeff Han rocks my world and makes me wish I'd done more with my life. [via pixelsumo].

Assembly '05 Results

The results of the Assembly 2005 demo party are out. I expect that next year the browser category will be chockas with Flash on account of Flash 8's pixel-manipulation speediness.

Sigur Ros Melbourne, After

Holy crap ... Most epic music to eat ice-cream by, ever.

Further compounding the greatness, they played at Hamer Hall, one of Melbourne's best auditoriums - the sound there is so awesome it could turn Twinkee Dink's Christmas Carols into heartwrenching power ballads.

Ahhh.