Colonel Andrew "Flash" Kennedy

So, Movember is over, but my grips are far from!  The memsahib is far too in love with ‘em (not).

Thank you to all that contributed to bring awareness to such a worthy cause – I am thrilled to say that you have helped me contribute £225 to the Movember appeal ...and in the true spirit of these things, I am proud to say that I have given my plums a good squeeze, and there is nothing to report.  As for the clacker, I leave that investigation to another day.

If you wish to get a future missive on my hirsute journey, please let me know.

Until then, toodle pip and tally ho!

Andrew

Movember update

And here's Andrew's completed whiskers. We'll get a proper photo done shortly to show them to you in all their magnificence!

Movember 15th

Andrew's whiskers, Day 15. Dashed fine, what! 

Confused? This'll help!

Flashy's Movember

Now, it's a little-known fact about Andrew that he's a big fan of the Harry Flashman novels. They're a series of bawdy adventures, featuring a Victorian soldier who gets into scrapes all over the world. Andrew's always had a secret hankering to emulate his hero, particularly in the matter of facial hair. So this month, he's decided to go for it.

Why? It's in a good cause. Here's Andrew's explanation.

Some people climb mountains, run marathons or bike across China. The lengths of human endeavour to support a needy cause can know no bounds when a driven individual decides to try and make a difference for a particular charity. So, those of you that know me will not be surprised to hear that I have decided to push my body to endure new lengths of suffering, all in the aid of stuff that my fellow man suffers from, but are crap at taking care of – the wife prostate and testicular cancer.

There are loads of stats about how bad the problem is, but I think Peter Griffin sums up the problem we face best ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHKTE75dgE4

So, for the month of November, I am devoting my top lip to bring awareness to the importance of giving your plums a regular squeeze, and potentially allowing a suitably qualified person to go where no man has gone before, all in the name of male health. I have the full intention of growing some truly embarrassing facial hair, that Dizz will absolutely hate.

If you would like to support the cause, you can support my Movember campaign by making a donation by either:
*Donating online at: http://mobro.co/andrewkennedy64
*If you want to go old school you can write a cheque payable to 'Movember', reference my name and Registration Number 2133058 and send it to: Movember Europe, PO Box 68600, London, EC1P 1EF

If you'd like to find out more about the type of work you'd be helping to fund by supporting Movember, take a look at the Programmes We Fund section on the Movember website: http://uk.movember.com/about

I thank you!

And here's the first photo of the new fuzz. This is Day 6. Dashed fine, what?

Please consider supporting Andrew in this worthy cause.

Thanks.

We do wear suits. Sometimes.

We sent the A-team (Andrew, Amos and Alex) to London last week for BETT, the largest educational technology show in Europe. It was a huge venue, and our little stand felt a bit lost in the middle of it all.

However, as you can see, people did manage to find us. Here's Andrew being interviewed by Martin Stanford of Sky News. So it was worth wearing the suit after all.

It was a tiring week, as these things usually are, but it was good to meet with so many people working in all parts of the educational system, particularly longtime Moviestormer Iain "Iceaxe" Friar.

We were actually taken aback by how much attention we got amidst everything else that was going on. Alex and Amos gave back to back demos from start to finish, and ended up hoarse partway through the second day. All the software trials were taken, and we had to rush out half-way through the show and print more fliers. Alex summed up the event perfectly in his message back to the team afterwards: "I was astonished about the response almost as much as the potential clients were about the software." Andrew, meanwhile, excitedly texted back that he'd just been told we were the "best solution at the show".

We're looking forward to BETT 2012.

Fixing the bleedin' obvious

I have quite a lot of computers in my life, and they all run Linux. In fact, the only time I leave the confines of my beloved Linux is when I'm at work (where my machine at Moviestorm Towers is a Macbook Pro). Most of my machines run a variant of Linux called Ubuntu. Last year, the Ubuntu development team announced a new project which they called 100 Papercuts. The idea was that they would identify 100 little irritations which were reasonably trivial to fix. Most of the issues identified were minor and really not too significant, but as they all pile up they start to become a serious problem. One papercut, after all, is only an irritant, but if you get enough papercuts all at once you just might bleed to death.

I was quite taken with this idea (the papercuts concept, not the bleeding to death), and spent some time talking about it with Dave and Andrew. As a consequence, we recently launched our own "papercuts" project for Moviestorm. Whilst Ubuntu's Papercuts project attracted over 1600 recorded bugs within a few weeks, our initial brainstorm generated a slightly less ambitious 200(ish) issues. We're going to be tackling these "papercuts" a few at a time, aiming to fix between 10 and 20 papercuts each time we have a code release.

Let's take a look at some of the papercuts for the forthcoming 1.3.1 release.

MS-3277 Keep window positions and sizes after the user has adjusted them

Wouldn't it be nice if, when you moved a customisation window over to the left, it appeared in the same place when you next reopened it? Now it does. We haven't implemented this behaviour for every window yet, but it's in place for all of the "adjust something" windows (what we call Activity Customizers).

MS-4887 Improve transitions between major mode views

This one's not so easy to spot, but the load time required to switch Views - to move from Set Workshop View to Director's View, for example - has been much improved. A lot of clever process threading and Clever Engineering Hacking in the background has allowed us to make these transitions faster and smoother.

MS-4826 Can't remove user images

I'm going to be totally honest with you here: this is one of those bugs that represents a lack of functionality not through deliberate choice but just because we forgot to put it in. Once you add a custom image to a set object, there's no way of actually removing that image if you change your mind later. The ring menu for such objects now features a "clear image" option, which removes the image. It also works for held props and bodyparts.

MS-4815 File overwrite message is confusing

This one was ridiculously easy to fix, but had still been sat in our bug database for a long time. Being such a small team, it's easy for small things like this to never actually make it onto anybody's "to do list", simply because there are so many other, bigger things that need to be done. That's exactly what the papercuts project is good for: making sure that issues like this do eventually get addressed. Here's the dialog as it appears in the current released version of Moviestorm:

And here's the new version:

A lot clearer, I think you'll agree.

MS- 4809 Can't find the movie I last worked on

My Moviestorm "movies" directory currently holds about a hundred different movies, in various states of completion. When you spend a lot of your working day testing Moviestorm you tend to accrue a lot of test movies. The load screen will now allow you to sort those movies, either by name or by modification date. That means that the movie you last worked on can be quickly brought to the top of the list.

MS-4806 Typo on first page of Help

Yes, well. The less said about this the better. Let's just move on, shall we?

MS-4786 Warn me if I'm not placing a character at time 0

Ever had a character appear halfway through a scene because the timeline wasn't at the start of the scene when you issued the "place here" command? Yeah, me too. Not any more:

MS-3690 Autosave

Matt has already blogged about this one.

There are about half a dozen other papercut issues in various stages of completion, but this should give you some idea of what we're hoping to achieve for 1.3.1. This is an experiment, so the choice of which of our 200 papercut issues to address first has been almost arbitrary. What about you? What little annoying niggle would you like us to fix? Comment with your papercuts, and I'll add them to our issues database.

Drawing on the walls

We here at Moviestorm are responsible citizens. We would like to make it clear that in no way do we condone the defacing of public property. We believe that Banksy is nothing more than a common hoodlum, not an artist, and should be locked up for his crimes. However, we do understand that it may be necessary from time to time to depict anti-social or illegal activity in films, purely for educational and moral purposes, of course. Like this.

Work in progress: art by Chris Ollis, images by Andrew Kennedy. 100% Moviestorm.

You know the answer. When it's ready.

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night ...

It's hard work sometimes, you know. In the last few days before a release, nobody is allowed time off, no matter how extenuating the circumstances. Andrew, our Chief of Operations, oversees us with zeal. He doesn't exempt himself from discipline, though. When the Air Conditioning system began to freeze his delicate neck, he used the ingenuity natively available to any upstanding British chap:

You see? Stiff upper lip, and on with the job. That's the way we do things over here.

We're all now convinced that he's actually got an enormous ugly boil on the end of his nose, and the helmet is just an excuse.

EDIT: After I posted this, Andrew realised that his foolish antics were bringing shame on our once-proud nation, and changed into something that looked slightly less silly: a tea-towel held in place by a baseball cap.