Dan Cooper

The most incredible thing on the internet today or How I Learned to Love the GLOW WebGL wrapper

 offbeat, WebGL  No Responses »
Dec 132011
 

This is the most incredible thing on the internet today is a visual demonstration of the GLOW wrapper for WebGL.  It renders all sorts of animated animals in real time using lots of vector pyramids flowing through a sphere.

It looks great and runs so quickly.  When you visit the site remember you can click the animation to morph between 9 or so animals and move your mouse to change your view of the sphere.

Displayed using lots of little vector pyramids in 3D in real time

On the GLOW website there is the animation in WebGL and the tutorial showing what techniques were used to make it.

An Open Letter in Support of Jubilee Church’s Planning Application

 Church  No Responses »
Dec 092011
 

I attend a church in Worthing that is currently looking to move in to a warehouse in an industrial estate in Worthing.  We were asked to write letters of support to the council and our local councillors to encourage them that this would be a good thing for the community.  Below is my letter that I wrote in support of the planning application.

I am writing to support the proposal of Jubilee Church’s change of use request. It is my understanding that there has been some opposition to the change of use and I would like to state my own reasons for why it would be good for the community on a local level and for Worthing on a wider level.  I have attended Jubilee Church for ten years and thus have some insight on Jubilee Church’s intentions for the use of this particular site.

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A possible reason for why some spam comments on blogs don’t advertise anything

 Spam Prevention  No Responses »
Dec 062011
 

I’ve seen it a little bit on my spam filter on this site.  My thoughts are that they’re expecting blog authors to mark their comment as “Not Spam”.  This would then skew the spam filters a little more in their favour!

Thus when they submit more posts to buy absolutely real genuine rolexs for rock bottom prices, they’re more likely to get their post past the filters. Still unlikely, but never-the-less more likely.

Don’t regard comments as “Not Spam” until you see their comment history, and determine for yourself whether this is Spam or Ham.

All fake gamestation sites

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Nov 162011
 

Gamestation have finally replied to my requests and have provided this list of all the fake gamestation sites they had.

Some are quite funny and I would have loved to have found them when they were up!

  • Trampstation
  • Flamestation
  • Moustachestation
  • Grannystation
  • Pigstation
  • Tutustation
  • Bikinistation
  • Artificialinseminationstation
  • Tentingstation
  • Chavstation
  • Legstation
  • Bongstation
  • Moiststation
  • Stripstation
  • Massdebatestation

Fake Gamestation Competition Hiding Something?

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Nov 082011
 

To help launch their new-look website, Gamestation recently held a competition for their customers to find other websites that “stole” their new design.  The competition encouraged customers to investigate websites that ended in “station.co.uk”.  I found a few but it never got recognised on the website and I never heard back from anyone. I asked gamestation’s customer support for some details of the competition and they were as helpful as a brick wall.

The competition page

Confirmed websites such as grannystation.co.uk and chavstation.co.uk were found and posted on the gamestation’s competition page.

Screenshot as of 7th November 2011 of the competition page on the gamestation website

As soon as I figured out that all the fake websites adhered to a simple naming pattern, (plus with me being a bit geeky and excited about writing something new) I wrote a powershell script that attempted to visit every site.  The script took in the English dictionary of words between 2 and 8 characters long and appended “station.co.uk”.  If it found a link to the gamestation.co.uk website, it would log it and move on to the next.

The script, it ran…

Lo-and-behold it found two more that had not been posted on the gamestation site.  I didn’t really care if I won the grand prize, I just did it for the fun and wanted to investigate all the work that the designers went to to create these sister sites.

I found www.tutustation.co.uk and www.bongstation.co.uk

I contacted customer services…

I entered the competition and checked back daily to see if my new findings were detailed on the site. Nope. Long after the competition ended, I emailed customer services and these are the responses I received:

Sorry but this competition does not run anymore . I no longer have access to any information regarding this.

Regards,

Syd W

I responded by saying “I know it doesn’t run anymore, that’s why I’m asking. How come you have no information regarding the competition? I would just like a list of the websites that were involved. Some information is available at [link to competition page] but it’s old and that information was available before the end of the competition.”

I would [...] like to apologise for any confusion. A list of the ‘fake’ websites and winners can be found by following the link below:

http://www.gamestation.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/HubArticleView?hubId=148280&articleId=148287&catalogId=10202&langId=45&storeId=10651

I apologise for any confusion this may have caused, and please do not hesitate to contact us with any further queries you may have.

Regards,

Sam F

Haha, this is the same link that I had just emailed to them! I ask again: “I’m afraid that is not the case. I found http://tutustation.co.uk/ but that is not listed. Why can’t you provide the full information?”

The competition regrettably is now over. If you have submitted your answer to the competition providers they will contact us direct if you are winner.

If you have any further queries please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Regards,

Charlotte H

Their excuse of the competition being over implies that I should have asked while the competition was running! What a joke.  At least now though I have learned from this email that the competition providers are a separate company to gamestation, yet at the bottom of the competition page it clearly states: “The promoter of the competition is Gameplay (GB) Ltd. trading as Gamestation”.

For now I don’t think I will ever find out what the other fake gamestation sites were. Maybe I did find them all? My curiosity is not yet satisfied.

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