personal posts

Ceilidh! Treeton Community Centre on Saturday November 24th 2007

willdashwood — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 00:38:16 +0100

Just a quick note to say my Mum is (part)organising a ceilidh (English country dancing) with CHEAP JACK providing the music and Brian Smith calling. It's Saturday, November 24th 2007, 8.00 till 11.00 pm, at Treeton Community Centre so make a note in your diary now!

Tickets cost £4:00 and best to get them early. Contact me for information. Last time I took people to a ceilidh they all loved it so I hope to see you all there for this!

Treeton Community Centre
Pit Lane (off Wood Lane)
Treeton
Rotherham
S60 5UY [map]

BBC Delivery On-Demand Open Consultation

willdashwood — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 21:30:44 +0000

Well worth spending a few minutes filling in this open consultation if you care about how the BBC should develop it's on-demand content services. I made a point of emphasising my opinion that open standards should be embraced for content delivery and that third-party suppliers of the service (e.g. ISPs) should not be subsidised to allow/encourage the use of such on-demand features. I think the first point is one which everyone would instantly agree on, after all there is no technical reason to lock ourselves in to a proprietary system when there are so many alternatives. However, some people might query my second point so here's my logic.

It's fair to say Nildram, my ISP, has fallen from grace since it was taken over by Pipex. Not surprising I know; Pipex have a habit of taking a perfectly good ISP and spoiling everything which was good about them. It wasn't long before they suddenly introduced traffic shaping without any announcement, much to the disgust of many users including myself. They quickly backtracked and according to one "technical" member of staff they "turned the volume knob down to 1" on the throttling hardware so that traffic was practically unaffected. I love the image of an incredibly expensive and sophisticated piece of network equipment being operated with the same mechanism as a Marshall stack! Anyway, the aforementioned member of staff tried to explain the company's reasoning behind restriction of p2p traffic, which boiled down to the premise that because more users are utilising services such as Sky Anytime which deliver content over p2p, ISPs are incurring increased costs without compensation from the content providers. Roughly translated: "Yes we're selling you a broadband package with a 50GB per month bandwidth quota but we don't want you to actually use all of it... unless Sky are going to pay us". Net neutrality is just as much of a key issue over here as across the pond!

Of course I'm well aware overselling is not just common place but pretty much guaranteed in the ISP business. However, as many others were quick to point out, if you can't sustain a certain level of service within your existing pricing structure, re-evaluate your tariffs! Don't annoy your customers with throttling or march off demanding money from the companies who actually add value to the service you're providing! Those who don't want to use Sky Anytime, BBC's proposed on-demand service or any other high bandwidth service can opt for a low usage tariff while the rest of us pay a little extra to finance the investment in infrastructure to deliver the content we want.

/rant over ;)

Via happenchance

Center Parcs

willdashwood — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 15:27:52 +0100

Just got back from our little holiday and centre parcs and thought it's a perfect time to try out Picasa2 and it's new web albums. Click here or below for the gallery.

Pablo Six

willdashwood — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 17:01:54 +0100

Thought I'd plop a link up on here to my would-have-been-brother-in-law's myspace page, the largely fruit and nut based mr pablo six. Hopefully he'll get some more of his songs on there for your listening pleasure shortly.

He's got a different MySpace page now. Why? Who knows!

About freakin' time too!

willdashwood — Fri, 12 May 2006 20:24:01 +0100

Yes I've finally joined the modern world and got myself a blog. It's been on my 'to do' list for over two years so apologies for the delay. Free coffee or tea will be provided from the refreshment trolley.

Rather than just bolt on another script I've replaced the humble static HTML pages with a content management system. Of course there was only one choice of CMS for me and I've been waiting for Drupal 4.7 to finally come out of beta/release candidate status before deploying it for real.

I've been running beta version on my test server successfully but not all the modules I wanted to use had been updated to the new form API. For those interested in how the site is pieced together I've put together a little recipe. I made a few notes as I was doing it but it's easy to see why a lot people are put of Drupal when you have to do a lot of tweaking to get it to do what you want. A proper install script is in development and I believe that will make a huge difference to the success of Drupal.

Well this is kind of weird, I feel like I should end on something special for my maiden post. How about one of my favourite lyrics?

It's always funny until someone gets hurt...
And then it's just hilarious!

Mike Patton, 'Ricochet'

About Me

willdashwood — Fri, 12 May 2006 20:05:21 +0100

Having been rushed in to taking down the embarrassment of a website that was here before (thanks Cat) there is now that inevitable moment where you have to dig deep and find something to better it. Hmm, well let's get the boring stuff out of the way first.

I'm Will Dashwood, self employed web developer, operating under the name w3Factory. Currently living in North Anston, on the outskirts of Sheffield, in a lovely detached house with a big garden, but moving soon to Thurcroft once the house has been done up.

There are just a few simple things in life I enjoy on a regular basis. I'm listening to music about 90% of my waking hours. I have a nice vinyl selection (just about every Faith No More record released in the UK) and an even bigger digital collection. I'd probably get more work done if I wasn't manic air drumming to a bit of System of a Down or getting down with my bad self to some Soulwax but where's the fun in that?

I love retro gaming on the old MegaDrive along with party orientated titles (Sing Star, Dance games and Buzz). Whenever we have a big meet up round these parts you know there's gonna be no shortage of games to keep the crowds entertained. 10 pin bowling anyone?

Business is going well, plenty of projects on the go. I do have a tendency to take on bigger, slightly unusual projects which require far more research than normal and as such are hard to make profitable. I'm also balancing this with property development which would probably be more lucrative. Before w3Factory I was technical director of Website World and before that, a programmer for D6 which was essentially the same company in a different role.

I studied Music Technology & Audio Systems at Huddersfield University (2000 - 2003), which I highly recommend if you're someone like me who has a passion for both music and computing. It covered a little bit of studio engineering/producing but by that stage I'd lost most interest in pursuing that line of work; my recordings of the Ghost Buster's theme and MJ's 'Bad' were probably a nail in the coffin! I did enjoy the experimental electronic music assignments and I'll get my weird soundscapes back up here soon.

The straight forward C/C++/MFC programming was much more interesting and useful. Tied in with DirectX for audio applications and OpenGL (GLUT) for a bit of virtual reality/3D programming it was right up my street. We also did a bit of Flash and graphic design, back in the day when Dreamweaver was my choice of weapon.

I never did properly finish off my final year project, an offline VST plug-in which convolutes two sound sources. Perhaps when I'm feeling nostalgic I'll dig all my old work out of the loft and see if I can sort out the memory leaks and polish it off. I've no idea what's been happening in the world of Cubase/Wavelab in the past 3 years, it might not work at all!

OK so that will do you for now you knowledge thirsty people!