I've got a lot of friends doing cool things, but these guys are doing something special.

They are building a computer game. When I spoke to Mo the other day he mentioned it and I was impressed but I was not expecting the standard that they have reached after only an month of programming.

It's a group of guys led by Nick, aka "Mad Nick", and, no i'm not going to give the game away (sorry about the pun), are not only are they coming up with amazing concepts but are actually building them.

It's all being programed in C++ which is way beyond me and although the idea is amazing, the industry is fun, it's the way they are going about it which is cool.

There are six, a head programmer, a second and third programmer, and three people testing and coming up with ideas.

In a business, this wouldn't be sustainable as the other three are just chilling and having fun with it. There is no money involved but they are really progressing.

The first stage is to create a free network game and the second stage is to create a single player commercial product.

The idea in the flat at the moment is to make the best ever free network game. What really excites me is not the stuff they are doing but the way they are doing it.
It is identical to many stories that come out of CA. Guys working in a garage on something they love....

Outstanding fun, in fact i'm going round for more now...

As shown, by the previous post. I got my new mac up to scratch and it's now running an apache server like it should. nice.

Today we really amped up our strategy and refined it as well as building the majority of the database structure. I have no doubt in my mind that it will be changed again before too long but it is good to get it started. That means tomorrow, coding will commence.

Now that we have two very good developers, it will mean that I have a lot less active role in coding. I guess that is a good thing but it's something that i'm going to feel really guilty about. However, if it is better for the business then that's what is required.

It's strange working with more than one person as you need to work in a manor that both of you are comfortable with. I do however know that once that is sorted then we will be extremely productive.

It is super hot today and I really should not be inside in front of a computer...

RBS are really starting to annoy us now. We applied for a bank account about 6 weeks ago and they haven't sorted us out yet. Basically, the guy went on holiday for a month without filing our account. Not really a problem though, always a way round.


Finally, a belated congratulations to Alex McCooke and good luck with the new job! King of the legal seas!!

It has been a total pain in the ass to fix up clean urls or mod_rewrites for os x leopard. Firstly I just installed Xampp and after fiddling around with httpd.conf it didn't like the .htaccess files.

I then decided to install the lot manually through php.net and dev.mysql.com. This involved a bit of faffing around with the terminal which is probably the geekiest tool i've ever played with. This fell to bits when trying to install phpmyadmin as i realised that it was not up for linking into mysql (which i now need to find and remove).

Finally I went to MAMP, which i've been avoiding due to the localhost having to be typed as localhost:xxxx (Where xxxx is your port number). Apart from that minor annoyance, it worked perfectly without any tinkering required.

So if anyone is having problems with getting clean urls to work with mac os x or confused about mod_rewrite with mac os x then install MAMP which you can get from http://www.mamp.info/en/index.php.

onwards...

We are now ready to build!

We have direction in which everyone is in agreement (thanks to the genius of G.docs), a great tech director, a new hired set of skills to help out, cash and an optimistic spirit that anything can be achieved.

We set up SVN today to make sure that nothing is written over with 3 different people adding, editing, deleting etc. It took a while to work out as it is run off the terminal in mac.

We also launched our series of "Getting into e-commerce" articles to generate credibility around us.

I listened to the Chong-Moon Lee podcast from Stanford today and to say inspiring is the word is an understatement. He came to America with nothing and is now the president of the One Bank!

He set about creating apple software for the pc (estimated at 1 year) and took 6 years to build it. At one point he had the IRS turn up to arrest him to which he talked his way out of it. He lost everything including his family and all his staff execpt one guy who owned 10% of the company and had to stay with it to get his green card.

When the company went for its ipo that one guy got $12m - a good price of loyalty. It just shows that anything can be done with enough perseverance.

The new macbook arrived today so like the ps3 youtube advert I can say "While you have no black macbooks, I however have two black macbooks!"

I still haven't worked out .htaccess on the mac.

I've just set up xampp up on the new mac and it was a breeze compared to putting it on the PC.

However i have just realised that macs (or a least osx) doesn't recognise .htaccess files which really sucks.

.htaccess files are of great use for securing folders etc, but I mainly use them to create clean urls such as www.test.com/nice_day.html rather than www.test.com/230984&skljal?=898&00&ksjl20%.

I'm sure there will be a way round....