Dave Whiteland

Just the facts.

mySociety: These days I work full-time for the remarkable people who are mySociety.
Beholder: I write, draw, and program the Beholder projects.

Current project:
The Knot-Shop Man, a set of four books for smart children or thoughtful adults, was published on 09/09/09 to coincide with the tenth anniversary of Planetarium.
Exploding Pen: I keep Exploding Pen ticking over, which publishes the Beholder book projects Fudebakudo and The Knot-Shop Man.
$_ means it, @_ means them: I’m a Computer Scientist by training — I studied and later taught at the Comp Sci department at Royal Holloway.; I work as a programmer (although these new-fangled days the industry term is "developer"), most recently working with Ruby on Rails. I tend to think in Perl for comfort-coding (not least because it seems to me there is something slightly backward about being forced to express yourself in a language doesn’t have pronouns), but the fact is I have probably spent far more time working in Java, together with a fair bit of Javascript. I do estoric code too: the Fudebakudo helmet was, for the challenge of it, crafted entirely in POV-Ray using a text editor (yes: no wireframe modeller used for that!). Going back in time, my first full-time job was on the early HOLMES system used in Police incident rooms, and before that I wrote Assembly code for a summer job. I did my algorithms coursework in ALGOL68 (on a VAX), and way before that I was coding BASIC on a 8+32Kb UK101 in a case made of wood.

Aikido: Not brawling for no prizes. In skirts. Weird.

Spelthorne aikido in Egham and Staines
Renbukan dojo, Bangkok
Suibhneas dojo, North London
Airenjuku dojo, Central London

Thailand: I’ve spent around six years, on and off, in Thailand. For two and a half of those years I was a volunteer at a girls’ school, where I taught art to 6-year-olds, and English to 11-year-olds.
Bike: I’m an ex-biker, and I miss it. Many, many years ago I had a trusty CX500. More recently, I was riding a Honda NT650DV. If you don’t know about bikes, you’ll think: ooh, big bike. If you know the difference between an NT and a CBR, you’ll think: Dullville.
Boat: I sometimes crew a type of sailing boat called a Drascombe. Two masts, tan sails (you care? OK: a gunter-rigged yawl with a loose-footed main) and the whole thing the size of a very large wardrobe.

Drascombe Association
Plymouth Sound webcam

Other things

For not entirely practical reasons, I used to be a member of the IGKT:

International Guild of Knot-Tyers

I consume the following things regularly:

Private Eye: The celebrated satirical magazine, featuring some of Britain’s best cartoonists
Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics: The pictures never change. After a while, you don’t even notice.
Radio Lab & TED talks: The Radio Lab podcasts are often beautifully crafted and easy to enjoy. Meanwhile, the signal to noise ratio at the TED events isn’t as good as it used to be, but the best ones are astounding
Neil Gaiman’s Journal: Mr Gaiman generously lets his readers know what he’s up to. And what he’s up to is more often than not something cool and/or interesting.
Gruts: A fine example of blogging: personal, silly, clever, funny
The Straight Dope: “Fighting ignorance since 1973 (it’s taking longer than we thought)”

Three worthy causes to which I belong:

Amnesty International
RNLI
Open Rights Group

There are a number of people whom I greatly admire, and luckily for me several of them are my friends and teachers.

Finally, in a list of no particular order, here are some people whose lives or work are, to my mind, especially deserving of a standing ovation:

Captain Hans von Langsdorff
Karen Woo
Richard Feynman
Ted Nelson
Ricky Jay
Terry Gilliam
James Randi
Johnny Ball

contact | home