Dave Whiteland
Just the facts.
Click to enlarge
- Beholder
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I write, draw, and program the Beholder projects.
Current project:
The Knot-Shop Man, a set of four children's books, will be published on 09/09/09 to coincide with the tenth anniversary of Planetarium.
- Exploding Pen
- I run Exploding Pen, which self-publishes the Beholder martial arts project Fudebakudo.
I'm a Computer Scientist by training (I studied and even taught at the Comp Sci department at Royal Holloway).
- Perl
- The whizzy bits of the Beholder and Fudebakudo sites are written in Perl. Perl's design fascinates me, because of its relationship to natural language. Larry Wall explains. Of course I've worked in other languages, but the projects that have been the most fun have generally been those that were well suited to being done in Perl. Perhaps that's not a coincidence.
- Apple
- These days my personal machine is an Apple macBook. I'm not a fan-boy, and it's not quite as good as the iBook that went before, but it's still got a lot going for it — not least the fact that under the surface it's Unix. Microsoft makes me grumpy.
- Java etc.
- In my last day-job I used to write Java and JavaScript and a wee bit of Perl. I'm between jobs now, so if you think you could use an experienced and imaginative programmer, with both client-side and server-side expertise, please get in touch.
- POV-Ray
- POV-Ray is a freeware ray-tracer (that means, roughly, it takes photos of things that don't really exist, for free). I keep coming back to it because years ago I learnt to use its nerdy scene description language and never really got it out of my system. (By the way, if, like me, you can't get POV-Ray 3.6 to run under OS X 10.4, use MegaPOV instead, which works fine).
- Aikido
- Not brawling for no prizes. In skirts. Weird.
- Renbukan dojo, Bangkok
- Spelthorne dojo, Staines
- Suibhneas dojo, North London
- Airenjuku dojo, Central London
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.
I recently became an ex-biker. I used to ride 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.
I sometimes crew a type of sailing boat called a Drascombe. Two masts, tan sails, and the whole thing the size of a very large wardrobe.
For not entirely practical reasons, I'm a member of the IGKT:
I consume the following things regularly:
- TED talks
- Almost all TED talks are interesting, but the best ones are astounding
- Private Eye
- The celebrated satirical magazine, featuring some of Britains's best cartoonists
- Ryan North's Dinosaur Comics
- The pictures never change. After a while, you don't even notice.
- 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.
- Randi's commentary at the JREF
- Updates from Randi's ongoing work to hold back the tide of pseudo-science, flim-flam, and the so-called paranormal
- Gruts
- A fine example of blogging: personal, silly, clever, funny
- The Straight Dope
- "Fighting ignorance since 1973 (it's taking longer than we thought)"
Two worthy causes to which I belong:
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: