hello, I am tef

I am thomas edward figg, born somewhere in scotland, and currently living in london, UK

everyone calls me tef, I think under scots law it may be my legal name

I am characterised in my school reports as a 'under-achieving smart arse'. Nothing much has changed since then. Currently I write code for a living.

I have some form of public presence on the internet:

I am on tumblr as programming is terrible.
I am on twitter as @tef_ebooks.
I am on github as tef.

unsolicited opinions on things and stuff:

on technology: I have used at some point a plethora of different languages on different platforms. they all suck.
i've occasionally enjoyed python, prolog, perl and javascript, but they are frustrating in their own way.

on design: I like Victor Papanek, Kenya Hara, Jasper Morrison, Naoto Fukasawa. (and I quite like Deiter Rams, and Per Mollerup too)

on data: I like Otto Neurath and Edward Tufte.

on books: I especially like hyphen press and lars muller publishers.

on coding: I like the books 'The Practice of Programming', 'The UNIX Philosophy' and 'The Art of Prolog'. 'Parsing Techniques' 2nd ed deserves a mention too.
in general: seymour papert was a smart person.

At some point in my life I have done the following:

Rode a unicycle (I now own two)
Gave a Funny talk about computers and computering
Worked in a port-scanner to powerpoint factory (aka penetration 'testing')
Volunteered at various hackercons in europe.
Sung in a concert hall
Went to a hen-night in drag
Dropped out of edinburgh university
Given a talk about origami, and ended up as a footnote in the guardian online.
Made everyone on a forum log in as 'John Malkovich'
Held a stick with fire and walked around a hill in facepaint for beltane.
Interviewed on bbc radio 4 - complete with voice changer.
Rode a unicycle while drunk
Worked on a cloud based thing that no-one really understood
Had a first date where the riot police turned up
Breathed Fire
Been on a demonstration
Taught children how to make games on computers

Online artifacts:

Wrote a ducked typed ipc library for python and ruby hyperglyph

Wrote an irc bot that says butt: buttbot
(with a plethora of different contibutors, and two offshoots - one in tcl and one in python)

Wrote a mandelbrot in javascript for the js1k (mirror).
It uses a hilbert curve to render the mandelbrot. I like space filling curves.

A logo interpreter, online in-browser: http://logo.twentygototen.org

A little javascript game similar to an old game called sfcave
and a nostialgic joke url: http://ten.print.hello.world.twentygototen.org.