We had a very hectic afternoon today. In amongst the Rather Useful Seminar and the Embedded Development Club we had an Open Day for Applicants.
Fortunately everything worked like clockwork, which was nice. I said during my intro talk that I'd pop up a picture of the audience (I always do) and here it is. Thanks for coming folks, I hope you found the trip useful.
Because nothing says "Thank-You for delivering a Rather Useful Seminar" like a small plaque made of bio-degradable plastic I've just printed some for our speakers this semester.
As I've mentioned before, I don't go to the movies for dramatic insights into the human condition. I go for fun. And popcorn.
Shaun the sheep is fun. It won't win any prizes for dialogue, because there isn't any. But there is a nice story, well told, with some very funny set pieces. The phrase "recommended for children of all ages" is a bit overused these days, but I reckon this one really is.
Portrait of the artist...
Some time back I made myself a camera. I've just got some of the pictures back and it's worked. Yay!
When I dropped the film off to be processed I said to the girl in Jessops that it was quite possible that the pictures may all be black, or white, or on the same frame. But I took 25 or so pictures and got 22 back, which is great.
We don't have a word that describes that feeling you get when you go to get something from the place where it is usually stored and it isn't there. If we did have I'd be able to use it now. I thought I'd been clever by having all my photographs transferred onto a CD when I had them processed. But of course when I got home I couldn't find my CD drive. Fortunately I'm an inventive soul and managed to use the PS3 to move the files somewhere I could read them.
Turns out that they have not been scanned to very high resolution and there are some nasty scratchy artefacts, but I'm very pleased with the results. They have a nice "other worldly" feel. I'm definitely going to put a few more rolls of film through the device.
I quite like Destiny. But I love Saints Row 4. Destiny is a bit serious for me, with a portentous narrative about "The Collapse" and ancient warlike races with mythical pasts of great mystery. Or somesuch. But Saints Row 4 is just crackers. Destiny is very worthy, but it hasn't made me laugh out loud once. But the presidential press conference right at the start of Saints Row 4 had me chuckling all the way to the alien invasion which takes place shortly after.
After the aliens arrive you get dumped into some deeply silly simulated worlds for no particular reason which is good for two reasons. Firstly you can lay waste to lots of people and buildings and stuff without worrying too much because none of it is real. And secondly you can break all laws of physics in increasingly outlandish ways.
It reminds me a lot of a game called Crackdown that I played on the Xbox 360 many years ago. It's a bit like Grand Theft auto, but after you've been eating some really strong cheese.
I'm only 9% or so through the game at the moment, but I'm having a blast. The graphics aren't as good as Destiny, the game is supposed to be glitchy (but I've not seen this), and I guess that for long term appeal it won't be as good. But I don't care about any of that. It's just more fun.
FYI I'm playing the PS4 version of the game that I arranged to have as a Valentines Day present. Which has turned out rather well. I've not played any of the previous versions of the game. The word on the street is that if you've played any of the other editions you might not get as much out of this version, but if you haven't tangled with the franchise before, you're in for a treat.
The settings screen has had a serious makeover
Well, right on time, as promised, we get a technical preview edition of Windows 10 for the phone in February. The only problem is that it doesn't work on my Lovely Lumia 1520. This is a technical thing involving the size of the boot images and phone internal storage. I reckon this is fair enough. The only problem is that I really want to have a go. Enter a bright orange Lumia 630 into my life.
You can pick up unlocked versions of these from Amazon for well under 100 pounds and they are actually a smashing little phone. They have nice things like a removable back and exchangeable battery, along with a socket for an SD card to boost the rather internal memory. They can also run the Windows 10 Technical Preview. Yay!
The install process was easy enough. I did it over the afternoon, just checking every now and then to see if the progress bars had moved any. You just install the Windows Insider application (you can find it here) then follow the instructions. There's a "red pill - blue pill" moment where you have to choose between bleeding edge or an older but slightly better supported preview version (I went for bleeding edge - of course) but after that everything runs on rails. Microsoft really are getting good at rolling out over the air updates.
And when it has all finished you are left with the latest build of Windows 10 on your phone. And you can play "spot the difference". Lots of things look exactly the same, almost certainly because they are exactly the same just at the moment. The Settings menu has had a makeover, the keyboard is a bit different, there's a file explorer and you have to configure the phone to the US region of you want Cortana.
From the point of view of Microsoft I think it makes very good sense to use the lower spec. phones to start with. If things run OK on the slower devices they are going to run really well on the larger ones. In fact the quality of the experience on the Lumia 630 brings out a problem that Microsoft have with flagship devices. Just what do you make the flagship do that sets it apart from the very acceptable behaviour of this low cost Lumia?
I was very pleased to find that Cheese Lander works fine on the phone, as has much everything else I've tried. I've had a few freezes in Internet Explorer but nothing that would stop me from using this phone as my daily driver. The interface is a bit choppy sometimes and there are occasional flashes of red screen as the video catches up, but it all works fine. I'm really looking forward to seeing how the system evolves in the future.
I picked up some flyers....
Yesterday evening I popped down to C4DI to hear Linda Broughton talk about Code Club. I'd not heard of it before, but now I have I think it is a splendid idea. The idea is to give pupils in primary schools some experience of coding, not necessarily with the aim of producing a nation of Mark Zukerbergs, but instead giving kids an appreciation of what software is all about.
Making, modifying and fixing simple programs is a great way to introduce kids to problem solving and diagnostic techniques that have a huge range of applications, not least in writing code. Code Club has material for Scratch (a neat game creation system), making web based solutions and Python. Volunteers spend an hour a week with the kids going through the content in the context of an after school club. About code. Hence the name.
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Code Club do all the heavy lifting, sorting out the insurance and health and safety issues, along with checks that have to be performed so that you can go into schools. You can also work from their curriculum, so you just have to turn up and do the session. You sign up on their web site (as a school or a volunteer) and then both parties can do a postcode search to find nearby partners to get involved with.
I think I'm going to sign up for this, but better yet I think it is something that students (and staff in our department) should get involved with. We've run school events before and I've always found that working with kids like this is great fun. Any students who fancy getting involved (it looks great on your CV and gives you some great life skills) can get in touch with me if you like, and we'll see if we can sort out a Hull based effort.
As soon as I found out that Charlotte Godley, one of our students, had landed a placement at Airbus Industries I made a mental note to ask her to do a Rather Useful Seminar on her experience when returned to the department. Today she came along and gave that seminar.
It was excellent.
Charlotte started with reasons why you should take a placement for a year. (it just makes you all round more awesome) and reasons why not (it is hard work, and you might get out of step with chums in your cohort who will graduate just as you come back). Then she spoke about the best way to get a placement. I think her approach really boils down to three words.
Have a plan.
Having a plan means things like finding out about a company and tailoring your CV and accompanying letter to chime with what they do. It means thinking about the kind of questions you might get asked at interview and coming up with some really good questions of your own for the company. It means preparing for careers events and making hit lists of companies to target. But most important, it means giving some thought to what you really want to do in your future.
A placement is a great way to find out if you really want to work in a large company, or write Python programs, or travel the world in a van solving mysteries (my favourite). It is also a great way to learn the ways of work, where suddenly everyone around you is not the same generation as you and everything stops at 5:30 leaving you exhausted but looking for things to occupy yourself with.
Charlotte gave a very good description of these issues and the fact that there were so many detailed questions at the end of the session was a testament to how well the material had been delivered. She has put her slides up on her blog, and I've asked if she wouldn't mind doing a screencast of the deck, as I'm sure it would be useful to all our students.
We are having a Careers and Internships Networking event in two weeks. Hull students can sign up here and get a set of free business cards that they can pass around. We'll be releasing the list of companies coming along so that you can prepare your "hit list".
Students from any year really should come along. First years can be thinking about internships over summer (we have some developers in the cohort who would be well up for this) and second and onward years can be thinking about taking years out or finding employers.
I've spent the last couple of weeks swearing at HTML files. Who would have thought that converting a Word document into nicely formatted markup could be so difficult. Anyhoo, I've finally managed to get the text into some sensible shape and it now has a proper Kindle table of contents. If you have already bought my C# Yellow Book on Kindle, then you might like to update your copy. If you haven't you can get one here. And why not?
Of course the original version is available at the usual place. And I've also added the entire content of our First Year programming course from last year. This includes over 100 slide decks, practical sessions and the assessed coursework. The content is free for anyone who wants to teach C# or learn it. Enjoy.
A note for your diaries folks. On Friday 13th of March I'll be doing one of my (in)famous Lectures in Rhyme in aid of Comic Relief. You can find out more (and sponsor me) here. You can also marvel at the strange distortion of my face in the picture. Or perhaps I always look like that. Ugh.
Anyhoo, after the fun and frivolity of the lecture we'll be embarking on a Red Nose Day themed Three Thing Game. We'll have "rent a thing" events and allow you to exchange your real money for extra "Bank of Thingland" pounds to get more auction winning powers.
My fundraising target is £1,500. If we reach that before the event I will do the lecture wearing a pink tutu. Apparently you can get away with a lot of stuff in the name of charity.....
One of the great things about living in Hull is that you can get up on a lovely morning like today, decide to go somewhere nice, and within 25 minutes be by the sea in Hornsea. Great place.
There beach was looking good too.
I promised these folks, who came along to our open day today, that I'd put them in the blog.
Turns out that I'm a man of my word.
Well, here's something completely crackers that you can buy for less than ten pounds from Tindie. It's a Four Letter word associative database all on a single tiny chip. You can ask it for a random word, and then get another word kind of associated with it. There's a blog post here that tells you how it works.
Of course I ordered one. It arrived today in a big padded envelope, sent all the way from Japan. Next I have to build a bit of hardware to read the words out and display them. I'm thinking it might make an awesome idea generator for Three Thing Game. The "Three Thing'omatic", I can see it now.....
Muyiwa Olu gave a really good (and Rather Useful) seminar this week about the Python language. It is great to see someone being enthusiastic about a platform they obviously enjoy working with. I reckon that every programmer should have a bit of Python in their lives, because it is just such a fun language, and it was lovely to see some of the features brought to life. A great presentation from one of our second year students.
You can find the slide deck for the session here.
Next week we have Charlotte talking about Computer Science internships and her time at Airbus Industries writing software, including some Python code...
This week we also had our first meeting of the new "Embedded Development Club". Quite a few folk turned up, if just half of them come back next week with some kit to play with then we'll consider that a win. You can find the slide deck for the presentation here.
And tonight we have a Hardware Meetup at C4DI. It's all go.
Well, I went off the the Post Office and got my Raspberry Pi 2. I really wanted to find out what kind of improvements you see when you use it.
The answer is, a lot.
Booting was snappy, and the time to launch X-Windows was quite a bit quicker (although I'm not sure of the effect of the different SD cards I was using). But things got quite conclusive when I ran a little Python profiler:
This is just one test, but it shows a lot of promise. Python really seems to benefit from the extra cores as well as the faster processor.
Just pootling around the internet with the browser is a lot quicker than the original Raspberry Pi, but doesn't really compare with my super cheap Linx tablet, which is on paper a broadly comparable device. I'm not yet convinced that someone looking at the Pi 2 as a desktop replacement will find it a good plan, but as a step up from the original it is fantastic.
News of the Raspberry Pi 2 took me completely by surprise. And then, to add to this shock I find that it is not only an awesome device, but available to buy right away. Amazing. Who do these people think they are? Apple?
If the news of a new Pi with quad core processor and twice as much RAM wasn't enough though, I then find that the new Pi will be able to run Windows 10. For free. The only word I can think of to sum up this turn of events is blimey.
The Windows 10 support will be limited to "universal" applications, which means an end to any dreams of running Visual Studio on a device you paid 25 quid for. But that does mean that you can use Visual Studio to write and deploy programs onto the device, which will be great. You can find out more about Windows 10 on Pi here.
The development puts a mild question mark over devices such as Galileo and Edison, which are of the same ilk, but are more expensive and have no display capability. I guess everything will settle down and find its place eventually. The two Intel devices probably have a bit more straight line speed, although the 900 MHz four core processor in the new PI is not to be sneezed at.
Anyhoo, my Raspberry Pi 2 is presently sitting in Cottingham Post Office waiting for me to drop round and pick it up. I actually bought 2. One to give the Video Arcade Table a shot in the arm, and the other for playing with. We really do live in interesting times.
Update: I've had a chance to do a very quick benchmark and compare the performance of the original and the new Rapberry Pi. You can find out more here.
I actually typed this in live in front of the First Year class this afternoon, just at the start of my 1:15 lecture. I was very impressed by the silence as I was typing it. But it stayed silent when they saw what it said......
Oh well. Welcome back folks for another semester of C# shenanigans.
I'm presently working in a much improved Kindle version of the World Famous (in my world) C# Yellow Book. Because the book has been written and upgraded over a number of versions the text formatting is a bit of a mess behind the scenes. It's taking a while to sort out.
I changed the style-sheet to make it a bit easier to see the code embedded in the text and got a preview page that I quite like above. With a bit of luck it should be finished in a week or so.
Number one wife got an amaryllis bulb for Christmas. It has just produced these lovely flowers.
They say that you don't need great equipment for a good photograph. Just the right kind of light. I took this yesterday morning when we had around 20 seconds of good light. Not long, but enough for me to get my Smartphone out of my pocket.
After a bit of tweakage I'm quite pleased with the result. Next time I'll try not to have that tree in the way, although you might say it adds a certain something to the picture I suppose. Mainly a tree.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
Begin to Code with JavaScript is now available for purchase and download. You can find it here
