As you get older it is best to make sure that you still have a few ambitions left. I've decided that my number one ambition is now to buy Bill Gates a drink. I'd like to be stood next to him at bar at a Preston Foster Appreciation Society meeting (I'm sure that Ian and Pete would let him become a member of the society and as the barmaid pulls his pint of Tetley I could turn to him and say "No, it's OK Bill, I'll get these". And I would.
Now you can have one....
My all new "Magic Message System" is now available for download. If you've ever wanted a message system as good as the one in Computer Science at Hull University then you can have one... For now. I'm going to make it play videos and do 3D next. And I might not give that version away......
Because it uses Windows Presentation Foundation you will need either Vista or XP with .NET Version 3.0 installed.
So, what does it do? Well, it will display a slideshow of your Flickr pictures and at the same time read messages off an RSS feed reader of your choosing. We are going to use it on our plasma screen in the meeting area.
You can find it here.
In the pub tonight conversation turned to wind power. It is presently fashionable to put a wind turbine on the top of your house (one of our political party leaders here has got one). Apparently, for the outlay of only fifteen hundred pounds you can get a device which, during a hurricane, produces almost enough electricity to power your hairdryer.
I'm not convinced by this, I think the answer has got to be reducing consumption by insulation and other clever tricks. However, now that you no longer need planning permission to put up a windmill on your roof, I suppose they are going to become fashionable.
However, if they ever become de regeur I have a plan. I'm going to make a balsa wood wind turbine and stick on the roof. Inside I'm going to put a tiny electric motor so that the blades always turning. Always.
Whilst my neighbours bemoan the lack of wind and the fact that they have spent all this money on something which is actually useless I'll be able to point up at my roof and talk about the kilowatts of power that I'm presently generating. Not exactly eco-friendly I suppose. But fun.
Some time ago I used know someone who knew someone who worked in a bank. For some reason we were chatting one evening and the conversation got around to "What would you do if someone came in and said 'I've got a gun, give me all your money'?"
Apparently the bank had a special code phrase which was to be used in this situation. The drill was to ask the cashier at the next position "What time is Andy's party?". Apparently the appropriate action involving silent alarms, marked notes and giant falling cages (or whatever) could then be taken.
This has bugged me for years. Viewed from the perspective of the robber this would be highly confusing. I'm presenting the person in front of me with the business end of a firearm, demanding money with menaces and the first thing they do is sort out a few social engagements before getting on with doling out the cash. At very least this would make me inclined to increase their motivation a bit, perhaps by shooting up the place. Bonkers.
I've since figured out that the code phrase has now been changed slightly. Now, they way that they signal miscreants is by not offering them life insurance, a new mortgage or a car loan as they hand the money over....
Went into Hull at 7:00 am this morning. Not because of some confusion updating the clocks (that was weeks ago) but to review the papers for BBC Radio Humberside. I've been doing this for a while, and I usually take the camera in case any nice photo opportunities arise.
Early Hull looking good
I managed to muddle my way through the reviews OK (note to self, you seem to run a bit slow on Mondays - go for other days of the week in future) and with a bit of luck they'll ask me back so I can get up early all over again.
Ours was maroon
When I was very young (and probably even more impressionable than I am now) my dad bought a Mark 1 Cortina. At the time this was the epitome of style and taste. Nowadays it would be regarded as somewhat primitive. I mean, the dashboard (not the fascia) only had four buttons on it. And nearest thing we had to airbags was an empty crisp packet in the "glove compartment". Which curiously never seemed to have any gloves in it. Ever.
I was reminded of this chunk of my personal history yesterday as I was standing in W H Smiths reading magazines for free. There is one called "Classic Ford" or somesuch, which had numerous pictures of the MK1 Cortina Owner's national rally. They even have their own web site. What memories.
There's probably a moral to all this, but I'm darned if I know what it is...
Ha. Found it. The document had got itself folded up with something else and I've now carefully copied the numbers onto an expenses claim form.....
After all the excitement of foreign travel and dodgy planes today we just settled for a litle drive to Durham and back to visit number one son.
On the way there we saw some amazing rainbows, including one which went all the way over the motorway. I'd love to have taken some pictures, but I was driving at the time, which is a bit sad.
When we got to Durham it rained. A lot. And then some more. Number one son showed his local knowledge by getting us lost down an alley on the way to the indoor market. With the torrents of rain, poor lighting and overflowing rubbish bins the place looked like the opening shot from a CSI episode. But fortunately there were no bodies to be found.
After a splendid time talking about nothing in particular and looking at large tellies (an AV upgrade is in the pipeline) we tootled back to warm Hull.
Well, I'm back home now. The conference was great fun. You can see a video of me here.
The trip back was slightly enlivened by the landing process, which seemed to involve a bit more going up than I remembered from previous flights. Then the captain came on and said that a warning light had come on concerning the undercarriage as we were making our final approach. However, not to worry because he had done the aeronautical equivalent of bashing the dashboard of the plane and things were fine now...
Although it was a bit disconcerting to find all the fire engines lined up alongside the runway when we finally touched down...
Yesterday and today have been a bit of a blur. I've been to more sessions. Marvelled at the .NET Micro Framework, revelled in the Robotics stuff and been very impressed with the RSS feed talk this morning. I've found time to take a few more pictures too, which is always nice.
Rather a good sunrise
Even got the moon in this one
The Expo centre
The exhibition floor
MSP's from around the world.
If you have met me you will understand the humour in this picture.
There are some more on Flickr.
Tomorrow I give my session. Wish me luck.
It seems that the time synchronisation betweeen diary and time zones has just about been sorted out. I know this because I set my alarm an hour early on my PDA to allow for the fact that I am in a different time zone, set my PDA to the correct time zone and then got my wake up call an hour early.
Drat.
Went to the keynote for TechEd 2007 today. I've been to a few of these and so I thought I knew what to expect. What I didn't expect to see was the Imagine Cup coming down the tracks as the first headline item.
Bigging up the IC
Interesting in that three and a half years ago I went to the first imagine Cup world final and there were 14 teams who had a bunch of booths off to one side of the main exhibition. Today we have the IC as a keynote item and teams from pretty much every country in the world taking part and a big stand in the middle of the exhibition area. If you are at TechEd go and see Caroline on the stand. Tell her Rob sent you.... This is all such good stuff. Nice to see that Microsoft is still keen on getting students fired up in this business. They also introduced a lass from Pakistan who, at the tender age of 10 managed to get some C# qualifications. Very impressive. I thought back nervously to my 11 year old self, I think I was writing joined up by then.....
Then it was on to the computer stuff. They showed a thing where you can view business processes via Sharepoint 2007 and actually modify their actions directly using C#. Very clever. Business process is a big, big, thing. And the ability to do this kind of thing is terribly interesting. I'm pondering about the potential of regarding academic progression as a process like this. Might be a fun student project.
Then we went on to using Ajax to seriously spice up the user interface, which was very pretty. They had a bit whre you could select swatches for clothing and then view the outfits that would be made from the. this was kind of impressive, but what I really wanted was a tool which would do full cloth modelling (like some of our students are doing for games) and then put them onto representations of real people. I guess it will come with time. And I'm pretty sure the platform would support it.
Finally it was the seriously techie stuff. Using the new Linq extensions you can connect databases directly to your software objects with just about no glue. This is hugely significant. One of the nasty problems at the moment is how you can take your nice shiny objects and connect them to your big fat database. It looks like Linq will pretty much nail this issue. And it has some lovely RSS tools too.
And now I'm off for lunch....
Done a lot of walking today. And a lot of top deck bus riding. After we had signed in at the conference centre we went on a tour of the city by open top bus. We took in the cathedral, which is the most impressive building site that I've ever seen, and Guadi park, which was very nice. Also a whole bunch of other, highly interesting, places which are all shut on a Monday. I've put a bunch of pictures up on Flickr. No doubt I'll take more.
Cathedral spires
Tomorrow the work starts for real.
Flew out the Barcelona today. Jet 2 gave me the one seat on the plane with uber legroom. Very comfortable. Because I am a speaker at TechEd I was met by a very smart chap in a suit with a shiny Mercedes to take me to my hotel. Which was great. The hotel is posh too. It even has WIFI, although this did seem a bit dodgy, so I only managed to see around twenty seconds of Torchwood. Never mind.
Just sent John the answer to this puzzle. I managed to solve it. Can you?
I love my job. Today has been uber busy. Updating the XNA presentation, giving a couple of lectures, attending a mid-semester review meeting with the second year (we had loads of students turn up - and some really good discussion about how we do what we do).
And acting as a customer in our Software Engineering project. At first I was not looking forward to this. We usually try to get people to do this who the students doing the work are not familiar with. I've been giving lectures to this group for a while, and in this respect I'm quite well known.
But for the project I have to be "just a customer". But actually it is quite fun. Some of the people who have come to see me have asked jaw droppingly sensible questions that I would not have thought of asking if I was doing the job, which is great. And I quite like being unhelpful and uncommunicative for a change. At least, I think it is a change......
If you live in Hull, and haven't been to Ferens Art Gallery, then shame on you. It is free to get in, they have a nice coffee shop and there are some stunning paintings in there. At the moment they have a special exhibition called "Darkness Visible" which is easily the equal of ones that I've seen at Tate Modern (that is to say that I didn't understand some of these exhibits either).
But that doesn't mean that I won't be going back. It really is a nice place. Right in the middle of town it is an oasis of peace and quiet and paintings and sculptures and installations.
I try to make a point of going into art galleries when I go places. Not because I am particularly artistic (obviously) but because it gives you a nice insight into the local area. Hull has some splendid galleries and museums and can really hold its head up with pride in this respect.
Students, a good place to take your parents if they insist on you showing them the neighbourhood. You can leave them with the impression that you are acquiring culture, which is always a good thing.
Since that horrible Horizon program on Wednesday about artificial intelligence I've been pondering on what is really going to happen in the future, when megabrain computers are loaded with the minds of our greatest scientists.
Now, I don't know much about this stuff, but it seems to me that us ignorant humans have managed to prove that:
In other words, no matter how clever you are there is a limit to the number of things you can work out using pure brain power.
Which means that our super intelligent machines are going to be in a bit of a fix because they won't be able draw any conclusions at the end of all this wonderful thought they will be doing.
And then it came to me; they will do what us humans do when we have nothing better to do. They will dabble in things like fashion.
Scene : Singularity Sixty Seven - outpost seventy three of hive mind five
Consciousness Alpha Four: "..then I said to him that recurring decimals were so last season and that all the really serious fraction action this year has got to be down with the vulgar's..."
Consciousness Beta One: "You are so right. Do you think my brain looks big in this?"
Just received a note about the Pay Modernisation framework the university is putting into place. One of the headings is "Assimilation Panels". Just what I suspected....
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.
