Your Brain and How To Use It?

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The Sunday Times has been advertising a new feature aimed at improving the mental prowess of the nation. On Sunday you will get a free DVD which will let you measure your brain power. Whoopee.

I hate things like this. I hate IQ tests, I think they are silly. If you get a low score you get upset because you think you are thick. If you get a high score in one of these tests you get upset because you are not running the country (not that this is necessarily an advert for cleverness).

Of course the real reason that I hate the tests is because I get very confused/irritated by them. When confronted by a "pick the right answer/odd one out/next in sequence" kind of question I can usually think of a whole bunch of reasons why any one of them could be the correct one, depending on the whim of the person setting the test. So what I'm really finding out is if my interpretation of the situation is the same as someone else. Who presumably has a "gold standard" of cleverness in their office.

You might find it strange that someone who often has to measure how good people are at something by setting exams and exercises dislikes IQ tests so much. I think the thing is that what I try to assess is how useful somebody would be. Given a bunch of learning outcomes (which is what courses have these days) I'm going to set questions that will try to find out how useful you can be with the knowledge that you are supposed to have.

I'll start by asking a few things which will determine whether or not you have taken the trouble to learn the fundamentals of the subject and then give you a bunch of situations where you can demonstrate that you can use this understanding to achieve things. Finally, I'm going to try and get you into a place where you can say "There are no right answers here, just different compromises which reflect different priorities" and then tell me all about these.

Of course not everything can be nailed down like this, and I'm also going to want to see how well you can present your understanding (which is why we get the first year students to demonstrate their programs), but it is a good start.

I've nothing against doing stuff which keeps your brain agile (I love the little brain power games for the Nintendo DS). But I am strongly against dodgy pseudo-scientific tests which don't really prove anything useful.

Leeds Bargain Hunter

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Leeds future sky

Went to Leeds today to look out for cheap clothes in the "Shop for strangely shaped people that cares not for style, quality or its customers". A tip, oh managers of such shops. Bearing in mind that the aim of a retail establishment is to entice shoppers inside to part with funds for goods, do not put something eerily tasteless in orange and brown directly inside the front door. Things did not improve much once we got further inside. A duffle coat that looked good in a picture turned out to be made of fuzzy felt and one of the buttons fell off as I tried it on.

However, we did manage to find a couple of tasteful items worthy of investment (thank heavens for Ben Sherman shirts) and so the trip was not a complete waste. And we did get to to go Ikea for meatballs.

In Praise of Insomnia

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I've started waking up in the night every now and then (last night it was easy because number one son and daughter got up at some ungodly hour to go to London). Quite often I find it hard to get back to sleep, but this is sometimes a bonus because I do have some of my better ideas at that time (or perhaps it is because my critical faculties are asleep at that time as well).

Anyhoo, last night I had a neat idea for the "Flashlight for the Fiftieth Century" (US version) or "Posh Torch" (UK version) that I'm developing as a worked example for the .NET Micro Framework book I'm presently writing. Yesterday I got a GPS interface sort of working. As I was lying in bed it occurred to me that it would be nice to add some mapping features to the software. So now I'm going to download some map images so that the device can have a "you are here" kind of display for certain areas. 

Mouse Waggling

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Many years ago I got hold of the first version of Windows NT (Version 3.1 for some strange, marketing related, reason). This was the beginning of "proper" 32 bit operating systems underneath Windows, a trend which has continued all the way to Windows XP and finally Vista.

However, as it was based on an Intel 486 chip with only 64 MBytes of memory the operating system used to struggle a bit. We used to have a game called "mouse waggling", where you would fire up the performance counter and see how much CPU load you could create just by moving the mouse pointer around the screen. Sad but fun (particularly on somebody else's computer). A good player could get up to 50 or 60%.

I tried the game today on Vista (it has some really nice performance displays in the sidebar). Except this time I was dragging a window, complete with contents, over a large and complex desktop.  The needle does move, but nothing like as far as it used to. I guess this is down to the use of the graphics hardware to underpin the display system, either way it is impressive.

Boomerang Settings

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I've just about got Vista how I want it. Every now and then I do something which means I have to load or configure another program I used to use, but most of the time I can putter along and get things done. And I rather like my new workplace. Except for one thing.

Settings that I've changed keep reverting back to their previous values. I'm using a network storage device which is based on a Linux processor and uses SAMBA, so I have to modify a Local Security Policy to make it work. I can make the change fine, and the drive works fine for a while. Then the setting flips back to the original value. Similarly, to get Outlook to log on to our Exchange server I've had to add a registry key. Which keeps vanishing.

The only thing I can think of is that the system thinks it is under attack, and puts things back to their safe values. I've had a cursory dig around but nothing out there tells me how to fix it. Very strange.

Recipe for Pain

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  1. Take one Toshiba M400 laptop running Windows XP Service Pack 2.
  2. Carefully image the M400 disk using Paragon Drive Backup 6.0 onto two separate external disks.
  3. Carefully copy all the document files onto further external disks, so that you have plenty of copies of all the important stuff.
  4. Install Windows Vista onto Toshiba M400, wiping hard disk in process.
  5. Remember some crucial files that are not in the document directories you copied onto external drives, but hey, I've got a drive image backup so no problem.
  6. Fail to find the Paragon Drive Image program CD.

New Year at Hornsea

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First, a happy new year to both my readers. At Chateau Miles, we have been know to celebrate the arrival of a new calendar by heading off to the seaside at Hornsea. Today the weather looked reasonable, and so we set out. On the way there it seemed like a bad idea, in that we drove along underneath some very nasty looking clouds and the odd smattering of rain.

But when we got to the coast it was wonderful. It was very blustery, but this really seemed to blow out the cobwebs at the start of the year. It was also pretty busy, and one or two valiant souls had actually gone for a paddle. I'd taken the big camera, and so I took a bunch of snaps.

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New Year seaside

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Arcadia

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Lights

Viva Pinata

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I am weak. Very weak. Show me a sale with two XBOX 360 video games for 60 quid and I'm pretty much bound to buy a couple. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, I can resist pretty much anything but temptation. I ended up buying Test Drive Unlimited, a game which lets you tear up and down great chunks of Hawaii in a fast car, and Viva Pinata, a gardening game. Number one wife noted wryly that the only time that I will actually do any gardening is inside a computer, and this seems to be the case.

In the game you create a nice garden in the hope that wandering pinata will come and live there, breed, eat each other, and form a living ecosystem. Pinata are animated versions of those things that kids at posh birthday parties in Mexican restaurants smash open to get out toys and sweets and there seem to be an unlimited number of these which can crawl, burrow, fly, swim and so on.

The game is aimed firmly at children, so I reckoned I would be able to cope. And so it seemed when I started. A friendly girl with a voice able to convey more enthusiasm than a very enthusiastic thing tells you what to do in awed terms, and introduces you to your toolkit noting that "If you hit your pinata with the shovel they may become ill". So let's play nicely out there kids.

Anyhoo, a lot happens in a very short time. Within an hour I had my version of a green and pleasant land running nicely and a few different varieties of pinata living side by side, eating, breeding and throwing fireballs at each other. And it looks very pretty. The clock spins in accelerated real time and the sun and moon wax and wane very effectively.

And I realised one more thing that differentiates me from youngsters (and probably lots of grown ups as well). I think that, once they have picked up the control system, kids would now have the patience and determination to try making different pinata, plant different seeds, build new types of garden, put their own drawings on their own breeds and do all the other things which make the game so much fun. But I couldn't be bothered. I turned the joypad over to number one son, who has more of an appetite for this kind of thing and wandered off to do some proper work. In a trice he had added a whole bunch of trees and species that would have taken me ages to sort out.

I think the snag is that at my age if I'm going to spend any amount of time in a learning curve I like to think that I'm going to get something concrete out of it at the end, and a pretty new pinata just doesn't cut it for me. For me the game is just too much like gardening, in that it requires effort and thought, and I'd rather put those into something else, like messing around with computers (which is probably how I really enjoy myself).

However, if you are looking for a game to play with your kids which is bright, colourful and creates a living environment with genuine causes and effects and unlimited scope for experimentation and cooperation, then you should take a look.

A Dangerous Obsession

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If you think about it, you really shouldn't let people with an obsessive nature anywhere near computers. When I was much younger I knew a chap called John. Actually, now I am older I still know a chap called John, but it is a different John, and not important right now. Anyhoo, John had one of the first microcomputers, a Nascom. It had a 25 lines of 40 characters display. And 8 KBytes of RAM. And he could write Basic programs on it and store them on a cassette tape. What power. I was dead jealous. One Monday he came in to work looking even more haggard and disheveled than ever, which for John was saying something. We asked him if he had enjoyed a pleasant weekend.

 "Not really" he replied "I wanted to see the robots feet and it took ages to get it to work".

Turns out that the Nascom had a display character set which contained graphical images, including little robots. Snag was that these were not displayed completely, because the screen hardware skipped some lines when it drew the raster. The feet were missed off. For John this was a bad thing. So he spent an entire weekend rewiring the hardware so that all the scan lines were drawn. And he could see his robots feet. We thought this was silly, and could hardly see the difference extra pixels made.

I was reminded of this during my attempts to get Vista Aero Glass to work on my Toshiba M200 this weekend. For those that don't know, Glass gives you a funky effect around each window, so you can sort of see through to the one beneath it. This adds very little to the usability of your computer, but it is very cute, particularly if you understand how fiendishly hard it is to draw this kind of thing. And my rather elderly Tosh machine can just about do it. But only if you download a special driver, customise the initialisation file and then throw in a registry hack. And it only sort of works, in that every now and then it runs out of display memory and drops back to boring old opaque window edges.

But getting glass on my desktop became very important to me, and I spent far too much time trying and failing to make it work. Finally I had a glass display running and I showed number one wife the finished result.

"I can't see the difference" she said.

Vistafied

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Some things are guaranteed to put me into a mild sweat. Finding we have no milk in the house, filling in my Tax Return. And changing my computer operating system.

Today I've done all three. The milkman seems to have vanished. We gave him a bottle of wine for christmas, told him we didn't want any milk for a few days and we've not seen him since. I have this awful vision of an upturned milk float half submerged in a ditch with a white clad body spreadeagled alongside, a half empty wine bottle still clutched in its dead hand. Or he might just have forgotten us. Anyhoo, I was nearly condemned to black tea until number one daughter mentioned that there were shops in the village which also sell milk. Phew.

Then I had to do my tax return, seeing as it is due tomorrow. I don't earn much money (most things I do for love - obviously) but I did get paid for some stuff I wrote some time back, so I have to declare it and pay the man. So there was a quick scrabble for forms, typing of numbers and pressing of submit buttons.

Then we came to my new operating system. I'm going to move to Vista. Part of me wants to, the other part has a great affinity for the status quo. However, some software I want to use only works with Vista, so I'm kind of forced into this. I'm not actually moving completely just yet. I thought I'd install the system on another computer first so that I have an escape clause. So far things have gone quite well. I've got Vista running on my old Toshiba M200 and it seems to work OK so far.

Live to Shop

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We went up town this morning shopping. So did everyone else. We didn't have a huge amount to buy, which was just as well, it is just that I'm addicted to the almond croissants that they serve in Costa Coffee and number one wife likes the tiramisu coffee (we are becoming terribly cultured).

Anyhoo, it was hell. We went to Marks and Spencer's to get some food and joined "The Longest and Slowest Moving Queue in the World"(tm). At one point I said out loud "This isn't just queuing, this is Marks and Spencer queuing" in what I thought was a clever parody of the current advertisement campaign they are running in the UK. I don't think this went down too well. 

Eventually we made it back home via a few present drop-offs and I'm just about to begin the wrapping up process. And yes, I have bought some sticky tape. But somebody has made off with my scissors.....

Christmas Do

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Getting into the spirit of the day....

Today we had our staff christmas lunch. For a change we had the meal at a nearby golf club. Very posh. The car park was full of expensive cars and a good time was had by all.

Then in the evening we repaired to the Hive Virtual Environment suite and found out what you get if you plug a Wii into a huge video projector and play tennis and bowling. The answer? Big fun.