Lectures, Scary Security, FPL, XNA and Sound Bites

Today has been busy. Oh yes. It started with an unexpected lecture. We are now in week 11 of the semester, with teaching supposed to have finished at the end of week 10. But the first year students wanted more, and so I went off at 9:15 to deliver. Actually, it worked quite well, in that I was able to go through the quiz that I set last week.

Then it was back to the labs to get ready for our XNA event. Andy Sithers from Microsoft had come over to formally hand over the XBOX 360s they have given us to help with our XNA teaching in the first year. We had to set them up in the lab for the pictures, and get some stuff working. Simon Dickson and Phil Cluff from our first year came in to show of what they have been doing.

Then, after a quick lunch the presentation tool place. We all contorted ourselves into the best position for the perfect shot for the papers. Danielle Cod from Radio Humberside interviewed our head of department, Andy, Simon and Phil and finally me, in search of the perfect soundbyte. You can grab the resulting two minute piece here. Much to my dismay they seem to have left Andy and Warren on the cutting room floor.....

This picture kind of captures the event. In the back Warren Viant, our head of department, is being recorded whilst Andy Sithers ponders the code and Simon grapples with debugging and being interviewed all at the same time....

After all this we had to dash off to an event that I had pretentiously entitled our "Software Symposium". (Did you know that symposium used to mean drinking session?). Anyhoo, the event started with a double headed presentation from Robert Hogg of software developers Black Marble and Ed Gibson who is Chief Security Advisor for Microsoft UK. The topic was safety and computers.

I'd heard bits of it before at the Black Marble event last year, but it was obviously news to the audience, who sat silently as Robert and Ed laid it on the line about just how scary things are. I managed to be both petrified about what was going on out there and relieved that Robert and Ed are going around spreading the word and engaging budding software developers with the problems posed by the wonderful connected world we live in.

The point they made forcefully and effectively is that the big problems are not down to technology, they are down to people. If we don't keep our software up to date and we allow ourselves to be bamboozled into giving passwords to cunning callers then no amount of code is going to help.

Next, and on a somewhat lighter note, the Seedlings, our Imagine Cup winning team, gave us a presentation of their entry. The First Programming Language they are working on is aimed to engage everyone with the kind of problem solving techniques that will allow them to use a computer to best advantage, whether or not they end up writing programs.

Then after a closing address from Andy Sithers of Microsoft, about the value of competition and the usefulness to students of just plain taking part, it was time to zoom off and try to find a recorder for the radio broadcast.....

Busy day.

Nature's Way...

Today I had to reboot Vista. Not something I do very often, or by choice, but I'd just installed some new software and it needed a reboot, so off we went.

On the way back it did a checkdisk. Something about broken chains somewhere. I'd not seen this message before, but I figured out it might be nature's way of saying it was time to take a backup. I fired up the Backup and Restore centre in Vista and two clicks and two hours later I'm the proud possessor of a bunch of files on my network storage device which will probably allow me to reconstruct my life should my laptop disk decide to tip over. The next thing I'm going to do, of course, is pick a file or two at random and try to restore them from the backup. When this works I can relax.

I remember a horror story from the back in the mists of time where a system manager (not me) had a hard disk crash. He was feeling quite relaxed about this, as he loaded up his backup tapes. Ten minutes later he was feeling less relaxed, when he found that his backup command saved the directory structure, but not the files. He hadn't thought to check that he could actually get anything off the tapes that he had been carefully creating and saving for years.....

So Many Questions....

I'm trying out something new with the First Year students. I hope they don't mind. Around this time of year thoughts turn to examinations, and I usually set up some quizzes to help the revision process.

This year I'm doing things a little differently. Rather than a set of complicated questions that take ages to work out and answer, I'm setting around 50 or so snappy "true or false" ones. The idea is that you don't have to figure out which is the odd one out, or what the question is gunning for, you just have to agree or disagree with the statement.

I'm going to send out the marked papers after the weekend and invite everyone to have a look at their answers and the right ones, and then at the end of next week I'll run a revision lecture to follow up on the whole thing.

It will be interesting to see how it turns out.

Games and Wires

Today we had a meeting where we are setting up a pilot project to let our students run a games server on campus. Previously this has been a fraught business, with concern about bandwidth use and system management from all sides. However, after an enlightened decision from the university Computer Users Group we are now opening up some bandwidth monitored ports onto the student cluster in freeside.

This could be fun...

Drunk with Readers

I've been using a new mechanism to make sure that the readership of these august pages is holding up (not sure what you are holding up actually, but from here it looks like your hands need washing).

Anyhoo, I've been using this new service from Google Analytics, which lets me see who has been visiting the page, what time they came, whether they were wearing a tie, etc, etc. It is very powerful. It has lots of things you can use to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising and page design, see how far most people go through your content and the like. Most people seem to arrive at my site, take one look at the opening page and then vanish at speed.

Such is life.

If you run a proper web page which actually has serious intent you should take a look at the service, I can see how it could be very useful.

There is talk of a new version, which will let you find out how many people have visited your web site on the way back from the pub. That is going to be called "Google Paralytics".

What Sundays are for

Spent Sunday eating Sunday dinner, mowing the lawn and washing the car. This is all very middle class and boring. Next week I plan to eat the car, wash the lawn and mow dinner.

Durham Driving

Drove to Durham today. Number one son (and his PS3) are now back in study mode, whatever that is.

PDF Output from Vista

I'm a happy bunny. The weather is good. The book is written. And I've got a working PDF output program for Vista.

Perhaps I'm setting my sights a bit low; other people might wish for riches or movie star looks whereas I'm happy with a bit of sunshine, a few pages of text and Primo PDF.

Mind you, according to a survey this week the key to happiness is maintaining low expectations...

Early Bird

Did the paper review this morning, which meant getting up bright and early. I don't know how the people at the radio station do it every day.

One of my students told me that they woke up to the sound of my voice on the radio, which is apparently really scary...

Plumb Job

Earlier this morning I was wondering how I was going to spend all this new free time that I have now that the writing on the book is finished.

This afternoon I found out. I get to clean mouse droppings out of the summer house. The pesky little rodents had made their way back in over the winter and seemed to have held a particularly messy party in my gardening gloves.

Lovely.

Under Observation

Number one son told me an amazing (and probably internet derived) "fact" today. Apparently there is one CCTV camera for every twelve people in Britain.

I wonder where mine is. And who the other eleven people are....

Back To Work

The office hasn't changed much in the week or so I've been away from it (i.e. it is still a mess). I'm tempted to have a bonfire or something to get rid of some stuff, but I'm not sure if this is allowed under health and safety. Even if we had marshmallows.

All In

The chapters of the book are now all in. And so am I. I think I'll go back to work tomorrow for a rest.

I wonder if I'll get one.

Gone to the beach

Most of the writing is now done. Just a few bits left to add. So we went to the seaside. I really like Hornsea. It has a faded charm that I find really attractive. Number one son and I took our cameras, and we were dead lucky because the light was lovely for photographs.

Beach front

Asset stripped

Indoor amusements

Windmills

Hornsea Mere Tea Rooms. Fantastic.

This pike is over 100 years old.

I once got a hole in one here. Snag is, it was the wrong hole....

Boats

Remember Me?

Sometimes to solve a problem you have to go and live there. And that is where I've been these last few days. Living in a book. Although I've actually done quite a lot since the last post.

• got a media pc
• met some ducks and swans
• been very jealous of my father in law
• controlled a robot vacuum cleaner with the .NET Micro Framework
• beat Ian at table football (twice)
• seen Laura Viers live
• gone to the seaside

I'll catch you all up with these things as soon as all the pictures have uploaded onto Flickr.

Roomba Magic

I actually own a useful robot. Amazing. I've got some useless ones too, but this one actually does something that number one wife thinks is good. It does the vacuuming. You plonk it down in the middle of a room, give it a kick and off it trundles, bouncing off furniture and cleaning as it goes. And it does a creditable job. To be sure, we did have to clear a bit of junk off the floor to give it a free run, and it does take longer than I would, but the evidence in the dust collector is clear, it cleans.

We set it loose in the bedroom and it rumbled about for a while. When I caught up with it later it was coughing a bit, and upon inspection it had picked up a lot of dust (it had been wandering about underneath things), an umbrella cover and 20 pence. I emptied it all out, charged the battery and off it went again. The device itself is beautifully engineered. It bristles with sensors so that it really can follow a wall, detect and manage collisions with obstacles and avoid falling down stairs (it is especially good at that one). And it has a bunch of brushes and proper filters and stuff. It really is a vacuum.

The funny thing is that I didn't really select it for its cleaning prowess. I was more interested in the interfacing potential for the Micro Framework book that I'm presently writing. The robot exposes a software interface into which you can plug a computer. It works too. I've had C# programs in a Micro Framework telling the robot what to do, which is very nice.  But now number one wife wants it to clean the conservatory, so I'll have to get on with something else.

Holiday for Banks

Today is Easter Bank holiday. Wish I worked in a bank.

Laura Viers Sings

Indeed she does. Very well. Number one son spotted that she was appearing in York, and so off we toddled. I took the big camera, but I might as well have not bothered. The lights were a bit low and even with the camera gain turned up to 11 it was hard to get any good photos.

Laura in red (and that is a sock over the microphone)

She played mostly new stuff, which was alright by me. She does have an amazing voice and her band were absolutely top notch.

Media Friendly

Number one son was supposed to be a restraining influence. He was supposed to drag me away from temptation and stop me doing things like buying Sony Media Centre PCs, even if they were half price. Unfortunately he was no good at all. So now I've got this Sony XL-201 thing lurking under the telly and I've thrown all the silver boxes out.

And it used to work very well. It was running XP and Media Centre 2005 but of course I wanted more. I wanted Vista. Well, today I got it. We left the machine upgrading while we went up town. When we got back all looked fine, which is bad. One of Robert's rules of computers is that "Everything useful requires payment in pain".

When things seem to work OK my heart tends to sink, because it means that the bits that are going to not work are going to be swines to fix. I'd much rather have a completely black screen and nothing happening, because I can attack that up front. With this variant of the hand of fate I have to find out what is going to be wrong before I can fix it.

Well, later today I found out what is wrong. Nothing too important, just that when you turn the TV on the computer crashes. The NVidia drivers just can't handle the fact that the TV is saying hello down its HDMI connection. They show their surprise by blue screening the box. As I am pitching this device to number one wife as the answer to all our problems, the media hub to end all hubs, the thing that only needs one remote control this is a bit of a sticking point.

We have tried various versions of the drivers and all have the problem to a different degree. By not turning anything off, ever, things work OK, but I don't see this as energy efficient. Actually, I see it as darned annoying. I have a Sony TV plugged into a Sony computer running drivers downloaded from the Sony site. And it crashes when you turn the TV on. Do they test this stuff? Do they ever turn it off? At the moment the best I can do is live with it until NVidia (for I suspect they are to blame) ship something a bit more resilient.

Then this evening we went round to see Ian. Everyone beat me at pool, which is bad. But I beat everyone at table football. Which is good.

And yes, I did churn out a bunch of book pages in the meantime.

Respect

My father in law has style. He showed this by getting out some of his record collection:

Ying Tong indeed

This is the sleeve from a Goons EP that he bought many moons ago. He still has the record too. Great stuff.

Then it was back onto the motorway for the journey home. On the way we passed a lorry loaded with stuff which the sign on the back referred to as "Equestrian Bedding". We think they mean straw.