Got the Bird

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When I got out of the shower this morning I found that I was being watched by a bird. Well, with a body like mine I suppose I should expect this to happen every now and then.

Actually, it was not quite like that. The bird was sitting on the bathroom window sill

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I don't think she saw much

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When I left for work the bird was still there.

I think that particular part of the house has the attraction of the updraft from the boiler flue, which is probably a good way to warm up (it was slightly chilly first thing).

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Bonus flower pic

Heroes with a sense of humour

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I love it when people you admire turn out to be good folks. I've mentioned "The Pitchers" comic strip before. This is a wonderful take on Hollywoodland from the point of view of a couple of aspiring script writers by a pair of talented artists called Berger and Wyse (they also did the title sequence from the BBC TV show "Hustle" - which should have won an award).  With a bit of luck they might one day they do a book of the Pitcher strips. I'd buy it on day one.

Anyhoo, last week they mentioned a "Trip Hazard" character, a clear infringement of my intellectual property rights since I've been not writing new Trip Hazard P.I. episodes for ages.  They did it again this week.

So I emailed them to tell them they would shortly be hearing from my lawyers. They shot straight back with this link which proves they had the name first, and told me that now I would be hearing from their lawyers. I hope they were joking. I was. Honest.

Box of Delights

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The Word

Got a parcel today. Not from the Post Office, they are on strike, but from DHL. In it were ten copies of my book.  Amazing. I daren't read it, as I'm scared that the first thing I'll see will be a huge glaring mistake, but it is very nice to actually see printed pages wot I wrote. There is even a picture of me on the back.

You can get the book from Amazon in the UK here. And in the 'states from here.

Hari Kiri Toshiba

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My laptop tried to kill itself again today. It turned itself on in the bag. I got to it just as the batteries were giving out after spending around an hour trying to set fire to my house. The bag and the laptop were really hot. I'd like to think that it would actually notice when it was catching fire, and shut down or do something sensible, but I'm not convinced. Perhaps it makes a WIFI connection to the fire-brigade or something.

This means I'm going to have to update the BIOS for one which is a bit less melty. Wish me luck.

The Secret of Eternal Life

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My newspaper is presently doing a list of "1,000 Films to See Before You Die". I've got cunning plan which will enable me to live forever. I'm only going to watch 999 of them.

Of course this raises the prospect of an intriguing murder case:

"And so I put it to the jury that the defendant showed my client 'Barbette's Feast' with the sole intention of murder most foul...."

Actually, I'm taking no chances, I'm not going to watch many of them at all. And since it doesn't include Napoleon Dynamite I'm wondering if it is the kind of list that I should have anything to do with anyway.

Old Clothes

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The funny thing is (ho ho) that we had planned to take today and tomorrow as holiday. We were going to drive out somewhere nice and eat sandwiches whilst sitting on a piece of cloth on the ground. But mother nature had other plans.

It is pretty much impossible to drive out of Hull at the moment. And very hard to get back again. So we stayed at home and did some tidying up. I went through my wardrobe in search of space to hang all these free shirts I keep picking up at conferences. I'm always very surprised by the lack of taste that I've shown in the past with respect to clothes. Things that seemed perfectly sensible at the time of purchase are now, with the benefit of my 20x20 fashion hindsight, quite beyond the pale. Still, at least the new stuff looks good on me........

Rain

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It rained today. That is pretty much all it did. Rained. We heard the rain over our meetings, and the view out of the window into the car park was not encouraging. After lunch, meetings over, I decided to go home early. This turned out to be a good call. On the way to the car park the water was a good six inches deep, easily covering my shoes and forcing me to drive home with bare feet. And what a drive. Getting of the campus was not good, with the road out of the university looking more like a river. Many of the streets were impassible, but fortunately myself and number one wife got back home safely.

This is the worst I've ever seen. Many people in Hull have been flooded out. Buildings on the university campus have basements full of water. The folks across the road had what looked like a stream running down the side of their house. I've not taken any pictures, but you can see loads here.

Slide 7 Rocks

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Today is Slide 7 day. Slide (Students Learn Innovative Developer Expertise - or something - we picked the name because the domain name was available) is run by Microsoft the Academic team at Microsoft UK in Reading. They put on sessions about professional development and get a bunch of students to turn up. This year it was all about connected applications.

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Our posse on the way into the Mother Ship....

I took a minibus full of folks from Hull to join the hundred or so others that had made their way from all over the country for the show.

And the show was good. There was a slight dip in quality after lunch, when I did my bit on Web Services, but the rest of the material was top notch. There were sessions on Web 2.0 (where we discussed the question of what Web 2.0 actually is), ASP, Windows Live and Orcas. And then a great talk at the end on Sliverlight.

People, you should find out more about Silverlight. You should also sign up for Popfly since this is mucho funo. I've been playing a bit with my Popfly account and it makes it dangerously easy to develop impressive applications.

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My Audience (most of the students were next door, but we manage to make more noise than them...)

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Mingling at the BBQ

At the end we had a BBQ and a great time was had by all. There will probably be a Slide 8, you should get your name down for it if there is...

Ed Dunhill, the Microsoft bod who made it all happen (Kudos Ed) is going to post all the slides and other material on his blog.

Then, after a five hour rumble up the motorway it was home in time for bed.

Amsterdam Gets XNA

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Had great fun today doing a session about XNA for DevDays. The audience were wonderful, and I took some happy snaps:

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on the right...

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...in the middle...

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...and on the left

Thanks for paying attention people, and I hope you use XNA to get to some interesting places.

Before my talk we had a session from Dave Mitchell of Microsoft. He was able to tell us that the XNA Creators Club memberships are going to be part of Microsoft Academic Alliance. This is the best news. Now we can put a bunch of machines in our labs for people to write for and it won't cost us extra on top of our AA subscription. That news alone was worth going to Amsterdam for. If you are a member of a university faculty you owe it to yourself (and your students) to follow this up and get your hands on one of the best bargains in education at the moment).

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Dave at the start of his presentation

Earlier today I went to a presentation by Scott Guthrie about Silverlight. This is a fantastic technology that lets you make very impressive user experience. It lets you put .NET powered behaviour into web pages and also gives you the Windows Presentation Foundation to drive your user interfaces. Excellent.

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Scot talking about multiple language support in Sliverlight.

I've had a really good time in Amsterdam. I went out for a meal last night and took even more pictures:

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Standard Canal picture

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Artistic cake

There are some more on my Flickr site.

DevDays 2007

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This morning found me boarding a plane for Amsterdam. I'm giving a session on XNA development tomorrow. Rather cleverly I didn't check in any luggage, so no waiting at conveyor belts for me. Rather less cleverly I'd also put my highly explosive shampoo and deodorant in my carry on bag. I managed to avoid the cavity search, but now I'm going to have to learn the Dutch for "Lynx Effect". Not that I seem to need it......

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These two lovelies were wandering round the show accompanied by a bloke with a camera and printer strapped to him who was taking photos and printing them out for free. Very nice. Although the reason I look so pleased is that I'm clutching a copy of the Microsoft Mobile Developers Handbook. I wrote Chapter 13, which is about mobile graphics. I was stood in the bookshop reading my own printed words when the girls turned up. I resisted the temptation to hold up the pages and shout "Look, I wrote this!", since I figured they might not be that impressed.  But I settled for a picture.

DevDays is neat. It is based in Amsterdam at the conference centre there. I'll grab some pictures from inside the conference tomorrow. For today, here are some external shots.

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Outside the Conference Centre

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Authentic Dutch bike rider

Adobe Steal another Half an Hour of My Life

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As I get older, I realise that time is becoming more precious to me. The number of hours left to me is not so huge that I can just squander them on wasted effort. Or have them taken from me.

Adobe Reader has just stolen half an hour of my time. All I wanted to do was read a document and then print it. Without being asked it went on line, found some updates, downloaded 30 MBytes of stuff, spent fifteen minutes installing this, rebooted my machine and then spent another five minutes rattling the disk drive.

Net loss to me, half an hour of my time.

Now, the Adobe reader is a program that lets me read documents. That's all. It does not control a heart-lung machine, fly a plane or operate a nuclear reactor. What can be so wrong with it that it requires 30 MBytes (more space than the original Windows 95 installer) to sort out? I know that the program is free, and so I probably can't complain. But this kind of behaviour means that I would be unlikely to pay for it anyway.

And now I've wasted another ten minutes moaning about the 30 minutes I lost. Bah.

Wedding Daze

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Confetti

Went to a wedding today. We went to the service and then the reception and then came home. Everything was great, even the weather. Number one wife was going out to the evening party, whilst I stayed at home and nursed the jetlag. Before she went out again I thought I'd print off a few of the photos I'd taken. Bad plan. The process went like this.

  1. Upload pictures to computer. Select picture and press print.
  2. HP printer drops out the print onto 6x4 as requested, but the ink cartridge has run out.
  3. Insert new ink cartridge.
  4. Printer refuses to do cartridge alignment.
  5. Take out all paper. Reset printer. Put paper back in. Reset printer again. Printer does alignment.
  6. Restart print.
  7. Printer prints out picture on A4 paper, not 6x4.
  8. Move lever on printer to get the right size. Print again.
  9. One good print. Hurrah. Print two more. Works again. Hurrah.
  10. Move on to next picture. Select print, ask for three copies. Go for cup of tea.
  11. Come back and find that all three copies have groom's head cut off.
  12. Examine the pictures carefully and note that all photographs are being cropped.
  13. Spend ten minutes trying to figure out how to get the HP driver to print the actual size that I want.
  14. Discover that this is impossible.
  15. Select another picture with groom's head closer to the middle. Ask for three copies. Go watch some Dr Who.
  16. Come back and find that the 6x4 paper has run out, so the printer has printed the three copies on A4.
  17. Load some more 6x4 paper in and ask for three more copies.
  18. One print comes out, with the picture diagonally across it as it has not loaded properly.  Printer then stops and flashes a red light.
  19. Give single print to number one wife, and walk away from the computer/printer before I do it some serious damage.

So Many Questions

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I spent a big chunk of today telling folks all about the .NET Micro Framework. We had a stand near the Visual Studio booths, so I had the pleasant duty of telling lots of people who had C# and Visual Studio 2005 experience they are now fully qualified embedded developers too. Embedded development is the fiddly business of putting code onto tiny processors.

One example application we have is a C# controlled massage char (which proved very popular as the day wore on) but we also have Micro Framework controlled RSS display sign and also a Z-Wave network interface device that was developed in weeks rather than months thanks to the fact that the company was able to use C#, VS 2005 and all the powerful emulation and debugging support that comes with it.

Once folks cottoned onto the idea they were well keen. Quite a few had experienced the horrors of writing embedded code and really relished the thought of controlling hardware with software again. Particularly as there are no new skills to learn (I'm starting to sound a bit like a salesman now, but what the hey, I like the stuff).

Then it was back to the hotel. I had a quick shower, lay down on the bed for a minute and then woke up four hours later. I love jetlag....

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Another satisfied customer

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What it is all about