If you can track down a copy of this months “360” magazine it is worth the effort. They have a lovely article about XNA in it, with some quotes from me and from Tom as well.
You can even win a free copy of my book by entering a contest they are running. There are some other good stories in there too, and the price is very nice at only 2.79.
The car needed new tyres. The man in the garage was trying to find out what kind to get. He asked me how far I drive each year. “Around 10,000 miles or so” I said. “Oh” he replied. “In that case I’ll get you a set of ‘Middle of the Road’ ones”.
I really liked that.
I thought I was doing OK this morning. I’d gone from broken to mended, with all my demo programs for the Portugal sessions working fine. I even sent a Tweet out to Twitter bragging about this.
Big mistake.
There was just one final link in the chain that I need to sort out, which is the tiny router I carry around with me to demos. There is nothing quite like having your own little network to hand, with an address range that you know and love. And I can even use the router to find out what addresses have been allocated so that they are easy to locate from Visual Studio. Unless, of course, I lose the admin password for the thing.
Which I have just done. Or the universe has engineered for my personal torment. Or whatever. Either way up, I foresee a certain amount of frantic pinging before the session.
Oh well, if you don’t learn something from an experience you really should not be in the game. I’m never going to brag about making something work. Ever again.
Talking of burning, we noticed that the dishwasher was making a crackling noise and burning smell this afternoon which stopped when we sprinted up to it and ripped its plug out of the wall socket. I think it is proper broken.
All this was made especially exciting by the fact that I was talking to number one son on the notebook at the time using the webcam, and so we had to carry “him” downstairs so that he could share in the experience, but perhaps without the smell of smoke…
I had a call with Devon from Microsoft in the 'states scheduled for late this afternoon. We agreed that it might be a good idea to postpone it slightly. After all, you don't want to have to answer the question "Where were you when America inaugurated Barack Obama as president?" with "Oh, I was on the phone at the time".
Thanks to Adam for a link to this, a fantastic PhotoSynth picture of the inauguration.
http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2009/44.president/inauguration/themoment/
One of my rules for debugging programs is "the fault is never where you think it is". This is because if the fault was where you thought it was, you would have fixed it by now. The fault isn't where you think it is because one of your assumptions about the problem is wrong. So I begin by checking all the assumptions I am making. Starting with "Am I running the program I think I am?" and going on from there.
I was reminded of this when I set out to find the source of a rattle in the sound system in the car. The nearside rear parcel shelf speaker was making an unholy death rattle in time with the bass notes in the music, and it was getting worse. So, armed with a bunch of screwdrivers I thought I'd go out there and frighten it into submission. I assumed that either something had fallen down the slots above the speaker into it, or I'd broken the cone by playing too many "bangin' choons".
So I set some music playing and sure enough, there was the rattle. So I spent a few minutes trying to find out how to get into the rear parcel shelf and listening carefully and came to an interesting conclusion. There is no speaker in the rear parcel shelf at all. The speakers at the back are in the doors. Well, how was I supposed to know? I've only had the car three and a half years....
Anyhoo, in the door pocket I found a happily rattling five pence piece. So, I now have rattle free music and I'm five pence up on the day.
Win.
And I remembered to take my camera with me today.
Cottingham Church
Went up town today. The light was lovely. A low sun shining through gaps in the clouds. Great conditions for awesome photographs.
Of course, I'd not taken my camera.
Bought some new boots on Saturday. They are proper ones, with heels and soles that can be replaced. I was getting cold feet and so I got myself some thick socks as well to keep my toes toasty warm.
They are great, but very noisy in the corridors at work. If I ever need to sneak up on someone I won't be wearing these boots. I was trying to think of some kind of CSI plot twist, where the murderer invents boot silencers so that he can stalk his victims on the mean street of Las Vegas, but I'm not sure how it would work.
Actually, this is not the daftest thing I ever heard about sneaky boots. In the Sherlock Holmes episode where he is brought back from his untimely death at the hands of Professor Morriarty the great detective says that he managed to put off his pursuers and leave misleading tracks by simply "Reversing his boots and walking home". I had a quick go at this with my new boots and it is nigh on impossible. Mind you, I'm no Sherlock Holmes. And I wonder which university Professor Morriarty used to work at?
Washed the cars today. I was kind of shamed into it by the awful state of them. Last time I did this one of our neighbours asked me why I was doing this, what with the way that they would become dirty again really quickly.
"Well," I replied, "At least they'll be clean underneath the dirt"
I've felt that something has been wrong all day. Nothing has seemed right, it was as if I didn't fit correctly into the fabric of the universe (and you know how that can be). This evening, I've found out why.
I've got the wrong day socks on. I mentioned some time back how I had acquired some socks labelled with days of the week, and the torment this caused me when I crossed a time zone wearing them.
Well, today I've been wearing socks emblazoned with "Thursday". And nobody has told me. (actually, I'm rather relieved about this bit, the idea of people paying attention to my ankles is actually somewhat scary).
Anyhoo, it turns out that things have got even worse. Number one son came to stay with us over Christmas and he has the same set of socks. And they got mixed up in the wash. I now have two sets of "Friday" and no "Monday" or "Tuesday". And I think I'm down to one solitary "Sunday" sock. Disaster.
I wonder if anyone makes packs of socks with the label "Today" on them?
Enough said....
Went shopping today for clothes. I do this precisely twice a year, when the tall person's clothes shop has its sales. I'm thinking of adding even more sartorial elegance to my look this year (it took me three goes to spell sartorial correctly just now though, so the omens are not great...)
Alfred Thompson had a good post on his blog about the way that programmers persist in using single character identifiers (i, j and k etc) for counters in loops.
I posted a comment on the post in which I put one of my favourite quotes - "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" from Emerson.
I'm presently going through back filling all my blog posts so that I don't have any gaps in the days.
Go figure.
Number one wife was back at work today. I felt kind of bad about this, and so as a gesture of solidarity I got up with her, had breakfast and spent the entire day writing some XNA stuff. Which turned out to be great fun.
Went up town to the sales today and bought a helicopter. It is a twin bladed Chinook type thing, which was knocked down to fifteen quid in Red5. Number one son has shown quite a talent for flying the thing, which seems a lot more controllable than the single rotor ones that we had bouncing off the furniture earlier this week. He can actually make it hover in one place and it has this fancy way of tipping the front rotor to make very controlled turns.
I think these will sell out real quick, but if you get the chance to buy one I'd recommend you do.
We drifted back up the motorway to Hull today. I wanted to get back in time to download my free music from Amazon (value 3 pounds). They had promised me a free voucher for Christmas or Boxing Day. Downloading on Christmas Day seemed a bit against the spirit of the occasion.
When I went on-line the wet site told me the offer had expired. Oh well.
Tree Snapshot
I would like to send all my readers the complements of the season. I hope that Santa brings you what you asked for. And remember, if all you get is a lump of coal this something that can only appreciate in value.....
I was having my hair cut yesterday (I was picking up number one daughter and I thought it might be good if she was actually able to recognise me) and the girl doing the cutting asked me what I did. I told her and she said that she had no real idea what computer programming was. A few years ago I would have had a problem at this point, because it used to be kind of hard to explain what computers were actually used for. Nowadays it is much easier. I just had to mention the Xbox 360 and PS3 and say that we produce students who write the games that go into them.
Afterwards I had a think about this and the way I see it, computer programmers now write the stuff that makes pretty much everything work. Just about any device that you buy with a mains plug will have a computer processor in it, as do all cars and so on.
When I started in this business we had one computer at the university, nowadays I don't think anybody knows how many there are on campus. I had no idea when I started in this business, but I'm very glad that I did, because it really is the stuff that makes the future go.
Of course, we also produce the stuff that makes it hard to print out things, but I'll let that pass for now. (Actually, and this is a tip for all Photoshop Elements users, if you want to make a book of pictures you don't actually want to make a Picture Book, you want to make a Collage. A Picture Book is pre-formatted for an on-line printing service, whereas a collage is just a themed collection of pictures which can span several pages).
Imagine you were thinking about buying a car. It had a satnav, heated seats, electric windows, a hundred and one extras that you will probably never use. It is attractively coloured and pleasing to the eye. You can almost afford it.
But it won't turn right.
Would you buy it? Me neither. And yet people are happy to buy and use software that fails just as spectacularly. I mentioned some time back my torment at the hands of some software by HP which purported to let me create albums but actually just messed me around until I removed it from my disk.
Today I've been playing with Adobe Photoshop Elements. This lets you create similar albums and, after a while, I've managed to get the images I want.
But I can't print them. That is, I can get them onto paper but the size is always wrong. I've wasted a couple of pounds worth of paper and ink. As I type this program is randomly resizing the images behind Windows Live Writer in a way that does not inspire confidence. I've tried numerous combinations of printer and paper configuration, screen preview and all manner of settings to try and get what I want, which is pictures on paper the same size and shape as the ones on the screen.
This is insane. I'm supposed to be good at this stuff. How someone less well versed in printer configuration would get by I have no idea. What you really want is a big red button that says "put these on the paper how they look on the screen". What I have got is several buckets full of confusion. I hate this. I would never let software go out of the door with this mix of complexity and uselessness.
I've had this before with various printers and programs. I M Wright has some things to say about the way that programmers always want to work on the advanced features and leave out the boring stuff like making the program actually do what it is supposed to do. How right he is.
Amazon are moving in to music distribution. Alongside books, computer games and toys you can now download unprotected MP3 files at very good prices including some albums at a loss leading 3 pounds each. So I had a go.
First mistake was to try and use the university network. So that meant a big hello to the university firewall and everything locking up and timing out. So, after a number of retries I just closed the notebook and went home, hoping that the machine would fire up and keep going on the home network. Which it did. Problem was that I had initiated the download several times, and the rather stupid Amazon download tool insisted on fetching the same thing three or four times, just to be sure. So that was an entire evening of bandwidth out of the window.
However, once I'd got the files off the machine and tidied up all the excess copies I reckon it is a pretty good deal. The files are standard MP3s captured at 320K bps, which means that they will play pretty much anywhere with good sound quality.
Worth checking out, but don't press the download button more than once.
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.
