Red Nose Day

Well, I did my lecture. Thanks to everyone who came along, it was fun. I’ll post the video tonight, once I’ve got it off my little camera. If you have any pictures or video of the fun and games, please get in touch and I’ll set up a group somewhere to share the magic…

We did rather well on the day:

..what it is all about. I’ll take it down to the bank later today. If you want to add to the pile, just drop by my office or sponsor me at:

http://www.myrednoseday.com/LectureInRhymeWithRob

I hit my target, and so I’ve moved it up a bit.

Update

on 2009-03-13 20:51 by Rob

We've counted all the money, and it turns out that the bucket had two hundred and fifty eight pounds 11 pence in it. All through the afternoon people were dropping by who couldn't make it to the lecture and they were dropping more cash in. Thanks to all the staff and students who were so generous. We are going to take the cash down to the bank tomorrow and this should bring the total earnings to well over 500 quid, which is ace!

I've put the lecture slides up here.

Average Clocks Conundrum

All the clocks in my house are slightly wrong, but if I take the average of them all I get the right time. Except sometimes. Why?

Immersion Therapy

What did you do this lunchtime? I bought and fitted an immersion heater switch. Turned the power off and everything (it seemed best to do it that way).

Hot showers tonight for everyone..

Lecture in Rhyme for Red Nose Day

I will be giving a Red Nose Day Lecture in Rhyme at 11:15 on Friday 13th of March in the Foss Building Lecture Theatre 1. An older boy told me to do it.

The lecture is part of the 08120 Programming 2 course and will be on the subject of class design in C#.

Students who turn up in fancy dress will get out half price.

If you want to sponsor me (and you do, really you do) then you can visit:

http://www.myrednoseday.com/LectureInRhymeWithRob

Jetlagged Poetry

You can’t beat being busy with jetlag. In between writing deathless prose for lectures, trying to find out why we have no hot water and where on earth that thing is that I put down a second ago I’ve been trying to write some poetry.

I’ve decided to give a lecture in rhyme on Friday as part of Comic Relief. I’ve loads of other things that I should be doing, but I’ve given them over the last twenty years or so, and I feel that the tradition really should continue.

I’m going to be talking about class based design in C#. The tradition is that I have to pick up whatever is in the course at that point and give a proper lecture on that subject, but entirely in rhyme. I did think about making the whole thing up on the day, but that is potentially dangerous, and so it was into Powerpoint and on with the rhyming dictionary…

Mended

I love a happy ending. The leak has gone. I tracked it down to the pipe in the wall near the inside stop tap. Dave from next door came round and pulled out the offending item.

Now that is what I call a hole. The water was really spurting out once we got the plaster off it. Turns out that sometimes the flux used to solder the pipe connections tends to corrode the pipe itself. Which is not good.

This is what it looks like now. Much better. Thanks Dave.

The only thing that worries me is that I have a house full of this pipe, so I suppose I’m going get this every now and them. Ah well, at least I have one less now.

Stealthy Leakage

Somewhere in our house, water is escaping. I can hear it. At three in the morning I can detect the tiny whoosh from the pipes when nothing should be moving.

I’ve checked all the obvious places. Replaced a few likely suspects. But the noise remains. Now, normally I don’t have a problem finding out where water is coming from. Ceilings change shape, objects underneath the flow become unexpectedly glossy, or suddenly go mouldy. But this leak is stealthy. There is no evidence at all. Anywhere. Everything is just as it should be, apart from the sound.

At one point I started to doubt myself. However, Dave came round last night and he heard it too. And (and this is the clincher) he heard it stop when I turned the water off.  The prevailing wisdom is that a pipe underneath the floorboards somewhere downstairs is leaking straight down into the ground. In the fullness of time this probably means that we will have our own indoor swimming pool, followed shortly by a moat.

I hate having a problem I don’t know how to solve. If this was a programming fault I’d be bunging breakpoints in, adding debugging code and generally getting to the bottom of things. If it was a piece of hardware I’d be working out where best to hit it. But when a pipe just disappears into a wall it is kind of hard to discover what is going on. I think I might need to engage stronger powers than mine on this one, in other words it might be time to find a plumber…

Hull in 360 Magazine

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.

Wheely Funny

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.

Universe 2 Rob 1

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.

New Dishwasher Time

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…

Presidential Priorities

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".

Update on 2009-01-21 11:14 by Rob

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/

The Fault is Never Where You Think it is

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

Always Take Your Camera With You

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.

New Boots

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?

Car Washing

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"

Sock Disasters

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?

Welcome Back to Marking

Enough said....

Big Clothes for Tall People

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...)

A Foolish Consistency

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.