Is the art of good planning where you have everything ready months in advance and just watch the deadline arrive with cool detachment? Or is it when you have things finished just in time, and finish within minutes of the due date?
I always try to aim for the first one, but then end up doing the second. But the good news is that the book is now complete and the Dare to Dream Different video is now with Microsoft.
And now I’ve no idea what to do with myself.
I quite like programming. You can take an idea and just make it happen. And every now and then you end up making something much more wonderful than you thought it would be when you started.
Making videos seems quite different to this. You start off with all the ideas OK, but when you try to film them you end up with something quite different you then have to hammer into some kind of shape, and you don’t end up anywhere near where you started.
However, both do have one thing in common, in that they seem to take twice as long as you thought, even if you you allow for this.
My original plan was to make a video in one 10 minute take. The batteries in the camera were up for this, but they turned out to be the only thing that was. And I have always regarded myself as a natural video performer, but this is unfortunately not how the camera sees me.
Anyhoo, Ian came round with Andy as cameraman and we managed to get a good chunk of video “in the can” as the professionals call it. The only problem was that for the group shot of “Team Building” as we call ourselves (well, I thought it was funny) the camera exposure seemed to have gone a bit awry, in that all you could see of me and Ian was eyes and teeth. And they are not necessarily our best features.
So I’ve made a rough cut of a few bits and pieces and we have having a reshoot of some scenes tomorrow. I know how Steven Spielberg feels now.
The last chapter for the new XNA book needs to be completed and sent off to the printers by this Friday. Our video for the “Dare to Dream Different” .NET Micro Framework needs to be filmed and submitted by, yes, you’ve guessed it, this Friday.
Oh well.
For some time I’ve been looking for a gadget that l can use to play my music in the car. The previous vehicle had a cassette player, and so I got one of those “fake cassettes” that let me connect my MP3 player of the day into the sound system.
Then, thanks to some rather off-putting clunking noises when I went over bumps, I swapped my old car for a newer, shinier one. What with progress and the like, the new car of course had a CD player. I tried putting the fake cassette into the slot and it wouldn’t fit. So that was that. I burnt a few disks of my favourites and just played them.
A few weeks ago the urge to play MP3s in the car returned though, mainly because I fancy being able to listen to podcasts and the like. Eventually I settled on a Griffin RoadTrip, because it doesn’t have any trailing wires. It just plugs into your cigarette lighter (I wonder if anyone still uses those things to light cigarettes) and you attach your MP3 player to the other end. It finds the quietest parts of the FM spectrum and then uses them broadcasts your tracks, including the RDS data, into your car radio. And it works a treat with the iPhone. I had to pad out the fitting with a bit of insulating tape to get a nice snug fit with the connector and stop the whole thing from slowly rotating out of the socket, but apart from that it worked fine.
Then I tried to use it with my five month old iPod. Which, of course, is an old model. The RoadTrip comes with a bunch of adapters which doesn’t include my apparently ancient and unsupported one. This reflects a kind of lack of foresight on my part I guess, but we’ll gloss over that. I sent Griffin an email bemoaning this and they instantly came back and said they’d post me a missing adapter. It arrived today, all the way from the USA. Great stuff. In these days of the internet and telephone helplines it is nice to see that some companies keep the idea of good service alive.
This is another quick test of the Twitter Notify plugin for Windows Live Writer. And no, I don’t know why it used to put Permalink after my blog address…
Today and tomorrow I am going to be mostly in the practical labs marking first year programming work. The students can produce either an implementation of a Bank Account management program or an XNA version of the Pong game and they have to show it off and chat about how it works. The marking is is very time consuming, but I love doing it because it lets me chat to the students and see what they can really do.
To make things even more interesting I’ve produced some stickers which anyone who gets more than 90% will get either a “Best Banker” or “Strongest Pong” sticker.
Well, could you get one?
I’m presently working away on the chapters for the sequel to my XNA 2.0 book. It is going to be about XNA 3.0 (which sounds like progress to me).
I used to get a bit upset when I got one of my chapters back covered in alterations and questions. Nowadays I’m a lot more relaxed though, as I realise that the editors are just making it better.
Went out to a DIY centre today to buy some correctly sized bath plugs, among other things. They had a big sign outside saying “Selected Cuprinol at special prices”. I can just imagine the salesman.
“A cheeky little little number with a smooth flavour and a lovely finish..”
Note to self. Always use the US mirror to download future Windows 7 Betas. Everyone in Europe is awake and downloading like mad at the moment, which is why it is going to take me 9 hours to get the image down. Whereas in the US they are all asleep at the moment and it always seems to go faster from there anyway.
The clock on my Windows Desktop updates the minute hand every minute. Which is fair enough. However, it does this at the end of each minute, which I think is wrong. It means that for the last thirty seconds of each minute the clock is more than 30 seconds wrong. I reckon that the minute hand should move to the nearest minute when it becomes the nearest one.
Or am I just being too pedantic, and should really turn the second hand on? (and then fret about the clock being more than half a second out…)
When I was a kid I had a Meccano set. I had some Lego too, but at the time all you could make with that was houses and not very realistic vehicles. The Technical Lego and Mindstorms stuff was years away in those days, and besides Lego stuff was too easy to put together, and fell apart too quickly.
Meccano wasn’t like that. Getting the nuts and bolts together could be murder. It was especially unforgiving of mistakes. Picking up the wrong kind of part early in the build often meant you had to spend ages undoing your painstakingly constructed model. The instructions were good, but you often had to use a lot of deduction to work out which bit you needed to use, and how it really fitted. On the other hand, Meccano was tough. It even survived the day that I decided some Meccano roller skates would be a good idea.
I was reminded of all this when I got to play with some Meccano recently. Number one daughter got one first, and I just had to follow suit and get a little Meccano model of my own. And then spend a couple of happy hours putting it together.
When I think about it, this was very good preparation for a programming career. Programming languages and their libraries are not known for tolerating mistakes, and you often end up taking to bits what you have just built, because you get to the point where you discover it just won’t work that way. And with Meccano, as with programming, if it ends up wrong it is pretty much always your fault. And, just like Meccano, every now and then you build something you really like.
Fixed the washing machine. Turns out that socks are not always your friends. One of them had managed to get inside the water outlet underneath the drum and blocked it. The reason that we had such poor drainage was that all our washing water was being “sock filtered for extra purity” before being sent into the drain.
Note: You are not allowed to steal this by-line and use it sell bottled water.
I’ve no idea how the sock managed to get there. And I’ve also no idea where the other one is. Perhaps it is up in the loft loosening my ball valves even as I write this.
Evil Sock
Today the sun shone, the overflow was as dry as a dry thing from a dry desert in a drought, and all seemed well. Of course, the washing machine was taking longer to run, but that could just be down to us using a new “eco friendly” programme. Or could it?
Turns out the washing machine uses water. That is, it takes water in but then, having churned it around for a while, it seems incapable of getting it out again. So I had more wet hi-jinks as I had to drain the darned thing and see if any of the filters were bunged up. There was some lint here and there, but nothing that should have slowed things down much.
At the moment we are at a kind of impasse. The machine works, in that things come out cleaner than they went in, but it does spend a long time emptying itself. I’m inclined to suspect the pump as not actually doing the pumping thing properly, and so I guess I can look forward to a visit from the repair man and uplifting discussions as to just what is covered by warranty.
I’m starting to wonder when it will all end. I’m turning taps on with the expectation of either a huge bang or nothing. I’ve taken to swimming in my dreams, just in case the house floods at night. Is this how hydrophobia starts?
Don’t like water. Getting into the car on the way out today we noticed that the overflow I had “fixed” yesterday was still leaking slightly. So I left wife and daughter in the car on the drive while I scrambled, cursing, into the loft to bend the valve assembly and make sure that it shut down properly.
I don’t mind working with electricity. I’m not allowed to do gas (thank goodness) but I hate working with water. You can never be sure it won’t start leaking when your back is turned.
On 17th Feb at 12:46 I made a singularly ill advised Tweet:
Ha! What do you call it when everything works? Oh yes. Rob is in the house....
Since then everything has broken. Water leaks too numerous to count, a broken heating system that cost a huge amount (wince) to fix. Cars that have needed new bits. And this morning our neighbour appeared on the doorstep with the less than welcome news that water was pouring from our loft.
Oh good.
Turns out that one of the ball valves on the header tank for the heating system was leaking, and the overflow was doing just what it should, which is nice. Fortunately I’m equal to this particular task, and so I went off to buy spares. Since I had to turn the water off, and there are two tanks in the loft, I replaced both ball valves at once. Apparently the practice of having a big tank of water in the loft is a curiously British thing that dates back to the Napoleonic wars, where there was some concern that the French could invade and cut off all our water. Or something. Actually, I heard that in a pub, so it might not be true.
Either way, there is nothing quite like spending your holiday banging your head against beams in the loft, whilst balanced perilously on a joist and trying to both tighten a leaking connector and avoid putting your foot through the ceiling.
While I was out buying valves I thought I’d get a replacement bath plug, because the one we have is looking a bit elderly. This way I could add some value to the day, and come out of it slightly ahead. The new one was very well packed, in a bag, in a bag, in a bag with tape wrapped all round it. I spent several careful minutes removing all the layers and throwing them away. Then I found the plug was the wrong size. I’m never going to Tweet again.
Came home today. Won nothing at MacDonald's this time. Oh well.
Drove down to see the in-laws today. Won a free apple pie at MacDonald's. Result.
The winning team from our Tag Treasure Hunt at the Mad March Bash have made it onto the Microsoft Tag Blog. I’m not sure if this counts as proper fame, but it is a start I suppose.
I’m having an all new Tag Treasure Hunt at the “Everything Must Go” bash later this year.
What do you do if you have sworn off working with computers for a while?
Go up town, buy some memory and a hard disk and spend the day upgrading stuff.
My little MacBook, which has all my music and media on it, has just about filled up its little 120G hard disk. It could do with something a little larger. And my Advent Netbook, although wonderful with Windows 7, does chug a bit when I run more than a couple of programs alongside each other. And so, since this is not technically programming as such, it was off to the shops and out with the debit card.
The Advent 4211 upgrade was simple enough, once I’d got all the screws out and unclipped the back. The memory went straight in and then, after a kind of “reverse tussle” to get the back clipped on again we were in business. Windows 7 noticed the upgrade straight away, and seems a lot happier. The good news about a move like this is that you don’t double the memory from 1G to 2G, you have a much bigger effect than that, since the operating system takes up a good chunk of the original memory. I reckon that I now have around three or four times the original space for running programs.
The Apple upgrade took a bit longer, what with having to copy all the files off the original disk onto the new one, but it was actually a very smooth process. I put the old disk in a USB caddy and then restored the old contents onto my newly installed operating system, which worked a treat.
All in all, a successful day, but not perhaps as far away from computers as I originally planned.
If you can’t solve a problem, just go to bed. I should have done that yesterday (although it would have meant I was in bed at 11:30 in the morning I suppose).
Anyhoo, I got up, had breakfast, and then made XNA networking work perfectly.
It turns out that there is something in the WiFi configuration at my house that stops network gameplay from working. I had connected all the devices by wires, but had left the WiFi turned on, which seemed to confuse matters. Replace wireless connections with wires everywhere and everything works.
I now have a working lobby system, proper host and client gameplay, sample programs and a completed Chapter 16. And, since that is the last chapter in the book, I guess that means that I can return to real life and start doing other things that have been piling up a bit. But I think I’ll have some time off the computer for a bit.
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.
