I’m getting ready for my DevDays session later this week. I’m demonstrating some .NET Micro Framework devices that are a bit small, and so I thought I’d use a webcam to show close-ups of the toys. I was testing it just now and of course I pointed it at the screen.
Cool eh?
If you are going to DevDays then feel free to come along. The Geek Night should be great fun.
Nearly bought a new camera today but talked myself out of it.
Never mind, there is always tomorrow…
Went to a wedding today. Not been to one for a while. This one was splendid. We had super weather, a really great ceremony. 
..and a really great setting.
This is Thrumpton Hall.
.. and looking the other way.
Thanks to Mark and Juliette for inviting us along, and all the best wishes for the future.
Aside from a few niggles with Nero, I must admit that Windows 7 is speeding me up. Moving around windows and getting things done is faster with the new system, and the generally quicker performance (apart from strange delays at certain times, for example importing Raw images into Photoshop) is much appreciated.
In fact, I like it so much that I’m not going to put Vista back on my machine.
if you had a camera that could travel faster than light, could it take a photograph of itself?
An eagle eyed student (thanks Scott) has found a picture of me on Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_TouchSmart
Fame at last.
Windows 7 is now installed on my machine. And it wants to bring along all it’s friends. It spent most of the day installing updates. I’ve had a day off the computer though, I’ve even done some tidying up.
Fortunately the weather was too wet for gardening.
Decided to celebrate my completion of everything by putting Windows 7 Release Candidate on my laptop. I did an upgrade, which seems to have worked fine except for my Nero InCd service, which I didn’t even know I had.
The desktop looks much nicer and seems quite a bit snappier than before. The system has even spotted the broken battery and told me that I might need to buy a new one, which is quite clever.
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
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.
