Girl Geek Dinners at Hull

Girl Geek Dinners started in London some time back. The idea is to give girls who are interested in technology an occasion where they can get together and chat about life, the universe and everything.

The idea has now spread all over the world. We even have them in Hull now. The department is sponsoring the next one which will be in mid-October. If you want to find out more, there is a Facebook group “Hull Girl Geek Dinners” which you can join. If you are at Hull you should also keep an eye out for the posters that will be going up soon.

Start of Semester

Everyone seems to have come back to Hull, which is nice. We have even had quite good weather today, which makes the whole thing even more pleasant. The corridor has been full of queues as people wait to register.

Being a new student seems to be a succession of standing in a queue to get a piece of paper that tells you to go to another queue and so on. As you go you accumulate lots of more bits of paper until at the end of the day you have a whole bag full. Then you sit through sessions where people tell you stuff that seems important but you probably aren’t taking in because you are concerned about being in the right place now and getting to the right place for the next session. And so on.

Don’t worry. It will all come right in the end.

Crazy Joke Book

While I was tidying up the bookcase I came across this little volume, that I bought a very long time ago:

Fantastic. Just the thing for the occasional blog post. My current favourite is:

WOMAN IN GREENGROCER’S: One pound of mixed nuts and not too many coconuts, please.

Fingerprint Removal for Beginners

I was doing some vacuuming today, as you do. The machine sucked up a couple of ball bearings (no idea where they came from) and proceeded to rattle like mad.

As an engineer, I knew how to fix this. I removed the little cover over the pipe and turned the vacuum upside down so that the bearings would fall out.Unfortunately, while doing this I left the machine plugged in. The biggest design flaw with our Dyson is that it is very easy to catch the power button and start it off. Which is just what I did next, with my finger still stuck inside it.

Apparently my screams were quite impressive. Number one wife even heard me, and she was downstairs on the telephone at the time. She snapped instantly into action “Rob’s just made a really strange noise” she said to the caller, and continued with her conversation.

When I got my digit out the end of the finger was all shiny, just as if it had been polished by thousands of strokes from a rotary brush. Which is not surprising really. It was also very warm. After I held it under the cold tap for a while it started to return to something like normal size and colour, and I think that no real damage has been done. I can still play the piano as badly as before I’m sure, and typing speeds seem unaffected.

The biggest worry is that it is one of the fingers that they check at US airports before letting you into the country. I wonder what they do if they discover that one of your fingers no longer has a print…

Last Day of Freedom

Today is the last day of freedom before the students all arrive. We have a large cohort this year, which is great. I’m presently polishing up all my presentations and working on my jokes.

Be afraid people, be very afraid…

I know what a “finial” is

You definitely learn things when you are decorating. I now know what a “finial” is.  It is that posh bit on the end of a curtain pole.

Not worth much in Scrabble, and really hard to work into everyday conversation (and I have tried).

Updated Yellow Book

I’ve updated the C# Yellow Book ready for the next academic session. The changes are minor, just fixes to mistakes that have bee pointed out over the last year. You can download the new copy from here:

http://www.csharpcourse.com/

Getting Set for University

This time next week the university here will be a different place. At the moment the place is quite busy with people feverishly finishing all the building work we have been having done. Next week the place will be packed with students, new and old. And just about everyone will be bringing a computer with them. Here are some tips that you might find useful:

1. Make sure that you have all your updates installed on your system. It doesn’t matter whether it is a Windows PC, a Mac or a Linux netbook. Find out how to check for updates and get everything up to date. At some point you will want to connect your machine up to a campus network of some kind, and if you don’t have all the latest security patches you may be vulnerable to infection.
2. Do something about viruses. At the very least make sure that your Windows PC has Windows Defender installed and running, and that the databases are up to date. If you want to install an anti-virus program don’t feel obliged to spend a lot of money, the AVG free anti-virus program is good and will cost you nothing. Get it from http://free.avg.com/. Please don’t spend huge amounts on some of the more expensive ones. The benefits are dubious and they also have annual renewal charges too.
3. Take a backup of your machine before you come, and leave it somewhere safe (perhaps even at home). Find out how to use the backup software on your machine and take a copy of everything. Use one of these cheap external hard disks that you can pick up for around 35 pounds or so from places like http://www.ebuyer.com/ or Staples, or even Tesco. That way if it all goes horribly wrong when you get to university you can recover your precious music, videos and other stuff. Once you have the backup habit, take one every month or so.
4. Don’t spend huge amounts on other software before you come. Most universities (including ours at Hull) have deals that get you some programs that you need cheaply.  The same goes for books. In the computing field they are rather expensive, and you don’t want to pay a lot for a book and then find out that it is only used for a small part of the course. You can check the books out in the library, and you might also find that there is a second hand book sale on your campus where you can pick up the required volumes from other students quite quickly. You might also want to form a little cartel with fellow students to share books between each other and spread the expense (this is also neat because it can also give you a ready made study group).
5. Get a usb memory stick (at Hull we give them out free to first year students when they arrive). Keep backups of all your work on it. You can also use it to take files into the university to work on. You will get some filespace on the university network, but it will not be an enormous amount, and having your files always with you is useful. Put a file on the drive with your contact details (just your name and phone number) so that if you lose the drive people can find out who to return it to.
6. Get some free on line storage. I like Windows Live Skydrive: http://skydrive.live.com/. This gives you 25 GBytes of space which you can access from anywhere on the web via a browser. The major limitation is that files can’t be more than 50M in size, but this is a perfect place to lob all those important essays and program source files. You’ll need a Windows Live account to use this and the uploading and downloading of files is all via browser which is a bit of a pain but there is a tool called Gladinet: http://www.gladinet.com/ that is supposed make this storage available to your applications although I’ve not used it. You can also use Skydrive to make your files available to other people. The access is controlled via their Windows Live Accounts and you can just email them a link to the download location or folder you want them to have access too. If you have more than one computer and you want to make sure that files are up to date on all of them you can use Windows Live Mesh for that: http://www.mesh.com/. Mesh gives you another 5G of free online storage and you can even synchronise files to Windows Mobile devices.  Anyone who just stores their important files on their laptop hard disk is an idiot. These services are free and mean that you can get at your files from anywhere, and you will not lose them.  If you want even more online space take a look at DropBox at http://www.getdropbox.com/.
7. Make sure you have insurance for all your nice toys before you set off to university. Don’t plan to sort it out when you arrive. It would be terrible if they got stolen or damaged before they were insured. Take a look at cover from student specialists like Endsleigh: http://www.endsleigh.co.uk/student-possessions.html (if anyone knows any cheaper deals feel free to let me know and I’ll update this post)
8. And finally, don’t forget to bring all the mains leads and power supplies for your toys…..

Painting with Radio 7

More painting today. But I had BBC Radio 7 on, which made it much more fun. A fantastic mix of comedy and drama which is the perfect accompaniment to this kind of job. Wonderful stuff.

Chain Reaction….

Sunday: Go out and look at chairs and sofas. Find exactly what we want at a good price. Buy it.

Monday: Decide that since we are changing the furniture we should really change the decor.

Tuesday: Someone wants our old sofas.

Wednesday: Old sofas now collected, downstairs looks strangely empty (as well it might).

Thursday: Decide since downstairs is clear we can paint the walls and ceiling.

Friday: Buy new fangled painting machine and 15 litres of paint.

I’m really looking forward to the weekend…

Satnav Software is Rubbish

There are a number of great mysteries out there which may never be solved. The Riddle of the Sphinx, The Mystery of Life, The Appeal of Chris Evans.  There are also others which are a bit closer to home, one of which is Why SatNav software is so universally appalling? 

I’ve used quite a few different solutions and, with one exception, they have been the programs that have come closest to making me hurl the device across the room. One program had the habit of crashing every time you added a favourite location. Another was so hard to use that I never actually figured out what it was I had done to enter a destination address. A third failed to make reliable Bluetooth contact with the GPS device (made by the same company as the software), meaning that you had to indulge in a bout of “Serial Port Roulette” each time you turned it on. That was also the software that would forget all its useful settings and addresses if the battery in the device ever dared to go flat.

Once they got going these programs usually managed to do the navigation part quite well, but it has always annoyed me that they were so badly written, with such poorly thought out user interfaces. I was reminded of this today when I got my wife a satnav program for her iPhone. I thought it would be a useful thing to have, and allow her to navigate even when out of range of cell towers. I even dared to hope that by now the developers would have fixed all the things I hate about such programs.

Not so. The program had an arcane and tricky installation process and followed that up with a user experience that goes completely against the lovely iPhone interface (even managing to implement a stupid alphabetic keyboard with an annoying click you can’t turn off). It ran slowly and lumpily for no good reason and then crashed without warning. As a final parting shot it managed to put our house in the wrong town. I wonder if I can get my money back.

Please someone, anyone, one of the proper software companies, bring out a satnav program that just works properly and is easy to use.  It is not impossible, I do have one satnav system that is wonderful in just about every respect. Unfortunately it comes attached to a rather large dongle in the form of my car, but it does serve as a reminder that it can be done…

The Problem is Never Where you Think it is

I mentioned to David how I had put the 2 of “our hall smells funny” together with the 2 of “..and the flat roof looks a bit old” and got the result “therefore the roof is leaking”.

He made the (quite sensible) observation that it hasn’t rained for over a week.  Oh dear, that probably means I’m playing with plumbing again.

Interesting Question

I was helping someone fill in a form about me recently and they asked the “Where do you work?” question.

“University of Hull”

“..and how long have you been there?” was the next thing they wanted to know.

“Thirty one years” was my reply (and it’s true – scarily enough)

When they said “Oh, do you like it there then?” I wasn’t quite sure what to say next. If I said I hated the place this would mark me down as rather a slow learner.

Clipper Race at Hull

The Round the World Clipper Race does exactly what it says on the tin. Ten yachts from various countries are setting sail around the world. The different thing about this race though is that the crews are made up of ordinary folk who have signed up, got trained and will join their boats for various stages on the round the world trip.

It starts from Hull tomorrow, but today the boats were in Hull Marina so we went for a look. I took the little camera for some snaps. I had a go at making a panorama shot of the side of the marina.

It seemed to come out OK.

The atmosphere was great and the weather amazing.

Home is where the leaky roof is

Got home from our holidays, not to a hero’s welcome, but to a dank smell in the hall. It seems that the flat roof on the porch is doing what flat roofs do every ten years, which is need replacing.

Carcassonne

While we have been on holiday we have been playing some new games. Number one son got a copy of Carcassonne. We have had some fun with it (and I’m not just saying this because I managed to win a couple of times). The game revolves around a landscape that is built up by players adding tiles and different types of settler to claim as much of the land as they can. It has just the right balance of skill and luck. When I win I can claim skill, but when I lose I can claim that the cards were against me. The games don’t take a long time to play, (which is something else I quite like about them) but they are quite absorbing.

If you like board games it is well worth a look.

Van Driving Man

Spent lots of today driving a big van. It was time to move number one daughter to her new pad in London, and so it was up with the lark and off in the big tin box on wheels that I’d hired for the day.

I like van driving. Everything in a van cab has been carefully designed to do a job. There was even a little clip in the dashboard into which you could put your delivery notes and a big area under the windscreen for your copy of “The Sun” and empty MacDonald's boxes. They also have monster (and completely un-burstable) engines and sound systems. And other people get out of your way. I’ve even figured out how to reverse them. Great stuff.

Project Runway Rocks

While I was spending my summer mostly writing, number one daughter and me had a little lunchtime diversion called Project Runway. It is a reality TV show for aspiring dress designers. Each week the contestants are given a stupidly short time to make some kind of clothing and then, after a fashion show, the weakest one is kicked out. A bit like “The Apprentice” but with sewing machines. Just the kind of thing I’d expect to hate.

I love it. I like the way that the people taking part really can do stuff. They can draw a design, make the pattern, cut out some cloth and then sew it together, and at the end they have something that looks like what they wanted.  Part (all right, most) of the appeal of “The Apprentice” is discovering just what kind of people have crawled out of the woodwork and been allowed by the producers to take part, and then watching them fail at whatever footling task they have been given.

But the appeal of Project Runway for me is that the people taking part are there because they really want to get into fashion, not just appear on the telly. The big prize is a chance to run their own fashion show and by the end of it you can really see where each of the designers is coming from. Good stuff.

Day Trip

Went out for the day today. Any idea where?

.. we had good weather though..

Nice place

Idiot Printing

Last night I thought I’d print out some pictures for my office walls. I’ve just switched back to using my venerable HP inkjet as I think it prints better colours than the Canon one I got last year. And 7dayshop were doing a good deal on proper ink cartridges for it. So off I went. Of course, I’d forgotten how horrid HP printer drivers are, and coupled with the “quirkiness” of Photoshop Elements (I’m being very generous here) I had a much rougher time than I expected.

I discovered that if you are daft/clever enough to try and print with the preview enabled in the printer driver (which is one way I try to avoid wasting a quid's worth of paper and ink) the driver just hangs up, with no way of clearing the print job. You have to delete the printer and make a new one. Of course I didn’t find this out straight away, I had to waste half an hour doing reboots and trying lots of other things before I finally managed to get the thing to work.

And the printing looked horrid. There were awful smears showing through on the page. I stared (and this is true) at the page coming out of the printer for at least 30 seconds before it dawned on me what I’d done. I’d put an already printed page through the printer. I’d used some enormously expensive amount of ink ruining a perfectly good picture, which I’d popped into the paper box to stop it from getting creased.

Idiot.