This is not where I bought the chipboard.
Most of our loft now has chipboard on the floor. I should have done this years ago before I, ahem, put my foot through the ceiling. (Dave next door came round and helped me sort it out – he was a bit late getting over to our house because it too him 20 minutes to stop laughing.)
Went to London today and one of my favourite places ever, the Science Museum. 
Always a bit scary when you find stuff you used to use in a museum.
These too (scarily enough)
But not one of these….
Where it all started, with Mr Babbage..
Indeed.
If you go to the North America TechEd site you are presently faced with the deeply scary picture above.
Blimey.
Spent pretty much all of today playing MineSweeper. Around 23 times. All of the first year get 15 minutes each to show off their programs and so Mike, Simon and myself were looking at how well they had done implementing this classic game.
It never ceases to amaze me how different people find their own way to write a program to solve the same problem. Some worse than mine, some better than mine. And just about all of them working.
In fact, some of them should make an appearance on Xbox Live at some point. They really were that good.
The Christmas Bash tickets went on sale today. Nearly put a picture of one here, which from a security point of view might have been a bit of a faux pas.
Instead, here is a picture of the packing material that my Chumby arrived in. I’m not allowed to play with it until December 25th, which should make it a proper “Gadget Christmas”.
The first year course is busy working on the Minesweeper programming problem that is the second piece of assessed coursework. This is proving to be a nice problem to solve, with a good mix of simple behaviours to play the game itself, and some more complex parts for those who want to get their teeth into something more challenging.
The marking starts on Thursday, I’m looking forward to seeing what folks have come up with.
No new picture for today. I took this a few years ago. It occurred to me that I have all these nice pictures lying around that haven’t been used before (I think). Anyway, worth a repeat I reckon.
Spent today putting floor panels up in the loft. And going to the tip.
Seeing as how it is Christmas soon, we are having another bash. You can find out more at www.robmiles.com/Events (like it says on the poster)
Very cold this morning. Lots of ice on the car.
Today was the last meeting of the “Programming 1 Monday Evening 5:15 Club” for this semester. Quite a good turn out. I thought I’d take a picture to celebrate.
There is another shot on my Flickr pages.
I wasn’t quite expecting a philosophical statement about the ultimate futility of life from my SatNav and car stereo. Particularly not at 8:38 on a Monday morning……
I’ve always liked the idea of remote controlling devices. I particularly like the idea of making stuff work without having to reach around to plugs and sockets. Today I went to Maplin and got some of these. They are not that expensive and they work really well. If you want to turn things off properly and remove the “curse of standby” I reckon they are worth a look.
Ages ago I got given a set of dice that are supposed to tell you what to do at the office. if you are unsure of how to behave you just cast the dice and follow the instructions.
It’s nice to see they still work.
The bi-weekly Wednesday afternoon “sports” sessions are now going very well. Hull ComSoc seems to be on to a winner (even when the server starts to wobble right in the middle of a game – cue laptops and nervousness…..)
I was doing a lecture on our Software Engineering course today. We were talking about UML (Unified Modeling Language) and how to map language specific features (for example C# properties) onto UML diagrams (if you want to find out more about this you can go here for some useful ideas).
Anyhoo, I thought it would be a good idea to show an example of a property in action so I wrote some C# on the board:
Rob.Age = 21;
The idea was to start an instructive discussion about the difference between fields and properties in C# objects. I asked the class to consider the statement and comment on it. A hand at the back shot up. “What do you think the statement means?” I asked. The reply came straight back “That you’re a liar”.
Thanks for that.
The village (oh, alright – suburb) where we live has a tradition of rather nice light display each Christmas, and today was the day they lights are switched on. We went along, and I took the camera.
The village was quite busy.
I was very tempted to buy one of these…
While we were in Berlin we went into the gift shop attached to Legoland Berlin. One new Lego product is the Lego nameplate. It comes with a bunch of shapes and an alphabet design you can use to make letters:
If you want one of your own you can find it here.
I really like Live Mesh. This is a Microsoft file synchronisation thingy where selected folders on your machine are reflected onto the Live Mesh storage out in the cloud, and also onto other machines that run the Live Mesh add-in. It runs quietly in the background and doesn’t seem to intrude much on normal life (unless you are daft enough to make changes to files on two different machine before connecting them both to the network – at which point you will have to resolve a bunch of conflicts).
I’ve got all my courseware for the current year stored on Live Mesh. You get up to 5G of space on the server behind the system and this is plenty for a year’s worth of PowerPoint slides and Word documents.
The really good news for me is that I now no longer care which machine I’m using. As long as I allow it a few minutes to “catch up” with the latest versions (if I’ve not used that particular machine for a while) then I can use any device. The net result of this is that I no longer carry the same laptop to and from work.
I guess I could have used an external drive for this, but I’m always afraid of dropping/losing/having stolen the device which holds the only copy of my stuff. Live Mesh means my data is held on multiple machines, as well as on the central server.
However, my bag is now much lighter and easier to carry, and this means that I’m missing out on some exercise and will probably gain some weight as a result.
But I reckon it is worth it.
A first year student came to see me today with their solution to the Mine Sweeper problem. It was better than the one I wrote. And that’s why I love my job.
There is a connection between this picture and the traffic lights in Berlin.
I was doing a tutorial this morning and I had just run the program when all the power in the building went off. The students present were most impressed, they had never seen a program that could turn off all the lights.
Fortunately (or unfortunately) it turned out that it wasn’t my code. The power came back on after five minutes or so, and later on we got an email saying that owing to problems at the local sub-station we would have to shut down the university and leave early as “any delay could cause catastrophic problems”.
I had this vision of people standing around a pair of glowing wires and someone playing the Scotty role and saying things like “I dinnae think she’ll take much more captain..”
Unfortunately it meant postponing my 4:15 VB lecture. Sorry about that folks, we were going to learn all kinds of interesting things about file paths too….
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.
