Preston Foster Rides Again

Last night we went out and stood in the rain while they turned the Cottingham Lights on then we went for a walk and I took some photographs. I’ll have some more later when I figure out how to use the new lens properly.

Tonight we went out for a beer for the first time in ages. We have not had a meeting of the “Preston Foster Appreciation Society” (long story) for quite a while.  Apparently they had heard we were coming, because the pub was shut. But that didn’t stop us. Where we live you are never more than a stone’s throw from a pub. Although the police turn up and tell you off if you start doing that. We not only managed to have a quorate meeting of the society, but Nick managed to work out which “reserve pub” we had switched to and join us as well.

Super Sleuth

Achieved one of my minor ambitions today. Got to see “The Mousetrap”. This is the longest running show in the world, and likely to stay that way looking at the size of the audience today. It is a good, honest, country house murder mystery that manages to be both completely of its time and also timeless. It is well worth seeing. And I’m not just saying that because I managed to guess “whodunnit”.

Tile Blindness

These look nice…

Spent some of this morning looking a tiles. I’ve discovered that I can only look at tiles for a certain amount of time before they start to all look the same. Especially if they are all white. The really good news here is that this time I’m just going to choose them. Somebody else is going to stick them on the wall….

Idiot Rob and his broadcast receipts

I’ve got lots more like these…

Today I finally got around to claiming money for some work that I did ages ago. (Actually, the results of the work have just been published here) . As part of the claims process Microsoft, not unreasonably, likes to see receipts of all the things I bought, including food and bits and bobs. So, I did what I usually do, which is make up a zip archive of all the relevant paperwork and put it on SkyDrive for Microsoft to read. This is not particularly confidential, so I just made a folder, dropped the file into it, emailed the link and thought nothing more of it.

Turns out this was really stupid. I forgot that lots of things out there are watching what I do and then sharing that information with lots of other people, including folks on  Facebook. I got a message last night that the file was visible and that Facebook had told all my friends about it.  I changed the protection so nobody could see it any more, but of course there are by now thousands of copies of the file out there on the web, and probably even a video on YouTube.

There’s nothing in the file that anyone couldn’t find out about me by doing a simple search of my name (apart from some aspects of my eating habits I guess) but I guess this is a salutary lesson to anyone who uses the cloud on a regular basis that if you want to keep thinks private, you should mark them private. Security through obscurity was never really an option, and with this kind of “auto publicity” it is now even less of one.

Update on 2010-10-29 15:39 by Rob

Turns out that this is easy to fix:

1. Go to your Windows Live Messenger Social page so that you can see the item you didn't want to put there.
2. Click the "gears" icon in the top right of the offending item to open the "Options" menu.
3. Select "More Options" from the menu.
4. On the page that appears next, clear the tickbox in "Updates about shared documents on SkyDrive"
5. Click Save.

No more updates about saved files.

Stay at Home Rob

I’ve spent the day working from home. I got a lot done, but I don’t really recommend  it much. There isn’t anyone to talk to. Not that I could have said much if there was. I’ve had this bad throat for a couple of weeks now, and my theory is that if talk a bit less it might get better. We shall see.

Broken Voice Blues

I felt fine first thing this morning. I even had enough energy to take some pictures as I walked from the car park to the university. But then I started talking. And realised I might have a problem. By the start of the first year lecture in the afternoon things were not great, and by the end of it I was really croaking. I think the combined strain of a cough and the Mad Development night have done for my voice.  At the moment I’m trying to run my life with hand signals, which is not going that well to be honest. But I have managed to get some ice-cream, which was lovely.

I think I’ll try to spend a day not talking tomorrow.

Need a bigger indoors

Bought one of these today half price. Supposed to be flyable indoors. If by flyable they mean “once across the room and then straight behind the radiator” it is.

I might bring it in to the Mad Game Development so we can try flying it around the department…

Bang Goes the Telly

We were sat in bed this morning when the FreeView box on the telly just blew up. Flash, bang, smoke and everything. I think one of the capacitors turned into a resistor for a very brief moment, before it turned into a puff of smoke. I remember a theory that I heard ages ago, which is that everything is actually powered by smoke. The proof, as it as told to me, was that if you “let the smoke out” the device instantly stops working.

Well, the theory is working well for me, with the result that  we can only watch five channels. Although I honestly don’t see this as a huge problem. Then we went up town with the camera. Quite a nice sky, and some reasonable light, which was nice.
 

This is PrincesQuay in Hull. A shopping centre over water.

..and this is Queen'sGardens.

Yellow Book Download Frenzy

This lunchtime I happened to take a look at the number of hits that I was getting on my blog. I have a fair idea of what constitutes normal traffic and what was happening was not normal. Oh no. I seemed to have had 12,000 hits. It seems that for some reason everybody was downloading my C# Yellow Book. I asked around on Twitter and I think I’ve traced it to a post on the MSDN Flash Newsletter. Thanks for your help folks. As it stands at the moment I’ve had 20,000 downloads, which is quite a lot.

I hope you all like it.

Windows Live Writer 2011

I downloaded an update to Windows Live 2011 today. Nothing like living in the future.

Anyhoo, it contains an update to one of my favourite programs, Windows Live Writer, which is what I use to write these hallowed pages. I’ve not noticed anything particularly new in the way of features, although it does look rather spiffy. Worth a look I reckon.

I also got the new Messenger client, which also looks quite good.

Saturday Open Day

These are some of the audience. The other photograph is on Flickr too, just click the picture to find your way there.

Just had a great University Open Day (I enjoyed myself, hope the people that came along did too). We had a massive turn out and the brand shiny new Lecture Theatre was packed. I saw several people on the campus clutching their C# Yellow Books (even though the cover is not as yellow as I would have liked). I promised to put a bunch of links up on my blog that I showed at the end of the presentation. Here they are:

• www.dcs.hull.ac.uk - Department Web Pages
• www.hull.ac.uk - University Web Site
• www.wherewouldyouthink.com - our admissions site
• www.freeside.co.uk - student cluster
• www.hive.hull.ac.uk - Hive Virtual Environment
• www.robmiles.com - you need to ask?

Friday Night Club

Some of the “lucky” Friday Nighters. The rest are on Flickr.

As luck would have it I, and one of the tutorial groups for the First Year C# course, have a session at 5:15 today. That’s 5:15 on a Friday.

Oh well.

The tutorial went OK in the end, and then I went home for Fish and Chips.

See you all next week.

DDD Manchester

A great audience. Even though not all of them like cheese.

Today I got on the train to Manchester, did 90 minutes of standup with a broken voice and then got on a train back to Hull. I had to wear two microphones, that’s how bad my voice was.

Anyhoo, the sessions I did (Writing Windows Phone Games and Windows Phone Marketplace) seemed to go OK. Thanks to the guys at Appamundi for inviting me to speak.

I said I’d put the slides and sample code up on the net and, as a man of my croaky word, you can find it all here.

On the way out of Manchester I, of course, took some photos.

Print Works and Odeon looking good

“The Wheel of Manchester” – it doesn’t half go round fast…

Everything Broke Again

Another picture of leaves. Another tale of woe because all my slides and stuff didn’t work. The good news is that my marker pens worked fine and so we were able to learn some useful stuff without all this new fangled technology.

Postgrad Party

Yep. These folks look like quiz winners to me….

We had our welcome part for the Post Graduates today. Great fun (again). Even though I was rubbish at the Playstation Move fighting game which kept everybody occupied for hours. In the end Peter emerged triumphant, and I suggested that he now put “Sword Master” on his business card. I hope he does.

First Year Fun and Games

What do you do when everything goes wrong, your slides crash and your remote control goes dicky? You carry on with the lecture, that’s what.

Helicopter

This is the one helicopter I’ve not broken yet. I daren’t fly it any more…

Working in the Lab

Spent most of today in the lab with the new first year students. Great bunch. In the very first lab session we bombard them with a maths diagnostic, a whole bunch of tasks, some questionnaires and last, but not least, they write and run a C# program. They took it all in good heart and it was great getting to know them. Lectures start on Monday. Looking forward to it.

Undergraduate Party

The panorama didn’t turn out too bad. Apologies if your face got mangled.

Thanks to everyone who came along to the Undergraduate Welcome Party today. Great fun. In spite of the quiz…. I’ll put some of the other pictures up on Flickr later. And we will sort out some Playstation Move sessions in the open area later in the semester.

University Life

Last year I did a blog post about getting set for university life. I thought I’d bring it up to date. This is a tad late (term has started here) but there might be some stuff folks 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  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 just yet. 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 . 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. Don’t worry. Really. You’ll be fine.