Friday at 5:15 pm is not really an auspicious time for a programming tutorial, but we do our best. Considering the horrible hour there was a pretty impressive turnout today, and we did have fun. We were drawing text with XNA and playing with multiple draw operations to get fake 3D effects.
Great fun. Hull students, you can find the clock code in the lecture content for week 4.
This is the lucky prize winner from the Open Day today. We had another great crowd.
These are some of them. Thanks for coming folks, hope you learnt something from the trip. I was asked if I had any ideas for things to do over summer to prepare for starting a Computer Science course. So I though I’d put some thoughts together.
First thing is to make sure you get good grades in your exams in summer. I’d hate to think that time spent playing with computers caused to you fail those. But once you’ve done your exams I’d advise you to get hold of an introductory text on programming and have a go. You can get our First Year course here:
There are links to my Windows Phone programming notes and also a version of my XNA book which you can download. If you are still a student I’d advise you to head off to Dreamspark and get hold of some free software. If you are not a student you can get free versions of Visual Studio here:
http://www.microsoft.com/express/
I wouldn’t try to do too much, but I would read the yellow book and try to get a feel for programming and what it is all about. A clue: it is not really mathematics, it is more about organisation.
The six Bronte children had a pretty raw deal in many respects. Their father, Patrick, lived long enough to see every one of them die, along with his wife and, from the look of the church graveyard, loads of the local population. Haworth in the nineteenth century was a world apart from the neat town it is now, with squalor and disease running rampant.
The three Bronte sisters grew up watching loved ones die around them, starting with their mother and two sisters. That they chose to escape into a made up world of stories is not terribly surprising. When they grew up they took this story telling into the wider world and produced a collection of books that was like nothing before.
I’m not a great fan of their writing, but I do like going to the Parsonage in Haworth where they grew up and wrote their greatest works. There are only a handful of rooms in the small building, but actually being in the room where Charlotte wrote “Reader, I married him” is pretty darned cool, although I did rather spoil things for number one wife when we were in the shop on the way out and I pointed at a row of paperbacks saying, in tone hushed with awe, “Hey, they wrote books as well!”.
I also insisted on buying a genuine Bronte Parsonage combination spirit level, torch and screwdriver tool. Apparently Emily used to use one just like it it to change the batteries in her digital watch. Or something.
Getting to Haworth was made much more interesting by the unexpected arrival of a large amount of snow overnight. This made driving great fun and meant the first thing we had to do in Haworth was find somewhere that sold wellington boots. On the other hand, it did make the pictures nice. And I was lucky to see a steam train arrive at Haworth station. (although of course you know that Haworth was not actually connected to the railway network until some time after the death of the sisters, who had to travel to the station at Keighley when they wanted to go to London to meet their publisher).
Of course I took a camera, and a bunch of pictures.
Genuine bona-fide steam train
Platform
Haworth rooftops
Fairly quiet for a Saturday..
Haworth graveyard
Train home
A couple of rules for night driving:
Never mind, at least we got there eventually.
Early morning guitar shop.
I did another paper review for Radio Humberside this morning. It seems that I’m doing a lot of early rising at the moment. And there is a surprising amount of traffic at 6:30 in the morning.
Anyhoo, we had fun talking about some tech stuff and Twitter. I tweet as RobMiles and Andy Comfort, the breakfast presenter, as andycomfort (which shows we both have the same level of originality I guess).
Andy even let me have some time to chat about PlatformExpo, which is going from strength to strength. It all happens on 27th March and you can find out more here:
We are going to have the results of our 24 hour game development competition, live interactive music and art, demos of 3D technology, digital showcases and I’ll be giving a session about Microsoft Kinect – having not slept the night before. One of those rare occasions where the audience has to keep me awake….
We had a couple of presentations in the department today. Team Yellow and Team Purple (Tentacle?) gave the initial presentations for their group projects. To say that the teams had been working together for a week or so and it was their first stand up together they did very well.
One thing that did stand out though was some of the phrases that were used and this brought home to me how you need to be careful how you talk in front of an audience, particularly if you want to convince them you know what you are doing.
For example take the phrase “User Friendly”. It is all very well to say “We are going to produce a user-friendly solution”. You want to convey that you think this aspect of a system is important. However, saying it like this is pretty much meaningless. The customer is not expecting you to produce something that is “user-hostile”, but the phrase could also be expressed as “We’re not going to make something that acts as if it hates you”.
It is far better to say what you are actually going to do to solve the problem. “We are going to closely involve the end user in the design and implementation so that they find the system easy to use.” is a much better way to express your intentions. Take a similar approach when you talk about security. Rather than saying you think something is important you must say what you are going to do about it.
The other thing that came out from the presentations was partly my fault. I’d said earlier that it is very important to make the customer aware of those aspects of the system that you are not going to implement. For example, you might be expecting the customer to back up the data rather than providing data backup as part of your solution. You need get this over, but I’m not sure you should have have a slide with the heading “Things we are not going to do”. It is far better to say things like “The server infrastructure that you are using will be used to back up our data along with that from other systems”. This puts the responsibility in the right place without sounding like you are avoiding work.
If all this sounds a bit like the dread “marketing speak” then I’m very sorry about that, but I do feel that it is important that you make sure that things you say are backed up with a some kind of action plan and you should avoid sounding negative about your intentions.
The first “Lucky” winner of a copy of my book. Sorry about the picture, I didn’t take it.
We had our first Admissions Open Day of 2011 today. Thanks for coming folks, hope you enjoyed the day. I did my talk and then at the end we had a prize draw for a copy of one of my XNA books. I was going to have a second prize of two books, but I couldn’t find any more….
Some more of the assembled throng. Hope you had a good journey back.
In celebration of my new book those nice people at O’Reilly asked me to share some words of wisdom on their Answers site. I’m not normally known for being wise. I actually asked my dentist to put in some wisdom teeth the last time I had a check-up. However, if you want to find out what I came up with you can go here:
http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/2456-robs-tricks-and-tips-for-a-better-programming-life/
These images don’t tell you you bad it is going to sound…..
This evening I thought I’d spend a few minutes taking some of my old records and making them into MP3 tracks. I’m not sure about the legal issues here, but since I’m not going to actually sell the recordings I think I should be OK. Years ago I recorded some albums by just recording the entire record and converting it into MP3. What I wanted to do now was just pull out individual tracks. I used Audacity, the best audio editing program you can get. It is free and works a treat. If you want to play with audio, get a copy here:
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/
A tip, the latest beta (1.3.12) is the one that you should use for Windows 7 and works fine. It also seems to have the MP3 encode/decode built in.
Anyhoo, I opened up each large MP3 file and then laboriously saved the sections that held each track. And was rewarded with some recordings that sounded, well, horrible. Horrible, horrible. Then I realised what I’d just done. I’d taken a compressed signal, decompressed it and then recompressed it again. They tell you not to do this, and blimey they are right.
Next step is to dig out “Ye Olde Recorde Deqque” and re-record uncompressed (wav files I guess) of the records and then save sections of these to compressed form. Oh well.
One of the records I was converting was Andrew Gold, “What’s wrong with this picture” which has one of the best record sleeves ever:
See if you can find a high resolution copy of the image and find all 32 mistakes in it…..
Dalby forest is one of my favourite places in the country. We go there a couple of times a year with a packed lunch and just wander round the place. Years ago, when the kids were smaller, we used to go and have barbeques. It’s just a nice place with loads of trees and some lovely walks.
And if the government have their way I won’t be able to go there much longer. They have this cunning plan to sell off, or lease, or give away, or whatever, the forests in the UK. This will save them some money and avoid them having to levy so much tax on very rich people. Or something. It will also almost certainly mean that places like Dalby Forest will be out of bounds to folks like you and me.
I’m not a particularly political person. My theory is that whoever you vote for the government always gets in. I’m also very aware that there are much more important things out there than whether or not Rob has a nice place to go and have his picnics. But I’m also aware that there are a lot of us packed onto this tiny little island, and that the few really nice green spaces that we have left should be protected, not sold off for profit.
There is a petition you can sign up to if you want your voice to be heard on this matter. I’ve already done so. You can find it at the Woodland Trust web site:
I was planning a kind of lazy Sunday. Soundproof my PC, wash the cars, find out who murdered Clarissa Lisle and so on. That’s kind of how it turned out. Except that nothing was quite as easy as it was supposed to be. First off was soundproofing. Having obtained a soundproof kit from http://www.akasa.com.tw/ I set about fitting it to the PC. This involved taking off all the panels and sticking what looked like a cross between foam and felt on each of them. The instructions mentioned that it was a bad idea to block up any ventilation holes and I agree with this, so I had to cut out gaps for the air to get in and out, which was kind of fun and left me with lots of odd foam shapes that I can put to one side in case they might be useful one day and then throw away in a couple of years’ time.
I managed to get all the cutting and sticking done and then carefully reassembled the PC and slotted it into place under the desk, forgetting the golden rule that is “Always test it before you put the lid on”. Of course, once I’d connected all the network, usb, video, power and audio cables I found that the machine no longer started when I pressed the go button.
A tip, if you are not sure whether or not power is reaching your PC, listen carefully as you plug in the mains cable. You should hear a tiny “crack” as the plug goes in. This is a smoothing capacitor in the power supply charging up. If you get this then there is a good chance that the fault is in the output of the PSU, not the input. I was hearing the sound, and so I knew that something was wrong inside the box. Of course. So I removed all the cables, pulled the machine back, took the side off and found that I’d managed to dislodge some cables from the motherboard. Since these were the ones connected to the power switch it was fairly obvious where the fault was. Pushed them back in, tested the machine with the lid off (even at my advanced years it is still possible to learn stuff) and then, having heard the happy sound of fans whirring into life, put everything back into place. It is a bit quieter with the padding. Most of the noise seems to be air moving around, which is difficult to silence completely. The machine itself seems nicely quick, and I’m looking forward to doing some serious work on it. I’ve even managed to get my old, broken, mouse back working again by the simple expedient of putting in some batteries that work, rather than a replacement set that seem to have been pre-flattened before I got them.
Next up was wash the car. Some people drive down to a car wash but I’m not one of them I’m afraid. I’m more of a “bucket and sponge” kind of guy. The main reason for this is because I like the idea of going carefully over the car looking for damage. Particularly at this time of year, when the authorities drop loads of salt and sharpened stones on the road which are then shot at your car by the tyres of the one in front. I was sad to see a bit of stone damage to the front of the Cube, which meant a trip down to Halfords for the right coloured paint and a little bit of touch up action, which sounds vaguely rude but actually just involved me and a very small pot of paint. I don’t think that the problem is completely solved, but at this time of year the best you can hope for is a holding action until the weather improves.
On the way back into the house I noticed that one of the tyres of the other car looked a bit flat. Or was it standing in a puddle? No, the tyre was on the flat side of flat. Something to do with the galvanised steel nail stuck in it. Ho hum. I’ve pumped the tyre up and if it still has some air in tomorrow this should get the car as far as the nearest repair place. So, I’ve done lots of stuff but still not found the murderer. I’m reading a story by PD James, “The Skull Beneath The Skin”. It took a while to get going, I was half way through before anyone got their clogs popped, but things are now hotting up nicely with a grisly death in a locked room and a whole drawing room full of suspects with their own motives and alibis. I do like murder mysteries, and PD James plays very fair with her plots. There is lots and lots of well written detail about the characters and the locations inside which are scattered enough clues to get you thinking. And this particular story even has a suspicious butler, which really marks it for greatness.
I’m reading the book on the Kindle, which is a lovely device for consuming things like this. Some books you want to own (those are the ones with big pages and coloured pictures) and some books you buy just to read once and throw away (those are the ones by John Grisham). The Kindle does the second type of books very well. I’d been put off the idea of an electronic book by the fact that you never actually own anything. It wasn’t until I realised that I didn’t want to actually own some of the books, but just read them that I actually cottoned on to the plot as it were.
The good news for us I guess is that eventually we will end up with a house full of books that are actually nice to own, rather than lots of paperbacks that we bought and now don’t quite know what to do with. Eventually they find their way down to the charity shop, which is fair enough but involves me having to do something, which is not great. And I often come back with more books than I took. We used to have a weekly pilgrimage to the library when we were younger, but I’ve not been there for a while. I used to get books about subjects that I found interesting, like advertising, and then read a whole bunch. I don’t have as much time for that kind of thing just right now, but I’d like to think I could go back and the books will still be there. Even with the magic of the Kindle and the interweb there is still something nice about walking down a row of books and picking out one to read. I hope we still have that in the future. Anyhoo, back now to a world of shady characters and murky plotting. And I might read some of the book as well...
Note: I’m having a long weekend. I’m making my blog posts at least 1,000 words long for the next couple of days. Just to see if I can. You don’t have to read them all. Normal, truncated, service will be back next week.
Tangled is the latest animated film from Disney. It follows in the footsteps of some pretty heavy hitters like Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. Unfortunately Disney has also made some pretty dodgy animated films as well. Anyone remember Lilo and Stitch? In a good way? Opinions in the reviews were pretty sharply divided, with critics either praising it to the heavens or calling it lacklustre and run of the mill. As we sat down with our popcorn I was consoled by the fact that most of the nastier reviews had been in the posh papers.
We were seeing the film in 2D instead of the much touted 3D. This was not because we couldn’t afford the 3D seats (although the difference in price had paid for the drink and meal combo that we carried gingerly into the theatre), but because we happen to prefer to see our movies the way that they are supposed to be made. Flat. There is a very good discussion of why 3D doesn’t work out there on the web somewhere, I recommend that you seek it out (search for “Why 3D doesn't work and never will” by Roger Ebert). Essentially he makes the point that when you watch a 3D movie your eyes have to focus at a fixed distance on the screen. But when you see 3D your brain thinks that the 3D bits are different distances away. The 3D seeing part of your brain then has to override the 2D part of your eyes to make the scene look right. In the 600 million years that the brain has been developing to give us useful 3D vision it has never had to do this before and the resulting mental tussle gives me (and lots of people) a headache after a while. Actually, there is another good reason why we only saw the 2D version. Due to a quirk of fate number one wife and I only have two good eyes between us (fortunately we were given one each) and so we don’t really miss the third dimension much. And anyhoo, although there were a few bits obviously added for 3D (point stuff at the audience and swing it around, lots of tiny particles etc etc) seeing it in 2D didn’t really make much difference. We were pleased to see that the theatre was packed with people who didn’t mind missing 3D either.
But back to the film itself. I’m not giving too much away if I tell you that the film is a reworking of “Rapunzel”, the fairy tale about the girl in the tower with the unfeasibly long locks. And they’ve done a pretty good job. If you know the story you’ll appreciate the stuff they’ve put in to make it interesting. If you don’t you’ll just appreciate the story. The villainess of the piece is very well portrayed, one of the better and more plausible fairy tale nasty’s and the hero and heroine are nicely matched. The music is not intrusive. It’s not a musical film (or of course I would not have gone) but the songs that they do are very well realised and enjoyable in a hum along but then forget after the film kind of way. The best one is the set piece in a lair of ner-do-wells which manages to echo some of the best of the song about Gaston in Beauty and the Beast (I don’t dislike all musicals, just ones that aren’t Beauty and the Beast).
The film is all computer rendered, but looks very lush. The fabric on the clothes is particularly impressive, especially the dress worn by the villainess (I’m wondering if we now call female baddies villains, in the same way that actor and comedian have now gone unisex. Perhaps this is something I’d best not dwell on). But the cloth does look very real, as if there actually was a character wearing clothes, rather than a surface with a texture on it. The characters look good, move well and fit their voices. Disney spent a lot of money on this film and it shows.
I liked the film a lot. It has been unfavourably compared with Shrek, another reworking but of a less popular children’s tale. I think this is unfair. Shrek had the advantage that nobody (or at least me) knew how it would turn out and did have some really standout actors voicing the characters. One big advantage of Tangled is that it is unlikely that we will see any massively inferior sequels, something that was unfortunately not true of Shrek. The critics also compared Tangled unfavourably to films by Pixar, saying that it lacks the wit and invention of some of their efforts. I kind of agree, but the producers are a bit constrained by the fact they are reworking a fairy tale. There is little chance of a cute robot or house dangling from balloons being able to make an appearance, and at least they avoided making any crass references to contemporary culture that can date a film faster than side splitting jokes about Betamax. The characters they have added to fill out the story are good, with a particular call out to Maximus the horse, who would get a film of his own if there was any justice in the world.
So, to sum up I really enjoyed the film. So did the rest of the theatre. If it can keep an audience made up of around 40% kids under 10 quiet (and me) then it must have something going for it. It is a genuinely nice story with well defined baddies and a good solid triumph of good over evil. The computer graphics are some of the best that you will see at the moment and it has the Disney trademark of lots going on in the background that marks some of their best work. The songs aren’t the best in my opinion, but they are OK and you will not leave the theatre feeling shortchanged. In fact you should work out feeling that you have just seen a really good film. I did.
I think I’m getting the hang of this. Thanks everyone for keeping still..
And these are the folks on the back of the stage. Well done folks.
Just done my first ceremony of the day. Everything went well and the audience were great (although to be honest I’ve never had a bad audience at a degree ceremony).
I’m really pleased with the photograph. It is made from three stitched together and actually came out very well. If you click on the photo you can get to my Flickr site and see the much larger version, where pretty much everyone is recognisable.
These are the students on the back of the stage, this panorama didn’t work quite so well because I didn’t hold the camera as still as I might have.
Another ceremony at 2:00. Great fun.
We got an email last week asking what kind of computer works best at university. Here are my thoughts on the matter:
Netbook
Netbooks based on the Atom processor are very cheap and great for web surfing, email and writing essays but they are a bit underpowered for the more demanding stuff like image editing and HD video. While you can use large tools like Visual Studio on an Atom powered Netbook it will not be a particularly enjoyable experience, particularly if you only have 1G of RAM in the machine. However, they are great for taking notes, very portable and their batteries should see out a day on campus if you are careful. And they are so cheap you won’t suffer an enormous loss if you drop or lose yours.
Laptop
If you are buying a laptop I would go for at least a Core 2 of some kind. Machines based on the i3 processor are becoming affordable and are worth a look. If you are buying a laptop make sure that it has (or you can upgrade it to) at least 4G of RAM. If you want to write games with the machine it really needs a separate graphics adapter, those with built in graphics might work, but their performance will not be good. Take a look here for details of requirements to write XNA games:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb203925.aspx
Such a machine need not cost too much, I got an Dell Studio 15 with ATI graphics for around the 600 pound mark last year, and I’m sure things have moved on since then. Of course the snag with buying a “proper” portable computer is that it is properly heavy and scarily expensive to cart round with you. This might mean that it gets left back at your house most of the time, which kind of negates the purpose of a laptop.
You should also look very carefully at the battery life. Bear in mind that although there are some charging stations on campus these are the exception rather than the rule and so a machine that can last all day is a good plan. I used to have a rule of thumb that I would take the manufacturers’ claimed life and halve it, so a machine that was supposed to be good for 3 hours would actually give only 90 minutes. However, I think things are improving a bit. My latest little machine claims 9 hours of use, and pretty much gets there.
Desktop
I’m in the process of returning to my desktop roots at the moment. I moved onto a laptop a while back because I loved the idea of having all my data with me at all times. It meant that I could pretty much work anywhere. However, I can now have my data anywhere by using Live Mesh and Dropbox, and I fancy having a go with two monitors, so moving back to desktop makes sense. If you are buying a desktop now you should take a look at the new Intel “SandyBridge” I5 processor, which is not that expensive and provides a big leap in performance terms. Such a machine with at least 4G of ram and a 1T hard disk and a reasonable graphics card should come in at around that magic 600 pounds (if you shop carefully) and will provide a big leap in performance over a laptop of similar price.
Some students have a great big hulking desktop at home and carry a tiny cheap netbook around during the day to take notes. This can work very well, particular if you use one of the cloud services (see backup below) to keep everything synchronised.
Apple
Apple seem to have figured out what makes something a pleasure to own and use, and then bottled it and sold it. All their machines run Windows really well, although the native OS X operating system has a lot to commend it and gives you access to wonderful programs like Garageband which come free with each Mac. And of course if you have a Mac you can write programs for the iPhone.
I would place a slight question mark over the reliability and longevity of their hardware though. My MacBook Pro has been through two batteries, a power supply and a main board since I got it, and my little MacBook is on its second battery. I've bought machines from lots of other suppliers, Dell, Sony, Toshiba and Acer, and never had this failure rate with them.
If you are in academia make sure that you buy using the Apple academic discount scheme, you will save a little money but you will also get three years of Applecare warranty, which is well worth having.
Software
Don’t forget software when you are pricing your systems. All our students get Microsoft Academic Alliance usernames shortly after they arrive with us and you can get Microsoft Operating systems and development tools for free from this:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/academic/default
The only thing that you will miss from this is Microsoft Office, which you can get quite cheaply from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/uk/education/studentoffer/
If you want to try Linux I’d recommend taking a look at Ubuntu, which provides one of the best turnkey Unix experiences.
Backup
It seems that you have to lose a big chunk of work before you appreciate the importance of making backups of your data. One of my project students had their hard disk crash the night after they had just finished writing a very important report. Of course they hadn’t backed up the files….
These days, rather than remembering take a backup I use Dropbox and LiveMesh to make sure that files on my computers are all synchronised. During a working day I’ll probably move between two or three different platforms and these technologies make sure that the data on all of them always lines up. They are also provide browser based interfaces, so that you can get at all your important files anywhere you can find a web connection.
http://explore.live.com/windows-live-mesh
The main problem with these services is the limited amount of space they offer. Live Mesh will give you 5G of online storage for free, with Dropbox you have to make do with 2G for free, although you can have more if you pay. However, this is not an issue for me. I don’t put any of my music or video on them, I simply use them to store “work in progress”, which for all the taught content and presentations that I gave last year only amounts to around 2 or so gig.
Insurance
If you do buy lots of fancy hardware do make sure that it is insured. Sometimes home insurance needs to be modified to cover expensive single items and if you move away from home you may need to get a policy of your own to cover your gadgets.
Final Words
Don’t spend too much on a computer. You don’t need a huge powerful machine to do our courses at Hull, actually most of the work (apart from 3D game writing) could be performed on a fairly basic system costing less than 300 pounds. We do have machines on campus which you can use, including some really powerful ones in the games lab which are available to students who need a lot of horsepower. Remember that anyone who tells you that you need the most expensive and powerful system they have is probably a computer salesman….
Is there anything more satisfying than spending a Sunday afternoon managing to make your HP printer actually print on both sides of the paper?
I suppose the answer is getting a printer that works as it is supposed to do out of the box with the drivers as supplied. And don’t get me started about how it is impossible to get Photoshop Elements 9 (latest version) to print out on paper exactly what is shown on the screen….
Almost enough here for four cups of coffee…
When I’m in the middle of conference calls I’ve taken to piling up all my change on the edge of my desk. So if you hear the sound of falling money when I’m talking you’ll know what has just happened.
Even on the Nissan website it is driving away from us….
Looks like my Nissan Cube is going to be even more special than I thought. Nissan have stopped importing them from Japan, blaming a fall in the value of the pound against the yen which made the profit margins too thin. I’ve had my Cube for a while now and I love it. Even the reviewers are deciding they quite like it.
Apparently there are still a few to be had at Nissan dealers, so if you really want to drive round in a conservatory then you might be able to snap one up if you are quick.
Before the fun starts….
Did my turn in the exam hall today. Something to do with micro-Biology. I’m glad I didn’t have to answer the questions, although the students there seemed to find plenty to write about. One candidate was very careful about erasing things that they thought were wrong. They must have gone through about a pen’s worth of ink crossing things out. A tip, never do this. Just put a single line through the text so that it is still readable. I’ve been known to give marks for crossed out stuff as long as it leaves me with the impression that the candidate knows something about the subject. If I can’t read what you have put then you have no chance of getting any credit for it.
I had this plan to turn up with a bunch of examiners, one dressed as an American Indian, another as a construction worker, a third as a motorbike cop and so on… When someone asked who we were I could have said “Oh, we’re the ‘Invigilation People’”.
We still have some places available for the trip to Bletchley Park. If the price seems a bit steep remember that it includes all transport and also entry to the park itself. Bletchley Park is pretty much the birthplace of the computer and also housed the code-breaking work that allowed us to win the Second World War. All in all, well worth a visit. I’m looking forward to going.
They also have a card punch machine just like the one I wrote my first programs on. (wipes away a manly tear).
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.
