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Number one daughter is taking part in a Three Legged Race today. Since she only has the two legs herself, she has teamed up with Bronwyn and they will be trying to cover three miles on three legs.
The cause is a great one, and she would really appreciate your support, however small the amount. You can give with PayPal, it’s really easy and completely painless.
Scott Hanselman (who talks a lot of sense) has been telling people on the internets to make sure they have secure passwords, and different passwords for all their various accounts. This is very sensible, and made me think about my passwords. I find that the problem is that when hit with an “enter new password” dialog my brain turns to mush and I can’t think of anything sensible to use. Actually, my brain turns to mush at other times too, such as when number one wife ask me questions like “What do you think?”, but I digress.
Anyhoo, having pondered the matter I reckon the way to solve this one is that whenever you are doing something mildly unexciting (for example mowing the lawn or vacuuming the lounge) you should use the time think about what might make a good password and practice remembering it. That way, when the prompt comes along you will have something to type in.
Yesterday I was eating my breakfast, as you do, when something went “crack” in my mouth. Not a good sound. Turned out that a piece of one of my teeth had broken off. Not good. So I rang my NHS dentist. Fortunately he was able to see me today, and so at around two thirty (which is very appropriate time to do this) I went down to the surgery and opened wide. I was expecting this to be bad in just about every way possible. It was going to be expensive and painful. Perhaps at some point my trousers would fall down too, so that it could also be embarrassing and I would have the full set.
But no. After poking around for a while the dentist, a thoroughly professional chap called Julien, pronounced that the tooth was fundamentally sound, and just needed a filling on top. Which he could do there and then for the sum of just 17 pounds. So I was getting it fixed for less than a price of a Blu-Ray. With no injections. Wonderful.
So I’m now sitting here with a mended tooth and a resolve to be more careful when eating nuts in future.
Spent the day marking First Year programming work. That’s around 15 different Breakout games and 5 or so banks (I got to do lots of games for some reason). I’m getting pretty good at paddle control, which is nice. We’ll finish tomorrow.
One thing that is impressing me is how much more the students are focusing on the deliverables. Last time we did this we had lots of submissions with bits missing. This time everybody seems to have read the specification and figured out just what they need to do. I think this is a really good development. Programmers are legendary for “drifting” off the original design, and it is nice to see some attention being paid to delivering what the customer needs.
It seems that there is a difference between tidying up and picking something up and putting it down somewhere else.
The SS Great Britain was one of the first large propeller powered vessels.
Up until the SS Great Britain nobody thought much of making ships out of metal. Especially iron, what with its well know lack of floating ability. Isambard Kingdom Brunel reckoned it would work though, and built an enormous ship to prove it. I wish I’d thought to have given one of my kids the middle name “Kingdom”, but I digress.
Today we went round the first “modern” ship ever built. Instead of using wood, with lots of internal bracing and strengthening, Brunel decided you could make a perfectly workable boat out of metal plate. Moreover, making it really large would mean that you could carry enough coal on board to power the thing on long journeys.
And it worked. The ship had a long history, from carrying 200 passengers across the Atlantic in absolute luxury to carrying 600 would be gold diggers to Australia in conditions that must have been a lot less comfortable. It ended its days as a gently rusting wool store in a bay in the Falkland Islands. Fortunately, after a lot of fund raising and effort it was brought back to Bristol, its spiritual home, and you can now go around and beneath it.
Well worth the trip. While it is sad to see the state of the vessel now, which must be mostly rust, it is very encouraging to see the work being done to keep it alive, and the imagination shown in making a look round as interesting as possible. They even have an “Isambard Brunel” wandering around in full Victorian dress, sideburns and stovepipe hat that you can chat to.
The weather was very kind to us, and I took loads of pictures which will find their way onto these pages over time I’m sure.
Having a few (hopefully well earned) days off this week. Today we headed down south to visit number one son for a few days. It is rather nice when your kids reach the age where you can go and stay with them. He is claiming to have a really fast network connection, we shall see.
This is not Hull
Got back to day, sat down and woke up an hour later. Gotta love jetlag.
Friday at 5:15 is not the best time to have a tutorial. Particularly on the very last day before Easter. Kudos to the hardy souls that turned up to learn stuff, I hope you found it worth your while. As a reward I brought along some sugary sweets left over from Three Thing Game last month.
All I have to do now is solder them onto a plug. Yeah, right.
My lovely (and so expensive I never told number one wife I bought them) Ultimate Ears headphones have broken. The wire that goes into the plug has failed on one of the connections. Being a chap who’s not afraid of hardware (perhaps because I don’t know that much about it) I was happy to get a new plug and solder it on. That is, until I saw what passes for wire these days.
In the Olden Days ™ headphones were wired with the next thing down from mains cable, which could be dismantled and worked on with industrial scale tools. My old Sony phones were much tougher too. They even survived a trip around the robot vacuum, which took a fancy to them one day.
Nowadays, with fancy “litz” cables and stuff it looks like it is pretty much impossible to mend the darned things. And they aren’t even heavy enough to serve as a decent paperweight.
I picked up this sticker thing from a stand in Bulgaria last week. I’ve no idea what the instructions say. Any ideas folks?
This is some of the audience for our mega Open Day. Great turn out.
It is scary how fast time goes by. We are running towards the end of the Open Days for this academic year. We are going out with a bang though, the turnout for today’s event was huge. This placed a certain amount of strain on the rooms that we have. We didn’t actually make the design lab bulge, but we came close. Thanks to everyone who came along, hope you had an interesting and enjoyable time with us.
As usual we gave away a copy of my book as a price, here is Warren handing it over. Note that we have now got some copies of the latest version (in all the shops now).
Warren hands out another free copy of my book. We should have the proper ones for posting out tomorrow.
We had another great open day today, loads of people turned up and I hope you found it worth the trip. One group had travelled up from the south coast, well done. Perhaps we should have a prize for the most travelled guest.
This will not print correctly.
I am not normally given to ranting. I consider myself quite a balanced soul really, and where computers are concerned I usually have enough good nature and technical skill to deal with most problems that come my way. But some things are just beyond the pale. I would like to think that to think that computers generally help to make people’s lives easier and when I find something that is so crass, stupid and ignorant as this I feel I have to write something.
The problem is a simple one. I have a brand new copy of Photoshop Elements 9, a recent model HP printer (C7280) and a desire to take a picture out of the former and print it on the latter. So that it fills an A4 page. And appears on the paper as it does on the screen. This does not happen. It does not even seem to be possible. I can get close, but the picture is always cropped or scaled so that it doesn’t fit. I was printing pictures with my Amiga around 20 years ago with fewer problems then I’m having now. I had the same trouble with an older version of Photoshop and in my ignorance I assumed that they would have fixed this by now because someone would have got back to them during their extensive testing to tell them they had made a product that was fundamentally useless in this respect.
I’ve just wasted two pages of expensive paper, and a lot of expensive ink, printing the wrong thing in the wrong place. The reason I wasted the second page was that I asked the printer driver to show me the page before it printed and it ignored me.
Photoshop will let me print collages, albums and all kinds of stuff I don’t want. The HP printer is clever enough to tell me that the ink has run out in a cartridge before it actually has. This technology is state of the art, and it stinks. I’m now reduced to carefully scaling printouts wrong so that they print out right. There is probably a fundamental setting that I’ve missed somewhere that could be adjusted to make all this work, but I’ve not found it yet. And if there is, why isn’t it set on by default?
Anyone like me who has been unlucky enough to invest in these useless products has my sympathy and an apology on behalf of those of us who have been promoting computers as a way to make things easier.
Scarborough Castle
Went to Scarborough today. Good weather, good food, great pinball machine.
Name the TV show…
Now with added Nose Images and High Score
The Red Nose Day game is coming along quite well. For something I started at 2:00am in the morning last week while jetlagged it is actually progressing in a reasonable manner. Some time back I read a very good interview with Jordan Mechner, the man behind “Prince of Persia”.
He said some very sensible things about game development and one point he made really resonated with me today. He said that it was OK to play around with ideas and mess about with your game until you find out what it is really about. Once you have got your central game theme sorted you must then build on that like crazy. And you must defend your idea against all.
Up until today I’d got some bits and pieces moving around the screen and some text drawing and screen swapping code, but I didn’t really know what the game was about. But now I do. I’m not saying it is going to be awesome. But it is going to be quite fun.
I’m hoping to finish all the bits and pieces, add some music and get the game into Windows Phone Marketplace by the end of the week so that everyone can get a copy and play with it on their Windows Phone, and donate lots of cash to Comic Relief.
We had another Open Day today. And another Prize Draw. The winner of the copy of my book, pictured above, had the surname Miles. This was not fixed. Not at all.
Note: Eagle eyed readers will of course have spotted that the book above is for version 2.0 of XNA, not the more recent version 4.0. This is because it seems that the copies of my Version 4.0 book are presently in a warehouse near Sheffield, waiting for me to go and pick them up. This is thanks to a particularly shy delivery company who don’t seem to want take the package to anywhere that might have someone able to receive it. Mr. Miles will get his proper version of the book sent through as soon as we have got hold of ours.
I’ve started wearing a jacket for work. I’ve been referred to as “dapper” twice over the last week. Very nice. However, I’ve found that it has made me slightly more nasty. In lectures I’m now trying to stop people from talking as much at the back, and generally getting folk to turn up on time and take part. This doesn’t seem to be a case of “clothes maketh the man” as such, but it does seem that clothes maketh the man slightly more grouchy.
Or perhaps it is the jetlag.
Time to fly home today. It has been a very brief visit but well worth the trip. Best MVP Summit ever. Thanks to all the folks at Microsoft for being so forthcoming about the future.
The lady in the red blazer came up to me as I was standing in line to check in for the flight. “Would you like me to find you a seat with more legroom?” she asked. Would I??? With a flourish of boarding passes I was moved to a seat that they had been keeping for tall people. Wonderful. The flight itself was very smooth and much shorter than expected, so I arrived feeling, if not as fresh as a daisy, certainly not as the crushed flower I thought I’d be. Hmm. Perhaps I’d better work harder on my similes in future.
Anyhoo, during the flight we had a good view of the coast of Greenland, and so I took some snaps. I’m here for the MVP summit which starts on Monday, in the meantime I’ve been meeting up with people I know and forgetting to remember their names. Great fun.
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.
