Things that go Beep in the Night

Think I might have overdone the perspective correction on this picture….

The burglar alarm went off at 5:00 am this morning. And I don’t mean went off in a “I’ve seen a burglar” kind of way. I mean went off in a “bottle of milk” kind of way. It started emitting clicks and beeps that indicated that all was not well inside. Since I knew that opening the box would probably set it off properly we just endured the unhappy beeps for a few hours.

When I took a look I discovered that the system seemed to have forgotten all its settings and was having difficultly remembering new ones. I think one of the memory chips has gone a bit soft. Since I hate being without intruder detection it was therefore time to fit another.

Turns out that I happened to have a replacement device lying around. I bought it a while back when I needed to find out about burglar alarms for a .NET Micro Framework project I was involved with. It has been sitting, unfitted, in the bedroom because the old alarm was working fine. Until now.

So it was out with the new kit and off I went. The new device actually has an alarm in the keyboard unit. I didn’t know this until I set the thing off by mistake. The resulting 100db of noise made me levitate from my chair around 2 feet and I spent 30 seconds or so trying to find out in the manual how to turn the darned thing off and cover my ears at the same time.

Anyhoo, I’ve configured and tested everything and it seems to work fine. I’ve had to say goodbye to the old one, which is a bit sad, it had served us well for a very long time.

Synchronicity

Ian came over today. He is the kind of chap who will turn up and help you carry a sofa upstairs. Which is just as well, as far as I’m concerned.

Anyhoo, we got to talking and he told me that earlier that day the mirror in his lounge had fallen off the wall, all by itself. This happened at pretty much the same time that a noticeboard fell off the wall in our house. Scary.

Not Welcome at Ikea

Not sure how it happened, but Ikea managed to both lose my password and then ban me for entering the wrong one. Not impressed. I guess I’ll just have to buy my compressed sawdust from somewhere else.

Robot Fun at St. Bede’s

These folks were a great audience.

Went over to St. Bede’s school to do a talk today. I did one last year and it was great fun. This time I was showing off a .NET Micro Framework. We did some simple robot control and then I managed to get the Kinect sensor working with the robot. I’ve not had a lot of time to play with the SDK, but I did manage to get the robot to move forward when I put my right hand on my head. The Kinect SDK is really easy to use.

Four Storeys of Sugar

An M&M (previously know as a Treet if you are very old) is a small, candy covered chocolate sweet. Like a Smartie only smaller. In London they have a huge building completely devoted to this confection.  We went around it yesterday. Scary.

I think I just saw the one at the back move….

This is the M&M Mix Lab. I think they have a machine that can put all the purple ones in one box. The girl on the right is saying to herself “For this I went to drama school…..”

If you are in London and want to see how far you can take the marketing of a single kind of confectionary, then you should go and take a look.

Meeting the Woman in Black

Actually you really, and I mean REALLY, don’t want to meet the Woman in Black. We first saw the play around 20 years ago and today we took the kids to see it. Just as scary as last time. If you want to find out how a play with only two actors can scare you to death then get yourself down to London and see it live. Well worth the trip.

Engineers Don’t Tend to Fib

You’re Fired

I like The Apprentice. As entertainment it works well. As a lesson for any kind of life it is however a disaster. This was brought home to me last night when “LordAllan” fired someone because he had never known an engineer who could succeed in business.

Ugh. I think what “LordAllan” means is that engineers have more difficultly telling porkies than folks in other branches of business, particularly marketing. Telling whoppers about a financial product is a lot easier than lying about whether or not a bridge is strong enough. And in the marketing game you can blame “market forces” when the shares tank and everybody loses their money. Where as in engineering it is a bit tricky to blame gravity when everything collapses and a train plummets to the bottom of the ravine. Engineers are expected to do their sums and get it right, whereas other folks can get away with telling the version of the truth that will get the deal.  Ho hum.

Update on 2011-06-21 18:17 by Rob

Having thought a bit more about this post I've decided that it is not the case that you have to be good at telling lies to succeed in business. Just that "LordAlan" thinks that you do.

And I'm sure that none of these comments are in any way influenced by the fact that I once bought an Amstrad amplifier and all the knobs dropped off...

External Examining with a Tablet PC

In Newcastle today to do some external examining.  It seems strange to have just finished marking our student work and then go off and look at a whole bunch of exam scripts and reports, but actually it is very interesting to see how other institutions deal with all the same things that we see in Hull. It is nice to go somewhere and just talk shop for a while too. And there was a really good sky over the city which I could see from my hotel window. 

The exam board is tomorrow morning. Last year I used my iPad to assemble my thoughts for the meeting. This brought home to me that the iPad is great for consuming content but can be a bit of a pain when you try to create with it. This time I’ve brought along a tiny Windows 7 notebook with a twisty screen, it is a Packard Bell (actually Acer) Easynote Butterfly Touch. I got it a while back. It doesn’t have massive performance, although things picked up a bit when I upped the memory to 4G and it will quite happily run Visual Studio 2010 and the Windows Phone emulator which is quite fun with the multi-touch screen. However, the best thing about this shiny device (which I don’t think you can get any more I’m afraid) is that the battery life really is good for 9 or so hours. In fact, if you turn the brightness down you can get close to the lifespan of an iPad. I’m really looking forward to trying to get Windows 8 running on it…

Anyhoo, it has behaved itself very well up to now. I’ve been using it to type in the reports. Tomorrow I’m going to flip it into tablet mode and use it to read the notes in the meeting.

Stalked by an Oven

I’m being stalked by an oven. It’s actually very scary. We are in the process of planning an upgrade to our kitchen. It should be completed this century with a bit of luck. As part of this I’m searching for prices of various kitchen appliances, including the device you see above. However, now pretty much every web page I go to has an advert for this oven appearing on it. Something in the interwebs has cottoned on to the fact that I’m in the market for some cooking equipment and is tailoring what I see to suit. Most interesting.

Web pages are highly aware of the searches I’ve been doing. Last week there was a very good article in the paper about this kind of thing, which made the point that what you see on the web and when you search depends on what you have already looked for/at. This is not something that you might expect. It means that, far from allowing the web to expand your creativity and send you down new avenues, what really happens is that after a while the search tends to contract and focus down onto what the engines think you are interested in.

Discovering this hot in the heels of the presentation from Sir Tim Berners-Lee last Friday on his dream of an open and level playing field for all internet users makes me wonder if somewhere a battle has already been fought and lost.

I’m not sure if anonymous browsing would make a difference, or if search aggregators like duckduckgo.com would help. As someone said last week “If the service is free, you are the product”. That is how it is with search these days.

Man Made Shed

This is not my shed, this is the showroom model. Mine looks similar, but with somewhat more tatty tools.

I’m spending a few days not on the computer. I’m either marking exam scripts or doing manly DIY type activities. Yesterday I failed to mend one thing (although I did also replace some broken pipe somewhere else, ending the day with a win on points).

Today I built a little baby shed which we are going to use to store all the gardening implements that I never use. I then bolted it to the floor and the wall. It has been a bit breezy lately and so I really don’t want it to fly away. If you have need for a tiny shed that is easy to make you could do worse. You can get it from B&Q here. It even has 13 reviews, 11 positive. I suppose it will shortly have its own Facebook page.

I Hate Plumbing

This is a picture of a cactus. You wouldn’t want a picture of anything else…

I don’t mind wiring things up. I know where I am with electricity. It tends to stay in the cable and not squirt out of joints at each end. Unlike water. The water pipe going into the toilet cistern has been leaking slightly and so I thought I’d improve on Fix #1 (a bowl underneath to catch the drips) with Fix #2, tightening the compression joint. (you just know this is going to end badly, don’t you).

Anyhoo, I attached my one good adjustable spanner (all the rest seem to have vanished) and gave the joint a twirl. This had the effect of twizzling the whole fitting round and shearing off part of the ball cock inside the cistern. This was extra annoying because I’d tried to use my other adjustable spanner (the bad one) to hold that part still and the spanner had just broken. So now whenever the toilet fills up after a flush I also get a four foot high jet of water into the air. Not good. So it was off down to the DIY store to get a replacement fitting. Which of course wouldn’t fit. In the end, by dint of a lot swearing and removal of skin from various knuckles I’m pretty much back where I started, with a bowl collecting the drips. I can’t replace the faulty part with a new one because all the new ones are the wrong size.

I think it might be new toilet time.

Panoramic York

Adventures with Panoramic Cameras in York

We went to York today. It only rained twice. Once for four hours and once for five.

Got a Hash Key!

One of my golden rules for developers is “Make yourself a nice place to work”. Of course I don’t always apply this to myself. For the last few years I’ve been using keyboards that I bought from the US which don’t have the proper keyboard setup for my machines. I’ve written a whole bunch of stuff on C# development using a keyboard that doesn’t have a proper mapping for the # key. Things are even worse when I use my MacBook, that doesn’t even have a # anywhere – I end up using block copy to get one, even though there is a strange “Picnic site + something or other” combination that you can use.

Anyhoo, I’ve just managed to get hold of a couple of bendy keyboards that actually have a # key on them in the correct place. My one worry now is how I’m going to get used to them.

FYI I prefer the Microsoft Bendy keyboards. These help a lot with things like RSI (at least for me). If you get any kind of wrist ache after a long bout of typing I’d strongly suggest investigating them. One of my big worries is that they might stop making them, which would be annoying. Fortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case at the moment, you can still get the one I like, albeit for a lot more than I paid….

Thwaite Gardens Open Day

This is right in the middle of Cottingham.

Thwaite Hall is one of the student halls at the university. At the back of Thwaite Hall is a frankly amazing garden (including the lake you can see above) and some greenhouses containing plant collections.  This is all managed by the Friends of Thwaite Gardens, who are working to make the gardens more accessible. They are open during the week for anyone to walk around and each year they hold an Open Day. This year’s Open Day was today, so we went down there with a whole bunch of cameras and lenses. And I took a bunch of photos. You can find all of them on Flickr here. Here are some of them.

This is just a small part of the gardens.

Trees

Cactus Greenhouse

Some of these cacti have amazing flowers

Flower

Cactus Flower

Another Flower

Using the bendy lens..

Lord Mayor’s Parade

Today was the day of the Lord Mayor’s Parade through Hull. I was in town at the time, and had the little camera with me. Unfortunately I also had a enormous suitcase that I’d just bought, which made moving around the crowd a little tricky, but I did manage to take a few shots of the fun and festivities.

This is as the procession went past. Note that there are some people in this picture who are even taller than me.

Only a really skilled photographer can manage to get a traffic light to grow out of the Lord Mayor’s head…

Sponsor Jenny Please

I just love this message. You can see it too when you donate.

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.

http://www.raceforlifesponsorme.org/jennifermiles72

Practice Your Passwords

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.

Crunchy Teeth

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.

Marking Time

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.

Tidying Up

It seems that there is a difference between tidying up and picking something up and putting it down somewhere else.