Welcome to Hull

Library looking good

Welcome to Hull for new students. And welcome back to everyone else. I love it when we start the semester with good weather. It really shows off the place, which is looking lovely at the moment. Each year I put up a bunch of tips for new students, so here goes again:

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 Microsoft Security Essentials installed and running, that the databases are up to date and that you run scans at reguar intevals. If you really 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 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 100M 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.
7. 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/. Dropbox and Live Mesh are also very good for sharing files with each other.
8. Make sure you have insurance for all your nice toys. 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/Pages/student-insurance.aspx (if anyone knows any cheaper deals feel free to let me know and I’ll update this post)
9. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. If something doesn’t make sense at the time make a note to follow it up later. Don’t let problems hang around until they seem to grow. Find someone and sort things out as soon as possible. Every department has people who know how everything works and can give you help. We have a fantastic team at Hull (I’ll let you find out who they are). If you have a problem, please come and let us help you with it.
10. Don’t worry. Really. You’ll be fine.

Welcome to Paris–Mostly

I’m here in Paris as part of the Nokia Windows Phone Jumpstart tour. Should be great fun. It starts tomorrow. Our hotel is just across the road from the tower in the picture, which is really nice. With a bit of luck we might find time tomorrow to go up it.

But I have learned one thing about travel, and that is “Don’t go abroad with a brand new, recently imaged” laptop and expect for stuff to keep working”. I tried to log in to Facebook and it said “Aha! Not seen this machine before and Rob seems to have changed country. I’ll lock him out”. Not a huge problem in the great scheme of things, but very irritating all the same.

I logged into the Facebook site to try and fix the problem and Facebook went “Aha! We are in France, I’ll give Rob the French version of the site and no obvious way to change this”. So now I’m being asked security questions in French about things I’ve never told it. The last five characters of my driving licence? As if? So I plump for a Facebook innovation, passwords by pictures. This was even more disastrous. I have quite a few friends, and many I have never actually met in person. So I don’t know what they look like.

Towards the end Facebook threw in the towel I reckon, and showed me some pictures of family members. That worked and I’m now back on line again. But my Flicker account steadfastly refuses to work. They’ve made it so secure it is unusable.

Cable Tied

There should be a special place in hell reserved for camera manufacturers who use strange cables to connect to the computer. These are the wires that instantly hide themselves amongst all the other, normal ones, that look like the might fit, but won’t.

Heading to Brno

Taking artistic pictures while having tea…

True story. I was invited to speak at the Mobera mobile development conference in Brno in the Czech Republic. It was in the week that we normally have for holidays, but, seeing that it looked like it was in a nice place (never been to the Czech Republic before) I said yes and bought tickets for myself and Number One Wife. I was looking forward to speaking about Windows Phone development and then spending a few days looking around the city.

Then the conference was postponed. Oh well. Since we’d booked holidays and bought flights we thought we’d go anyway. Good move. The city (what we’ve seen of it) is very nice, the hotel (Hotel Europa) is super and great value, and we seem to be surrounded by great restaurants. I’m giving a talk to a user group on Tuesday night, so I even get to do some performing while I’m here.

Number One Son Falls Out of Plane

Number one son today took it upon himself to fall out of a plane in aid of charity. I don’t have any pictures, but I’m assured that the chap he was strapped to will vouch for this. If you want to make a contribution to his good cause, then head over here and give him some cash.

Spam Overload

For some reason I’ve been getting a lot more span recently. The university filter is usually pretty good, bur over the last few weeks I’ve seen an increase in people wanting me to help move money out of shady countries and I have had lots of attacks on bank accounts I’ve not got.

I’ve been pondering the best way to deal with this and I did start to wonder if the best thing to do would be to reply to every spam message that I get, but give invalid information each time. If everybody in the world did this then the spammers (who rely on getting responses from just the few folks daft enough to respond) would have a denial of service attack of their own to deal with...

Actually this is a very bad idea though, in that the best approach really is to not do anything, since it is best if they don’t know whether or not your account is active and if you make yourself visible it marks you as someone worth chasing.

Foolishness and Consistency

Just noticed (to my abject horror) that my Sunday games was posted on Monday, and my Monday reminders were posted on Tuesday. I’ve fixed it with a bit of temporal adjustment.

Programmers have a thing about consistency, (it is one of the better ways to make things work and manageable) but perhaps I’m taking it a bit too far. One of my favourite quotations is from Ralph Waldo Emerson – “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

I remind myself of this whenever I make temporal adjustments and back-date blog posts just to keep my record of one post per day intact. I’ve only “missed” one day in around five or six years (as I remember). But then again, I’ve always had the philosophy that I blog for my own amusement, if anyone else likes it that’s just icing on the cake…

Sunday Games

Spent some of today playing games with no computer involved at all. Great stuff. Although I managed to destroy my car just before the final corner. Oh well.

Back in the Rain

Flowers for sale in Pike Place Market. From slightly warmer times.

Got back today. Actually managed to sleep on the plane. When we got back the cloud reached almost all the way to the ground. By gum it was raining. Splashed home just in time for fish and chips. And sleep.

Climbing Needles

I’d convinced myself that there was no point in going to Seattle. I’ve been before, it is a half hour bus ride and I had work to do. Then I saw the weather outside, and I went anyway. Monorail – Space Needle – Pike Place Market – wonderful.

This is the tower reflected in the building nearby. Amazing stuff.

Another view from the top of the needle.

I took a bunch of pictures that will no doubt appear on these pages over the years. Then it was time to board the return bus and head back to pick up my luggage and catch the flight home. I’ve been using this rather cunning (I think) trick of getting up around 3:00 am while I’m out here to try and trick the body into not adjusting to the Seattle time zone. In a couple of days I’ll find out if it works…

It’s been a great trip. Very intense, but very rewarding. Great questions and interaction with the audience. Thanks folks.

Welcome to Hull

If you’ve got your results and you’re coming to Hull to study then welcome. The campus was looking lovely in the early morning sunshine so I took a few pictures on the walk to my office. There are a few more on my Flickr pages.

This is our front door. Please don’t pull on the blue rope. We are on the third floor of the Robert Blackburn building. See you an a few weeks.

A Job With Rob

One of the great things that the university does is Knowledge Transfer Partnerships. These are set up to do two things. Get students into good jobs and spread expertise into business. We are presently setting one up and I’m one of the academics at Hull University who is involved with managing the work. It is a very interesting project in a nice part of the world (not Hull actually) with good pay. If you are a recent graduate who wants to get started in the business you could do a lot worse than apply. Even though you might end up in meetings with me….

There are lots of KTPs out there. The one I’m talking about is here. You can find lots more, including some others from the university here.

A Floor in the Plan

Spent some of today looking at kitchens and tiles. Great fun. No, really. Very useful to have a phone with a good camera. Whenever we saw something we wanted to remember we just took a picture. No messing around writing down names and numbers, just a quick click and there you are. These pictures are then dutifully uploaded by the phone to SkyDrive where they will probably stay for ever…

Bristol M Shed

Outside M Shed they have this rather nice boat

M Shed is a really good industrial museum in Bristol. You should go. It’s free and the whole setup tells the tale of commerce and trade in Bristol through the ages. The cafe is nice too, and they have a rooftop terrace with some really nice views that will find their way onto these pages once I’ve tidied them up a bit.

Inside they have some very interesting exhibits with roots in the area, including this Raleigh moped.

Sent Packing

Packing again for a trip away. Put the clothes in a tiny bag. Put the mains leads, power supplies, cables, gadgets ect. in a slightly larger bag.

Meeting Alfred Thompson

Alfred and I, conveniently name tagged for your convenience. No idea who the bloke in the background is though…

One of the really nice things about going to the Imagine Cup was that I got to meet up with some friends I’d never met. One of them was Alfred Thompson. I’ve known Alfred since the days of “the Spoke”, an early network community where we used to via for visits to our respective pages. This was way back in 2003, when the idea of community sites and stuff was just taking off. I was very proud of the fact that I’d had more visitors to my page, right up to the point where Alfred overtook me and headed off into the distance.

Alfred works hard to promote Computer Science as a “good thing” and it was nice to finally meet up and swap some stories.

Back Home

Got home today after an overnight flight which managed to steal five hours of my birthday. Oh well. Nice to be back though. Hull is looking good in the sunshine.

Heading Home

These are some of the tickets, brochures and badges that we have used over the last couple of weeks. Some great memories here.

And now we have to fly back.

MIT Museum

This one’s for you, Dr Brayshaw….

We went to the MIT Museum today. One of the highlights of the trip. They take all the things they’ve done and put them on display. Great idea, and some really interesting stuff.

Robot close-up. I know what a few of these chips actually do..

They had this robots idea wall. I had to add an idea of my own. I’ll be back next year to see how they’ve got on.

Franklin Park Zoo

Boston has a really nice zoo, located a way out of town – the journey itself was a bit of an adventure, particularly as we missed the stop to get off the bus.

They have some butterflies.

..at least one peacock..

..and a gorilla.

At the moment things are very, very hot. We had to keep ducking back into the gift shop to cool down.