Happy Holidays Rob…
Today could have gone one of two ways:
Good weather -> trip to the seaside
Bad weather –> replace the flooring in the porch
Ho hum, at least the stuff in question didn’t put up too much of a fight. And we do have quite a small porch.
We had out last formal Open Day of the “season” today. We’ll be having more University Open Days later in the year, but this was our last one for entrants for next September. Above you can see some of the audience. Thanks for making the trip to Hull folks.
Notice how Darren (HellBoy) has filed down his two horns to just a couple of yellow marks on his head, specially for his birthday…
It was Darren’s 40th birthday yesterday. He knew this. What he didn’t know was that we did too. So when he turned up for a “jetlagged drink” this evening he wasn’t quite expecting a whole bunch of folks to jump out and say surprise. So we did.
Great fun was had by all, lots of familiar faces, drink, and cake. Number one wife reminded me that the next “big birthday” for me will be my sixtieth. Can’t wait.
I took this in Hull Holy Trinity Church this morning while I was up town shopping. It is an HDR picture made from five original images. I’m quite pleased with how it turned out.
Then, this afternoon we had our last Saturday open day of the season. As usual I took a shot of the audience:
Another good turnout. And of course we had a lucky (!?) winner of my XNA book.
After the open day it was back home to vacuum round the house (what lifestyle I have) and spend some more time playing with HDR pictures.
I quite like this one too. Next time I’m going back with a proper tripod. Balancing the camera against bits of the furniture doesn’t always make for the best compositions.
If you live in Hull and you haven’t had a look around Hull Holy Trinity church then you are missing out. It has an interior that would put quite a few Minsters to shame.
This evening I went off to the Hull Digital March Meetup. We had a talk from Steve Bell of Kingston Communications about the upcoming fibre optic developments in the city. It looks like we are going to get some seriously fast networking around the place, I’m looking forward to getting it where I live. Then we had a talk from Gareth Hanson and Dave Foy who run 'Woof', an on-line marketing consultancy based in Hull. They were talking about Google Analytics. I use it on this site to carefully track all my visitors and analyse the effect of changes to the content so that I can relentlessly tune the material to increase the number of visitors and make them stay longer.
Actually I don’t. Because my blog is not really a business as such. I have Google Analytics enabled, and every now and then I go and look at which way the curves are going, but I don’t really do much with the information. But the important thing is that I could. Gareth and Dave made the point that by proper configuration of the analytic content in your pages you can find out where readers “bounce” from the site and the effectiveness of each step of your transactions. The bottom line is that if you are serious about making the most of your web presence, and finding out which of your pages are working hardest for you, you should look into this technology.
Saturday open days are always busy, this is some of the audience from today. Thanks for being another great audience and laughing at my jokes (at least most of them).
Just to show I have no fear, I set up the Kinect sensor and showed some demos of that before the actual talk, and it worked a treat, which is nice. You can click through the picture to the full size image on Flickr and also a picture of today’s lucky prize winner.
These are some of the open day attendees. I’ll settle for “Mostly Happy”.
We had another Open Day today. Good attendance for a mid-week session, which was nice. There was even a chap there who had got hold of my yellow book, written some games and made money out of them. Can’t be bad.
This is the winner of the prize draw, accepting her prize from Warren.
Here’s a tip. If you are buying a digital camera which is not completely new, point it at a white piece of paper and take a photo. Then look at the result. The photograph will show you if there is any dirt on the sensor or the lens.
I didn’t do this today, which is why I had to take the camera back to the shop……..
The students came back to lectures today. A chance to use all those great jokes that I’ve been practicing over the break.
Or something.
Did my Graduands Marshal thing this morning. As usual I took a picture of the audience and it mostly came out OK, sorry if you are in the blurry part of the audience… There are some more of the other ceremonies on Flickr. Click on the right to find my photostream and take a look. I should have set a faster shutter speed really. I tend to fret about noise (which you get when you make the camera more sensitive to light) whereas I should remember that you can always get rid of noise, but you can’t do anything if the picture is blurred….
Both ceremonies were really good ones, I hope you had a good time if you were there. For me one of the the best bits was finding the chap next to me had a Nokia Lumia 800, and was liking it.
I have a few hero/heroines in my life. One of them is Verity Stob. She has been writing about computers for about as long as I’ve been playing with them. I’ve mentioned her before, and now I’ve discovered to my great joy that she is still writing for The Register. Her piece on exceptions is one of the best I’ve read on the subject. If you have any interest in computers you should read her stuff and treasure it.
Keep your diaries free for the weekend of 17th 18th March folks. You know why….
Last week I sold a MacBook and bought a camera. And got a free copy of Adobe Lightroom. And it is wonderful. Up until now I’ve been muddling through managing my many photographs, keeping them in folders and using Windows explorer to find and look after them. This mostly works, but it is a bit of a pain.
Lightroom provides a really good way to find and then fix your pictures. It works really well with raw files and the noise reduction abilities are awesome. It also has some rather cool picture styles built in. And it will upload directly to Facebook, Flickr and SmugMug, among other places. It also takes care of the importing and has very good tagging and metadata management.
If you are serious about your photography, then I think you should take a good look at it. The trial download runs for 30 days or so, by which time you should be hooked.
I had one of those happy/sad moments today. Someone showed me a stunning little game they’d written for Windows Phone. Snappy graphics and fun to play. “Is it in the Marketplace?” I asked. “No” was the reply.
Some people hold back until their game is “finished”. This is a bad idea. There is no such thing as finished as far as a developer is concerned. You can always add bits, make it better, tidy up the class design, make all the curly brackets line up. But if you keep on like that you never get anything out there. I’m not saying that you should push out broken programs, I’m saying that things like on-line high score tables, multi-player, extra levels, a level editor etc can always be added later.
The faster you can get something out there the faster you can start getting feedback and recognition. So go for it.
I’m always impressed by how clever modern things are. But I’m also perplexed how some people take all this cleverness and make things that aren’t very useful. Take my telly. I’ve got a Sony PS3 plugged into a Sony amplifier which is connected to a Sony TV. When I try to watch a Bu-ray disk on the PS3 it takes ages to connect to the TV and I sometimes get a bright green (or purple – it varies) screen. And often the PS3 has forgotten all about any previous audio settings that I’ve laboriously made so that I have to go and do them all again. And when I watch the Blu-Ray (also from Sony Columbia Studios) it shows me a warning that because the disc contains “Advanced Interactive Content” (which I have no interest in) it might take several minutes to get started. And then when it has loaded the disk it insists on showing me lots of trailers and other stuff about how much Blu-Ray is better than DVDs before I get to the main feature that I have paid money to see. Say what you like about my old record player, but I could guarantee that within 10 seconds of arriving home with a new album I could be listening to it.
Wah. Did nobody at Sony actually try to use this stuff? Apple are rumoured to be moving into TV soon. I bet their system won’t have 30 second pauses while nothing useful happens. Here’s hoping that their presence will force manufacturers to get their act together.
Bought four of these today. Very expensive, but they did each come with a free chair.
Got a spiffy red case for my Lumia 800 today. I like the way that it really looks part of the phone, even to the way that the buttons show through holds in the case itself. I’ve got a blue one on order so that I can change the colour to reflect my mood. As long as I only have three moods – black, red and blue.
I was up in the loft again today and I happened across something of great historical interest. I found a Computer Science Departmental Prospectus from 1978, the year that I graduated. I’d kept it because, ahem, I’m in it.
This is the cover. Any idea which language this is?
..and this is the money shot. I think I’ve probably still got those shoes somewhere. And that hairstyle….
The computer in the corner (yes, that is a computer) was a Prime machine and myself and the other chap (another prize for naming him) were allowed special access to it for our Final Year Projects. We then went onto create an unbeatable version of the “Fox and Hounds” board game that was so good that nobody wanted to play it.
Good times.
For some reason we always try to go and see the sea early in the New Year. This usually means a trip to Hornsea. Today the weather and the tide were very kind to us, and so we had a little walk down the beach and I took some snaps.
The weather was nice, but very chilly in the wind. We sought refuge in an amusement arcade.
They have these “Penny Falls” machines where you try and push pennies off the a ramp. This looks like it is good to drop, but I reckon those coins are super glued into position…
This
plus this
equals this
Yay!
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.
