My Two Dogs

Digby and Wrex

Simon Grey has been posting about his dogs. So I thought I’d post about my two. On the left we have Digby, who is sufficiently autonomous that he can fall downstairs unaided. On the right we have Wrex, who doesn’t do much by himself but has a really cool remote control.

Digby doesn’t get out much these days. But today I powered him up and let him wander around for a while. The best comment about him that I ever heard was from someone who actually owned a dog. “That’s just what my dog used to do” she said as she watched him wander around. It is a crying shame that Sony stopped making Aibo robots, they were just getting interesting when the company pulled the plug.

With all the sensor and processor developments taking place at the moment Aibo 2.0 would be awesome.

Protecting your data for free

What’s the most important component of your computer? The cpu? That expensive graphics card? The three monitors that you’ve plugged into it?

Wrong.

The most important component in your computer is the data that you put into it. If you lost any of the others it would be a simple matter of getting another lump of hardware. Sure, it might hurt a bit, but the fix is an easy one. Just replace the missing piece.

If you lose your data you not only have the problem of restoring the information, but frequently you don’t know just what you have lost. The importance of that little file of test data or the original of that letter you wrote nine months ago will only become apparent long after you’ve replaced the failed disc drive.

That’s why you should use Dropbox, Live Mesh or Skydrive (or all three if you have a lot of files you want to look after). These systems put your data in the cloud for you. Dropbox is good because it also does versioning, you can even recover when you damage a file by overwriting. The other two are good because they provide a bit more free storage. Google are also getting into the cloud storage act with Google Drive, which is available in the US but not the UK yet.

I keep all my files in the cloud. I can fit all my important documents and presentations into the few GBytes that they provide for free. All the above systems let me easily move my files from one machine to another, so if I get a new machine I just have to sign into the account for that particular service and then wait as all my files are magically loaded onto it. This makes the hardware pretty much incidental. I can use any machine to work on since the latest versions of my files will arrive from wherever I was working before. The decks I’m going to present on my “twisty top” tablet will move onto it in the time it takes me to walk to the lecture theatre.

All these systems are free and there is no excuse for not using them.

Don’t Forget the Sanity Check

I sent out a bunch of emails today with the details of the lab demonstrations for the First Year programming course. Last time I did this I managed to make the final part of the schedule repeat, so that I had some students down for multiple sessions. At the time I remember thinking “Better not do that again”.

Of course I did though. I had all the sessions spread over four days, which is a long time. Too long. If I’d done a simple Sanity Check – e.g. “If we can mark 66 students in one day, how long does it take to do 170 or so?” then I’d have figured out that something was wrong. But I didn’t. I just blindly copied down the slots and pasted them into the timetable document. Idiot me.

This illustrates an important point. Just before you press send, or submit the file, or do whatever it is that sends your work off, you should do a quick “Sanity Check”. Just make sure that there is nothing obviously wrong. Quite often you’ll focus on all the small bits (like I did) and not check the big picture. See if you can come up with some simple test that you can use to make sure that nothing is stupidly wrong – like creating 240 slots for 170 students…..

Singapore Rocks

Before I went to Singapore a few people said that I’d like it there. They were right. I’d go back tomorrow if I could. For a Brit it has a weird “Abroad without being abroad” kind of feel. The cars drive on proper side of the road. Lots of the streets have familiar, English sounding names. Even the mains sockets look the same. And yet, unlike the UK, there is a vibrancy about the place that is really rather nice.

They have lots (and I mean lots) of shopping malls. They have Prada and even Mont Blanc shops like other places have Starbucks. And they have Starbucks as well. I’d love to have had more time to take a bit more of a look around, most of what I saw was basically like a tidy, well run city anywhere in the world.

My advice; if you get the chance to go, just go. Even if it means a 30 hour journey.

Mage Knight Winner

Over the last two evenings we’ve been playing Mage Knight, a game that number one son brought along. My goodness it’s complicated. Cards, markers, dice, crystals, hexagonal maps, little figures and towers. And a winner. Me. Not sure how I did it but I ended up with more fame than anyone else at the end, which is how they decide who wins. Great fun.

Good Friday at Sewerby Hall

Today, despite the poor weather and the even nastier forecast, we headed of to Sewerby Hall, another of my favourite places in all the world. It has the most amazing gardens, as you can see above. We had a great lunch and then took a walk along the cliff tops.

This picture is probably more in keeping with the weather, which by now had gone back to horrid grey mode after the promise of yesterday.

Merely Hornsea

Now, isn’t this a turn-up for the books? After yesterdays “grey-fest” today has dawned all bright and sunny. Of course, we’ve got to stay at home waiting for a package to be delivered, but once that arrived we headed out to Hornsea Mere, one of my favourite places in all the world. It has a place you can buy cups of tea, and a very old Pike stuck on the wall.

It also has a pitch and putt golf course where I once got a hole in one. Unfortunately it was the wrong hole though. The massive slice I played at hole number 1 somehow ended up in hole number 9. And there are ducks and geese and boats and stuff.

“You lookin’ at my bird?”

Cafe view

If you are lucky enough to be a student at Hull and you are at a loose end later this term, take a trip to the Mere. Just a great place.

A Floor in the Plan

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.

Last Open Day of the Season

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.

Happy 40th Birthday Darren

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.

Open Day and Holy Trinity HDR

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.

Hull Digital March Meetup

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 Day

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.

Open Day

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.

Cameras and Lumps

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……..

Back in Lecture Mode

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.

Degrees of Fun

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.

Read Verity Stob

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.

Three Thing Game Three is Coming

Keep your diaries free for the weekend of 17th 18th March folks. You know why….

Lightroom Rocks

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.