First person to correctly guess what’s in the bag wins a bag of their own..
I’ve been told that a sensible amount of exercise is a brisk thirty minute walk each day. Turns out that Sugar Sugar Sweets is almost exactly fifteen minutes walk from my office. Result.
Should you be stupid/unlucky enough to overwrite a file you have stored on SkyDrive you might like to know that you can bring back previous versions of your files by opening Version History. Open your folder in the browser via https://skydrive.live.com/ and right click the file name.
Select Version History from the menu that appears and then travel back in time to get the file that you want. This saved my bacon tonight.
Here’s a nice picture to cheer me up.
Some days are great. Some days just grate. Today was in the latter category. Nothing too much, just lots of things going wrong when they really shouldn’t. Like me managing to delete a file rather than copy it to a USB key. I didn’t know this was possible, what with the the recycle bin and all, but I managed to achieve this magical feat and flush a couple of hours of careful Powerpointing down the toilet. By the end of the day, as I pulled up at the traffic lights on the way home I realised that one more thing had gone wrong. My phone wasn’t in my pocket where it should be.
So it was time for a frantic U turn back to the office, where of course the phone wasn’t. At this point something nice did happen. I met up with a couple of early first years (we start next Monday) who were taking a look around the place so they know where things are before the madness of Fresher’s Week kicks in. I said hello and welcome, but I must have seemed a bit distracted as I was wondering where my lovely Lumia had got to.
Finally I found it, down the side of the car seat where it had dropped. And the really, really annoying thing is that of course if I’d thought to check the Bluetooth on the car (which was lit up on the dashboard as usual) then I’d never had any of the panic. It just goes to show that if you expect bad things to be happening, you can then go on to make them happen yourself.
Oh well.
And then this morning I put on the wrong jacket and then spent a frantic five minutes looking for the wallet that wasn't in the pocket. I hope this is not an ongoing thing....
The weather today was splendid. Nice and warm. Lovely for just about everyone at the first Cottingham Food Festival. Except the unfortunate folks selling hand made chocolates in bright sunshine…
They did it properly, closed the streets and then filled the place with over thirty stalls selling all kinds of yummy stuff. And they had a big tent for the cookery demonstrations. And a bouncy castle. And hook a duck. And a slide. Which I am unfortunately far too old for.
Anyhoo, we had a wander round, bought some chocolates and cupcakes (the peanut butter ones were excellent) then staggered home. I hope they do it again next year.
Creative Tool?
I’m in the middle of updating the Windows Phone Blue Book to Windows Phone 8. It is going quite well and should be out and about in a few weeks. I’ve reached the point where I have to dream up some ideas for lab exercises for some of the fancy new features in Windows Phone 8.
So I vacuumed the house.
This works very well for me, and I reckon it might work well for you. I find that if I sit down and think to myself “Right Rob, time for you to have some great ideas” then nothing much happens except that I get a headache and an urge to do something else. However, if I do a boring job like wash the car or push the vacuum around for a while the ideas seem to percolate through quite nicely.
After forty five minutes or so I had a cleaner house and a couple of lab ideas. And I even had this idea for a blog post too. Bonus.
Actually, it is pretty great to be back in the department. In spite of what my calculator says.
We have shiny new students arriving in a couple of weeks and loads of things to plan and do. We also have new toys to play with and people to meet. I’m really looking forward to it all.
It’s been a while since I’ve travelled somewhere with the express purpose of doing nothing when I get there. Heading off to Imagine Cup, TechEd, Campus Europe or whatever is always great fun, but there is always that underlying concern that you might not have the right kind of VGA adapter for the Surface in your bag when you get there. And they might not laugh at the jokes.
Anyhoo, today we are setting off for a week in the Italian Lakes. Actually, not in the lakes, that would be silly, but in a carefully selected, economically priced establishment just on the shoreline. Of course, I’ve not completely released my grip on my iron work ethic, there will be blog posts and pictures.
But I’ll do them when I get back.
Hull is one of the cities in the running for “City of Culture 2017”. On the showing of the Freedom Festival event we went to today I think it is there already.
It. Was. Awesome.
They had these fluttering flags all around the city centre.
And the museum up town had been suitably decorated.
I’m ashamed to admit that this was my first trip down to the festival. We are not normally around this time of year, but having seen some of the preparations and with a good (but not great) weather forecast we decided to go for it tonight.
I’m so glad we did. Everything was wonderful. You just walked around a corner and there was another great band, playing superb music. We bounced off various stages and I took some pictures.
This is Kirsty Almeida, with her brilliant band. Great jazz singing, amazing musicians.
I’m not sure who these guys are. But by gum they were good. And loud.
And this is acrobatics to a driving African beat.
Around the streets we had some donuts that were cooked before our eyes (and were yummy), went round an art show and visited the Museum of Club Culture who had a special David Bowie exhibition. Then we bought some strawberry sherbet bon-bons a pig shaped bag from the craft stall (not for me) took in a few more acts and headed home.
The festival is on for the rest of the weekend.
Get. Down. There.
Last week our washing machine broke. Yesterday I fitted the new one. Only problem is that the new machine is slightly larger and catches a cupboard door so that it won’t quite open as wide as it used to. This means that we can’t get the cleaning bucket out of the cupboard very easily. My proposed solution was to design and 3D print a new hinge that moved the door pivot point as it was opened so that it didn’t catch the washing machine and the door could open further. Number one wife suggested we put the bucket in another cupboard.
Ever fancied playing a card game with the aim of finding the most powerful moustache? Well, if you do, thanks to number one daughter, I’ve got a copy. It is a bit like Geek Power, but based on facial hair. The pictures are great (where do they find these people?), along with the captions.
Earlier this year I bought a new computer. And now I seem to have broken it. I appear to have a rare talent, I can over time reduce any computer to abject uselessness. I have behind me a trail of Dell, Novatech and even Apple machines which have slowed down to a snails pace and become much harder to use. Just because I’ve been using them for a while.
My lovely Sony Ultrabook is still mostly lovely, but the touch screen driver has acquired an irritating habit of suddenly tapping the touch screen rapidly and making the mouse unusable. I can get rid of that problem by using CTRL+ALT+DEL to bring up the lock screen but it is still irritating. I’m not sure if it is hardware or software to be honest, it seemed to start after I took the (apparently stupid) step of enabling the automatic download of updates and the machine turned itself on in my bag and tried to commit thermal suicide.
I can live with the occasional touch screen foibles though, what I’m finding much harder to deal with is the way that the “Anti Malware Service Executable” will suddenly and violently take my machine away from me by pushing the hard drive activity to 100%. This happens after a reboot and when I’m trying to get something done and is very annoying. The stupid process seems to have no way of working out that “Robert is actually using the machine now” and just wades in and breaks everything.
While it is amusingly ironic that a program designed to protect me against my machine becoming clogged and unusable is actually making my machine clogged and unusable, it is also darned annoying.
Verity Stob writes of cruft, which builds up and slows down a machine, and I’m probably suffering a bit from that. I think that when Windows 8.1 shows up I’ll do a complete re-install and see if that sorts things out.
This is the view from the window at C4DI down in the Fruit Market part of Hull. This is definitely a region “on the grow”, what with Platform Expo and a bunch of other tech folks setting up shop around there. As you can see, it is a stone’s throw from The Deep, a fantastic looking building (although I don’t think they’d appreciate you throwing stones at it…)
Anyhoo, C4DI provide space for business to start, grow and flourish. For a monthly fee you can get access to a desk, power, a fast (and I mean really fast) network connection and ample coffee.
You are also surrounded by like minded folks, and so there is tremendous scope for mentoring and collaboration. Jon Moss, one of the folks behind the project, will be coming up to the university to talk about what they are doing as part of our Rather Useful Seminar series next semester. They have some amazing plans for the future.
Peter and I went down to C4DI to talk about taking part in session about 3D printing that we hope to set up in a month or so. While we there we sat in on a Skype call with Brendan Dawes, which was very illuminating. I know what I want to do when I grow up now….
My view of the call
Brendon takes stuff, fiddles with it to find out what it can do and then uses it to make interesting things. I sometimes build things “for no reason” or to see what they do, and I love the idea of being able to do that for real. He has been doing some neat things with Electric Imp devices. I saw these a while back but the cloud based model that underpins them worried me a bit as I’ve bought a couple of devices (Chumby and Nabaztag rabbit) that turned into paperweights when their supporting companies went bust. However, if you think of them as a bit of fun you can have for less than the price of a video game, they start to get a lot more interesting.
I’m going to get one or two to play with when I get some free time. And I’ve paid for the new washing machine that I seem to need…
If you have a white van, you have to go to Ikea. I’m sure it’s in the handbook somewhere.
We drove the last leg of the journey today. Used my lovely Lumia 920 for navigation and it worked really well, except for one bit where the program threw a strop on the way out of Ikea. Probably because I inadvertently asked for a walking route down the M62.
Anyhoo, I used to think that I’d never buy a car without a SatNav built in, but the Here Drive application has totally won me over to phone based navigation. It was very, very good. We even amused ourselves by watching the speed limit display on the phone change at exactly the point where we went past the speed limit signs. And it makes warning noises when you exceed the limits. At one point I had a light on the dashboard telling me to change up a gear, and the phone beeping to try and get me to slow down. Talk about mixed messages.
I think now that I’d never buy a car without a phone holder built in. Which I’m not sure they make. Rather strangely modern cars these days have magical unfolding cup holders that spring out of the dashboard, but nothing you can easily slip your phone into. I had to resort to buying a plastic clippy thing at a motorway service station and then wedging it on the dashboard with a pack of tissues. Well worth it though, made the journey much easier.
And now I’m back in Lovely Hull, the van has been returned, and I’ve just taken delivery of a box which should, if I’m lucky, contain a Lumia 1020 phone.
Weapon of choice.
For the next couple of days I’m leading a nomadic existence. Just me and a Bedford Luton van, hurting down the country, filling the van with stuff and then driving it all somewhere else. I’ve done this quite a bit in the past, helping families and friends move. and I quite like doing it really. There’s something about driving a great big van that is rather nice. You learn things:
So how come, having said to number one daughter “Don’t let me buy anything else today, or perhaps ever.”, I still end up with a Lego Back to the Future kit?
Just had a visit from a Fire Safety person (#nogoodwillcomeofthis)
He didn’t really have to say much. Just look around my office at the collection of daisy chained mains cables, piles of paper and other inflammable detritus lying around the place. So, time for a tidy up methinks. My bin is now full and I can see part of the surface of my desk. And two mains extensions have gone back to the systems team. I also found this rather nice button while I was clearing up. Ongoing.
Ha. Found the other button. Knew I had two.
The minic system in the bridge control room
Little known fact. Since 1998, if you have driven over the Humber Bridge and paid a toll then you have been interacting with some software that I wrote. Ian Bell and myself produced the instation and minic software that has been keeping track of bridge crossings and toll takings. We worked with Siemens Road Traffic Controls who put the hardware into the booths, our code kept track of mis-registrations and printed out the totals tables. It’s been working ever since, with a mid term upgrade and a little problem when it lasted longer than it was supposed to.
And today, just after 5 o’clock in the afternoon, I turned it off forever.
The final moments
The system is being replaced by an altogether more up to date one, which allows for toll payment without stopping, special rf badges and all kinds of new fangled things.
It seems like less and less of my software is being used in the world. For a magical time a few years ago programs I had written were putting datestamps on Budweiser beer and Cadbury’s Roses, passing part programs into machines that cut wing-spars for aircraft, measuring winch lengths on trawlers and flushing toilets in the Reckit and Coleman test labs in Hull. Happy days.
Anyone can write, just like anyone can cook. As soon as you move from restaurants and ready meals to getting ingredients and mixing them in pans you can start thinking about getting a white uniform and people shouting “Yes chef!” to you across steam filled kitchens. Moving beyond shopping lists and one line Facebook updates means that you can start pondering putting “writer” on your business card and extracting killer quotes from unresponsive interviewees. Or then again, perhaps not, because of course the really important thing is what everyone else calls you.
If you are the only person that thinks you are the next Jamie Oliver then you might have a hard time getting folks to eat your food. And while the internet does provide a potential audience of billions, getting them all to come and read your web site will take more than just your idea of deathless prose. This means that you have to do the hard stuff, like practice and learning how to get better.
I’ve never dared call myself a writer; I’m more someone who throws a bunch of words at a blog post every day to see which ones stick. But today I went along to a Guardian Master class called “Writing with Colour” to find out a bit more about this writing business. There was actually another reason for going as well, the sessions were being given by writers who I’d long admired from afar, and I liked the idea of admiring them from a bit closer up.
There were about 80 or so of us on the course, which took place in the actual Guardian newspaper building in London. The sessions were all great. If you have a low opinion of journalists and editors then you should go along, just to find out how thoughtful and considered these folks are about what they do. I’m pretty sure that not all writers are like this, but these were folks who I’d be happy to listen to all day, which is just as well, because that is what we did.
A few of my thoughts from the sessions:
Read what you have written. Out loud. All the writers took evident pleasure in reading what they had put on the page. This is as confidence thing I reckon and darned good advice. Sometimes you might like what you hear. If you don’t like it, go back and change it until you do.
Be loyal to your work. This can mean a bit of internal wrangling as you seek permission to print that quote from a reluctant interviewee. It might mean you can’t be a totally nice person all the time. And it might mean dropping that wonderful sequence because it doesn’t add anything to the piece.
Always deliver what you were asked for. Someone asked Lucy Mangan what she did if her four o’clock deadline came along and she hadn’t thought of anything to write about. Her reply was brilliant. That. Does. Not. Happen. If you are a proper writer and you are asked to write something that’s what you do. You can wrestle with your inner demons about the content (and you should) after you have pressed the send button, but the important thing is if you are asked for 550 words you should deliver 550, along with a convincing pitch for why you should be allowed another 200 or so.
Always edit, and always cut. The editor is the person who makes things better and tighter, sometimes by cutting out what the writer thought of as the best bits. If we end up losing the traditions of print journalism I reckon the editor is the person we will miss the most. This probably means that writers will have to spend more time editing their own work. So try to do this.
Work at what you write. I was very pleased to find that nobody said that they found writing easy. Everyone said they had to work at it. Interviews take preparation and persistence in writing everything down. Features take research and rewriting. And the work doesn’t stop when the piece is finished, everyone valued re-visiting items and look at why they wrote what they wrote.
Seek out the colour. Work to find that killer fact, or interesting angle, which will give you a hook to hang your words on or will be quoted in the pub by your readers. If you are very lucky the colour will find you, but mostly you find it in the research you did, or the huge pile of notes that you made.
Last week I sent a jaunty tweet to the organisers saying how I was bringing along some crayons, as the subject was “Writing with colour”. I can imagine the sinking feeling in the stomach of the recipient, along the lines of “We’ve got a right one here….” Sorry about that.
Anyhoo, I found the whole affair really stimulating, and if you want to get tips about improving your writing style, and maybe meet a few heroes, then it is well worth the price of admission. And the lunch was good too.
Our car SatNav has a mode where it will give directions over another audio signal, automatically turning down the music/radio or whatever when it wants to tell you want to do. Today we were using it while listening to some comedy on the radio, which worked really well. It was great to hear the machine say “At the roundabout, take the first exit” and then get a huge laugh and a round of applause from the audience.
This is one of my designs for my Surface RT. I just like the colours.
While I was at the Imagine Cup I was admiring the rather nice skin that Ben Riga had on his Surface device. Turns out that it is supplied by Decalgirl. Ben showed me the web site and within no time I was wasting hours trying to find the perfect skins for my devices. Then I found out that you can upload your own artwork and I then lost even more of my life finding suitable pictures and uploading them to their skin design pages. Thanks Ben.
Anyhoo, the skins arrive in a couple of weeks and I’m looking forward to seeing how they have turned out. But for me the reason for mentioning the company is that I reckon that they are just about the perfect web trading operation. Their site has a snazzy design and is quick to use. Within seconds of arriving on the home page for the first time I’m offered the chance to sign up to get a discount on my first order. Then, when I don’t buy anything for a while I get a follow up email with an even better discount. When I left my partially completed order on the system for a few days I got an email reminding me my order is still out there and giving me a chance to finalize it. Then I get regular emails detailing the progress of the order and I’m sure that I’ll get more over time as new designs appear. And all done in a way that leaves me thinking that I’m not being badgered to buy stuff, but helped along with my purchases. Very, very well done.
If you are involved in ecommerce and want to see it done well (and by the by find some awesome skins for your various devices) then they are well worth a look.
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.
