That's Torn it

I was going to have a play with Tearaway for the PS Vita today.  I picked up a cheap copy yesterday. But since I seem to have lost the charger and the magic Vita cable that it uses, I'm going to have to wait a bit. Oh well.  

Creativity

In case you were wondering, this is what creativity looks like. At least in my part of the house....

So now it's OneDrive...

Just found this in Word 2013. I wonder how it did that?

We Welcome our Robot Masters

I took this picture in the robots lab a little while back. We've got some "Eddie" robots that we are going to get wandering around the department. Should be fun. 

Open Day Ego Mania

We had an admissions open day today. First one of 2014. And it was packed, which was rather nice. I did the opening talk, as I do, and then we split up the attendees to allow the prospective students a chance for a lecture experience and us to have a chat with their parents. And someone asked me a question that I've not heard before, but struck me as a very sensible one. "We've been going round universities and looking at their departments for a while now. What has Hull got that they haven't?".

I could have said we have Three Thing Game or Rather Useful Seminars or Seed Software or Freeside or any number of things. Instead I said "I work here." It got a laugh, which was nice, and then we went onto mention all of the above plus a whole bunch of other things. 

As I was preparing to answer the question I looked across at Mike, John, Brian and Neil from the department and I knew that they were expecting me to say exactly what I did.......

Domain Name Suffering

Turns out these numbers are quite important

Every now and then I do something really idiotic. I try not to, but perhaps there is a "Conservation of Stupidity" thing at work in the universe which means that every half way clever thing Robert does must be compensated for with an action of outright daftness.

Anyhoo, yesterday I was working on www.wherewouldyouthink.com, a little site for use by anyone thinking about university. It has a bunch of bits and bobs about student life and whatnot. And I was re-hosting it all using glorious Squarespace Version 6. To make this work I had to update the DNS settings for the site. And I remembered that I'd done that for this venerable site only recently, so I might as well copy those settings.  So I opened up my doman name hosting folks and made some adjustments. And by mistake I ended up changing the IP address of my two sites to completely the wrong values. This turned out to be a very, very, silly thing to do. 

The IP address is like the telephone number of a host on the internet. It is now part of popular culture. There is usually a point in a crime/spy caper where the evil guys have been posting things on the internet and one of the tech guys says "I've got their IP address, let's go..." Cue onscreen map, squeal of rubber as cars hurtle down ramps and gunfight before end credits. 

We don't like having to remember phone numbers, so we have an address book in our phones that maps names onto the appropriate digits. This saves us work and it is also useful because when someone gets a new handset you can just update their number and stay in touch.

The internet works in just the same way. Normally we don't bother with 198.185.159.135, instead we put www.robmiles.com into our browser. But something has to do the mapping of names to numbers,  and that something is the Domain Name Service, or DNS for short. This is like the address book for the internet. It is very cleverly designed, with a hierarchy of servers giving out addresses for names.

If your computer asks the local network for a host and the network server doesn't know the address of that one it will ask the one above, and so on to the very top of the tree. When a new name is added to the internet it is added to the very top site and eventually the name/address pair percolate down to the all the machines in the tree.

Each server will keep local copies of the address values so that it doesn't have to keep asking the one above it for help. But every now and then it checks to see if the copy it has is up to date. This means that if the address at the top changes it takes a while for this to have an effect. 

So when I broke my DNS settings everything kept going for a while. But then my site started to become inaccessible. And in a very strange way. Depending on which network I used, the site would either work or it wouldn't, depending on whether the DNS data was "fresh" or "old". 

Of course I figured out what had happened very quickly, and fixed it fast. But it still took the best part of a day for things to settle down and return to normal.  Oh well, I'll be a lot more careful in future when I fiddle with those numbers.

Driving a Hard Bargain. And weddings.

An action packed day today. First we were off to a wedding fair. I'm not getting married, but I know someone who is..... Anyhoo, it was fun. Lots of free cake. 

Then, after lunch, it was on to look at second hand cars. Again, not for me, but apparently I'm the "car expert" in the family, mainly because I used to drive a very old, first generation Mini, and you had to become a bit of a car expert just to keep those kinds of cars going. So it was my job to kick tyres and wear a leather jacket in a knowledgeable way.

Times have moved on a bit. In my time in this part of the market the principle question you had to consider was "How much of this car is actually metal?" as the vehicles of the age tended to turn back into iron ore (or rust as it is more commonly known) really easily. The cars that we saw today, although they were at the lower end of the market, seemed to have all of their metal still present, which is the good news. The bad news is that a modern cars have very expensive engine management systems and other fancy electronic gizmos that are pretty much impossible to fix and very expensive to replace. My Mini had fewer electrical things in it than you could find in the door of a car today.  So rules about low mileage and as new as you can get it still apply in spades.

We  took a car for a test drive. That was fun. The car was being sold as low mileage. As in "freakishly low". As in "we replaced the speedometer last year low". The garage staff had definitely read "Pro-tips for car buyers" Chapter 1, where it is written that "You can tell mileage of a car by wear on things like the top of the gear stick and the foot pedals."  This car had a brand new gear lever and shiny pedals, which shows enterprise on the part of the sales team, but the amount of wobble in the gear linkage and rattles from under the bonnet told a story quite at odds with the number on the dial. 

As we were leaving, promising to think about the purchase, a chap came out with another salesman and examined the car we had just tested. We left with him looking around the vehicle with evident enthusiasm, opening the bonnet, peering inside and looking genuinely interested. I got to thinking that perhaps, if a sale looks like it is teetering on the brink, they get someone to come and do that in front of a prospective customer. But then I am very cynical. 

I only know two things about buying cars. One is that it is a lottery and the other is that it is expensive one way or another. You reach a point where you just have to take a deep breath and take the lowest risk that you can afford. Bit like life really.

More precious than gold...

I was up town today and was surprised to notice a low flying police helicopter overhead. Then a convoy streaked through the streets, escorted by motorcycle outriders with their flashing lights on and sirens blaring. They all stopped outside a local stationary warehouse and two men got out in full body armor and carried a bulky package into the building while snipers on the rooftops provided cover.

Once the convoy had left and the fuss had died down I wandered into the store to ask what was going on. The assistant looked up from her magazine and told me "We've just had another delivery of ink-jet cartridges."

Actually this didn't happen. But I've just bought some more ink for my printer, and from the price I'm pretty sure that this is how they arrive...

Big Graduation Ceremony in City Hall

I was Graduands Marshall at the university degree ceremony today. That meant I had to give a speech at the start to tell people what to do and then make sure that all the graduands (people who have qualified for their degree but not got it just yet) are present in the right order to go up on stage to strut their stuff in front of the Chancellor.

We were in Hull City Hall and the place was packed. I was told that there were only a handful of seats free and the place is big. I did my usual opening speech (with the appalling joke at the start) and it all went very well. I'd taken my own advice to turn my phone off and I've discovered that, lovely though the camera in my Lumia 1520 is, it doesn't work very well when the phone has been shut down.  So no pictures this time I'm afraid. 

Congratulations to everyone who got a degree today. 

The Single Headlight Theory

Driving home tonight I saw four cars with broken headlights. Me being me, I started to wonder why,

I've decided that it is the cold weather. Turns out that the electrical resistance of metal falls when the temperature drops. The lower the resistance, the larger the amount of current that can go through the filament. The greater the current, the more chance of the lamp failing if it has developed a weak spot somewhere. 

This is why bulbs often go "pop" just as you turn them on. The peak of current that they receive before the filament has warmed up and started to glow is usually when they are going to fail.

Up until now we have had a pretty mild winter, so lights with weak spots have had it easier. But over the last couple of days it has been proper cold, and I reckon that the extra current that has gone through the bulbs has finished them off.

That or I just noticed them more....

There goes my data allowance.....

What? Me worry?

Just got this email from KC about my internet. It is the kind of thing that happens when you have the family home for the holidays. I was quite worried until I saw the dates. I don't think it would be physically possible to go over my limit now, which makes sending the message a bit silly really...

Farewell to Thor

For the last couple of weeks we've been looking after Thor, number one daughter's hamster. Last night for some reason he sat out in the top of his cage. It was as if he was posing for goodbye pictures, so we took some. 

We took him home today and he was awake for most of the journey, looking out of the cage and wondering why the outside was moving past so quickly.

Learning a New User Interface would seem to be hard

I'm slowly getting my hang of the new user interface for blog publishing that I have to use now.

For now my pet hate is that some important behaviours are initiated by text that you have to click on, and others by buttons.  I hate that, and I've no idea why designers think it is a good idea. I reckon that if an element does something it should look like it does something, not like a message.

Oh well, I'm just going to have to get used to clicking on everything to see what happens....

Moving into the Future

Some time back I tried to move my blog. It didn't end well.  Now I'm trying again. The main reason is that changes to Twitter and Flickr have broken my blog posting workflow and Windows Live Writer (my blogging tool of choice for years) has been badly compromised by the way that high resolution displays in Windows 8.1 show the text as too tiny for my elderly eyes.

This move is not without cost. I'm expecting that some permanent links to resources may break during the move, I'm going to make a pass through the last six months or so of posts and fix them. If you find that a resource is not available then please let me know and I'll re-host the files and update the link. I think that if you access things via robmiles.co.uk you should be able to get everything as before. Then again, if it all goes horribly wrong you won't be able to read this post.....

The good news is that the new site has lots of lovely features that I'm very keen to try out. So please bear with me.

Laser Cutter Purchase Chicken

Ian came around today and we played a kind of “dangerous purchase chicken”, each trying to persuade the other that what we really need in our lives is a laser cutting machine. Turns out you can get these from ebay for a few hundred pounds, which for a device with a 40 watt C02 laser is actually amazing value we reckon.

The one we looked at can cut paper, card, leather and most other non-metallic materials. Including fingers and thumbs I suppose. The vendor page shows a video of the machine happily burning through card, with the lid wide open and presumably all the safety interlocks (which I hope it has) turned off.

It would be nice to be able to precisely cut plastic parts and the device might be a nice complement to Una the 3D printer. But bearing in mind that the thing is water cooled and needs a hole cutting in the wall to install the vent that gets rid of all the nasty smoke,  I think I’ll pass for now.

Donald Fagen and Lego Minifigures

I got a couple of great books for Christmas. It’s really nice when you get things that you like, but didn’t know existed until you pull off the wrapping paper. First up was Donald Fagen, Eminent Hipsters. I’ve been a fan of Steely Dan since forever. They make west coast sounding jazz/rock that number one wife says sounds like “Middle of the Road Music”. Whatever. I think they are great and they are still writing and touring despite being in their mid sixties.

The driving force behind the group, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, studied English Lit. as students and this really comes out in their lyrics and sleeve notes. And now Donald Fagen has published a collection of essays and notes with stories from his childhood, growing up as a jazz geek before the word geek became respectable, and also charting the trials of being a rock star on the road, jetting between five star hotels and sell out concert venues.

You won’t get much insight into the lyrics of the songs they’ve written, and to be honest Mr Fagen sounds like a bit of a grump from time to time. But he really can turn out a splendid phrase or two. A good read if you like well written prose. A truly great read if you follow the band.

When we go up town shopping I usually end up buying everyone a Lego minifigure. As if our house is short of bits of coloured plastic that are hard to dust. Anyhoo, they are fun to put together and always nicely themed.

It turns out that you can get a book about them. Now, I realise that what we have here is really just a brochure/catalogue/marketing thing that is probably a cynical ploy by a steel-hearted multi-national company bent on getting us to buy more bits of coloured plastic from them. But I like the pictures. And I like looking at the images and getting the “I’ve got one of them….” And you do get some more minifigures with the book as well……

Mending Glasses with Heat Shrink Tubing

.. and you get to play with things that look a bit like ray guns….

My glasses fell apart a while back and up until now I’ve been making use of duct tape to hold them together. This works but it is not great from an elegance point of view. So I’ve got hold of some heat shrink tubing and now I’m using that. The repair is much stronger, and unless you know to look, much harder to spot.

Heat shrink tubing is wonderful. It is just strong plastic tubing that you can buy in different diameters. And when you heat it up it, well, er, shrinks, tightly gripping what ever it has been slid over.

It’s best to use a heat gun like the one above, although you can use a hair dryer at a pinch. If you are serious about building your own electronics you should definitely make use of the stuff, particularly when you are soldering wires onto connectors. It provides a strong physical support for the connection and also insulates pins from each other.

Me, I’m now saving for the huge expense of getting another pair of specs.

Christmas Coup

I think she looks quite seasonal. What with those Christmas lights across her nose….

We had a great Christmas. I hope you did too. We rounded off the whole splendid day with a bit of theft, assassination and insurrection. As you do.

We played Coup. It is from the Resistance family of games and contains a similar mix of bluff, lies and downright nastiness. The game lasts only a few minutes each, which is nice because when you get assassinated by your nearest and dearest you can start plotting for the next round….

Great Christmas Eve

What can you write abut a day where you just sit around and have a nice time? Nothing much. And I really like that.

Shower of no power

Here’s a Christmas Riddle for you: “When is a shower not a shower?” The answer, at least in our house, is “At 7:35 am this morning” when number one wife turned the dial and nothing happened.

Truly, there is no better way of starting the week before Christmas, with guests arriving who will presumably be expecting bathing facilities, than by standing in the bath wearing your pyjamas and dismantling a shower unit. The hope was that it was just blocked. The fear (which was actually more of a certainty if I’m honest) was that something inside (probably the outlet valve) was bust.

Turned out that my fears were justified. However, thanks to the power of the internet, a bunch of calling round and the services of a very obliging plumber, we had the replacement in and working by the end of the day. All it meant was that I was a bit poorer,