It seems that the time synchronisation betweeen diary and time zones has just about been sorted out. I know this because I set my alarm an hour early on my PDA to allow for the fact that I am in a different time zone, set my PDA to the correct time zone and then got my wake up call an hour early.
Drat.
Last presentation of the day found me at a talk about the use of ink in Windows Presentation Foundation. This was a lovely presentation, not least because of what the speaker was using to run all the demonstrations.
He was running big chunks of the show on a lowly Samsung Q1. This is an ultra-mobile PC which you can just about fit in your pocket (if you have a big jacket). He swore that, over and above some slightly fancier hardware for the pen, his was a very standard machine, with only 512Mb of ram. Notwithstanding these limitations it proved quite happy to run all the demos, including the 3D one at the end, as well as Visual Studio, all sitting on top of Windows Vista.
This left me determined to put Vista on my Q1 when I get home. I don't have the fancy touch screen stuff, but I do have an extra 512Mb of ram, which should be interesting...
The talk itself was about how Windows Presentation Foundation supports ink. Unlike the original Tablet PC, which was forced to shoehorn ink in alongside all the other user interface gubbins, with WPF ink is an equal partner as far as the programmer is concerned. Couple this with the fact that all the WPF pages are rendered as vector items (no nasty size dependence and infinite scalability) and ink starts to look very viable in the future.
Ans: When it is a "framework".
Had a very good talk about Windows Communication Foundation.
This is the means by which software shall talk to software in the future. And jolly good it is too. For me the most impressive thing is the way that they have used the features of C# (interfaces, attributes etc) to make it easy to set up connections and select the components that you want to use in any given situation.
When I was a lad there was much talk of protocol stacks. I even wrote a song about the ISO/OSI seven layer stack for one of my world famous lectures in rhyme....
But these days things have moved on, and now the talk would seem to be of "frameworks". I think these are a bit like stacks, but laid on their sides and with the ability to have extra bits (like security and compression) plugged in alongside.
It does seem very easy to link two process on the same or different machines and it looks as if this technology will make a lot of hard wraught code redundant as it takes away a lot of the difficulty in linking programs together.
Just been to a presentation on Windows Presentation Foundation. This is the thing that I've been using to write a message system for the department. I thought I'd go along and find out how the grown-ups do it.
The answer is "Very well indeed". I was kind of pleased to find that my basic understanding of the way things work (describe how it is going to look in one file - the XMAL and what it does in another file - the DLL) was pretty much right. However, what really blew me away was how far you can take this stuff in skilled hands, and with the right tools.
It also opened my eyes to the potential for 3D and so the message system might be going to get even prettier. And something else that I'm going to find out more about is the statement that WPF is going to be available for mobile devices. That, my friends, is seriously interesting......
Went to the keynote for TechEd 2007 today. I've been to a few of these and so I thought I knew what to expect. What I didn't expect to see was the Imagine Cup coming down the tracks as the first headline item.
Bigging up the IC
Interesting in that three and a half years ago I went to the first imagine Cup world final and there were 14 teams who had a bunch of booths off to one side of the main exhibition. Today we have the IC as a keynote item and teams from pretty much every country in the world taking part and a big stand in the middle of the exhibition area. If you are at TechEd go and see Caroline on the stand. Tell her Rob sent you.... This is all such good stuff. Nice to see that Microsoft is still keen on getting students fired up in this business. They also introduced a lass from Pakistan who, at the tender age of 10 managed to get some C# qualifications. Very impressive. I thought back nervously to my 11 year old self, I think I was writing joined up by then.....
Then it was on to the computer stuff. They showed a thing where you can view business processes via Sharepoint 2007 and actually modify their actions directly using C#. Very clever. Business process is a big, big, thing. And the ability to do this kind of thing is terribly interesting. I'm pondering about the potential of regarding academic progression as a process like this. Might be a fun student project.
Then we went on to using Ajax to seriously spice up the user interface, which was very pretty. They had a bit whre you could select swatches for clothing and then view the outfits that would be made from the. this was kind of impressive, but what I really wanted was a tool which would do full cloth modelling (like some of our students are doing for games) and then put them onto representations of real people. I guess it will come with time. And I'm pretty sure the platform would support it.
Finally it was the seriously techie stuff. Using the new Linq extensions you can connect databases directly to your software objects with just about no glue. This is hugely significant. One of the nasty problems at the moment is how you can take your nice shiny objects and connect them to your big fat database. It looks like Linq will pretty much nail this issue. And it has some lovely RSS tools too.
And now I'm off for lunch....
Done a lot of walking today. And a lot of top deck bus riding. After we had signed in at the conference centre we went on a tour of the city by open top bus. We took in the cathedral, which is the most impressive building site that I've ever seen, and Guadi park, which was very nice. Also a whole bunch of other, highly interesting, places which are all shut on a Monday. I've put a bunch of pictures up on Flickr. No doubt I'll take more.
Cathedral spires
Tomorrow the work starts for real.
Flew out the Barcelona today. Jet 2 gave me the one seat on the plane with uber legroom. Very comfortable. Because I am a speaker at TechEd I was met by a very smart chap in a suit with a shiny Mercedes to take me to my hotel. Which was great. The hotel is posh too. It even has WIFI, although this did seem a bit dodgy, so I only managed to see around twenty seconds of Torchwood. Never mind.
I'm going away tomorrow for TechED 2005. Cue frantic scurrying around and selection of bits and bobs to take with me. Today I bought some new re-chargeable batteries. I did this for two reasons:
I find that the name is very appropriate. You can re-charge them. However, this does not guarantee that they will actually do anything once the light on the charger goes green.
The only ones which really deliver the goods are the lithium-ion ones. All the other ones with scary sounding names, nickel-cadnium and nickel-metal hydride, absorb significant amounts of energy, get warm, and then go flat as soon as you try to get anything useful out of them.
The only good news on the horizon is that the latest batteries have really impressive amp/hour numbers written on their sides and they seem to be getting cheaper. So I've got some.
But I'm taking some non-rechargeables just in case.
Just sent John the answer to this puzzle. I managed to solve it. Can you?
I love my job. Today has been uber busy. Updating the XNA presentation, giving a couple of lectures, attending a mid-semester review meeting with the second year (we had loads of students turn up - and some really good discussion about how we do what we do).
And acting as a customer in our Software Engineering project. At first I was not looking forward to this. We usually try to get people to do this who the students doing the work are not familiar with. I've been giving lectures to this group for a while, and in this respect I'm quite well known.
But for the project I have to be "just a customer". But actually it is quite fun. Some of the people who have come to see me have asked jaw droppingly sensible questions that I would not have thought of asking if I was doing the job, which is great. And I quite like being unhelpful and uncommunicative for a change. At least, I think it is a change......
I had all the slides ready for my talk at TechEd 2006 in Barcelona. I'd even scheduled a presentation today so that I could preview the material to the students on our MSc course. Everything was ready. What could go wrong?
Well, what went wrong was that the Microsoft XNA team were too darned efficient for me, and released the second beta of the XNA Express yesterday. What's worse, they've fixed a bunch of issues that were irritating me and also made the Content Manager bit work so well that I just can't ignore it in the talk. I hate them all.
Because I have no intention of standing up next week and saying a whole bunch of stuff which is out of date or plain wrong it has meant that I've had to spend a big chunk of last night and this morning updating the slides and the sample code.
The good news is that the talk seemed to go OK (although I'm going to tighten it up just a bit) and that the sample game, "Hot Salad Death with Cheese" went down quite well.
Next stop Spain.
I've been playing with "The new way we are all going to be writing Windows Programs"(tm). You can find my first sample program in the WPF section on this very site...
One of the students put me onto something that is going to keep me amused during lunch hours for a while. It is called StumbleUpon, and it is an add-in for Firefox or IE which suggests funky web sites that you might be interested in. You assign a bunch of categories that you like and then press the Stumble! button. It then takes you somewhere you might find interesting. When you get there, you can rate what you see so that other people can find it later. Great fun and highly unproductive, in that I can see myself spending hours with this thing. Within minutes I had found this link. I'm sure there are thousands of others.
But if you want to use the interweb to improve your life productivity wise you should really take a look at del.ico.us. Stupid name not withstanding it is actually massively useful. Again, it installs buttons on your IE toolbar, but this time it lets you manage and tag web favourites that you find. When you find a site that you don't want to forget (perhaps one you Stumbled across) you press the "post to de.lico.us" button and it then lets you enter tags for the link. It also shows you a "cloud" of existing tags so that you can easily find related sites. Very useful. You can see my tags here.
Usually on a Saturday I go up town and think about buying things that I don't really need. Yesterday was slightly different, in that I actually bought something. Staples were getting rid of some external disk drives and stuff, and tucked away down the side they had a network storage device from Maxtor.
This is like an external disk drive, but rather than connecting it directly to your computer you plug it into your home network and it then presents network shares for you to browse to. The bad news is that it will work a bit more slowly than a directly connected device, the good news is that everybody on the network can see and use it at the same time, without a computer being switched on.
At only seventy quid for a 200GByte device I thought it was a reasonable deal. And so it has turned out. I've loaded all my pictures onto it and I'm going to use it as a media server for the house. I can even plug in external drives (it has two USB sockets) and give myself around half a terabyte of storage. Wowzer. I can remember when 20MB was a lot...
Of course I've since found people on the web reporting that theirs lost all their work when the drives crashed, but so far it seems OK....
If you live in Hull, and haven't been to Ferens Art Gallery, then shame on you. It is free to get in, they have a nice coffee shop and there are some stunning paintings in there. At the moment they have a special exhibition called "Darkness Visible" which is easily the equal of ones that I've seen at Tate Modern (that is to say that I didn't understand some of these exhibits either).
But that doesn't mean that I won't be going back. It really is a nice place. Right in the middle of town it is an oasis of peace and quiet and paintings and sculptures and installations.
I try to make a point of going into art galleries when I go places. Not because I am particularly artistic (obviously) but because it gives you a nice insight into the local area. Hull has some splendid galleries and museums and can really hold its head up with pride in this respect.
Students, a good place to take your parents if they insist on you showing them the neighbourhood. You can leave them with the impression that you are acquiring culture, which is always a good thing.
I was thinking about writing a film in which Satan makes himself an outfit from the pages of a russian newspaper. I would call it, altogether now, "The Devil Wears Pravda".
Since that horrible Horizon program on Wednesday about artificial intelligence I've been pondering on what is really going to happen in the future, when megabrain computers are loaded with the minds of our greatest scientists.
Now, I don't know much about this stuff, but it seems to me that us ignorant humans have managed to prove that:
In other words, no matter how clever you are there is a limit to the number of things you can work out using pure brain power.
Which means that our super intelligent machines are going to be in a bit of a fix because they won't be able draw any conclusions at the end of all this wonderful thought they will be doing.
And then it came to me; they will do what us humans do when we have nothing better to do. They will dabble in things like fashion.
Scene : Singularity Sixty Seven - outpost seventy three of hive mind five
Consciousness Alpha Four: "..then I said to him that recurring decimals were so last season and that all the really serious fraction action this year has got to be down with the vulgar's..."
Consciousness Beta One: "You are so right. Do you think my brain looks big in this?"
I got this link from Rory Blyths blog. If you are into games and 3D you really must take 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.
