The Day of the Wii

What a day. I'm exhausted. I was up really early after the bus trip yesterday, and zoomed up town to try and get hold of a Nintendo Wii console, which launched today in the UK. This was mildly important since today is our special Wii Open Day and a whole bunch of people are coming to see them. We have one running in our open area.

But we want more.

I had everything carefully planned down to the last minute. Into Game, grab the console and then back to the university in time to set it up. And then I saw the queue in the shop.  At 9:20 I was in the middle of paying for the console. And the first group were due to arrive at 10:00....

Fortunately it all went wonderfully well. Even better than that. Dr. Paul Chapman (who was in the paper and on the local TV yesterday demonstrating the worlds first paraglider trainer that he's just built at Hull) was able to show how is system works, and some of guests even got to have a go at flying. And we showed off the Hive setup. And we did some programming using XNA to take a look underneath the bonnet of a video game. And there was a lot of Wii time.

Then, after lunch, we did it all again. And followed it up with a student run quiz computer games quiz and further Wii play. For just about the whole day you could here howls of laughter and enjoyment as the little console worked it's magic.I took a whole bunch of happy snaps...

Getting Started

Letting fly with the controllers

Damian shows how to box in pink.....

In the USA people have been crashing into their tellys. I can see why.

Boxing was very popular for some reason

Remember to guard...

...and then punch

Jon congratulates the Wii winner on the day. And stands in the way of the projector . He  won't do that again...

Quiz Prizes

The end of a balanced meal

"Everybody say Wiiiiiiii!"

Second prize quiz winners

And the winners, who showed a deeply scary level of knowledge about computer games.....

Ed Gibson is "The Man"

Today we went up to Bradford for a rather special talk. The folks at Black Marble arrange seminars for IT professionals (you'll never guess who's giving the next one) and today they had managed to get Ed Gibson over to talk about Computer Security. Ed is quite a chap, an ex FBI guy who is now Microsoft UK's chief security advisor.  So a bunch of students and myself boarded a magic bus to Bradford.

We were lucky enough to meet up with Ed. before the talk. Thanks to my super advanced planning I managed to get everyone to the venue around 90 minutes early, and so we had plenty of time to sit around a roaring fire in the hotel bar and chat. Ed turned up and the first thing he did was buy everyone a drink. My kind of guy.

Then, after some superb sandwiches courtesy of Black Marble it was time to get down to the serious business of the evening. And it is serious. Ed has been there, done that, and told us some truly scary stories. For me the most interesting thing that emerged from his talk is that the computer fraudsters don't want your bank details. They want your bandwidth. If they can get enough machines on the net under their control they can pretty much take down any server, anywhere. Unless you pay them big money.

At some point we will have laws that extend far enough to catch the perpetrators and enough systems out there hard enough to resist the attacks that can turn your home PC into an agent of the bad guys. However,  until then the rule has got to be keep your system up to date. Don't think of computer crime as a "soft" crime with no real victims. The people who do it are in there for the cash, very organized and totally ruthless.

Ed made some good points on a broad canvas. The speaker that followed him zoomed right down into the low level detail. He showed how breathtakingly easy it is to attack a system. One of my programming rules is "build yourself a nice place to work". What I means is make sure that it is very easy to create, build and test the systems that you are writing. It never really occurred to me that hackers would do the same.

We were shown a tool which used SQL injection (basically a way of putting database commands into the text you feed into a web page) to stripmine entire company databases. I knew about the technique, but I never thought there would be such advanced tools for this kind of thing. The next thing that we were shown fair took my breath away. It involved changing the way that the .NET Framework itself works.

Imagine that a developer has got some permissions set on a program. And they want to stop users from pressing certain buttons on certain screens. The Forms library that ships with Windows will do this for you. With a simple property change you can disable a button. If the button is disabled it turns grey and the user can't press it. Job done.

Unless someone changes the guts of .NET so that this property change no longer works. By just changing one particular byte in the right library file a nasty person who has access to your machine can make every single button work all the time. So simple, sooo scary.

Admittedly you'd have to do something rather stupid to let someone else run their program on your machine in the first place, but the result of this is that even securely written code can now be totally banjaxed by being hosted on a corrupted system. Amazing stuff. Simple yet brilliant. And a very worthy follow on to the talk from Ed.

This was a superb evening. Kudos to Black Marble, Ed and his associate (who's name I've forgotten I'm afraid). All the students had a great time, with some pretty deep conversations on the bus on the way back. This was the first Black Marble event I've been to. It will not be the last...

And with that, I'm just going to update my virus scanner...

Blanked

We had the first of our new season of open days today. If you came along, thanks for coming, it was nice to see you.

I did the opening talk and it seemed to go OK, then I sat down to run the little question and answer session afterwards. I was introducing our staff and I got to Helen Wright, one of our lecturers. As I was starting to announce her name to the group another part of my brain was thinking how terrible it would be if I forgot her surname. So I did. So she was introduced as "Helen, our Quality Officer". Forgetting the name of the person in charge of quality. Way to go Rob.

It is probably the kind of thing which is supposed to happen when you get old, but it has been happening to me for absolutely ages (which might mean I'm very old, but I'm putting it down as an endearing character trait of mine).

Anyhoo, I think it went OK apart from that slipup, and the name did come back to me, and I did apologise.

For me the best part was when all the parents of the candidates took over the Nintendo Wii system we have on loan and showed the young'uns how to play Tennis. Great fun.

.NET Micro Framework Book

I'm writing a book. I'm very excited about this. The schedule is deeply scary, in that we hope to have the bulk of it completed by the end of January next year, but then again if you don't set a deadline you don't know when you are late. Anyhoo, myself and Donald Thompson of Microsoft are writing a programmers guide to the new .NET Micro Framework.

This is a new embedded platform which Microsoft have been working on for ages (it is what powers the Microsoft SPOT watches). For me it is a terribly interesting because it means you can write code in a high level, managed, environment using C# and then run it on a device the size of a postage stamp which costs pennies to make.

I am anticipating that it will do amazing things to the world of embedded development, as it makes it much easier to write code and put it into any kind of tiny system.

I've had a .NET Micro Framework microsite on my pages for some time. We've just set up a site for the book and we will be posting sample chapters and the contents for comments soon.

Wii Week

"Batter Up" with Peter and Darren

Well, we have started our Wii Week. The machine arrived from Nintendo on Saturday, and we have set it up on in our open area for the week. The climax is on Friday, when we have some schools coming over for a look and we are going to have three or four systems running in the department.

I had a very quick go with Tennis, Baseball and Bowling. All I can say is "The system works". It works wonderfully well. It works "want one" well. The feeling of control that you get with the small gamepads is very good and surprisingly subtle.

The Wii is going to massively change gaming by adding a new level of fun (and probably fitness) as well. The games we played are all free with the console. And they are smashing.

There is no way that I can see the Wii being anything other than a hit with this kind of stuff available at the start. Wonderful.

If you are in the department, we are running the Wii from 12:00 to 1:45 pm each lunchtime. Feel free to drop round and have a go.

How true....

Don't laugh too loudly at this. I'm still wiping the tears from my eyes.

York was full

Did everyone in the world decide to go to York today? Just because we did doesn't mean that everyone else has to. Anyhoo, we had a nice time (although we had to try three places to find somewhere for lunch - and I'm not tell anyone where we did go because it was nice and quiet and I we might want to go there again). Took the camera, and the light was quite good for pictures.

A nice bridge

A few leaves left to fall....

A few that have fallen

..and another Bliss replacement (Clifford's Tower)

Wiik Ending

We've been preparing for the launch next Friday of the Nintendo Wii. I (of course) have got one on order, and I'm planning on heading up town at midnight on Thursday.

We're going to open up the department to kids from local schools and do some demos of research level motion sensing technology in our Hive Virtual Environment. And some of our stalwart students are bringing in their Wii machines to help show them off.

Today we heard from Nintendo. We've been pestering them to let us have a machine to demonstrate, and they' promised to let us have one of their store demo pods. Today they said "We're terribly sorry, we can't get the pod to you next week. We have to send it tomorrow. Is that a problem?"

Hmmmmm. Somehow I don't think so. With a bit of luck we should have the device running in our open area for most of next wiik.

Marvelous.

Talking to the future

What will you send?

How was your day?

Have you been shot at, gassed, beaten up, had your girlfriend kidnapped, been fitted with a TV camera and made to shoot the mayor?

Thought not.

Trip Hazard has. New installment coming soon.

Private Agenda

My new-fangled PDA has got Microsoft Voice Command in it. This is a totally wonderful application that lets you use speech to control your life. It is like having a little person inside the device that you can ask to do things like place calls, tell you what is coming next, play you music and so on. It works extremely well, and is pretty unique amongst these things in that it does not require any voice training.

My PDA therefore presently announces all my appointments in a robotic American voice and will also read me the heading of incoming urgent emails, when they arrive.

This is all very useful, but all my appointments are pretty boring. I think I'm going to set a few more interesting ones so that in the middle of an Information Services Committee meeting my device can go "Bing Bong - Secret Weapon Briefing in fifteen minutes" or "Bing Bong - Tony Blair call at four o'clock" or "Bing Bong - Kill them all. Do it now. DO IT NOW!!!"

Update on 2006-12-01 09:23 by Rob

Alas, I chickened out. But I was the only bloke at the meeting not wearing a tie. Go fashion rebel me.

Robs Laws

I was talking in a Software Engineering lecture today about "Rob's Laws" amongst other things. I think it is time these were finally written down.

1. Any given computer is too slow. No matter how fast you think it is when you get it, after a while you will think it is too slow.
2. Any given project will take longer than you think. Even (or especially) if you allow for this. The only exception to this rule is a project you won't get paid for, or one where you have massively misunderstood the requirement and are therfore doomed.
3. A program that is useful will have bugs in it. The only programs that can be proved to be correct are too small to do anything that you might want.
4. A highly successful, fully working, system which contains hardware components will just about always have a massive "kludge" somewhere in the middle of it. This is the bit that has to be there, otherwise it won't work. Nobody will completely understand why it has to be there, or what it does, but they do know that if you take it out the system stops working.
5. A customer will never ring you up and tell you their program is working fine. Never. If the phone rings, it is always bad news. Silence either means they haven't got round to testing it yet, or it is working fine. At the point where you think it has gone quiet for long enough for it to be definitely working the phone will ring and they will tell you they've just got around to testing it and have found something they don't like.
6. As soon as you assume something about what the customer wants you are doomed. For sure.

Update on 2006-12-02 08:50 by Rob

Hmmm. I've been thinking further about this. I reckon that law 4 is probably a bit harsh. I think it applies to projects involving hardware (they do seem to need this level of magic) but not always to straight software ones.

Does this make sense?

Yesterday I bought an extra large aerial for our WIFI router at home. This should help us get good network reception in the living room. I can recommend these, the one I got was from Maplin and cost 15 quid, which means they are probably available for a bit less elsewhere.

Anyhoo, it works well, but I'm a bit confused about one thing. The aerial comes with a magnetic base, so that you can easily stick it to your fridge or whatever. 

Great for a quick and easy way of mounting I guess, but I'm not sure how sensible it is to put a device designed to send and receive radio signals right next to a big lump of metal. Very strange.

My Cultural Life

At Hull New Theatre : Number one wife and other family members attend "A Christmas Carol", performed in ballet form with full orchestral accompaniment.

Chez Miles : Number one daughter and I watched some Family Guy episodes followed by The Dukes of Hazard movie......

My Ambition

As you get older it is best to make sure that you still have a few ambitions left. I've decided that my number one ambition is now to buy Bill Gates a drink. I'd like to be stood next to him at bar at a Preston Foster Appreciation Society meeting (I'm sure that Ian and Pete would let him become a member of the society and as the barmaid pulls his pint of Tetley I could turn to him and say "No, it's OK Bill, I'll get these". And I would.

Do not read this in public

...because it is not good for other people to see you having hysterics:

http://rinkworks.com/said/courtroom.shtml

A Peek at Office 2007

Yesterday I took my life in my hands and upgraded from Office 2003 to Office 2007. Of course I had a backup. Of course...

Anyhoo, unlike the move to 2003, where on the surface things were pretty much the same as before, when you go to 2007, your whole world changes. The file menu has gone, and in its place you have an Office Button which sometimes glows for no reason that I've been able to establish.

In use I'm reminded of when I got to use a posh SLR camera many years ago. The arrangement of the controls seemed rather arbitrary and counter intuitive. Until I started using it. Then I found that the buttons and levers were actually just where you needed them. Someone who knew a lot about the business of taking photographs had put the features on the hardware in just the right way.

Office 2007 is very like this. After a while you find that commands you used to use a lot and had bother finding (undo and the Format Painter in my experience) have been made big, bold and easy to find. The grouping of tools into particular tasks makes it much easier to find what you want to do, and encourages you to try things that you hadn't seen before. I've only used Word and PowerPoint, but they are shaping up very well.

So far I only have one major grouse. Like most people, I use Styles a lot. Therefore I was pleased to see that Styles have been given an overhaul, which much better preview and the ability to sort the list of styles into alphabetical order. Finally.

However, there is one thing which they do seem to have got wrong in a big way. In the old Word you could click on a paragraph and the style of that paragraph would be instantly displayed in the toolbar. In the new Word the styles are shown on a kind of rotating panel which is good because you can see more than one and easily select from those available. But they don't automatically change to show you the style of the paragraph you are presently typing.

Even if you get a full list of the styles on the screen this still doesn't help if the style you are using is not on the part of the list you can see. So when I'm typing there is frequently nothing telling me which style I'm presently using, and I really hate that.

For me this is a major step backwards and almost, but not quite, negates the good things that they have done in this area. Perhaps there is an option you can select which will make this work better. I certainly hope so.

I'll write more about the shiny new bits as I find them.

Update on 2006-11-26 19:38 by Rob

Ha. Found it. You can customise a thing called the "Quick Access Toolbar" on the top left hand corner of the screen. One of the things you can add is a style item, which gives me just what I want. I always like it when something that should be easy turns out to be easy......

Put some magic into your life

Now you can have one....

My all new "Magic Message System" is now available for download. If you've ever wanted a message system as good as the one in Computer Science at Hull University then you can have one... For now. I'm going to make it play videos and do 3D next. And I might not give that version away......

Because it uses Windows Presentation Foundation you will need either Vista or XP with .NET Version 3.0 installed.

So, what does it do? Well, it will display a slideshow of your Flickr pictures and at the same time read messages off an RSS feed reader of your choosing. We are going to use it on our plasma screen in the meeting area.

You can find it here.

Infinite Power

In the pub tonight conversation turned to wind power. It is presently fashionable to put a wind turbine on the top of your house (one of our political party leaders here has got one). Apparently, for the outlay of only fifteen hundred pounds you can get a device which, during a hurricane, produces almost enough electricity to power your hairdryer.

I'm not convinced by this, I think the answer has got to be reducing consumption by insulation and other clever tricks. However, now that you no longer need planning permission to put up a windmill on your roof, I suppose they are going to become fashionable.

However, if they ever become de regeur I have a plan. I'm going to make a balsa wood wind turbine and stick on the roof. Inside I'm going to put a tiny electric motor so that the blades always turning. Always.

Whilst my neighbours bemoan the lack of wind and the fact that they have spent all this money on something which is actually useless I'll be able to point up at my roof and talk about the kilowatts of power that I'm presently generating. Not exactly eco-friendly I suppose. But fun. 

Party Time at the Bank

Some time ago I used know someone who knew someone who worked in a bank. For some reason we were chatting one evening and the conversation got around to "What would you do if someone came in and said 'I've got a gun, give me all your money'?"

Apparently the bank had a special code phrase which was to be used in this situation. The drill was to ask the cashier at the next position "What time is Andy's party?". Apparently the appropriate action involving silent alarms, marked notes and giant falling cages (or whatever) could then be taken.

This has bugged me for years. Viewed from the perspective of the robber this would be highly confusing. I'm presenting the person in front of me with the business end of a firearm, demanding money with menaces and the first thing they do is sort out a few social engagements before getting on with doling out  the cash. At very least this would make me inclined to increase their motivation a bit, perhaps by shooting up the place. Bonkers.

I've since figured out that the code phrase has now been changed slightly. Now, they way that they signal miscreants is by not offering them life insurance, a new mortgage or a car loan as they hand the money over....