Maxing out Vista

I managed something today which I didn't think was possible. I managed to get my machine to use up nearly all its memory. I was testing a SideShow gadget application which starts running automatically when the SideShow device is connected. But because I haven't completed the code yet, the program didn't finish properly. So Vista started it again. And again. So I ended up with several hundred copies of the program in memory before I realised what was happening.

86% and counting...

By the time I worked out what was happening I had 86% of my memory filled up. The nice thing is that Vista never really slowed down or seemed to suffer. I just saved my files, shut the machine down and rebooted. Which is quite impressive when you think about it.

Kitchen Orchids

The Orchids in the kitchen are doing well

Durham Roses

I just liked the colours.

Almost Lucky

This is the complicated tale of boy meets tablet, boy tries to run Vista on tablet, boy finds that more memory would help run it faster, boy buys memory that won't fit and then, after he has made the memory fit boy finds that it won't work. And he is the thick end of 60 quid light on the deal. Now read on...

I sent the memory back to Ebuyer who admitted it was faulty. At the same time I managed to acquire the memory from somewhere else. So I called Ebuyer and say that, since the memory was faulty and I'm sorted, I'd really just like a refund. They say yes. Happy ending.

Then the memory arrived this morning in the post anyway.....

Open Wide....

Went to the dentist today. I had to fill in a new form. Apparently my dental practice has spent up all the money that the Health Service gave them last year, and is now running on empty until April. This means that yours truly has now had his teeth privatised. I had to sign up to say that I would pay for my treatment.

There were three prices on the piece of paper, fifteen quid, forty three quid and one hundred and ninety quid. "Don't worry about those" said the nurse airily. "We'll decide which one to use later". 

There is only one thing that scares me more than someone poking around in my mouth with bent metal and drills, and that is having to pay around half the price of a PS/3 for the privilege.

Anyhoo, apparently my teeth are OK at the moment so it was the lowest price for me today. My teeth are a pretty horrible colour but apparently quite hard wearing. And I'm going to brush them very carefully from now on...

Go See Hot Fuzz

Hang on a minute. Let's see if I can find the right font. Ah. There it is.

Go See Hot Fuzz

Go now. Go quickly. You'll thank me. It is brilliant. Best film I've seen this year. Better than Bond (and that is saying something). Funny. Clever. Well made. True to itself.

The film is about a hot shot London copper banished to the sticks for being too efficient. But once he gets out there he finds something very nasty in the woodshed, and the church, and the florists. Gory, scary and funny in turn, it reminds you just how good Simon Pegg is. I'm going to buy the DVD as soon as it comes out. And in the meantime I'm going to re-watch all my Spaced episodes again.

Cheesy Wotsit Challenge

I've been giving the first XNA lectures to students this week. This is actually a world first; the first time ever that XNA has been used to teach C# to first year students in Hull by a tall bloke who needs a haircut.

Anyhoo, it has gone pretty well. I had a few minutes spare at the end of the lecture so I showed the students "Hot Salad Death With Cheese". I've given them the source of the code and offered a bag of Walkers crisps as a prize for the person who produces the best game based on it. If you fancy a go you can pull the files down from here.

Normal Service

For the last couple of weeks the car has been displaying "Service Required" and showing me a little green picture of a spanner. I figured it was trying to tell me something. I checked in the handbook and apparently it needs servicing. So today I took it to my favourite garage and turned them loose on it. I've got it back and the car seems just the same, although the message has gone and I am a couple of hundred pounds poorer.

Questions abound. What would happen if I'd ignored the message?Would the spanner turn red?  If I kept ignoring it, would the text change to "Service Me Now or Die" and the airbag go off? Would the engine management system eventually start making the car run badly and force my hand? Would the GPS, if I had one, tell me that all roads lead to the garage? Did the service just involve turning the message off?

It begins..

I've started a Playstation 3 sinking fund (wonder why it is called a sinking fund?). Anyhoo, item one is here. Next up is my tasteless clock (a timepiece since you asked - nothing to do with my face).

Playtime Postponed

I can't get my hardware to work. Lights flash but nothing happens. I've got some lovely toys to play with and I can't get anything to go. It's like "Christmas morning and no batteries" all over again.

Except with RS232 cables.

Am I Spam?

I've sent some email of late which I don't think has been read at the destination. In fact, I think that my deathless prose has just ended up in the spam folder of the recipient. I wasn't offering any little blue pills, I was just getting in touch. But perhaps because the correspondence was from a new address and the content included a web link the filter may have decided that this was fishy..

What I really need is some form of "From Rob and therefore highly important" tag that will get the attention of people the world over.

Then again, if it fell into the wrong hands.......

Pirates Ahoy

Went to see number one daughter play tonight. Actually,didn't see her play at all, since she was in the orchestra pit at the York University Gilbert and Sullivan Society production of Pirates of Penzance.

The PR machine

Now, as you all probably know, I'm not really one for culture. I remarked, as we were listening to what I now know to be the overture, "Aren't there supposed to be singers in this..."

Anyhoo, the production was excellent. It is surprising how many of the songs have found their way into my head over the years. It was great to see the performers enjoying themselves as much as the audience. Actually there is not much of a story to the show, it is more a collection of sketches and songs and a bit of shameless pandering to Queen Victoria at the end. But that didn't get in the way of the fun. I took the tiny camera and grabbed a few snaps.

Pirates!

Ladies!

The model of a modern Major General....

The Police

The happy ending....

Got Hardware

I've got me some .NET Micro Framework hardware. Donald, my co-author, has sent me an i-MSX system to play with. It is very nice, but scarily fragile. Given my experience with hardware earlier in the week (current thinking is that I converted a functioning but wrong memory device into a non-functioning but still wrong device by cunning use of a nailfile- at least it should give the chaps at Ebuyer something to laugh at before they stamp "Rejected" on my letter) I fired the device up with some trepidation.

At present it doesn't work. This is no surprise. It connects via RS232 and so I'll need to use one of my copious collections of cables and lights to get the signals aligned correctly on the plugs. But it does light up. And it looks very promising.

Valentine's Day

Found a screw that fits the Motion. So now I'm kind of happy.  And I got some nice things for Valentines day from number one wife.

I bought her, amongst other things, some chocolates, an exercise ball and a book called How to Kill your Husband.

Idiot

I'm an idiot. No, really. Hard to believe, but it's true. Here's the proof.

I've been using my Motion LS800 tablet PC for a while and I really like it. It is tiny, works well and is on the way to becoming my traveling companion of choice. But it could really use more memory if I want to run Vista comfortably on it. And I do.

It is supposed to be a bit hard to take to pieces and upgrade, but to someone who had a lot of Meccano as a kid this sounded like a challenge. So I ordered a memory stick from Ebuyer and yesterday it arrived.

Getting the back off the device was OK, there were some nasty plastic catches but nothing I can't handle. A tip though, if you are thinking of upgrading a Motion Tablet, grow your thumbnails a little bit so you can slide them under the edge of the back and then use them to pop back the little tabs without scratching the case. I'm kind of due for a manicure at the moment, and that helped a lot. Anyhoo, I got the back off and pulled out the old memory chip. Then I get the new chip out of the package and I hit a snag. These memory devices have a little slot which aligns with a tag in the memory socket. Except on the new chip the slot didn't. It was around half a millimeter in the wrong direction.

And this is where the idiot bit comes in. A smart person would have just gone "Oh dear, have to send it back and get a replacement". But an idiot goes "I'll just grab a nailfile and open up the slot a bit so that it fits". So I did. And after a tiny bit of adjustment I had it fitting perfectly. But of course it didn't work. So now I have an expensive damaged component (which I probably damaged) that doesn't work. A situation broadly similar to taking a bundle of fivers and flushing them down the toilet.  In my defence, it had been a long day at work and I wasn't mentally at my best at the time I did all this. But I still think I'm an idiot.

I'm not sure if the slot was in the wrong place because it is a different type of memory (even though I took special care to make sure that it was the right type) or because the thing was badly made. I've sent the whole thing back to Ebuyer (with a note inside explaining what an idiot I've been and throwing myself on their good nature).

And to cap it all, after I'd put original memory back in and put the Motion back together I find I've lost one of the screws that holds the back on.

Idiot.

Cheap TV

If you have a laptop and a TV licence I can recommend this.  I just plugged one into a USB port on my Vista running tablet, gave it a pat on the head and told it to go off and find its drivers on the network and it just worked. I didn't bother putting the supplied CD-ROM in the machine, although it might be useful if you have not got a Media Centre PC or Vista with Media Centre, as it contains the TV viewing, recording and transcoding software.

The supplied aerial is a bit of a non starter in Hull, which is not very well served for digital TV, but plugging the device into the home aerial worked a treat, finding all the major channels.

They say that it will even pick up high definition broadcasts, but you have to be living in London to make use of that service. Anyhoo, for the price it is extremely good value. If you spend a few more quid you can get one with a remote control.

Chapter Seven is Nearly Done

Got too much time on your hands? Enjoying things a bit more than you think you should? Want to torpedo your social life and turn yourself into a zombie?

Try writing a book.

I'm writing about a subject I find interesting, with a wonderful bunch of folks, on a comfy chair with a nice big screen and I'm using a bendy keyboard. Snag is, I've been doing it for 9 hours today and I'm starting to notice there are things I really should be doing as well. Like have a life.

The good news is that Chapter 7 is nearly done now. And we did go out for lunch today (WokSoEver in Cottingham, all you can eat including sushi for a really good price), so there is some kind of work/life balance here - although I could do to have it shift a little the other way.....

I am Number Six

Well, I've done it. I said I wouldn't, but I've done it anyway. This morning advanced orders for the Playstation 3 opened up and so I wandered into Game and slapped down my fifty quid deposit. (coincidentally, last night I found I was going to be paid for some of my work on "the book" and that is what made it possible - funny eh?).

The PS/3 might end up being owned by the department, depending on how much bother they have getting hold of one for launch day. Actually, things were a lot quieter than they might have been. I didn't get up extra early to go and put my name down, and I still ended up number six in the list. I'm not sure if this launch is going to be the complete sell out that some people are hyping it up to be.....

Anyhoo, it looks as if the Sony magnet has sucked me in again. And now I'm kind of looking forward to March 23rd. If only to see what happens on ebay.....

I'm Bored with the Cold

Enough. I'm tired of being cold. We haven't had any snow yet. Just cold. It's all part of my economy drive, where I turn off all the heating until just before we get back from work. The result is that the house is freezing for the first few hours of the evening. Then the heating goes off for the night and we get cold again. Fortunately British Gas (or "evil profiteers" as they should more properly known) have decided that their prices (raised around 50% last year) are indefensible and will be shaving some small numbers off the cost of heating for me, so I can have around an extra 15 minutes of warmth a night.

I've turned on all the computers in the room to try and heat things up a bit. It is coming to something when you are reduced to warming your hands on a Tablet PC. I've given all the machines something hard to do, to try and get the heat output up....

21st Century Displacement Activities

In the old days, when I had a bunch of marking to do I would go off to the union shop and spend ages choosing a suitable red pen. I'd try each of those on sale at least once and then carefully weigh up the heft of the pen, the quality of the ink colour, the feel of the writing action and so on. I could usually pass quite a while doing these activities, not actually doing anything towards getting the marking done, but feeling good about the fact I was in fact making progress. When of course I wasn't.

Spool forward a few years and I can't do this any more. Some of the stuff doesn't use a pen at all, everything happens on the computer. But I still need my displacement activities. Fortunately the computer, if it is nothing else, is a wonderful source of potential displacement.

I've been marking stuff submitted via Class Server. This has the option for the marker to create six pre-formed text items which can be inserted into the student comments. Thing is, six is nothing. I've got loads more than that. Loads. It really hurts to type the same kind of thing over and over, but I need more than six. More like sixty. So, I built PasteMaster to do this for me. It took me around an hour to build, which is probably longer than I spent choosing pens, but I think it is worth it.

You can type the comments into the text fields and then when you press the button they are inserted into the block at the bottom. You can edit the text at the bottom and add new bits, and everything you add is also placed in the paste buffer, so you can drop the whole report into any windows app. It remembers the comments from last time you ran it, and there are 6 pages of 12 comments that are colour coded and you can flip between.  I managed to set up a page of comments about each of the deliverables I was asking for, so that I could pull out pre-formed bits where appropriate and save myself quite a bit of typing.

(I was going to add a "randomise" button which would pull a comment out of a textbox on each frame and make a random response, but I thought this might be dangerous....)

Anyhoo, it works a treat and saved me a fair bit of typing. Of course, I could have used Notepad, but I think it would have been a bit harder to do and I would not have had the fun of making Pastemaster work.

If you fill out forms with pre-formed responses, or you do the kind of marking that I do, you might like a copy. If so, let me know....