Games and Wires

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Today we had a meeting where we are setting up a pilot project to let our students run a games server on campus. Previously this has been a fraught business, with concern about bandwidth use and system management from all sides. However, after an enlightened decision from the university Computer Users Group we are now opening up some bandwidth monitored ports onto the student cluster in freeside.

This could be fun...

Drunk with Readers

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I've been using a new mechanism to make sure that the readership of these august pages is holding up (not sure what you are holding up actually, but from here it looks like your hands need washing).

Anyhoo, I've been using this new service from Google Analytics, which lets me see who has been visiting the page, what time they came, whether they were wearing a tie, etc, etc. It is very powerful. It has lots of things you can use to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising and page design, see how far most people go through your content and the like. Most people seem to arrive at my site, take one look at the opening page and then vanish at speed.

Such is life.

If you run a proper web page which actually has serious intent you should take a look at the service, I can see how it could be very useful.

There is talk of a new version, which will let you find out how many people have visited your web site on the way back from the pub. That is going to be called "Google Paralytics".

PDF Output from Vista

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I'm a happy bunny. The weather is good. The book is written. And I've got a working PDF output program for Vista.

Perhaps I'm setting my sights a bit low; other people might wish for riches or movie star looks whereas I'm happy with a bit of sunshine, a few pages of text and Primo PDF.

Mind you, according to a survey this week the key to happiness is maintaining low expectations...

Threading with Forms

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Some of our students have been having fun with threading and forms (there is a lab out there at the moment which can be solved by creating a thread which performs a task).

Threads are great, because you can send them off to do something while you get back to responding to the user, or whatever. Snag is, when another thread tries to dicker with the contents of a form this ends in tears, as the Windows system is very picky about actions like this. There is a way round the problem though, and so I've written a little sample application which shows you how to do it.

It creates a form which has a single button on it. When you press the button it creates a worker thread and fires it off in another class to do something. When the something finishes it then calls back into the form to change the text in a label on that form. You can use this as a model for whatever you fancy doing with threads. You can find the code here.

Plumb Job

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Earlier this morning I was wondering how I was going to spend all this new free time that I have now that the writing on the book is finished.

This afternoon I found out. I get to clean mouse droppings out of the summer house. The pesky little rodents had made their way back in over the winter and seemed to have held a particularly messy party in my gardening gloves.

Lovely.

Gone to the beach

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Most of the writing is now done. Just a few bits left to add. So we went to the seaside. I really like Hornsea. It has a faded charm that I find really attractive. Number one son and I took our cameras, and we were dead lucky because the light was lovely for photographs.

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Beach front

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Asset stripped

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Indoor amusements

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Windmills

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Hornsea Mere Tea Rooms. Fantastic.

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This pike is over 100 years old.

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I once got a hole in one here. Snag is, it was the wrong hole....

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Boats

Remember Me?

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Sometimes to solve a problem you have to go and live there. And that is where I've been these last few days. Living in a book. Although I've actually done quite a lot since the last post.

  • got a media pc
  • met some ducks and swans
  • been very jealous of my father in law
  • controlled a robot vacuum cleaner with the .NET Micro Framework
  • beat Ian at table football (twice)
  • seen Laura Viers live
  • gone to the seaside

I'll catch you all up with these things as soon as all the pictures have uploaded onto Flickr.

Roomba Magic

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I actually own a useful robot. Amazing. I've got some useless ones too, but this one actually does something that number one wife thinks is good. It does the vacuuming. You plonk it down in the middle of a room, give it a kick and off it trundles, bouncing off furniture and cleaning as it goes. And it does a creditable job. To be sure, we did have to clear a bit of junk off the floor to give it a free run, and it does take longer than I would, but the evidence in the dust collector is clear, it cleans.

We set it loose in the bedroom and it rumbled about for a while. When I caught up with it later it was coughing a bit, and upon inspection it had picked up a lot of dust (it had been wandering about underneath things), an umbrella cover and 20 pence. I emptied it all out, charged the battery and off it went again. The device itself is beautifully engineered. It bristles with sensors so that it really can follow a wall, detect and manage collisions with obstacles and avoid falling down stairs (it is especially good at that one). And it has a bunch of brushes and proper filters and stuff. It really is a vacuum.

The funny thing is that I didn't really select it for its cleaning prowess. I was more interested in the interfacing potential for the Micro Framework book that I'm presently writing. The robot exposes a software interface into which you can plug a computer. It works too. I've had C# programs in a Micro Framework telling the robot what to do, which is very nice.  But now number one wife wants it to clean the conservatory, so I'll have to get on with something else.