I was overjoyed to find last week that Waterstones bookshop in Hull had a copy of my book in stock.
I was less overjoyed to discover this week that the copy is still there. Now I'm fretting as to why nobody has bought it. Of course, they might have sold hundreds and kept refilling the shelf.
But I doubt it.
I got a royalty cheque yesterday and so there must be some copies selling somewhere, but I'd love for the one in my home town (so to speak) to sell as well.
I've got the Mac just about how I want it. Everything works, I've got four versions of Visual Studio on it and most of the data that I need. Except for one thing.
The icon for iTunes is broken. It just displays the standard folder one, rather than the proper picture. I've rebuilt the icon cache and spent much too long (i.e. more than five minutes) trying to fix it.
Oh well, according to some religions anything perfect is an offence to God. So I guess that makes my machine as perfect is it could be.
Today is the day that the Imagine Cup entries are due in. Cue much panic, tweaking of software and poster preparation.
..and a five minute trip around the campus to get a picture of Team X in their natural habitat. You think writing software is hard? Try getting these three to all smile at the same time.
Anyhoo, the entry deadline is midnight tonight. I reckon they'll make it with minutes to spare. Minutes...
Went to see Iron Man tonight. Good film. It's a superhero movie with a beating electric heart. Having a proper actor in the lead works very well, Robert Downey Jr. is excellent in the role. And it is nice to see no implausible "super powers" and completely broken laws of physics and instead some very nice looking, but vaguely fallible, technology.
The story was good, the climax was proper, there's a "will they-won't me" romance storyline in the works. I'll be there to see the sequel and the one after that.
All that work. Just for this!
I've got my Zune working on my newly fettled PC. To celebrate I've made the screen go all blue (actually this is the default project). Time to get some cheese in there methinks.
If you ever seen the film Amélie you'll know how good it is. If you haven't, then I envy you, because you get to have the experience of seeing it the first time. One of the best films ever. Ever.
Anyhoo, it has a scene at the start where it describes how her father likes to pass the time by emptying out his toolbox, cleaning it and then putting everything back in the right place. It captures perfectly the idea of someone who likes to have one small part of his life completely under his control, and which he can make how he wants it. I think I'm a bit the same with my PC.
Today, for a number of reasons, I wiped my MacBook clean and restored everything from scratch. I've done a lot of work too, I've read all the final year project reports that I'm marking and I've also made a start on tidying my office. You can get a lot done when your computer is broken...
I've been meaning to re-install Vista for a while, there is a broken install of an old XNA version which is stopping it working with the Zune and it doesn't pick up my camera properly. It also has some software on it which I'd be happier without, and I wanted to re-partition the hard drive to give more space to Vista and less to OS X. Nothing wrong with the Mac operating system, it is just that Vista does all the things I need to do, and I know how to make it do them. I like using the Mac, and GarageBand is a program I'd love to spend more quality time with, but I don't think I need to give it as much disk space as I did.
So, after taking complete backups on four different disk drives I wiped the Vista partition and tried to use the Mac BootCamp program to create a larger one.
And there the fun started. The first time BootCamp didn't work, and told me that it couldn't move the partitions because some files were fixed. The second time it tried it crashed the machine, leaving the disk file structure a bit awry. I fixed that, tried it for a third time and had the same problem. So, I wiped OS X and did a complete install of that, so that I could then put Vista on afterwards.
Operating installation is nowhere near as fraught as it used to be, both OS X and Vista loaded themselves onto the machine with a minimum of fuss. There were occasional moments of high drama, updating the firmware in the Mac was a bit scary, as was the part where I found out Apple was updating one part of the system whilst Microsoft was twiddling with another at the same time, which could have gone badly, but all in all it was just a case of looking up from what I was reading and clicking OK every now and then.
By the end of the day I'm about back to where I stared operating system wise, now all I have to do is put the applications and my document files back into place.
The heck with Yahoo. I reckon Microsoft should buy Clusty.
Went to Asda today to do the shopping.
I could have bought a magazine for a fiver. Or one of these.... Guess which I got?
It is ace, you can steer it round the floor and rapid fire off 12 missiles. If only we had a cat...
Geoff: "Went to see Iron Man last Monday"
Rob: "Can he do shirts?"
One of our students came to see me this morning. He is hoping to go to TechEd 2008 in Orlando and wanted me to write a supporting letter for his visa application.
You bet I will. I'm actually going to TechEd 2008 myself (I'm giving a session on the .NET Micro Framework) and I know what a great experience it is. Particularly if you are a student.
I've advised him to prepare carefully before he goes to make sure that he gets as much as possible out of the trip. He should be able to get his session schedule sorted out in advance of the conference, and he really should make use of the Hands On Labs to play with the latest toys. There are also discount Microsoft Certified Professional tests that can be taken on site, but for me the most wonderful feature of the event is the "Ask the Experts" bit.
It continues to amaze me that Microsoft puts its absolute top dogs out there for the public to harangue. Perhaps it is because they are too cheap to hire "booth babes", but I like to think that it is because the really want their developers to meet up with the people that use their stuff.
When you go and talk to someone on the XNA, or Micro Framework or Sharepoint or whatever stand at "Ask the Experts" you are actually talking to the product managers and developers that make the product. They aren't just customer support people, they are the authors themselves. Most delegates at the conference just use this opportunity to see what swag is being given away at each booth. But a few have cottoned on to this part of the conference and take the opportunity to get deep answers to hard problems.
I've told our student to make sure that he goes around the experts and has a chat with them, from my experience they love talking about the stuff they make and why they think it is the best in the business. I really hope he makes it out there, I just wish more students could get to go.
Alfred reports that you can now get the first CTP version of XNA 3.0. This is the one that will make it possible to create and deploy games on Microsoft Zune devices. Wonderful stuff. If you want to write games for mobile devices you should take a look. All we want now, Mr. Microsoft, is a UK release of the Zune. Please.
I don't think it was the Wii fit. In fact I'm fairly sure that it wasn't. However, the bottom line is that at the moment my neck doesn't work properly. I'm moving a bit like a Cyberman, turning my whole body to face people rather than just rotating the head part. Looking slightly to the right is fine, looking more hurts like heck. It seems to be easing a bit, but I've been playing GTA 4 rather than exercising.
Just in case.
Good weather on an English Bank Holiday? Shurely shome misthtake. We went to Hornsea for the afternoon.
Baby geese
Hornsea mere looking good
Even the sea front looks good today. Although that water does look a bit brown...
I love stalls like these.
This is Hornsea Sunday (and Bank Holiday) market. Amazing place, with a water feature and a place you can buy old photos that might have you in it. I checked, but there were none of me.
Today saw us up at the crack of dawn and haring down the motorway to Milton Keynes to take part in another Collectormaina. Well, at least it is a trip out.
So, who is this chap?
..or this lass?
The "throng"
I don't think this is a family portrait as such....
Any nightclub owners out there?
A Lego shop opposite an Apple shop. Seems somehow appropriate.
The Milton Keynes Tree. And some concrete cows.
Downstairs I have a copy of GTA4. Nico has been out on a date, taken my cousin bowling and killed a few times ("But they were all bad people"). And today, in my so called leisure time, I've spent a few hours writing C#. And having at least as much fun as I did with the video game.
Perhaps it is a control thing. When I'm writing code I not only have complete knowledge of what I'm doing, but I also created the thing I'm working within. I don't know, I'll leave the finer points of character analysis to those who already think I'm a bit strange, and move on.
Anyhoo, the code is coming along nicely. I'm finishing off (or at least moving on a bit) a thing I started ages ago. It uses a Tablet PC to help you mark class work. You fill in a form with comments, grades and suggestions and the program stores all this (including ink) in an XML file. You can then use this to generate a custom web page or set of report images you can send to the students. I've got all the storage and editing story sorted and I'm just finishing off the reporting.
When I've got the system working I'll post it for anyone to play with.
In the meantime I'm having a bunch of fun making it.
Got a code in the node. I feel kind of bad because I've spent the last couple of days in the labs looking at student work and presumably breathing germs on everyone who has shown me their software. Oh well. According to a study (always the prelude to some enormous whopper or other) young folk today fall prey to all kinds of nasties because they aren't exposed to enough things to challenge their immune system as they grow up. So now I see my sneezing as a kind of social service.
Anyhoo, I really enjoyed the marking. The general standard was excellent. Students could either make a bank application or a game, and the split was around 50:50 over the cohort. I saw some "production quality" banks, with excellent code and some highly playable games.
Good work folks, and I hope I haven't made you too ill.
Last night I either dreamed I had toothache or I laid awake with toothache for some time and then woke up with no toothache. Most confusing.
I feel terrible. Today I bunked off using the Wii fit (which is excellent by the way) so that I could play Grand Theft Auto IV instead. Now I know that the fitness program is going to give me a hard time when I next use it. Mind you, I'd back Nico against a weighing machine in any kind of fight. Oh yes.
I'm doing two sessions at DevDays in Holland next month. They asked me to make a video about them.
So I did.
I've spent a lot of time over the last few weeks working with my final year project students and their reports. They've been sending me drafts and I've been adding comments. This year has been great, because most of them have really engaged with the process, coming to regular meetings and responding very well to what I've said. It has been nice to see the drafts improving in quality with each pass.
The actual hand in date is this Thursday, and I'm quite looking forward to seeing the finished results. If you are writing something it is very important that you go through this review phase, and you allow time to do it. I reckon that a properly written report can add ten percent to a project mark so it is worth the effort.
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.
