Art in Hereford

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We like to go to the art festival in Hereford. Last year we turned up on Monday and found that the main exhibition was shut. So this year we did the same thing, which was a bit daft really.

Anyhoo, we did find some artists who were doing little exhibitions at home, which was very nice. If I was rich I'd love to invest in a few bits and bobs.

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Showing style in the face of adversity. And yes, those are guys in sumo costumes in the distance.

Friday on the Road

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Spent today driving. Mostly on the right side of the road. Had to go to London to fetch number one daughter. Her sojourn in the smoke has finished and she now has to come back to Real Life(tm) in Hull for a while.

The M1 was actually quite kind to me on the way down, but threw in a half hour delay on the way back. But we did get back to Hull in time for Friday Fish and Chips.

Off on our hols tomorrow, which will probably be a cue for even more driving...

Mastering Mailing

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All I wanted to do was build up a little mailing list. I had a bunch of incoming mail messages and I wanted to take the address of each sender and use it to construct a list of recipients I could send the same message to. Common sense left me thinking that there would be something in Outlook that would make this easy.

Common sense (at least mine) was wrong.

Outlook let me laboriously create a mailing list from the addresses by hand, and then hid the list in a place where I can't actually find it. No kidding. This is obviously a variant of the highly secure "Write Only Memory" devices that we invented years ago.

Google mail sort of let me do it, but I had to laboriously insert the names one at a time, and it informed me, just enough times to be irritating, that it already knew some of the addresses anyway.

Finally I got the messages sent off, only to find that some of them ended up in spam filters. Such is life.

If anyone knows of a tool or trick that makes what I want to do easy, then I'd love to know it.

Thoughts on the Large Hadron Collider

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Today might be the end of the world. It seems that mad scientists have created a machine that could destroy everything. Or could it?

Before worrying too much about the safety of the experiment, it is worth spending a bit of time on why it is being performed. It is all to do with something called "The Standard Model", which has been created to explain how the universe works.

If you try to hit a tennis ball really hard you have to work hard. This is because the ball has mass, and you need to put in work to make that mass move. You have to work even harder with a bowling ball, because that has greater mass. Take your bowling ball to pieces at the lowest possible level and you find a bunch of particles inside the atoms that it is made of. The Standard Model has to explain how all these particles work together to give you something that behaves like a bowling ball. We can prove the Standard Model by finding evidence of all the particles that it says must be there.

Thing is, one of the most important particles, the one that makes mass work, and makes a tennis ball behave differently from a bowling ball from a mass point of view, has not been observed in the wild yet. This particle is called the "Higgs Boson", after Peter Higgs, who suggested it as a way to make the Standard Model work. Unfortunately you can only observe the existence of these particles at very start of the universe, when things are compressed really tightly together. The rest of the time they fade into the background and we can only infer that they exist by the fact that the universe seems to behave in the way the Standard Model predicts.

So, to prove that the model is right, we have to create the same conditions as the start of the universe by bashing some bits of atoms together where we can look at them. Then this magic particle will appear, we will see it and we will know the Standard Model works. Or it won't appear and we'll know that it is duff. Or the universe will end, and we will not know anything....

The danger is that when you bash these particles together you can't be absolutely sure what you will get. You might compress them so much that they turn into a black hole, and suck everything in. You might create particles that haven't existed since the origins of the universe, and these might combine with everything around them and turn all matter into a new state, which could be grey goo.

The bad news is that since nobody has done this experiment in this way, nobody can really say what will happen when we do it. Scientists are very hard to pin down. They will never say "That won't happen" they will say "That is very unlikely to happen". By "very unlikely" they probably mean things like "hasn't happened in the last 13.7 billion years", but it still rings alarm bells. The weatherman sometimes says that rain is "very unlikely" and then we get wet anyway.

As far as I'm concerned, I feel quite safe. The kind of collisions that are going to happen in the experiment are taking place all around us all the time as high energy particles from space bash into the earth. I find it hard to believe that the people around the device are prepared to risk the future of the universe just to prove a scientific point. And if I'm wrong, nobody will be around to sue me anyway.

Media Rivalry

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Hah. Just as I am basking in the reflected glory of my item in the Hull Daily Mail yesterday, news arrives that Paul Chapman has got an article about the Venus Project in today's Guardian. On page 17, nearer the front than mine.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/sep/09/archaeology

Ah well. I'm on Radio Humberside tomorrow morning talking about the Giant Hadron Collider. I expect Paul will be on Radio 4 on Thursday.....

Zune Power

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I've been playing with XNA on Zune, porting a little sprite toolikt from StarLight onto it. For those of you who haven't played with the Zune, it is basically an ipod that you can run XNA on. I managed to get 400 sprites with transparency bouncing around quite happily. I'll post the code on VerySillyGames when I've finished, but this means that you can get quite complex displays on the tiny platform with no problems at all.

So Much for the Weather

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Today was the day of number one daughter's abseil for money. She was doing the jump for Marie Curie Cancer Care (you can still sponsor her here). The venue was Guy's Hospital at London Bridge in, er, London.

We turned up nice and early, daughter went off in the lift to practice on the top of the building and we waited with the other anxious observers.

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The building is very tall. You can just see one of the earlier arrivals making their way down the building in the middle of the picture.

The folks next to us had real style, cheering as their friends came down and even uncorking champagne.  We just waited. And waited. Then the jumps were put on hold for while, then further weather checks were made. Then daughter re-appeared at the bottom, still in her harness and wearing a safety hat with the word Cheese on it (something which was never satisfactorily explained).  Then the wind and rain got worse and they were forced to abandon abseiling for the day.

I was kind of relieved, but very sorry for daughter, who had got all the way to the top, done the training, been pretty much the next person to go and then been told "Not today". It is just one of those things, it is nice to know that they take safety very, very seriously, and they will be rescheduling for later this month.

But we did have a great trip to London, and I got some nice photographs.

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HMS Belfast, and Tower Bridge

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"The Gherkin", and friends

Clever Cameras

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I've been taking pictures of business cards and sending them to Evernote. This works really well because the system does optical character recognition on the text on the cards, and makes it searchable. Very impressive, all the more so because it actually works.

For the best results I used a setting on the camera which is specially for taking pictures of text. Out of interest I pointed the camera at myself and took a picture. I got an image with the word "Rob" on it.

E Reader from Sony

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Bought yet another gadget today. It is the new Sony e-reader. Sony have actually got around to launching the device in the UK, in conjunction with Waterstones bookstore. What made it particularly attractive to me was the way that it ships with 100 classic books on CD-ROM. I actually got the device for number one wife, who really likes the idea of having every book by Jane Austen with her at all times.

It is really nice, very shiny and the screen is lovely to read. It is based on an ink based technology which requires no power at all to retain the display. This means that battery consumption can be measured in page turns, rather than hours. The book says it is good for over 6000, which equates to quite a lot of reading.

Number one wife (and I) really like the device. I've loaded it up with pretty much everything that came with it (You can get around 120 books into the 120M ram of the device and you can also add an SD card if you want to carry a really  huge number of volumes)

The only annoyance is that the Waterstones ebook site, where you can buy DRM versions of new books, has a rather limited range of content at the moment. Also the prices are just stupid. I would expect an ebook, which has no resale value once you have bought it and costs nearly nothing to produce and distribute, to be quite a bit cheaper than the paper version. Savings of 3 quid on a sixteen pound book just don't cut it for me, particularly as these are against the advertised full price of the publication, which nobody pays anyway.  If they don't get their act together on these issues then I can see them killing off the new device before it even gets started.

Some reviews have been very sniffy, saying things like "It will never take the place of a real book.". These people are missing the point. It is not a replacement for a physical tome. I expect our shelves at home to be groaning under the weight of volumes for some time to come. What it does do though is make it much easier to have a big chunk of your library with you at all times, which is really useful. And for trips away it would be terribly good. And if they get their pricing sorted out it would be a great way to buy and read all those books that you don't really want to have in physical form. 

The device will also show monochrome pictures that actually look quite cute. And it can play audio as well, which is nice.

So nice that I got one for me as well, but you had already guessed that.

Tech-Ed EMEA 2008 Barcelona

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I've just found out that I have had a session accepted for Tech-Ed EMEA 2008. This means that if you sally forth to Barcelona in November you will be able to see me strutting my stuff about the .NET Micro Framework. I did a session about this in Orlando earlier this year, and this time I'll be able to use even more hardware (every time I turn around another Micro Framework board has appeared).

I'd love to see you in the audience, so if you are coming out to Spain feel free to search out the session. I'll post more details when I have them. And I'm going to be using "All New Jokes" (tm).

Underwater Magic

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The University of Hull is one of the partners in the Venus Project. The aim of the work is to preserve underwater archeological  sites by making a completely accurate record of them, and provide a realistic visualisation of what they are actually like to visit. Paul Chapman from the department is giving a presentation of the system later this week, and as a taster he set it up in our visualisation suite and let us have a go on it.

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Darren navigates the submersible to the site while Paul watches.

The system provides an eerily accurate version of the view that you would get from a submersible craft if you explored the sites yourself. You can move around just as you would in the submarine, and all artifacts are there just as when they were discovered.

Fantastic stuff.

Rob in the News

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Earlier this year I was awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) status for another year. I was really pleased about this and the university seems quite pleased too. They even wrote a little story about it and the our Imagine Cup success over the years, with a specially taken scary photo of me in my "pyjama shirt". You can find out more, and marvel at the picture, here.

Sunday Reading

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Spent a very pleasant part of Sunday reading The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett. Absolutely brilliant.

If you've not discovered the Diskworld books then good for you, because it means you'll have the pleasure of reading them for the first time. They are written with a lightness of touch, a cleverness and a humanity that nobody else can match.

Terry Pratchett was recently diagnosed with an early form of Senile Dementia which doesn't seem to be slowing him down much just yet, thank goodness. He is truly great writer who has not been granted anything like the recognition he richly deserves in spite (or, one wonders perhaps because of) his great popularity with huge numbers of readers.

All By Myself?

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Just watched the end of "Last Choir Standing", a BBC music contest thing where the title pretty much sums it up, although they had to sing against each other rather than a potentially more interesting mass brawl.

Anyway, I just can't get my head around the concept of a load of blokes stood together singing "All By Myself". Just doesn't seem right somehow.

And the best choir came third, which is even worse in my book.