If you have a Windows Mobile device you might want to take a look at skyfire. It seems to be a really fast mobile browser option and at the moment it is free.
Unfortunately at the moment it only seems to be available in the 'states. But it does look good.
I've got a cold. A rotten one. I'm surrounded by used tissues and I'm hoping I've got enough clean ones to last the day. I've fallen back on the usual treatment. Loud Music.
One the way to work I had Beautiful Garbage on pretty much full blast all the way. Great stuff, although some of the cyclists did look a bit surprised as a somewhat distorted rock band seemed to be sat next to them at the traffic lights...
And the best bit? The track ended just as I pulled up in the parking space. I love it when that happens.
As part of the refit of our department we have got all new doors. These are rather swish, and the ones to our offices have windows in them, to let light into the corridor and give everyone a view of what we are doing. I'm going to stick a picture of someone working on the inside of my door window.
Anyhoo, the main doors have been replaced too. And they've solved a problem that has bugged me for literally years. They only have handles on one side.
Version 1.0 of the doors in our building had handles on both sides. This lead to significant levels of confusion and wrenched shoulders, as people like me grabbed a handle and heaved manfully to find that the door doesn't open that way. I got quite good at looking for door hinges, and even invented a rhyme to help me remember what to do: "If hinges you see, then you should pull me". Unfortunately not everyone did this, and so version 2.0 of the doors added little labels with explicit "Pull" or "Push" instructions.
Version 3.0 of the doors, where we are now, have the innovation that if you are supposed to push the door there is no handle to pull. This is a great idea, in that if you can't do something there should not be a way of trying to do it.
From a user interface point of view there is a school of thought that says if you can't do something, the option to do it should not be present. This means that unusable program functions should be either grayed out or missing. This lines up nicely with doors version 3.0.
I used to think that this was always a good idea, as it means that users don't get frustrated when they try to do something and the system tells them they can't do it. However, it can lead to even more frustration, where the option or command is tantalisingly visible but can't be used, or worse yet, other people claim that they have the command and you don't. In the case of doors it is easy to see what to do from the start, you either pull or push, but with software things are always more complicated.
In my programs I now tend to enable all the features and then have a helpful message that appears and tells the user what they need to do to make it work. Rather than saying "Not Allowed" the message would be "You must log in to perform this command" and give a link to the appropriate help.
We were in the pub, putting the world to rights, and were talking about the recent turmoil in the stock markets where people who don't actually produce anything have just discovered that you can't do this indefinitely without something bad happening.
Anyhoo, conversation turned to the way that it seemed to be possible to earn vast sums of money by not actually doing anything. I mentioned that I would feel kind of uncomfortable in this situation, in that I would have got paid for no reason.
"But you still collect your paypacket from the university at the end of each month..." said Ian.
Thanks for that.
We now have an experimental Twitter feed for the department at Hull. This will be used for sending out messages as a supplement to the RSS news feed that we run internally. You can find it here:
http://twitter.com/HullCompSci
Since Twitter has an API I was thinking of writing a program that reads an RSS feed and tweets any item under 150 characters in length to twitter. This would make it a completely automatic extension to our message system. Does anyone know if this has been done already? Does anyone fancy doing it?
Oh, and you can follow me on Twitter at:
I'm not a very good twitterer (or is it twit?) to be honest, I have enough problems thinking of something to say in daily blog posts, but if you want to follow me you are more than welcome.
Andy Sithers (who we call "The Dark Lord of the Sith" - no he doesn't think it is very funny either) has started a blog. Andy is a Microsoft Academic chap who is very clued up on the ways of Microsoft and is also a top bloke. Well worth a read.
One of his early posts brings great news. The Ultimate Steal is back. This puts a copy of Microsoft Office into your hot little hands for less than the cost of a video game. You can get all of it for 39 quid. Hence the name.
Went up town and bought a gadget. What are the chances? Sony have released their PlayTV add-on. This turns your PS3 into digital video recorder with two tuners. It works well, although it is a bit expensive at 69 quid. Some time back I got a complete recorder for around the same price. However, if you want to watch and record TV via your PS3 and you don't want to have to put another box under your telly then it is well worth a look.
The picture is good, although they don't seem to be doing the fancy upscaling thing that the PS3 does with DVDs, which makes them look really amazing and close to Blu-Ray in quality (which probably counts as a bit of an own goal really).
You can stream video off the PS3 onto a Playstation Portable over local WiFi and even configure your router to allow you to watch home telly using your PSP from anywhere in the world. Some time ago I had a thing called a Slingbox which did something similar with a home video signal, but that could target PCs rather than the PSP.
One other thing which is nice is that the system supports Digital Teletext too, which puts it one up on the Windows Media Centre (although it won't record all the episodes of a program automatically, which probably puts it one down again).
The only thing I really don't like is the way that the device (which is a rather ugly little box) connects to the USB cable on the front of the PS3, leaving a wire trailing across the front. The Xbox 360, rather cleverly, has a USB port at the back for connecting devices like this, which is a bit neater.
If you haven't got a video recorder, but you have a PS3, this is well worth a look.
Came home today. To the land of working networks and big monitors. I've not done much with computers, honest, and it has been nice. But I like coming back too.
Went for a walk in the woods today.
This is what you seen when you look down.
This is what you seen when you look up.
We had our second barbeque of the year today. This is a bit late (the first one was on Monday. Snag is, we have just not had the weather for standing outside admiring the miracle that is fire. Anyhoo, it went well enough.
Firelighter power
In the field next day they were getting in the harvest.
I wanted to complain, because according to all the research I performed at the age of five, a combine harvester is red. Not camouflaged. I had a play with the macro lens whilst the burgers cooked.
I think this is a thistle.
And this isn't.
Went to the American Museum in Bath as part of some birthday celebrations. It is a wonderful place. And we didn't get rained on.
I like the shades of green.
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.
Showing style in the face of adversity. And yes, those are guys in sumo costumes in the distance.
We went off to see the ducks at Slimbridge today. We go there every year and always enjoy it. I took the big camera and tried to get some snaps.
These are not ducks
We set off this morning for our week away. I'm only taking two computers, which must count as some kind of a break. Hopes are high for the weather, in spite of the disaster that was last week.
Not a bad view from the bedroom window
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...
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.
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.
I wrote this piece as a way of organising my thoughts for a local radio interview I did about the Hadron Collider this morning.
I've just done the interview and it seemed to go OK. Everyone at the station said how wonderful it was, they reckoned that, given the circumstances, I might as well go out on a high....
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.....
And, right on time, to cap my radio efforts here is Paul on Sky News...
I've made the papers! Picture and everything. If you rush down to the newsagents and grab a copy of the Hull Daily Mail for today (Monday) you will find me, larger than life and twice as ugly, on page 18. The story is about my MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional) award and my involvement with the Imagine Cup.
Great stuff.
You can say what you like about Microsoft, but I don't think you would find many other people at the level of Bill Gates doing things like this. And I find it genuinely funny.
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.
