Today brings the start of a new Academic Year at Hull. There are of course lots of things to worry about. Sorting out all the paperwork that a new session brings, Finding all the lectures on the sprawling campus. Getting on with all the new people that are bound to be there. Keeping up with the material in the courses. And worrying about fitting in.
But that's enough of my problems.
Welcome to all our new (and returning) students.
Today was the day for number one's daughter to dangle from a rope in a good cause (actually the day was a few weeks back, but it was cancelled due to inclement weather). I was actually quite pleased when it was put off, it gave us another excuse for a trip to London.
Today the weather seemed anxious to pay us back for last time, it was the best we've had in ages. After the early morning mist the day was an absolute belter. We had a walk round Oxford Street before the off.
I liked these reflections.
Then it was time to go up to Guy's Hospital and the main event. The building looked even higher than last time we were there, but daughter gamely went off to do the deed.
Well, would you abseil down this?
This time there were no hitches, and they even had a height immune cameraman at the top to record things properly.
View from the top
If you want to sponsor number one daughter retrospectively, (and after seeing this picture you must think she has earned it) then visit here.
This might be the last hurrah for our trips to Milton Keynes. We've found out that after today the whole shebang is moving to a football stadium. We've been going for a while, and the mix of celebrities and interesting stands has held our attention up to now and because there is also a Lego shop (and an Apple store) at the shopping centre where it is held we've seen it as worth the trip.
Anyhoo, we got up at an early hour and set off. Number one son was meeting us there and wanted to snag one of the Serenity cast.
Morena puts pen to paper..
So, who is this cool gentleman?
..and this chap (a clue, his part is going to get a lot bigger in the future..)
Not sure if we'll do this again, but it has been fun while it lasted. I bought another watch, and then we retired to a Travelodge to watch "Strictly Come Dancing" (although I was more pre-occupied with checking the score in the Hull City match - which we won. Yay!).
London tomorrow.
There are not many things that improve themselves after you buy them. Spend twenty quid on the latest blockbuster book from Jordan and it is unlikely to improve in content over time. Buy a Girls Aloud CD and, although you might get to tolerate the tracks after a while, it won't suddenly sprout extra songs and arrangements. But video games seem to be different. I've just spent a little while upgrading the copy of Burnout Paradise I bought a few months back. Now I've got proper day and night and bikes to ride. In short, a great game just got greater. The upgrade is automatic for Xbox and PS3 owners and works a treat.
A lot of video game manufacturers walk away from a game as soon as it is released. Sometimes they don't even hang around long enough to make patches to make the game playable. It is nice to see that Criterion are in it for the long haul.
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.
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.
