The GigaPan is a device that will let you take huge panoramic pictures using an ordinary digital camera:
I really like that kind of picture, so getting one might be a nice idea. But I think it would be even more fun to try and make one out of Lego. On the other hand, if you have 400 dollars to spare you can find out more here.
http://gigapansystems.com/system-page.html
Doh! Some one has beaten me to the idea.
The car park, on arrival today
Yesterday I finished the PS3 game Uncharted. Only started playing it in October last year. Go me. If you’ve not played the game I can strongly recommend it. Very much in the Tomb Raider mould, with some great level designs.
I’ve now moved on to Valkyria Chronicles from Sega. Number one son bought a copy whilst he was with us at Christmas, and since it was a good price I bought it a couple of weeks back. It is a turn based strategy game, a bit like the Advance Wars games that are so good on the Nintendo handhelds, but with lots of personality, a strong storyline and fantastic graphics. You get to hand pick, train and equip your troops before going off to fight against the Imperial forces (I was wondering if Imperial forces have always been the bad guys, perhaps it started with Star Wars).
The game itself has a very strong moral theme, starting with just how horrible war itself is, with picture postcard villages reduced to mud and wreckage before your eyes, and normal people dragged into the fight.
I’m enjoying playing it, except for one thing. If you are not careful some of your comrades in arms get shot. I hate this bit. Fortunately you can get them treated and evacuated from the battlefield, and I’ve not lost anyone permanently yet, but it is starting to worry me that I might in the future. I know that they don’t exist, and that the whole thing is actually a block of data running inside an unfeeling lump of hardware, but it still bothers me.
Went to York today and took some photos.
This is my new desktop background.
If you want to rediscover the joys of writing little programs and doing fun things with computers you could take a look at SmallBasic. It is inspired by the tiny Basic interpreters that you used to get with your Commodore 64 or BBC micro and lets you write programs using a very simple language in a friendly IDE.
I’m a great believer in starting to program by keeping your focus on the algorithms and things like this can only be good. Although I’m not sure about the Goto statement figuring quite so large....
Alfred Thompson had a good post in his blog about software testing. Alfred and I are around the same generation (I hope he won’t mind me saying this) and we’ve both written software for money in the past. When I was writing my largest projects I didn’t make use of any kind of tester particularly, I just make sure that it worked before I handed it over. Alfred was the same.
Nowadays it seems that there is a trend towards developers handing stuff over which they haven’t really tested, on the basis that the test people who receive it will find any mistakes they made. Alfred (and I) hate this idea. I put quite a verbose response to this effect on his post you can find here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2009/01/27/how-not-to-develop-software.aspx
I’ve since talked to people in the business and was appalled to hear that this practice is not uncommon nowadays because developers are pushed to meet deadlines and the only way they can do this is by skimping on the testing they do. Ugh. I reckon this really goes back to Bad Management, in that a manager will get a good feeling if they are enforcing a strict regime with tight deadlines which the programmers are all hitting.
The end result though is that the testers keep sending stuff back for re-working because it has bugs in, the developers lose time on the next phase because they have to fix all these bugs, so they send the next version out (in time for the deadline) with more bugs and so on. The words Vicious and Circle spring to mind. Along with Bad and Product.
It turns out that one of my heroes, Eric Brechner, has written a lovely post about this that sets it out really nicely:
http://blogs.msdn.com/eric_brechner/archive/2009/01/01/sustained-engineering-idiocy.aspx
I have just received a nicely printed document called “Developing the Future” from Allison at Microsoft UK Academic Alliance. This is a summary of a report produced by the British Computer Society, software firm Intellect and Microsoft. The report is produced every year and takes a look at the way the UK Software Industry is going. If you are interested in the business I strongly suggest that you take a look at the summary. It makes lots of good points about the future. The full report is even more interesting (but is also 128 pages). Points that I took away were:
I read this with my “Hull University, Department of Computer Science” hat on of course, and I like to think that the graduates we produce are useful and have good employment prospects. Past experience seems to bear this out, and (not wishing to blow our own trumpet or anything) the fact that we are presently ranked sixth in the country for graduate employment bodes well.
You can get the summary, and the full report from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/uk/developingthefuture/default.mspx
I used to have a little Polaroid camera. I loved the way that the pictures appeared over time, and the strange way it had with colours. Nowadays such technology is being replaced by digital, but the Poladroid application does give you a way to recapture that old magic. It takes pictures and gives them the Polaroid treatment, right down to the borders and the way that they take time to appear. You can actually watch the image develop, and even take snapshots of the slowly appearing picture.
You can get the application from: http://www.poladroid.net/
A couple of snaps which have been converted.
Great fun.
Then again, Polaroid might be making a comeback:
I thought I was going to have to spend this evening rebuilding my machine. Just because I installed the new IE8 Release Candidate 1. It didn’t go well at the start:
I’d advise you to take a look at IE8. I’m sure you won’t have the fun and games that I’ve had. I’ve done some searching and nobody else has had problems like mine (do they ever..) It must be something funny about my machine that upset things at the start. You can find IE8 at: www.microsoft.com/ie8
And I even managed to sort out the timetable problem too.
Ha. It is the campus network which is causing the problems. I've reported the fault with IE (it must be something to do with IntraNet and InterNet settings, but I need extra information from the server to find out what) and dropped back to Ye Olde Messenger 8.1, which seems to work OK.
The smartest thing I did last year was to give something away. The result of putting the "Famous Yellow C# book" up on the blog has been a huge increase in traffic and thousands of downloads over the last few months.
Loads of people have been in touch saying how useful it has been to them. A number of courses are using it as one of their texts and it has even made its way onto the digital bookshelf of some leading software manufacturers. And of course quite a few new typos have been discovered....
I got a query today from someone who is moving from Java to C# and I remembered that some time ago I wrote some notes about this. I put them up on this site ages ago, but I've tidied the text up, converted it to pdf and put it in a coloured cover (this time orange). You can find the new material alongside the Yellow book on the same site:
I've made some tiny changes to the text, and fixed some typos. It never looks good if you get the words wrong in the introduction.....
Microsoft Tag is a new way you can put out links to web sites or whatever. The links are printed as patterns a bit like bar codes which you can read with your mobile phone camera. They use a cunning colour technology which means that even when they are snapped out of focus they can still be resolved into a readable address.
The tag for this blog.
The tags are linked through the Microsoft Tag site, which means that you can put expiry dates in them and the use of your tags is automatically logged so you can get reports on how much they are being used.
There are reader programs for most Smartphones including Windows Mobile, J2ME, iPhone, Blackberry and Symbian S60 devices. To work the phone needs a camera and of course internet access.
I'm thinking that when paired with a Polaroid PoGo printer, which prints sticky coloured prints just the right size for some text and a tag, this would be a very neat solution. I'm thinking about having a Tag treasure hunt at the next departmental bash. You can find out more about Microsoft Tag here.
I remembered the camera this time. The light wasn't quite as good, but I still managed one shot worth bothering with.
Hull Marina
I got a lovely surprise today. The hardware for our Micro Framework entry turned up. And it is wonderful. It is one of the latest Tahoe II boards from Device Solutions. I installed the drivers, plugged it into the laptop and got my first program working in minutes.
My first program just displays a picture of the team (as well it might). Next step is to see if I can get the touch screen going, then I'm going to play with the Zigbee wireless networking(we also got a Zigbee adapter for the PC) and interface some sensors and, and, and.....
Good thing I've finished my marking.
I've just discovered that to get the Zigbee board to work on the PC you need to have USB drivers for the carrier boards as supplied. You can find them here: http://www.digi.com/support/kbase/kbaseresultdetl.jsp?id=2138
I've done some more playing. Some notes you might find useful if you are building something for this competition:
Don't try and build a Console application for the Tahoe board, for some reason it won't work.
The PC connection for the Zigbee board simulates a COM port (in my case it was COM17). This should be configured at 9600 baud, 8 data bits, no parity, 1 stop bit. You will need a USB cable with the big connector on the back to power up the interface.
The Zigbee board on the Tahoe board is connected to COM2. When creating the SerialPort instance to talk to the Zigbee device you can just use the simplest version of the constructor, which just takes the name of the port to open.
I've made a couple of really simple programs that should get you started:
XBeeTest is a program for the PC that creates a COM port and implements a tiny terminal that will talk to a Zigbee board on the USB port. You can use Device Manager on your machine to find out which serial port the board is connected to (the program is set up to use COM17). The one button sends the AT command +++ to start a remote session. If all is well you should see OK appear in the TextBox. If you select the TextBox and type commands these will be sent to the Zigbee device and the responses will appear in the TextBox. This does not perform the actual network connection. You have to use the protocol described in the manual here.
MicroXBee is a program for the Tahoe board that connects to the Zigbee device and resets it. When you press the Select button in the middle of the keys the program creates a SerialPort and sends the +++ command and then displays the "OK" message that comes back. Again, it doesn't tell you how to do the comms, but it will get you started sending and receiving them. It assumes that you have installed the drivers for the board.
I've spent the entire day marking First Year exams. It does funny things to your brain. Next time I'm in charge of an exam I'm going to make sure that one of us turns up dressed as a Red Indian, one of us as a construction worker, one as a motorcycle cop, one as a cowboy and so on. When we are asked what we are doing I'll just say...
"Oh, we're the Invigilation People"
I wasn't sure if this was the kind of film that I'd enjoy, but everyone else wanted to go and so I went along. Glad I did.
The plot of Slumdog Millionaire sounds a bit trivial. A poor boy from the wrong side of the tracks gets a shot at the Indian version of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire". However, there is a lot more to it than that. With every question answered there comes another step on the backstory that builds to a very satisfactory climax.
The film is beautifully shot and captures a lot of gritty detail about life in India, but it also shows how the human spirit can triumph in just about any circumstance. The actors are particularly impressive, particularly the child cast who are brilliant. Some bits are hard to watch, but in the end I think you will find the film worth the effort.
I had a call with Devon from Microsoft in the 'states scheduled for late this afternoon. We agreed that it might be a good idea to postpone it slightly. After all, you don't want to have to answer the question "Where were you when America inaugurated Barack Obama as president?" with "Oh, I was on the phone at the time".
Thanks to Adam for a link to this, a fantastic PhotoSynth picture of the inauguration.
http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2009/44.president/inauguration/themoment/
Here is a challenge. Put this on and try and keep still. Excellent stuff.
One of my rules for debugging programs is "the fault is never where you think it is". This is because if the fault was where you thought it was, you would have fixed it by now. The fault isn't where you think it is because one of your assumptions about the problem is wrong. So I begin by checking all the assumptions I am making. Starting with "Am I running the program I think I am?" and going on from there.
I was reminded of this when I set out to find the source of a rattle in the sound system in the car. The nearside rear parcel shelf speaker was making an unholy death rattle in time with the bass notes in the music, and it was getting worse. So, armed with a bunch of screwdrivers I thought I'd go out there and frighten it into submission. I assumed that either something had fallen down the slots above the speaker into it, or I'd broken the cone by playing too many "bangin' choons".
So I set some music playing and sure enough, there was the rattle. So I spent a few minutes trying to find out how to get into the rear parcel shelf and listening carefully and came to an interesting conclusion. There is no speaker in the rear parcel shelf at all. The speakers at the back are in the doors. Well, how was I supposed to know? I've only had the car three and a half years....
Anyhoo, in the door pocket I found a happily rattling five pence piece. So, I now have rattle free music and I'm five pence up on the day.
Win.
And I remembered to take my camera with me today.
Cottingham Church
Went up town today. The light was lovely. A low sun shining through gaps in the clouds. Great conditions for awesome photographs.
Of course, I'd not taken my camera.
Ian, number one son and myself have managed to get through the first round of the "Dare to Dream Different" contest. We should be getting our hardware fairly soon and beginning work on our top secret device.
We have decided to call ourselves "Team Building" and this is our team picture, with a bit of help from http://simpsonizeme.com/#
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.
