Clusty to the Rescue

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I’ve spent bits of today trying to get my .NET Micro Framework devices to work. For some reason I want to take my smallest PC away with me next week to Portugal, and this has meant a certain amount of heartache.

The PC is an Advent netbook. I bought it earlier this year and I love it to bits. It arrived running Windows XP, and I’ve just put the beta version of Windows 7 on it. This turned out to be really easy. I just plugged in an external DVD drive, tweaked the BIOS to make it boot from the DVD and then booted from the Windows 7 disk. I did a brand new install, wiping out the original operating system and, of course, removing the recovery partition. I don’t do things by halves, me.

The installation was smooth and surprisingly quick. The only problem was that I had to find my way to the RealTek site to locate and install the WIFI drivers, but once I did that I had the machine on the campus network with very little fuss.

That was a week ago. Since then I’ve installed Microsoft Office 2007, Visual Studios 2005 and 2008, Photoshop Elements and a bunch of other programs, all of which seem to work fine. Unfortunately, when I tried to install the USB drivers for some of my .NET Micro Framework devices, things started to get a little tricky.

The drivers that were supplied with the hardware didn’t work. I read somewhere that Windows 7 refuses to install drivers that have not been signed, and so I did some digging and found that there is magic that is supposed to switch this off.

Unfortunately it didn’t seem to work for me. I did a lot more digging and kept hitting brick walls, trying increasingly more complex searches for the drivers that it seemed like I needed and not finding anything. By lunchtime I’d resigned myself to taking my heavy old Toshiba away with me.

Then I remembered Clusty. This is a clustering search engine that I’ve used in the past to good effect.  You get your search results nicely categorised, which makes finding your way through them must easier.  I fed in the same search string that I’d been using unsuccessfully on Google and it came back with a list of hits that made it very easy to find just what I wanted. And it worked. So it looks like I’ll be writing code for tiny devices on a tiny device, which I guess is just how it should be.

I M Wright Speaks

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You’ve probably heard me go on about I M Wright before. He is the “Microsoft Development Manager at Large” alter ego of Eric Brechner. He wrote the book Hard Code, which is a wonderful look at how to create software properly. He also has a blog which is brilliant. And now he has a podcast too, so you can listen to the good word rather than have to read it. You can find the file here.

Hull Museums Quarter

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For no particular reason we went for a walk around Hull Museums Quarter today. Makes a change from buying stuff up town, and I had a camera I wanted to play with. If you live in Hull and you haven’t been down there for a look round, shame on you. I’ve always liked looking around these places, and there are some quite nice bits and bobs in the Transport museum

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It might have had “One Careful Owner”, but what about all the other ones?

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I’ll have the oats please…

Mending Laser Printers with Bubble Wrap

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Some time back we got a colour laser printer. The price was amazing (cheaper than the first 9 pin dot matrix I ever bought) and we got a free set of toner cartridges too. The machine (a Samsung CLP-300) worked fine when we got it, and I thought that was that.

I was wrong.

It no longer feeds the paper in properly. The paper gets so far and then it sticks. Very annoying (a tip for printer buyers, do a search for “printername paper jam” before you buy one, just in case you get loads of hits. You do with the CLP-300…).

Anyhoo, I did some more searching and came across FixYa at http://www.fixya.com/. These people serve as collectors of self help tips for hardware owners, and there were quite a few threads about my printer, including one that said the springs in the paper tray were a bit under specified. These push the paper up against the first roller on the way into the machine, and get weak over time, leading to paper jams. The suggestion was to find some stronger springs.

Unfortunately my local spring emporium was shut for the night, and so I was forced to improvise. Turns out that a length of bubble wrap (unpopped works best) rolled into a cylinder and forced underneath the tray provides just enough extra spring power to make the printer work a treat. I’m not sure how long it will last, so I’d probably better get some springs at some point, but at the moment it works fine.

GigaPan Epic

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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.

Valkyria Chronicles

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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.

SmallBasic

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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....

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/devlabs/cc950524.aspx

Bad/Mad Practice

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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

Developing the Future

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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:

  • The UK is still a great place to start a software business, with access to venture capital, a good tax regime and a public who provide a ready market for new developments. (although you might get bought out by a large multinational company if you do well – which might not be too bad I suppose). Other countries are starting to compete though, with targeted incentives for particular fields – notably Game Development in France and Canada.
  • Whilst Small, Medium and Large software development companies are doing well, there has been a decline in “Micro” companies, with less than 10 employees (although the small company sector has got bigger – so perhaps the Micro companies are growing).
  • There is still a “Knowledge Gap” in the Software Industry. Although there are many Computer Science courses in the UK, some are having difficulty recruiting students and there is a feeling amongst employers that not all software graduates have an appropriate skill set. Which leads to a good jobs market for those that have.

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

Poladroid

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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/

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A couple of snaps which have been converted.

Great fun.

The Rocky Road to IE8

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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:

  1. Installs IE8. Installation goes very (suspiciously) smoothly. In fact it did most of the work when I was at my coffee break.
  2. Fired up the new browser and it complained that the version of “Windows Live Sign-in Helper” was out of date and then opened up a window with the message “Internet Explorer Add-ons are not running”. This confused me a bit, for a while I thought that all Add-ons were broken, not just one, and I spent a few less than happy minutes trying to turn them back on.
  3. Gave up on that, and went off to download a new Live Sign-in helper.
  4. This insisted on installing a new copy of Messenger, and a whole bunch of other stuff, including an upgrade for Windows Live Writer (yay!) which I love.
  5. Fired up IE and, lo and behold, the message about the sign in helper had gone.
  6. But I couldn’t get onto the Sharepoint pages at work. Wah. The server gives a message which implies that the server doesn’t understand my browser. Mention this to system support. Their installation of IE8 works fine. Double Wah.
  7. Start Messenger for a moan to other people. Messenger starts running, and then hangs, whilst the fans in the laptop ramp up to warp speed. Sure enough, it is taking all the processor time. Kill Messenger, shutdown IE, and then have to do some proper work for a while.  Spend the afternoon timetable juggling. The only thing keeping me smiling is the disk image I happen to have at home, which means I can return to my starting point in around half an hour.
  8. Get home and reboot the machine. Everything works. Web sites, Sharepoint, Messenger, the lot. The new Messenger front end is really cute and seems to reach out to a whole bunch of other services, which is very interesting. I like the look of IE 8 (even though it has to drop back to Compatibility View to work properly with my blog pages – hopefully Squarespace will fix that eventually). Pages load more quickly and there are some new buttons I’m looking forward to pressing.
  9. Fire up Windows Writer and it looks even more spiffy, I’ll have to wander around the program and see what is new.

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.

New Free Stuff

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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:

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