Funny Way to Run a Railway

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Got into a conversation with a web design company today. They had asked permission to use one of my pictures on Flickr (which was nice of them) and mentioned the site they were building.

I had a quick look and the site was really swish. Well designed and with nice content. But I noticed that one of the pages did not render quite correctly with IE8, my current browser of choice. I’ve been quite happy with IE8, although it has to be said that sites don’t always look right with it. Perhaps this is due to it being more standard than they are, but I’m not sure. Anyhoo, I tried the page with Safari and it seemed to look OK so I pinged the company my findings.

They came back to me and said “Oh, that’s interesting. We don’t usually test our sites with IE8 or Safari.” I found this very surprising. I’m not sure if a shop would do very well if it has window display that was only visible to blondes, or put everything on a high shelf where only tall people could see it (although I’d be OK on both counts of course).

If I was running a web design company I’d make it my business to ensure that the site worked correctly with everything. Of course one day, in a distant utopian future, we might have some web standards that would mean browser compatibility was no longer an issue, but for now it is – and I would have thought that would be standard practice to worry about this kind of thing.

Live Code at the Humber Bridge

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The clocks changed on Sunday morning. In the UK we started British Summer Time, which meant that a sinister government plot resulted in 60 minutes of my life being stolen overnight. We had to put the clocks forward of course. One year I tried to assert my independence from this time base tyranny, but it didn’t work that well, and I was late for everything (or early, I forget).

Anyhoo, many years ago I wrote some software for the Humber Bridge that is part of their toll management system (Ian and Nicky did the rest) and my bit is in charge of making sure that the clocks get put forward and back. Because the software had to go quite quickly I implemented a little look-up table with the dates hard wired into the code. And then I forgot all about it.

Of course this weekend my little table ran out, and today I got a call from Neil at the bridge because their system was living in the past. So it was out with the Windows 95 system that I used to create the software, a quick extension of the table and down to the bridge to install it.

We use a system by Siemens to talk to PLC machines in the Toll Booths. It has a wonderful ability to let you update the code while everything is running. This is because the software is designed for process control, where you sometimes can’t turn everything off just to put new versions out there. So I was able to add the new code (which I’d already tested on my laptop) and then watch as the clock pinged forward to the correct hour.

The table now works to 2012. I’ve set an appointment in my diary to remind me to get in touch with them well before then, so that it doesn’t happen again.

One Hundred Followers on Twitter. But Why?

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I now have 100 followers on my Twitter account. I’ve no idea why. I still don’t fully “get” Twitter. I only follow 4 people, and two of them hardly tweet anything. The other two are quite chatty, and I have bother keeping up with everything they put out there.

Some people follow thousands of other Twitterers, which begs the question “How do they keep up?”. The answer must be they don’t. I think they use some filtering stuff so that certain words in Tweets cause those to bubble to the surface. This means that lots of tweets go un-noticed and ignored. That bothers me for two reasons. One is that when I’m having a conversation with someone I think it is bad manners not to listen to what they say. I wouldn’t feel right following someone and then ignoring them. The second reason is that I’d hate for any of my deathless prose to be ignored by anyone else.

Perhaps I’m reading too much into the whole thing, but at the moment I kind of regard Twitter as the digital equivalent of standing on top of a bus and shouting things out. And we know what we think of people who do that kind of thing.

Anyhoo, I’m going to keep putting the odd (and I do mean odd) tweet out there. Just as I’ve found that writing a regular blog has vastly improved my writing style (you might disagree) perhaps regular tweeting will improve my “Shouting on a bus” technique.

Treasure Hunt Kit

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If you want to have a Tag Treasure Hunt like the one we had at our Mad March Bash you can now download the tag designs and the question and answer sheets from here.

I printed out the tags on my Polaroid Pogo printer and then stuck them around the department, gave the question sheet out and then watched as people whizzed around trying to find the tags and solve the clues. They seemed to have fun.

If you do this though, a note of warning – the glue on the sticky prints seems to get much harder over time. Don’t stick them on any painted surfaces and try to take them off as soon as you can. Otherwise they can be a bit tricky to remove.

Spring is in the Air. And in my Sofa.

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A week or so back I sat down rather more heavily than usual and there was a loud twang from underneath me. One of the springs in our Ikea Ektorp sofa had broken. I checked the interweb and apparently this furniture has a lifetime guarantee. Unfortunately this does not cover springs, cushions or covers or anything else likely to break or wear out.  Such is life.

Fortunately the interweb also took me to http://upholsterysupplyman.co.uk/ where I could buy a replacement spring (you need a 23 inch serpentine/zigzag spring for the Ektorp) for only two quid. I got four in case I decide to sit down heavily again, along with a bunch of clips to hold them in place.

The springs arrived yesterday, and so today I had the fun and games of fitting one. Turned out to be quite easy, although what I really want is a staple gun to pin the fabric back onto the frame properly. I’ve used such things in Doom, and they seem to work quite well.

One handyman success a day is usually enough for me, but then, last thing at night I got the “chance to shine” again, when the power shower suddenly became a lot less powerful. And much, much colder. Having just spent the price of a really nice camera (and I mean *really* nice) on replacing big chunks of the water heating system I was less than happy at this point. So it was off with my socks and hello to an evening of standing in the bath swearing while I tried to dismantle chunks of plumbing.

After a while skimming my knuckles and reflecting that it might be time to call in a plumber again I had a kind of breakthrough when the piece I was pulling at came off in my hand. Turns out that something was blocking the hot water inlet filter. Feeling a bit like a chap in CSI I bagged it for further investigation, put the shower back together and it all worked perfectly. I think something must have got left in the replacement heating tank and found its way into the part of the system that would cause me the most bother. There wasn’t enough of the sample to get a DNA trace, but foul play is not suspected at this point. Just dumb bad luck.

After that it was time for a shower and bed, at the end of a slightly shorter but on the whole successful day.

Fantastic Blog Site

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Abhinaba Basu is a Microsoft Developer working out of Hyderabad in India. He works on the Compact Framework Team, take excellent photographs and even finds time to paint great pictures.

He has written some great blog posts about how the internals of the Compact Framework and you really should read them. If you have ever wondered how Garbage Collection works he has one of the best explanations I’ve seen. You can find his work blog here.

Mad March Bash

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Today was the day of the Mad March Bash. This follows on from the Christmas bash we had at, er, Christmas, and has pretty much the same format. With a treasure Hunt too.

We had to use a different lab for the FragFest, but this did mean that we could have more systems, with 32 players taking part in mammoth Counterstrike action.

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Network Gaming Action – but the only things moving are mice and keyboards

We tried using the Buzz quiz, and that was a great success. At Counterstike I got shot every time, but with Buzz I actually managed to win one contest. Go me.

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Getting the Buzz

The food was the usual Pizza, fizzy drinks and afters. Including  (of course) Easter eggs.

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Meat Feast was still the most popular…

We actually had a winner of the Treasure Hunt. The team “The Nuzzling Badgers” managed to find every single cunningly hidden tag. Even the very high one.

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Now, that’s a prize worth winning.

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The Dance Mats were popular as ever.

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..as was Rock Band.

Thanks to everyone who came along, I think a good time was had. Now we start preparing for the Grand Finale Midsummer Bash.

There are some more pictures on Flickr. I’ve tagged them with hull2009madmarchbash.

Tag Treasure Hunt

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Spend all evening setting up a Tag Treasure Hunt for our Mad March Bash tomorrow. I’m using these new fangled tags from Microsoft that let you use pretty much any mobile phone which has a camera and a network connection to read a printed tag.

The phone hooks up with the tag server which delivers a message, a business card or a web link. We’ve come up with 26 clues to 26 websites and 26 tag stickers. The idea is that you match the clue to the tag.

As an example, one clue was

"640K should be enough for anyone" But he claims he never said it

And the answer….

 

Tomorrow I’m going to print out the tags on the Pogo printer and then stick them around the department for the students to find. Should be fun.

X48 Cheesy Success

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Last weekend four of our students went over to Derby to take part in the X48 Marathon gamecamp.  The idea was to create a game from scratch using C# and XNA 3.0 based on a particular theme. So it was that Harry Overs, Rob Eagle, Rob Hubbucks and Craig Dickman from our second year headed over to Derby to rub shoulders with lots of fellow game developers, many of whom were students from Masters levels courses.

Our lowly second years actually did quite well for themselves. The theme was “evolution” and by the simple technique of not sleeping for a day and a half they managed to come up with “Evo Fighter” a beat-em-up that merges arcade punching action with an exposition of the ideas of Darwin.

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Part of the very funny start screen….

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Evo Fighting Action

This managed to walk off with the “Cheesiest Game Award”. When the cheese arrives from Derby, I’ll put up a picture of the team with their prize. I’m very proud of them, and like to think I have taught them well. You can find out more about them here.

Apparently Channel 4 were there filming, so there might be some TV coverage too.

I’m hoping that the competition will become an annual event. I’m tempted to dress up as a student (some say I already do) so that I can take part if it runs again. Many thanks to everyone at Derby, Microsoft and Pixel-Lab for setting it up.

Off the Air

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After a great weekend, everything broke. On Monday a router failed at my service provider, which knocked out the IP address that all my blog pages live at.

This probably worried me a lot more than it should. After all, it is not as if I run a business from these pages. But the thought that the link to the outside world was broken was kind of upsetting. I’ve been blogging for a long time, and it is the first time that I’ve been “off the air” like this.

Anyhoo, the new address is now in place, and you should be able to read this.

Splendid Sunday

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This is turning out to be an excellent weekend. Went out for a superb meal at Fudge yesterday and spent this morning making things work that work (actually, number one son wrote most of the code – I see myself as more of an ideas man).

We now have multiple sensors talking to our .NET Micro Framework device and the next thing is to build the emulation environment and interface the actual sensor electronics.

This seemed as good a time as any to take a break and watch a dodgy James Bond movie, and so we did. There was no particular agreement on who was the best Bond, I think your choice says as much about your generation as it does your taste, but there seemed to be no doubt who was the worst, with Roger Moore coming out on top.

I think the film was “For Your Eyes Only”, but they made a whole bunch of anonymous Bond films in the eighties, and it could have been any one of them. It did have some hilarious “Hi-Tech” bits, where Bond could be seen manhandling what looked like RL-02 disk packs on a Digital Equipment machine (which as I remember provided a whole 20Mbytes of storage). Bond then spent some time sitting in red lighting doing something fatuous with a really old display, before going out and failing to get killed by idiot assassins.

Ideal Sunday afternoon fare.

First, Update the Firmware

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Did some work on our Micro Framework project today which will be our entry into the Dare To Dream Different competition. We are creating an “Anything Bad” alarm system with nifty remote sensors. The sensors are based on the XBee ones that we got supplied with the competition hardware, and they work a treat.

Eventually.

First thing we did was build some test remote sensors:

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This turned out to be easy enough, although I did solder 20 pins rather than four, which took a bit longer than it needed to…

Anyhoo, the next thing to do was configure the XBee devices. This was harder, in that nothing seemed to work. We were giving the correct commands and everything, but the device was complaining every time. A bit of searching got us the answer. We found a blog post with the revealing message “To get the devices to work you must upgrade the firmware”. I’m not sure why a company would ship a product which doesn’t work out of the box, but then again, welcome to the world of hardware development.

After the upgrade things went swimmingly. We reached a point where I could press a button on the device above and have a program on another machine notice this. Wonderful.

Mad March Bash

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After the roaring success of the Xmas Bash I am organising a follow up, the Mad March Bash, for Wed. 25th of March, starting at 4:00 pm in Room 312 of the Robert Blackburn Building and finishing at 8:00 pm.

There will be Half Life 2 Deathmatch, Zombie Panic, Wii Sports, Dance Mats, Rock Band and an all-new feature, the Tag Treasure Hunt.

Pizza, pop and sweeties will be provided.

Entrance to the event is by ticket only. Tickets will be on sale in the Departmental Office, priced at 2 pounds each, from 2:00 pm on 19th March. As last time, numbers are limited, so make sure that you get yours early.

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