Inaccurate Clocks

The clock on my Windows Desktop updates the minute hand every minute. Which is fair enough. However, it does this at the end of each minute, which I think is wrong. It means that for the last thirty seconds of each minute the clock is more than 30 seconds wrong. I reckon that the minute hand should move to the nearest minute when it becomes the nearest one.

Or am I just being too pedantic, and should really turn the second hand on? (and then fret about the clock being more than half a second out…)

SkyDrive is Superb

Fancy 25G of online storage for free? Thought so. It gets even better though. You can have public storage, private storage or anywhere in between. Everything is done via the web, so you can push files between PCs, Macs and anything with a browser. I’m getting into the habit of lobbing important stuff up there just to keep things safe.

If you have a Windows Live account you are in business. Just head up to http://skydrive.live.com and start uploading files. The biggest downsides for me are the fact that you have to drag individual files into the storage and that my home broadband makes uploading a rather slow experience.

Great stuff.

Meccano Makes Good Programmers

When I was a kid I had a Meccano set. I had some Lego too, but at the time all you could make with that was houses and not very realistic vehicles. The Technical Lego and Mindstorms stuff was years away in those days, and besides Lego stuff was too easy to put together, and fell apart too quickly.

Meccano wasn’t like that. Getting the nuts and bolts together could be murder. It was especially unforgiving of mistakes. Picking up the wrong kind of part early in the build often meant you had to spend ages undoing your painstakingly constructed model. The instructions were good, but you often had to use a lot of deduction to work out which bit you needed to use, and how it really fitted. On the other hand, Meccano was tough. It even survived the day that I decided some Meccano roller skates would be a good idea.

I was reminded of all this when I got to play with some Meccano recently. Number one daughter got one first, and I just had to follow suit and get a little Meccano model of my own. And then spend a couple of happy hours putting it together.

When I think about it, this was very good preparation for a programming career. Programming languages and their libraries are not known for tolerating mistakes, and you often end up taking to bits what you have just built, because you get to the point where you discover it just won’t work that way. And with Meccano, as with programming, if it ends up wrong it is pretty much always your fault.  And, just like Meccano, every now and then you build something you really like.

Nice Looking Hull

This is the middle of Hull. No, really.

De Nutty Professor Rob Miles

I'm going to be presenting at DevDays09 in Holland later this year (28/29 of May to be precise).

I'm doing two sessions during the conference, one on the .NET Micro Framework and another on XNA. I'm also doing a session at Geek Night. I did one last year, and it was great. This time I'm talking about "Ruling the World with the .NET Micro Framework". I'm going to show how you can achieve greatness by programming tiny devices. It is going to be fun, on the site at the moment they refer to me as "Rob Miles, de nutty professor uit Hull". Works for me.

Reading Twitter Feeds with LINQ

LINQ (Language Integrated Query) is a really neat feature of .NET which makes it very easy to work with structured data. I’d always thought this meant things like databases and stuff, but it also works with XML. This CodeProject article shows how you can use LINQ to read information out of Twitter feeds.

http://www.codeproject.com/articles/35668/How-to-Read-Twitter-Feeds-With-LINQ-to-XML.aspx

Very clever. It took me around five minutes to make a simple Twitter Viewer application based on the code given:

https://static.squarespace.com/static/5019271be4b0807297e8f404/52c5bcfce4b0c4bcc9121347/52c5bd03e4b0c4bcc91238f5/1240577347000/TwitterViewer.zip

Monsters vs Aliens

Went to see this film last night. I’m a sucker for computer animated movies, and this one has been quite well reviewed.

I enjoyed it. We saw it in 3D, which meant funny glasses and a slightly dimmer picture than normal. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to this part, the last 3D movie that we saw, Bolt, was OK but the 3D effects weren’t that noticeable and not worth the hassle in my opinion. Not so with this film. I got the feeling that they really went for the 3D angle with the direction, there were lots of scenes where things were pointed at you, or flew past your head. Great fun and worth the trip.

Wookieepedia

Geoff sent me this. Brilliant.

http://www.wookieepedia.org/

Evil Socks

Fixed the washing machine. Turns out that socks are not always your friends. One of them had managed to get inside the water outlet underneath the drum and blocked it. The reason that we had such poor drainage was that all our washing water was being “sock filtered for extra purity” before being sent into the drain.

Note: You are not allowed to steal this by-line and use it sell bottled water.

I’ve no idea how the sock managed to get there. And I’ve also no idea where the other one is. Perhaps it is up in the loft loosening my ball valves even as I write this.

Evil Sock

Lovely Day at Hull University

If I have to work somewhere, I reckon this will do nicely.

I took these on the way to try and teach the first years about threading in C#.

No, Water Really Will Be the Death of Me

Today the sun shone, the overflow was as dry as a dry thing from a dry desert in a drought, and all seemed well. Of course, the washing machine was taking longer to run, but that could just be down to us using a new “eco friendly” programme. Or could it?

Turns out the washing machine uses water. That is, it takes water in but then, having churned it around for a while, it seems incapable of getting it out again.  So I had more wet hi-jinks as I had to drain the darned thing and see if any of the filters were bunged up. There was some lint here and there, but nothing that should have slowed things down much.

At the moment we are at a kind of impasse. The machine works, in that things come out cleaner than they went in, but it does spend a long time emptying itself. I’m inclined to suspect the pump as not actually doing the pumping thing properly, and so I guess I can look forward to a visit from the repair man and uplifting discussions as to just what is covered by warranty.

I’m starting to wonder when it will all end. I’m turning taps on with the expectation of either a huge bang or nothing. I’ve taken to swimming in my dreams, just in case the house floods at night. Is this how hydrophobia starts?

Water will be the Death of Me

Don’t like water. Getting into the car on the way out today we noticed that the overflow I had “fixed” yesterday was still leaking slightly.  So I left wife and daughter in the car on the drive while I scrambled, cursing, into the loft to bend the valve assembly and make sure that it shut down properly.

I don’t mind working with electricity. I’m not allowed to do gas (thank goodness) but I hate working with water. You can never be sure it won’t start leaking when your back is turned.

Tempting Fate

On 17th Feb at 12:46 I made a singularly ill advised Tweet:

Ha! What do you call it when everything works? Oh yes. Rob is in the house....

Since then everything has broken. Water leaks too numerous to count, a broken heating system that cost a huge amount (wince) to fix. Cars that have needed new bits. And this morning our neighbour appeared on the doorstep with the less than welcome news that water was pouring from our loft.

Oh good.

Turns out that one of the ball valves on the header tank for the heating system was leaking, and the overflow was doing just what it should, which is nice. Fortunately I’m equal to this particular task, and so I went off to buy spares. Since I had to turn the water off, and there are two tanks in the loft, I replaced both ball valves at once. Apparently the practice of having a big tank of water in the loft is a curiously British thing that dates back to the Napoleonic wars, where there was some concern that the French could invade and cut off all our water. Or something. Actually, I heard that in a pub, so it might not be true.

Either way, there is nothing quite like spending your holiday banging your head against beams in the loft, whilst balanced perilously on a joist and trying to both tighten a leaking connector and avoid putting your foot through the ceiling.

While I was out buying valves I thought I’d get a replacement bath plug, because the one we have is looking a bit elderly. This way I could add some value to the day, and come out of it slightly ahead. The new one was very well packed, in a bag, in a bag, in a bag with tape wrapped all round it. I spent several careful minutes removing all the layers and throwing them away. Then I found the plug was the wrong size.  I’m never going to Tweet again.

Back Home

Came home today. Won nothing at MacDonald's this time. Oh well.

Count the Chicks

We went down to Slimbridge today. We like going there. If you are going to bird watch I reckon it is best to go to a place where they keep loads of birds.

Apparently these chicks are all part of a record breaking brood. But how many can you find in the picture?

Free Apple Pies

Drove down to see the in-laws today. Won a free apple pie at MacDonald's. Result.

Professor Layton will Steal Your Life

I picked up a second hand game for the Nintendo DS on last week. “Professor Layton and the Curious Village”. It is a collection of 130 puzzles wrapped around a plot where you have to find “The Golden Apple”, left in a legacy by a mysterious baron. The adventure is set in a Japanese version of France, in a village called St. Mystere and with a cast of eccentrics that also seem to be getting murdered and disappeared one by one.  And everyone you meet has a puzzle they want you to solve.

Some of them are easy, some more tricky. I’ve done 40 or so puzzles so far and I’ve only found one that I’ve not been able to crack, and that is just because I’m too lazy to work it out the hard way. The game is great fun. I really like the way that the puzzles have no time limit, so I can ponder them at my leisure.  It has taken far more of my time than I should spend playing games, and is a nice illustration of the way that games are developing to bring in a wider range of players. I can strongly recommend it.

Tag Blog Fame

The winning team from our Tag Treasure Hunt at the Mad March Bash have made it onto the Microsoft Tag Blog. I’m not sure if this counts as proper fame, but it is a start I suppose.

I’m having an all new Tag Treasure Hunt at the “Everything Must Go” bash later this year.

Whitby at Easter

The weather forecast wasn’t wonderful. But that hasn’t stopped us from going to Whitby before, and it wouldn’t this time. And the Big Camera went too.

Beach Huts

The Harbour

We did get rained on. But we did manage to get into “The Magpie” for lunch. This is quite famous for serving really good fish and chips. And it was really good.

Round Thing with No Purpose I can Understand

Memory Upgrades and New Hard Disks

What do you do if you have sworn off working with computers for a while?

Go up town, buy some memory and a hard disk and spend the day upgrading stuff.

My little MacBook, which has all my music and media on it, has just about filled up its little 120G hard disk. It could do with something a little larger. And my Advent Netbook, although wonderful with Windows 7, does chug a bit when I run more than a couple of programs alongside each other. And so, since this is not technically programming as such, it was off to the shops and out with the debit card.

The Advent 4211 upgrade was simple enough, once I’d got all the screws out and unclipped the back. The memory went straight in and then, after a kind of “reverse tussle” to get the back clipped on again we were in business. Windows 7 noticed the upgrade straight away, and seems a lot happier. The good news about a move like this is that you don’t double the memory from 1G to 2G, you have a much bigger effect than that, since the operating system takes up a good chunk of the original memory. I reckon that I now have around three or four times the original space for running programs.

The Apple upgrade took a bit longer, what with having to copy all the files off the original disk onto the new one, but it was actually a very smooth process. I put the old disk in a USB caddy and then restored the old contents onto my newly installed operating system, which worked a treat.

All in all, a successful day, but not perhaps as far away from computers as I originally planned.