Went to London today and one of my favourite places ever, the Science Museum. 
Always a bit scary when you find stuff you used to use in a museum.
These too (scarily enough)
But not one of these….
Where it all started, with Mr Babbage..
Indeed.
If you go to the North America TechEd site you are presently faced with the deeply scary picture above.
Blimey.
Spent pretty much all of today playing MineSweeper. Around 23 times. All of the first year get 15 minutes each to show off their programs and so Mike, Simon and myself were looking at how well they had done implementing this classic game.
It never ceases to amaze me how different people find their own way to write a program to solve the same problem. Some worse than mine, some better than mine. And just about all of them working.
In fact, some of them should make an appearance on Xbox Live at some point. They really were that good.
We had the first Hull Digital event at the university today. People found their way to the department OK, because (or perhaps in spite of) the arrows that I stuck on the wall using borrowed blu-tack.
Anyhoo, we had two speakers and both were excellent.
Andrew Chalkley, from Cake Solutions showed just how powerful Ruby on Rails is. He did this by creating a complete blog site, with comments and user authentication, in around fifteen minutes. The fusion of language and tools that you get with this framework looks very powerful, and well worth a look I reckon.
Then Craig Albeck took to the floor. Craig works for the Hull based company behind Omerta (a text based Mafia game) and ThirteenOne (a free on-line video gaming magazine which actually features some stuff by me). In a very interesting talk Craig spoke of his experiences in the market place and how to get out there and build a brand of your own.
Great stuff. I’m looking forward to the next event.
The Christmas Bash tickets went on sale today. Nearly put a picture of one here, which from a security point of view might have been a bit of a faux pas.
Instead, here is a picture of the packing material that my Chumby arrived in. I’m not allowed to play with it until December 25th, which should make it a proper “Gadget Christmas”.
The first year course is busy working on the Minesweeper programming problem that is the second piece of assessed coursework. This is proving to be a nice problem to solve, with a good mix of simple behaviours to play the game itself, and some more complex parts for those who want to get their teeth into something more challenging.
The marking starts on Thursday, I’m looking forward to seeing what folks have come up with.
No new picture for today. I took this a few years ago. It occurred to me that I have all these nice pictures lying around that haven’t been used before (I think). Anyway, worth a repeat I reckon.
Spent today putting floor panels up in the loft. And going to the tip.
Some time back I got an Artigo PC to play with. This is a lovely little PC in a tiny box which will fit into the drive bay of a “proper” computer. It was supplied running Windows CE, which is a very nice operating system, but I wanted to do a bit more with it. I wanted to run Windows 7 on it.
I started small, with the Windows Embedded Standard 2011 CTP2. This is the latest version of Windows Embedded, basically a componentised version of Windows 7 where you can select just what you want in your installation. The idea is that you can make small footprint, customised, builds of windows for things like kiosk displays. My plan was to get maximum performance by just including the bits that I needed to let me watch recorded TV over the network and BBC iPlayer from the web.
It really is easy to install. If you have had horrid experiences of customising operating systems this will be a revelation. You just boot your target device from the distribution image and then start selecting what you want to have in your custom Windows 7 deployment. There are a number of templates you can use as a starting point, or you can build your configuration from the ground up. You can pick which components that you want and the installer checks the dependencies and tells you the size of the footprint on the hard disk that you will end up with. The idea is that once you have made a machine that that works the way you want you can pull this back off the device and use it to manufacture as many more as you need.
Works a treat. I quickly had a version of Windows 7 running with just Media Player and IE. This kind of thing would be great for use in open areas. It removes the need to worry what people might do with things like the command prompt, since there isn’t one there from the start.
The hardest bit of the job was upgrading the BIOS on the Artigo so that it would work with later versions of Windows. To do this I ended up making a boot floppy (I’ve not touched a floppy disk for years) and using that to boot the Artigo into Windows 95 and run the BIOS upgrade program.
If you fancy having a play with this you can get a free download of the entire thing by signing up on the Microsoft Connect link above, and the software will run for 180 days (until summer next year) so it might even be properly useful for a while.
As for me, I found that Windows 7 ran so well on my tiny machine that I thought I’d go for broke and put Windows 7 Ultimate on it. This worked very smoothly. The only problem was with the drivers for the graphics display, where I’ve had to use the original ones that were designed for Windows XP. These mostly work, but at the moment the video playback is a bit choppy for full screen viewing, although it works fine in a reasonably sized window on the desktop.
Great fun though, and a very interesting exploration of where Windows Embedded is going in the future.
Saw a thing on the telly today about a man who trains dogs to pull sledges over the snow. Apparently he shouts his orders in a husky voice….
How good are you at spotting phishing emails? Take a test here.
http://www.sonicwall.com/phishing/
(I got 9 out of 10 – which is nice)
Seeing as how it is Christmas soon, we are having another bash. You can find out more at www.robmiles.com/Events (like it says on the poster)
Very cold this morning. Lots of ice on the car.
Today was the last meeting of the “Programming 1 Monday Evening 5:15 Club” for this semester. Quite a good turn out. I thought I’d take a picture to celebrate.
There is another shot on my Flickr pages.
I wasn’t quite expecting a philosophical statement about the ultimate futility of life from my SatNav and car stereo. Particularly not at 8:38 on a Monday morning……
I’m not a great one for bird watching. But as I was doing the washing up I noticed some in the garden.
Someone will know what this one is.
Scary blackbird. I think it was trying to keep the other birds off the berries.
Nothing to do with birds really, but since I had the long lens on the camera…..
I’ve always liked the idea of remote controlling devices. I particularly like the idea of making stuff work without having to reach around to plugs and sockets. Today I went to Maplin and got some of these. They are not that expensive and they work really well. If you want to turn things off properly and remove the “curse of standby” I reckon they are worth a look.
Ages ago I got given a set of dice that are supposed to tell you what to do at the office. if you are unsure of how to behave you just cast the dice and follow the instructions.
It’s nice to see they still work.
If you are making use of your Dreamspark access to get hold of lovely free Microsoft software then you might have noticed that a lot of the good stuff arrives as ISO disk images. The idea is that you burn these images to disk and then install the software on them.
However, if you have a netbook with no CD-ROM drive, or are simply in a hurry I can recommend IsoBuster. This tool lets you copy files from ISO images onto your hard disk or memory key so that you can install programs from the disks without needing a physical disk.
There is a copy you can pay for, but I’m told that the free version will do all you need to get hold files from a disk image. IsoBuster is also useful if you have a damaged disk that you need to recover.
Thanks for all your constructive reponses. Boss reccomends Virtual CloneDrive which also looks rather good.
I really like the idea of this.
The bi-weekly Wednesday afternoon “sports” sessions are now going very well. Hull ComSoc seems to be on to a winner (even when the server starts to wobble right in the middle of a game – cue laptops and nervousness…..)
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.
