The Internet is an amazing place. I was looking for help because the backup battery in my Yamaha sequencer is flat and I happened across this lovely little video. The original track is worth seeking out too.
The six Bronte children had a pretty raw deal in many respects. Their father, Patrick, lived long enough to see every one of them die, along with his wife and, from the look of the church graveyard, loads of the local population. Haworth in the nineteenth century was a world apart from the neat town it is now, with squalor and disease running rampant.
The three Bronte sisters grew up watching loved ones die around them, starting with their mother and two sisters. That they chose to escape into a made up world of stories is not terribly surprising. When they grew up they took this story telling into the wider world and produced a collection of books that was like nothing before.
I’m not a great fan of their writing, but I do like going to the Parsonage in Haworth where they grew up and wrote their greatest works. There are only a handful of rooms in the small building, but actually being in the room where Charlotte wrote “Reader, I married him” is pretty darned cool, although I did rather spoil things for number one wife when we were in the shop on the way out and I pointed at a row of paperbacks saying, in tone hushed with awe, “Hey, they wrote books as well!”.
I also insisted on buying a genuine Bronte Parsonage combination spirit level, torch and screwdriver tool. Apparently Emily used to use one just like it it to change the batteries in her digital watch. Or something.
Getting to Haworth was made much more interesting by the unexpected arrival of a large amount of snow overnight. This made driving great fun and meant the first thing we had to do in Haworth was find somewhere that sold wellington boots. On the other hand, it did make the pictures nice. And I was lucky to see a steam train arrive at Haworth station. (although of course you know that Haworth was not actually connected to the railway network until some time after the death of the sisters, who had to travel to the station at Keighley when they wanted to go to London to meet their publisher).
Of course I took a camera, and a bunch of pictures.
Genuine bona-fide steam train
Platform
Haworth rooftops
Fairly quiet for a Saturday..
Haworth graveyard
Train home
A couple of rules for night driving:
Never mind, at least we got there eventually.
Just finished my Windows Phone Rock Star session. Now I can put the guitar back on the wall. Thanks for being a great audience and staying to the end. Some great questions too. You can find the sample code here.
There were some questions. If you are not based in the ‘states and are wondering how to get the tax side of things sorted you can find some interesting information here:
http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/19464.aspx
When I figure out how to do it myself I’ll put a post up explaining what I did.
You can find my Blue Book (and my Yellow Book) here:
Having hardware fun today preparing for the lab tomorrow when some of our second year students will get control of my little Micro Framework robot. We are writing serial port code that we are sending through the Xbee radio interface to make the robot dance across the carpet.
I love my job.
Early morning guitar shop.
I did another paper review for Radio Humberside this morning. It seems that I’m doing a lot of early rising at the moment. And there is a surprising amount of traffic at 6:30 in the morning.
Anyhoo, we had fun talking about some tech stuff and Twitter. I tweet as RobMiles and Andy Comfort, the breakfast presenter, as andycomfort (which shows we both have the same level of originality I guess).
Andy even let me have some time to chat about PlatformExpo, which is going from strength to strength. It all happens on 27th March and you can find out more here:
We are going to have the results of our 24 hour game development competition, live interactive music and art, demos of 3D technology, digital showcases and I’ll be giving a session about Microsoft Kinect – having not slept the night before. One of those rare occasions where the audience has to keep me awake….
I’m treading the virtual boards again. There’s a Microsoft Certified Career Conference on Thursday and I’m doing a session about Windows Phone development. You can find out more, and sign up, here:
http://www.mscareerconference.com/
The title of the session is “60 Minutes Rock Star: Find out how to become a Windows Phone Rock Star”. It as at 2:30 pm GMT. I might even get my guitar of the wall and lay down some riffs.
Then again, I might not….
I’m really pleased that I took the camera on the trip yesterday. Loads of photo-opportunities. Here are a few more. The rest of the images will appear over time I’m sure.
They had this in the Computing Museum. It is of special importance to me, because it is how I wrote my first programs. It is an IBM card punch. We wrote our program on coding sheets which were then punched onto cards and handed them in to get them run. We used to get three runs a day. I started writing Algol 60 like this, before too long I was using run length encoding to produce Snoopy calendars on the line printer. Happy days.
I had one of these too. A tin calculator that was almost as fast as writing things down on paper.
Then I got one of these. Somewhere in the loft I have “Boots the Chemist” branded slide rule…
This is an ICL (International Computers Limited) 2966 mainframe computer. There is almost as much computing power here as in, say, your MP3 player. The disks on the front can store 80MB each. To put that in perspective, that’s around enough to hold one MP3 album in reasonable quality. We had something similar at the university for a while.
They even had some model railways on display. This is fairly heavily “Thomas the Tank Engine” themed.
Little People
Finally, for now, one of the great highlights. This is the office where Alan Turing used to work. Apparently he used to chain his mug to the radiator so nobody would walk off with it. You really should find out more about the chap. One of the cleverest people there has ever been and an object lesson in how horribly countries can treat their heroes.
We’ve been meaning to go to Bletchley Park for ages. Today, thanks to the efforts of Emma, we managed to get there. It meant that we had to set of really early from Hull, but nobody minded that much.
This is us, gathered in the “Music” room for a briefing. If you don’t know about Bletchley Park, you should. It is how we won the Second World War. All the way through the war this place was effectively a “decoding factory”. Great minds like Alan Turing figured out how to break the German cyphers and an army of engineers, technicians and clerical support staff produced thousands of decoded messages every day. They even managed to build the first electronic computer to read the messages sent by German High Command.
The secrets of what went on in this unassuming country estate only started to come out in the nineteen eighties, over forty years after the end of the war. Now you can walk around, meet up with some of the people who were there and see the machines that were built to crack the codes.
This is what we were up against. A battery powered, portable encoding machine called “Enigma”. By a cunning combination of a plug board and encoding wheels this mapped whatever the user typed onto a meaningless sequence of letters. All the receiver has to do is set up another Enigma machine with the same arrangement of plug board and wheels, type in the encrypted text and out comes the original. The encrypted messages were broadcast so that anyone could receive them (including us) but unless you knew the settings of the the sender all you would see is guacamole.
However, the clever folks at Bletchley Park built machines that could try thousands of possible settings of the machine, looking for stock phrases and exploiting the few weaknesses in the Enigma machines. These devices, called “bombes” (apparently because the Polish mathematician that first thought of them did so at an ice-cream shop and bombe is Polish for a type of ice cream) would click through combinations looking for a “stop” which might be the code settings for that message. And it worked. On an industrial scale. Thousands of people worked on site receiving, analysing and finally sending a steady stream of intelligence back to UK commanders.
Not content with cracking “every day” signals they then moved on to cracking encrypted teletype signals used for high level communication. These were manually transcribed onto paper tape which was then analysed by an electronic computer called Colossus, the world’s first.
This is the five hole paper tape containing the incoming message. This was decoded by hand from graphs of the teletype signal that were read by human eye.
The front of Colossus
Some of the valves
Some of the wires….
That it worked at all was astonishing, nobody had built anything of its complexity before. But work it did, on one memorable occasion the UK high command was able to read messages before they arrived at their German counterparts.
Bletchley Park is also home to a Museum of Computing and a whole host of other interesting exhibitions. But these are for another post.
We clambered aboard the coach just as the museum closed and made our way back to Hull. Great day. Thanks again to Emma for sorting it all out.
We had a couple of presentations in the department today. Team Yellow and Team Purple (Tentacle?) gave the initial presentations for their group projects. To say that the teams had been working together for a week or so and it was their first stand up together they did very well.
One thing that did stand out though was some of the phrases that were used and this brought home to me how you need to be careful how you talk in front of an audience, particularly if you want to convince them you know what you are doing.
For example take the phrase “User Friendly”. It is all very well to say “We are going to produce a user-friendly solution”. You want to convey that you think this aspect of a system is important. However, saying it like this is pretty much meaningless. The customer is not expecting you to produce something that is “user-hostile”, but the phrase could also be expressed as “We’re not going to make something that acts as if it hates you”.
It is far better to say what you are actually going to do to solve the problem. “We are going to closely involve the end user in the design and implementation so that they find the system easy to use.” is a much better way to express your intentions. Take a similar approach when you talk about security. Rather than saying you think something is important you must say what you are going to do about it.
The other thing that came out from the presentations was partly my fault. I’d said earlier that it is very important to make the customer aware of those aspects of the system that you are not going to implement. For example, you might be expecting the customer to back up the data rather than providing data backup as part of your solution. You need get this over, but I’m not sure you should have have a slide with the heading “Things we are not going to do”. It is far better to say things like “The server infrastructure that you are using will be used to back up our data along with that from other systems”. This puts the responsibility in the right place without sounding like you are avoiding work.
If all this sounds a bit like the dread “marketing speak” then I’m very sorry about that, but I do feel that it is important that you make sure that things you say are backed up with a some kind of action plan and you should avoid sounding negative about your intentions.
When I had my iPhone I used to enjoy browsing the App Store and downloading and playing with little programs. You could pass an hour or so spending a couple of pounds on things that caught your fancy, searching for that neat app you could show of in the Tea Room the following day.
Windows Phone Marketplace is nowhere near as full as the App Store, but it has now reached the point where I can go in there and pull out some diverting programs. Here are a couple I’ve found recently. Both are free and both are fun.
This gives you your own personalised fireworks display on the phone, that you can drive by tapping the screen. There is a good range of different firework types and colours with satisfying explosions and even haptic feedback (the phone vibrates when the fireworks go off). You can capture images of the displays and also use any picture as the backdrop. Great fun, if totally useless, and free. Search the Marketplace for Fireworks.
This program is excellent. It is a dictionary of British Slang. If you want to know the true British meaning for words like Gazump and Wally you can use this program to find out. It also defines some words that you might not want your kids using, but it might even be useful for those of you around the world not from these shores, and it is very amusing for us locals too. Another good, free app. Search the marketplace for “British Slang Free”.
The first “Lucky” winner of a copy of my book. Sorry about the picture, I didn’t take it.
We had our first Admissions Open Day of 2011 today. Thanks for coming folks, hope you enjoyed the day. I did my talk and then at the end we had a prize draw for a copy of one of my XNA books. I was going to have a second prize of two books, but I couldn’t find any more….
Some more of the assembled throng. Hope you had a good journey back.
In celebration of my new book those nice people at O’Reilly asked me to share some words of wisdom on their Answers site. I’m not normally known for being wise. I actually asked my dentist to put in some wisdom teeth the last time I had a check-up. However, if you want to find out what I came up with you can go here:
http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/2456-robs-tricks-and-tips-for-a-better-programming-life/
If you are thinking of getting involved with the Imagine Cup Software Design competition I’m hosting a couple of Live Meetings where I describe why you should. The meetings both contain the same content, one is in this evening and I’m trying not to think about the time of the second one…
You can find details of how to sign up on the Imagine Cup Software Design page or you can follow these simple steps that I’ve stolen from it.
There will be fun, jokes and some rare Imagine Cup pictures from way back. Oh, and if you sign up and enter it might just change your life forever.
One presentation down, one to go. Thanks for being a good audience and staying to the very end. Some great questions too.
...and we're done. Did the second meeting at 6:00 am this morning. Thanks for being another great audience. With a bit of luck we might meet up for the next meeting. Stay tuned for dates and times.
Getting started as a student in Windows Phone marketplace is actually quite easy, but there are one or two issues that you need to be aware of, and best practices to follow to make sure that you get going as quickly as possible. If you know how to do stuff the two issues that you need to be aware of are very simple:
The bottom line here is that the first thing you must do when you have registered is submit an application for approval. Think of this as a “placeholder” that will move you through the process. You can remove it from sale later.
If you are an experienced Windows Phone developer this should be no problem. If you are not submitted before the process is simple enough, and to make it even easier I’ve made a tiny screencast that goes through it for you. In this I make a brand new application from scratch and then show how it would be submitted for approval. If you just copy what I do you can be sorted in around half an hour or so.
You can download and view the video here:
Windows Phone Marketplace Walkthrough
Note: The application that I submit during the screencast hasn’t appeared in the Marketplace yet. I’ll let you know when it does…
The King’s Speech is a great film. Colin. Firth. Must. Get. An. Oscar. Apparently Queen Elizabeth has seen the film and is of the opinion that it is OK. It must have been strange for the queen to see herself portrayed as a child in the film. Especially when she saw that her sister was actually that irritating little girl from “Outnumbered”.
The film tells of a man who was not born to be king but had greatness well and truly thrust upon him, in spite of being stuck with a terrible stammer. His wife finds him an unconventional speech therapist and the resulting collision of cultures is a great thing to watch. This is just a nice, uplifting film with a great cast and visuals that captures the spirit of the times beautifully. I’m not totally convinced that everyone was exactly as they are portrayed in the film, but that is by the by. Go and see it.
Quite a few students at Hull now have Windows Phones, which is nice. They are also writing games for them and Imagine Cup entries. Which is even nicer. If you are a student at Hull and you want a phone to play with I can lend you one for a little while. This offer is only open to people who turn up at my office and show me some neat stuff on the emulator, and I can’t let you keep the phones (shame) because we need them for teaching later in the semester. However, they should be useful to people who are stuck for a way of testing their program on a real device.
Later this month I’m going to run some “Bring Out Your Living” Windows Phone sessions on Wednesday afternoon where anyone can turn up with a XAP file and we can try them on a device and see what happens.
Oh, and if you want to make your Windows Phone work on the exchange server on campus the settings are:
Server: exfs.adir.hull.ac.uk
Domain: adir
Server Requires Encrypted (SSL) connection: ticked
Find your way to the advanced settings when the standard ones take you there. Use your university username and password and it should all work fine.
The latest version of my XNA book, XNA Game Studio 4.0: Learn Programming Now! has just been released. It must be good, it has an exclamation mark in the title!
The book contains content updated for Visual Studio 2010 and XNA 4.0. It also contains three chapters about Windows Phone game development, so you can take your XNA skills and show them off on the phone.
Bubblegum is a new program for Windows Phone 7 (and coming to other platforms they say) that lets you take pictures and share them with your chums on Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. The application also has some very “hipsteresque” (if that is a proper word) filters that you can apply to the pictures before you send them. These make you look even more artistic and interesting. As a true artist, I have of course posted a few of my own. My name on Bubblegum is, unsurprisingly, RobMiles it you want to take a look.
The program is free, and fun. It was written by a couple of folks from Microsoft who are also a couple, if you see what I mean. Aarthi Ramamurthy and Sriram Krishnan have done a super job in making a nice little program which does the job with flair and humour. Sriram Krishnan even has a blog. Everyone should read his “Stuff I’ve learned at Microsoft post”. Great stuff.
These images don’t tell you you bad it is going to sound…..
This evening I thought I’d spend a few minutes taking some of my old records and making them into MP3 tracks. I’m not sure about the legal issues here, but since I’m not going to actually sell the recordings I think I should be OK. Years ago I recorded some albums by just recording the entire record and converting it into MP3. What I wanted to do now was just pull out individual tracks. I used Audacity, the best audio editing program you can get. It is free and works a treat. If you want to play with audio, get a copy here:
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/
A tip, the latest beta (1.3.12) is the one that you should use for Windows 7 and works fine. It also seems to have the MP3 encode/decode built in.
Anyhoo, I opened up each large MP3 file and then laboriously saved the sections that held each track. And was rewarded with some recordings that sounded, well, horrible. Horrible, horrible. Then I realised what I’d just done. I’d taken a compressed signal, decompressed it and then recompressed it again. They tell you not to do this, and blimey they are right.
Next step is to dig out “Ye Olde Recorde Deqque” and re-record uncompressed (wav files I guess) of the records and then save sections of these to compressed form. Oh well.
One of the records I was converting was Andrew Gold, “What’s wrong with this picture” which has one of the best record sleeves ever:
See if you can find a high resolution copy of the image and find all 32 mistakes in it…..
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.
