Things that go Beep in the Night

Think I might have overdone the perspective correction on this picture….

The burglar alarm went off at 5:00 am this morning. And I don’t mean went off in a “I’ve seen a burglar” kind of way. I mean went off in a “bottle of milk” kind of way. It started emitting clicks and beeps that indicated that all was not well inside. Since I knew that opening the box would probably set it off properly we just endured the unhappy beeps for a few hours.

When I took a look I discovered that the system seemed to have forgotten all its settings and was having difficultly remembering new ones. I think one of the memory chips has gone a bit soft. Since I hate being without intruder detection it was therefore time to fit another.

Turns out that I happened to have a replacement device lying around. I bought it a while back when I needed to find out about burglar alarms for a .NET Micro Framework project I was involved with. It has been sitting, unfitted, in the bedroom because the old alarm was working fine. Until now.

So it was out with the new kit and off I went. The new device actually has an alarm in the keyboard unit. I didn’t know this until I set the thing off by mistake. The resulting 100db of noise made me levitate from my chair around 2 feet and I spent 30 seconds or so trying to find out in the manual how to turn the darned thing off and cover my ears at the same time.

Anyhoo, I’ve configured and tested everything and it seems to work fine. I’ve had to say goodbye to the old one, which is a bit sad, it had served us well for a very long time.

Synchronicity

Ian came over today. He is the kind of chap who will turn up and help you carry a sofa upstairs. Which is just as well, as far as I’m concerned.

Anyhoo, we got to talking and he told me that earlier that day the mirror in his lounge had fallen off the wall, all by itself. This happened at pretty much the same time that a noticeboard fell off the wall in our house. Scary.

Light Field Photography with Lytro

I’ve always been interested in photography. When I was young I used to read books full of theory about ASA film speeds, f-stops and depth of field calculations. One book said that there was no chance that a camera would ever be able to focus itself. I really wish I’d kept that one.

Anyhoo, I’ve just found out about Lytro. This is a new way of taking pictures they are calling “Light Field Photography”. Rather than using a lens to capture a single, hopefully well focused, image on a sensor, what Lytro are doing is capturing the entire “Light Field” from a scene. The blurb (and this highly detailed thesis) say that the camera captures not just the light, but the direction it is coming from. This means that by using cunning computation they can then built up an image which is focused after it has been taken. The photographer can make decisions about which parts of the picture they want to have sharp after the shot has been taken. They have some astonishing demos on their web site where you can click on different parts of the picture to focus at that point.

I’ve had a read of the thesis and I think what they are doing is putting a bunch of tiny “micro-lenses” in front of the sensor so that different parts of the sensor are focused at different distances. This means that you lose resolution (since the same spot in the image is being focused at different points) but by selecting the output from particular sensors you can build an image focused at any point, or indeed build up an picture that is sharp at all points. This requires a fairly ferocious amount of processing power, but does give you a lot of flexibility after the picture is taken.

I’m not completely convinced by their pitch. Modern cameras with small sensors have a large depth of field (most of the image tends to be in focus anyway) and they also have very efficient auto-focusing software. However,  I’ve clicked the box that says “Let me know when the cameras are for sale” and we will just have to see how it all turns out.

Not Welcome at Ikea

Not sure how it happened, but Ikea managed to both lose my password and then ban me for entering the wrong one. Not impressed. I guess I’ll just have to buy my compressed sawdust from somewhere else.

Using the Proper Kinect USB Drivers

This picture has nothing to do with Kinect, but I took it after the End Of Year Ball and I quite like it…

I’ve been playing with the Microsoft Kinect SDK and I really like it. The speed with which it snaps on to people and tracks them is really impressive. However, I did have one bit of fun and games when I installed it. Like loads of other people I’ve been using other drivers with the hardware and although some of these have uninstall behaviours they don’t always get rid of the device drivers themselves. This can lead to problems when you try to install the “proper” drivers and the old ones load up and get in the way. So, to get rid of the Kinect drivers you can do this before you install the Microsoft Kinect SDK. First perform the uninstall on all the previous drivers. Now you need to get rid of anything left lying around:

Open up a new command prompt running in Admin mode. The best way to do this is to click the Start button, type CMD into the search box and then hold down CTRL+SHIFT and press Enter. If you get this right you will be rewarded with a User Account Control dialogue box warning you that you are about to do something vaguely dangerous. Click OK.

Now, in the command box give the command:

SET DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1

This sets an environment variable to tell Windows you want to see all the hardware devices, not just the ones that are active . If you type this command wrong you won’t see an error of any kind, but the process won’t work either. You can select and copy the above text into the paste buffer, then right click in the command window and paste it into the command prompt if you like. Now give the command:

devmgmt.msc

This starts the Device Manager. Now open the View menu and select “Show hidden devices”. This is actually quite fun, as now you will see every device that has ever been connected to your computer. If your machine is like mine there will be around 50 or so different Disk drives, one for every memory key that has been plugged in over the years. Look through the device tree for things with the word Kinect in the name, or the name of the package you are removed.  Look in the “Human Interface Devices”, “Sound, Video and Game Controllers” and “Universal Serial Bus controllers” parts. Anything you find that you want to get rid of you must right click and select Uninstall. If the dialog that appears has a checkbox marked “remove driver software files” then you should select this so that the driver files are no longer around to cause trouble.

Note that this could be vaguely dangerous, in that if you delete an important driver for your system you might find that it will stop working until you replace the driver file, but if you only remove things that are to do with Kinect you should be fine. One tip is to plug the Kinect sensor in before you remove the software and just note what appears in the Device Manager when you do this. These are the things that need to be removed.

Once you have removed all the drivers simply exit Device Manager and close the command prompt. The setting is forgotten, so if you want to remove other drivers later you have to do the whole thing again. This technique can also be useful for removing old USB drivers that are causing trouble.

Robot Fun at the University Transition Event

Making Robot Cowards with C#

Sometimes it helps to read the specification. I’d been asked to prepare a talk for a schools visit today. Six sessions in front of students from schools who were visiting the university to learn about the kind of things we do. I thought Oscar the robot and the Kinect SDK might hit the spot, so I made my slides, built some demos and turned up to give a talk to a bunch of interested Sixth Formers. Who were between 8 and 9 years old. Ooops.Turned out that this was a visit from youngsters looking at moving to the new Northern Academy which opens in 2012. If I’d taken the trouble to read up on the event I would have known all this. Oh well.

During the introductory talk I made some frantic changes to the slide deck and then off we went. Children at this age are about the toughest audience you can get. You either have them, or you haven’t. The good thing was that I had some nice props. I had a robot that you could control by touching your hand on you head. And this proved very popular. At the end of every talk we had a queue waiting for their turn to step in front of the Kinect Sensor and make Oscar the robot do a wheelie.

Who wants to have a go next?

It was really hard work, but enormous fun. All the kids were fantastic and a real credit to their schools. I got some great questions from the audience and everyone left happy, including me.

Two satisfied customers

Watching Oscar

Thanks to Moy Lanade for sorting everything out and Mike Park, University Photographer, for the pictures.

Flipboard

I’m not sure if Steve Balmer reads my blog (actually I’m pretty sure he doesn’t) but in the unlikely event that you are reading this Steve, would you please give Flipboard an enormous sum of money and ask them to make their program available on Windows Phone. And the Microsoft Tablet when that appears.

Flipboard takes a very simple idea (read social network feeds and use them to build a personalised magazine) and implements it in truly beautiful way. Your Twitter feed becomes a gateway onto a whole collection of interesting content. Simple tweets containing links are presented as pieces of editorial over multiple pages that you can flip through. If you have an iPad you must get this program. It is completely free and totally wonderful. And I want it on my Windows Phone.

Robot Fun at St. Bede’s

These folks were a great audience.

Went over to St. Bede’s school to do a talk today. I did one last year and it was great fun. This time I was showing off a .NET Micro Framework. We did some simple robot control and then I managed to get the Kinect sensor working with the robot. I’ve not had a lot of time to play with the SDK, but I did manage to get the robot to move forward when I put my right hand on my head. The Kinect SDK is really easy to use.

Four Storeys of Sugar

An M&M (previously know as a Treet if you are very old) is a small, candy covered chocolate sweet. Like a Smartie only smaller. In London they have a huge building completely devoted to this confection.  We went around it yesterday. Scary.

I think I just saw the one at the back move….

This is the M&M Mix Lab. I think they have a machine that can put all the purple ones in one box. The girl on the right is saying to herself “For this I went to drama school…..”

If you are in London and want to see how far you can take the marketing of a single kind of confectionary, then you should go and take a look.

Meeting the Woman in Black

Actually you really, and I mean REALLY, don’t want to meet the Woman in Black. We first saw the play around 20 years ago and today we took the kids to see it. Just as scary as last time. If you want to find out how a play with only two actors can scare you to death then get yourself down to London and see it live. Well worth the trip.

Kinect SDK Now Out

The Microsoft Kinect SDK is now available for download. I’ve had a quick squint and it looks really easy to use. And the body tracking is much, much, much faster than the Open NUI drivers I’ve been using up to now.  Go get it from here.

Engineers Don’t Tend to Fib

You’re Fired

I like The Apprentice. As entertainment it works well. As a lesson for any kind of life it is however a disaster. This was brought home to me last night when “LordAllan” fired someone because he had never known an engineer who could succeed in business.

Ugh. I think what “LordAllan” means is that engineers have more difficultly telling porkies than folks in other branches of business, particularly marketing. Telling whoppers about a financial product is a lot easier than lying about whether or not a bridge is strong enough. And in the marketing game you can blame “market forces” when the shares tank and everybody loses their money. Where as in engineering it is a bit tricky to blame gravity when everything collapses and a train plummets to the bottom of the ravine. Engineers are expected to do their sums and get it right, whereas other folks can get away with telling the version of the truth that will get the deal.  Ho hum.

Update on 2011-06-21 18:17 by Rob

Having thought a bit more about this post I've decided that it is not the case that you have to be good at telling lies to succeed in business. Just that "LordAlan" thinks that you do.

And I'm sure that none of these comments are in any way influenced by the fact that I once bought an Amstrad amplifier and all the knobs dropped off...

Putting Plenty of Music in your Car

My car (see above) has a very good in music system. Very loud. Like lots of modern cars it has a USB socket into which you can plug a memory stick. I’ve been experimenting with the devices to see which work. I bought this amazingly tiny 16G one but it didn’t work. For some reason the car rejected it. However, if I take a 16G SD card and put it in a tiny reader this works a treat. So, if you want to drive around with several day’s worth of music in your car, you might want to try this. The other benefit is that SD cards tend to be somewhat cheaper than USB keys of the equivalent size.

Imagine That Judging

Did the exam board (portable worked very well as a tablet, I was able to flick up and down my notes very easily) and then shot back to Hull in time for an Imagine Cup Judging Live Meeting.

We are busy briefing all the judges for the Imagine Cup World Finals next month. We have 67 (yes, sixty-seven) teams to judge. Every year Microsoft say they are not going to have as many as last time. And then they end up with even more teams taking part. Which must say something for the popularity of the competition around the world.

The finals are in New York, and it looks like it is going to be an amazing event. Find out more, meet the teams taking part and see how the judging works at www.imaginecup.com

External Examining with a Tablet PC

In Newcastle today to do some external examining.  It seems strange to have just finished marking our student work and then go off and look at a whole bunch of exam scripts and reports, but actually it is very interesting to see how other institutions deal with all the same things that we see in Hull. It is nice to go somewhere and just talk shop for a while too. And there was a really good sky over the city which I could see from my hotel window. 

The exam board is tomorrow morning. Last year I used my iPad to assemble my thoughts for the meeting. This brought home to me that the iPad is great for consuming content but can be a bit of a pain when you try to create with it. This time I’ve brought along a tiny Windows 7 notebook with a twisty screen, it is a Packard Bell (actually Acer) Easynote Butterfly Touch. I got it a while back. It doesn’t have massive performance, although things picked up a bit when I upped the memory to 4G and it will quite happily run Visual Studio 2010 and the Windows Phone emulator which is quite fun with the multi-touch screen. However, the best thing about this shiny device (which I don’t think you can get any more I’m afraid) is that the battery life really is good for 9 or so hours. In fact, if you turn the brightness down you can get close to the lifespan of an iPad. I’m really looking forward to trying to get Windows 8 running on it…

Anyhoo, it has behaved itself very well up to now. I’ve been using it to type in the reports. Tomorrow I’m going to flip it into tablet mode and use it to read the notes in the meeting.

Stalked by an Oven

I’m being stalked by an oven. It’s actually very scary. We are in the process of planning an upgrade to our kitchen. It should be completed this century with a bit of luck. As part of this I’m searching for prices of various kitchen appliances, including the device you see above. However, now pretty much every web page I go to has an advert for this oven appearing on it. Something in the interwebs has cottoned on to the fact that I’m in the market for some cooking equipment and is tailoring what I see to suit. Most interesting.

Web pages are highly aware of the searches I’ve been doing. Last week there was a very good article in the paper about this kind of thing, which made the point that what you see on the web and when you search depends on what you have already looked for/at. This is not something that you might expect. It means that, far from allowing the web to expand your creativity and send you down new avenues, what really happens is that after a while the search tends to contract and focus down onto what the engines think you are interested in.

Discovering this hot in the heels of the presentation from Sir Tim Berners-Lee last Friday on his dream of an open and level playing field for all internet users makes me wonder if somewhere a battle has already been fought and lost.

I’m not sure if anonymous browsing would make a difference, or if search aggregators like duckduckgo.com would help. As someone said last week “If the service is free, you are the product”. That is how it is with search these days.

Missing Mole Wrench

This is what my Mole Wrench looks like when I can find it.

One of the reasons I had such fun trying to repair the toilet last week was that I had lost my precious Mole Wrench and wasn’t able to use it to hold things still. My Uncle George used to say that the fastest way to find a missing golf ball was to get out a replacement. On that basis I’ve just bought another one. Surprisingly inexpensive. If you not got one of these they are jolly useful. You can even use them as a mini-workbench where they can hold things so that you can work on them.

Update on 2011-06-14 19:12 by Rob

The Wikipedia site for Mole Wrench has this amazing link to Popular Science from 1935. A fantastic read.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee at the Yorkshire International Business Convention

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. I was lucky enough to take a few students up from Hull today and hear him.

During his talk today at the Yorkshire International Business Convention he mentioned that 20% of the world now has web access, and that access to the web is being made a human right in some countries. It was great to hear him speak of the origins of the world wide web as a side project and how it has developed to become the massively complex beast that we have today. Having designed the way that systems on the web interact he has made it his mission to ensure that it continues to develop according to the original vision of free access for all, to all.

He was preceded by Roy Walker who, as a highly accomplished comedian, gave a master class in comic timing and reminded me of a simpler time when jokes were just funny, and not complicated.

Once outside we made for the beach and an ice cream:

These are the crew that came along from Hull in the minibus.

TouchStudio for Windows Phone

If you want to create programs on your Windows Phone 7 device you can of course use the delightful Iron7 implementation of Ruby. This works startlingly well, but using it you are painfully reminded of the fact that mobile phones are best suited for consuming programs, not creating them.

TouchStudio is a project from Microsoft Research that aims to change that a bit. It has been designed from the ground up to work with a touch interface, rather than in spite of it. The commands and the syntax of the language have been created to make it easy and engaging to write applications for the phone, on the phone. There is a nice paper that sets out how it works here here and the project web site here. If you search Windows Phone Marketplace for TouchStudio you can download the latest version for free.

The programming model is easy to pick up, although the language syntax is different from ones you might have seen before. I don’t see this as a bad thing actually, I reckon that programmers should be used to the idea of using different types of language. What makes it stand out for me is the ease with which you can create stuff, and the level of integration they have with the phone. You can work with pictures, maps, music and even set up phone calls from within the language. The web integration is very good, in around 10 minutes I had a program that would fetch my Xbox avatar, convert it to black and white, display it and then save it as a picture on my phone:

I need to do a bit of scaling and tidying up, but the program itself is simple enough:

action AvatarDisplay() : Nothing { 
  pic := web->download_picture('http://avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/rob the bloke/avatar-body.png'); 
  pic->desaturate; 
  pic->post_to_wall; 
  wall->screenshot->save_to_library; 
}

There are also a bunch of built in programs that play games or even do some simple image processing. This is what one of “\themify Picture” did to one of my photos:

If you want to while away some time with your phone and actually achieve something fun and maybe even useful, you should grab a copy and have a play.

Giving Great Presentations

If you are serious about presenting (and I reckon everybody should be) then you will find this presentation from TechEd 2011 very interesting/useful. It was given by Mark Russinovich and Mark Minasi who are very experienced Microsoft speakers.

They make all the sensible points about presentations that seem like common sense; know your stuff, practice your demos, engage the audience etc, but they also set out some other very good thoughts that will take your presentations to the next level.  Well work a look.