Going the Distance

This came up on the car this morning. I had to stop and take a picture, as I’d come over all “IBM PC”.

Nokia Lumia 900

The guy serving me in the chip shop on Friday caught a glimpse of my Lumia 800. “Good phone that.” he observed. “A mate’s got one. My iPhone is up for renewal soon and so I thought I’d get one as well”. Smooth move.

I really like my Lumia 800. The latest update has removed the only real issue I had with it, the battery life is now excellent. Of course, I’m selling mine now. On Saturday I went up town to not look at, and definitely not buy, the new Nokia 900. Which you can get in White at Phones4U. So I didn’t go in. And I didn’t look at it. And I definitely didn’t want one. But then…..

Having done all the maths and looked up the price on ebay of Lumia 800’s I concluded that if I sold my old iPhone (which I’ve been keeping for mainly sentimental reasons) and my Samsung Omnia 7 plus a few other bits and bobs I could run out even on the deal if I bought an unlocked device. Particularly as the chap in the shop uttered the magic phrase “It does tethering”. This means I can use the phone as a WIFI access point for any other devices that want to talk to the internets on the move. Tethering is promised for the Lumia 800, but my reasoning here is that it is not guaranteed that all carriers will enable it. However, if I have an unlocked device I can just turn it on and it will work. Which I have, and it does.

There is nothing wrong with my Lumia 800 at all. All the problems are with my eyes and fingers. I find the screen just a tiny bit too small to read easily and the keyboard is just a bit too tiny for my lanky fingers to find their way around. It is on eBay at the moment and I’ve had some expressions of interest already.

Changing phones was not too bad. Microsoft Exchange made sure that my address book moved over with no problem. All the pictures from the phone are already on Skydrive. The only real problem is that I’ve lost all my SMS conversations, but I can live with that. The Lumia 900 is properly lovely. I might even show it to the bloke in the chip shop.

Tight–Loose-Tight

I don’t usually regard The Apprentice as a ready source of business acumen. Still less The Apprentice You’re Fired. But a couple of weeks ago they had a chap on, forget his name – think he runs a chain of restaurants, who said something I thought was very sensible. He talked about his philosophy for team management. He said that he used a “Tight – Loose – Tight” approach.

• Tight – get your team together and make sure that everybody is absolutely clear about what you are all doing, the part that each person must play in the enterprise and what they must deliver.
• Loose – let the people get on with it. Don’t interfere with what they are doing or insist on doing it “your way”. (He made the point that this requires quite a bit of bravery and trust on the part of the project manager)
• Tight – once everyone has done their bit, get the team together and make sure that everything has been done and have got where want to be.

I quite like these ideas, I think they are probably enshrined in a management textbook somewhere, but I don’t know much about management, I just try and get things done and make everyone happy.

Marks and Spencer and the Inverse of Service

I’ve mentioned the book The Thank You Economy before. If you are in the business of providing things for other people you should read it. One of the central tenets of the text is that you should regard a failure on your part as a chance to show just how good you are in “failure mode”. The idea is that if you shine in this aspect of the business then you can create your own evangelists. At the very least you will prevent people from moaning about you in blog posts.

Marks and Spencer have not read this book. Or at least the lady serving us today hadn’t. We were returning something that had broken. And we were told that “Because it is part of a two part set we have both parts so that it can go back to the suppliers”. Now, from a Marks and Spencer business process point of view this probably makes sense. But from a “Customer with a broken thing point of view” it sucks. It meant that we had to go home, find the other bit, and come back again.

I hate it when people try to make their problems my problems. It is not my problem if someone sells me something that subsequently breaks. It up to them to fix it. If they immediately try to bat the issue back to me I reckon this is wrong. In the end of course, being British, we meekly went away to find the other part, but if I’d been on my own, without the civilising influence of number one wife, and there hadn’t been a queue of people waiting behind us, I think I would have had a go at getting a happier outcome there and then.

The item in question was not expensive and there are much worse things that can happen to you than having a dodgy customer service experience. However, the thing that most upset me was the sense of an opportunity being missed. Rather than making happy customers (who they presumably want to come back some time in the future) they have made us a bit less inclined to shop there and look somewhere else next time.

Windows 8 Camp at Hull

On June the 6th we are having a Windows 8 Camp at Hull. The aim is to get students building Windows 8 applications and to help this along Microsoft are going to come up to see us and get things started. If anyone at Hull fancies getting involved then they can sign up for here:

http://hullwindows8.eventbrite.com/

The format will be the same as the Windows Phone Camp earlier this year, and there will be pizza…

Along with the event Microsoft will also be selecting applications and games produced by students to be fast-tracked into the Windows 8 Marketplace. Places for this are strictly limited and each proposal will be assessed individually. If you want to get involved with this, step one is to join the Windows 8 developers Linkedin Group for UK developers http://linkd.in/ukw8apps. If you are a student and you aren’t on Linkedin you should be. Once you have signed up and joined the group you can start putting together ideas for a Windows 8 program to pitch.

Samsung Series 7 Slate Rocks

I blame Black Marble. A week or so ago Robert (Boss) Hogg and Steve Spencer from the company came over to see us and give a presentation on professional software development. Very good it was too. As we were chatting at the end of the session the conversation turned to tablets. I mentioned the Samsung Series 7 Slate that I fancied and Boss said “Oh, we have a few of those. Found a very good price on the internets and Samsung are doing a “VAT back” offer that makes them even cheaper”.

And that was me sold. I had to sell some cameras and lenses to get there, but for a price slightly higher than a fully loaded iPad I’ve now got a really proper portable tablet. It has an i5 processor and 4G of ram, which makes it the second fastest machine I own. The only slight snag is that it has a small-ish 64G internal SSD, but since I’ve been using Live Mesh and Dropbox to store my data I’m used to making do with carrying fairly small amounts of data around with me. At the moment I’ve got pretty much all the software I need loaded up along with data and I’ve still got over 20G left. If I want to take some movies with me I can put them onto a micro SD card and pop them in the slot on the top. I can also be very confident it will play anything without conversion because at the end of the day its a PC.

One standout feature is the Wacom pen support. There is multi-touch of course, but I can also write on the screen surface with a digitiser pen. I can’t really put into words how good this is. The OneNote program, which I’ve always liked but never had the right platform for, suddenly comes alive. I can convert my dodgy handwriting into text and search it, and put my documents into Skydrive for instant sharing. Taking notes in meetings will never be the same.

The tablet also comes with a docking station which gives me HDMI video out and a second USB port (could really do with more). I’ve got at least four hours of use out of my first charge of the battery.

Last night I put Windows 8 on it, following the instructions on the Samsung Windows 8 Preview site. The only really scary bit was deleting every partition on the disk so that I could get the installer to complete, but after that everything went well. And it just works.

I love my iPad, but I hate using it to create anything larger than an email. The Samsung gives me a touchy interface that makes it easy to consume data, plus raw power and a productive environment and all my familiar tools. And a fantastic pen based interface. This and Photoshop would be awesome.

This machine has even replaced the twisty tablet in my affections. I reckon this is a little slice of the future and when Windows 8 launches and these become the norm there is going to be a second wave of tablets coming along, but these will be properly useful.

One note of mild warning: There has been a bit of kerfuffle about problems with the screen glass coming away from the bezel. Some people have had problems with this, particularly with early versions of the hardware. Mine doesn’t look like it is prone to this and the rate of reports of the problem are dying down a bit at the moment. It is hard to make things this small and slim without there being some manufacturing issues. I remember that my first iPhone 3g wasn’t exactly well stuck together, with an overlap on one edge that made the sides not quite flat, but it worked fine for the time that I had it. However, if you are buying one second hand I’d advise that you take a careful look at what you are getting.

Hull Programme and Module Catalogue

Here’s a trick, if you want to take a look at what we teach at Hull and how our courses fit together you can take a look at the university module catalogue here.

https://www.courses.hull.ac.uk/

You can search by course code or department and get the learning outcomes and assessment mechanisms for all our modules.

Think of the User

I’ve jut spent the day in the programming labs looking at first year work. When I go to bed I will not be counting sheep, but Sweepy Cleaner games and Bank applications.

Some of the work was astonishingly good. One thing I did notice though was quite often the applications (I’m thinking mainly bank here) were a bit hard to use. Sometimes to achieve an action you had to move to a menu, type something in, press a button, click a confirm dialog and then click another dialog to acknowledge a message that you’d done the task. I often made the point that if there were 1,000 bank accounts to be entered these actions would add up pretty quickly and lead to a bunch of very unhappy users.

If you are making anything with a user interface you must show it to some users. Saying “I did it this way because I thought it would work the best” is not really a recipe for success. Getting someone to use it, or using it yourself for a few transactions will quickly bring home whether or not an application is easy to use.

Weather Flow for Windows Phone

There are loads of weather applications for Windows Phone. Today, on a whim, I bought one. Weather Flow looks lovely. It also has really nice Live Tiles. There are only two things I don’t like about it. It can be a tad slow to find the weather information (although nothing terrible) and it doesn’t have exactly where I live on its list of locations.  Worth a look though.

Recovery For Idiots

I’ve just invented a new policy for all those important disks that you get with cameras and computers which become so important when you subsequently try to sell your old stuff on ebay.

As soon as I get them I’m going to throw them in the bin.

I’ve just spent a chunk of the day looking for a set of mysteriously vanished drivers and they would seem to be completely lost. If I’d chucked them away as soon as I got them, rather than put them “somewhere safe”, I’d be in the same position as I am now, but at least I’d have not wasted all the time getting here.

Don’t Buy Dodgy SD Cards

Some time back I bought a couple of economically priced cheap SD cards. They were rated at category 10 (the fastest you can get) and were huge (32G). They were from a shop based in the Channel Islands who have sold me good stuff in the past. I can’t precisely recall their name, but I seem to remember that they are open all week.

Anyhoo, one failed shortly after purchase and the other has developed the interesting ability to turn filenames into guacamole and move datestamps into 2315. Having thought about this properly I’ve decided that perhaps I should have spent the same amount of cash on cards that were around a half (or perhaps even a quarter) the size but were from companies that I’ve actually heard of. It is very unlikely that I’ll wander out and take 650 pictures in a single trip (even assuming I’ve got enough battery power to do this).

I’ve come to the conclusion SD cards are one area where false economy will not just fail to save me money, but also raises the possibility that I might not get my pictures back home.

How to put files in sensible places

I’ve been in the lab marking student work all day. I’ve watched around 25 or so demonstrations of software. Great fun. You might find it surprising, but I actually like this part of the job. Very hard work, but worth it just to see what students have done with the problem that we set. Every now and then I tell a student about something and they say “You should blog that”. And so here goes.

One of the things you often need to do is store a file from your program. You want to put the file somewhere sensible, for example in the user’s documents folder. If you want to find out where this is you can use an environment variable:

string docPath = 
    System.Environment.GetFolderPath(
                         System.Environment.SpecialFolder.MyDocuments);

string fileName = docPath + @"\MyFile.txt";

The code above creates a string variable called docPath which refers to the documents folder for that user. It then creates a filename (remembering to put the backslash path separator in and use the string notation that stops it from turning into a control character) which can be used to create a file called MyFile.txt in that folder.

If you use Intellisense you can find lots of other special folders, including the ones for music and photos.

Hull Digital May Meetup

Hull Digital are another good reason why you should live in Hull. They’ve been going for a while now and I’ve gone along to a number of their Meetups. I always leave with plenty to think about, and tonight’s meeting was no exception to this.

There were a couple of speakers tonight. First up was Marc Towler who was speaking about Open Source. Marc made some very good points about Open Source development, including one which I think is particularly relevant to students. Taking part in an Open Source project is a great way to get development experience. It exposes you to production quality code, and lets you work with other developers, some of whom will be the best in their field. It lets you build your expertise and get yourself noticed. It is a wonderful way to break the “can’t get a job with no experience – can’t get experience without a job” cycle. And with a wealth of projects out there it is very likely that you will find one in an area you find interesting.

The second speaker was Adam Jennison who works at Hull City Council. These people are in the big league when it comes to data processing, with more systems than they can count and a huge number of users, all with different needs. Adam was talking about Open Data and how the council is building APIs that will allow developers to get hold of council data and use it. By the use of appropriately designed interfaces based on RESTful principles, anyone can take the information and do things with it.

For me the strongest message from the talk was that Adam doesn’t see himself as in the business of predicting exactly how the data will be used, or how it can be combined with other data to produce new kinds of applications. He spoke about one or two ideas that he had, and how the open data could be used within the council itself, but it seems to me that there are all kinds of fascinating options to explore. Benjamin Welby, who also works for the council, has written some interesting background here.

From a teaching point of view the possibilities for great projects and practical work look really interesting.

Universities and Gymnasiums

Something that one of the speakers said at the “do” last night has stuck with me. He said that, with students paying more and more for their degrees there was a danger that they might be seen as consumers of education, where they were obtaining their qualification by paying for it. He suggested another way of looking at the situation that I hadn’t heard before.

He said that going to university was like joining a gym.

You can join a gym to get fit, but just joining doesn’t make you fit. It simply gives you access to machinery and expertise that you can use to get fit. If you fail to listen to the trainer or make use of the equipment then you don’t get a better body, you just get poorer.

I really like this way of thinking. I think it puts all the responsibilities in all the right places. Our job as educators is to make sure students have all the stuff they need to make progress, but at the end of the day it is the student that gets their qualification.

Inspiring Teacher Award

A couple of weeks ago I got an email saying that I’d been shortlisted for an award. The Student Union at Hull has instituted a set of Teaching Awards and I’d been nominated in the “Inspiring Teaching” category, which was very nice.

I was invited to an awards ceremony where they were serving tomato soup, roast beef and profiteroles. My favourites, which was even nicer.

The actual ceremony was fantastic. They even had a band who played through the evening. The result for my category was towards the end of the proceedings, which was a bit nerve wracking, but the food and conversation were great and the time passed really quickly. Then came the results. And I’d won. Which was amazing.

I staggered down to the front and was presented with the trophy. Photos were taken and then I staggered back. I’m not usually someone who is lost for words but I was this time. In fact I still am. It is just so nice. Thanks everyone.

Event Today: Real Life Software Engineering

Anyone at Hull who fancies an hour’s break from coursework and revision today can pop along to a lunchtime event run by Robert Hogg and Steve Spencer of Black Marble. Rob and Steve are Microsoft MVPs (but none the worse for that) who have a lot (and I mean a lot) of experience of writing software for customers. If you want to hear some “Tales from Real Life” then you should go along to LTA in the Robert Blackburn Building at 1:15 pm today.

This event would be particularly useful for any First or Second Year students who want to learn more about the software development process.

I’ll be there…. taking notes….

Update on 2012-05-02 07:47 by Rob

Steve and Rob gave a great presentation that brought home the realities of the software development business. I think for me the thing that they brought out is that, perhaps surprisingly, software development is all about people. A successful developer must be able to interact with the customer, their manager, other developers, the test team and lots of other people to get a happy ending.

The iTunes Experience

Apple make carefully designed and beautifully presented products that amaze and delight their owners. They also make iTunes. Which is amazing, but not in any good way.

Yesterday number one dad got a new iPad. I heard the news with dread. Because it meant that I’d be the chap installing it. In theory this is easy, just back up the first iPad and then restore the backup to the new iPad. A doddle. Except….

The new iPad refused to talk to the version of iTunes on dad’s laptop. So I fired up the Apple Upgrade Manger. Which found an upgrade for itself. Which failed. Eventually I figured out that it was trying (and failing) to uninstall the old version. Nothing I could do would persuade the darned thing to get out of the way so that I could upgrade iTunes. Time for Plan B. Install a new version of iTunes on the desktop and use that to do the upgrade. Installation went well, tried to sign into iTunes and authorize the computer. Turns out that iTunes is incapable of remembering dad’s password for more than ten minutes. Go through the password reset. Authorize the computer. Plug in the old iPad to perform the backup. Fail. The iPad will only talk to the iTunes library on the broken laptop. One wrong press now and I wipe the iPad by restoring an empty library onto it. At least you get the warning now. I’ve known people wipe their iPods when they get a new computer. Why Apple persist in such a stupid library arrangement in this cloud connected world is beyond me. Anyway, no dice.

So decide to just register the new iPad so that we can do something with it. Find that that iTunes has forgotten dad’s password again. Get another password.  Finally get the registration completed and start restoring applications onto the new iPad. Three hours in and we now have something working.

I’m going to have to back up and rebuild dad’s laptop so that I can do a clean install of this idiotic program. I looked up the procedure to back up the iTunes library. It seems that there are two ways you can do this. Copy the files and hope or buy a program to help you do this.

I’ve thought for a while that Apple are probably quite happy to give users a horrible experience if they use iTunes on a PC. I’ve found PC installations to be very fragile and completely impossible to get off a machine. There’s no way I’d install iTunes on any of my PCs, in fact I keep an “emergency Mac” around with iTunes on it that I use to keep my Apple devices up to date. I’ve found the Mac version of iTunes to be a lot better behaved, thank goodness.

One of the great things about iOS 5 is that you can do pretty much everything without using iTunes. As for me, I’m off for a lie down….

My Two Dogs

Digby and Wrex

Simon Grey has been posting about his dogs. So I thought I’d post about my two. On the left we have Digby, who is sufficiently autonomous that he can fall downstairs unaided. On the right we have Wrex, who doesn’t do much by himself but has a really cool remote control.

Digby doesn’t get out much these days. But today I powered him up and let him wander around for a while. The best comment about him that I ever heard was from someone who actually owned a dog. “That’s just what my dog used to do” she said as she watched him wander around. It is a crying shame that Sony stopped making Aibo robots, they were just getting interesting when the company pulled the plug.

With all the sensor and processor developments taking place at the moment Aibo 2.0 would be awesome.

Imagine Cup Captains Blog Post

I did a post for the Imagine Cup Blogs this week. I thought I’d copy it here too. 

Hi. I’m Rob Miles, Competition Captain for Software Design. I teach Computer Science at The University of Hull and I’ve been involved in the Imagine Cup for all of the ten years it has been around. I thought I’d write about a few things that might help you make your great entries even greater.

More is Not Always More

Sometimes when you are building your entry you start to think about what you can add. However, adding extras is not always a good plan. If you are thinking about adding an extra feature you should ask the hard question “How does this new feature build on the central theme of our entry?” If the answer is “it doesn’t really” then you should probably not include it. Every time you increase the “footprint” of your solution you dilute the central idea and add to your workload. I’ve seen lots of entries that have a great central idea which is then bogged down by lots of other details that aren’t really important. If you want to add value to your solution the best way to do this is to make it more credible. Spend more time getting it into the hands of the users and getting their feedback. Make sure you have a strong story on how you are going make the system viable. Find sponsors if you need them, or get professionals in the field to praise your solution and continue to build your solution based on that feedback. Remember that adding a feature doesn’t mean that it will add value to your solution.

Show Your Solution to People You Don’t Know

Your friends, family and teachers all like you. They care about you and worry about giving you critical feedback. Therefore they aren’t the best people to evaluate your solution, as they won’t always tell it like it is. What you want are people who have never met you before, and have no reason to like you other than the system that you are showing them. This might hurt the first time you do it, especially if they tell you they can’t understand what your solution does, or how to use it. Nevertheless, you should capture their feedback which will likely add a huge amount of value to your solution, and you’ll get some great stories that you can use to improve your entry.

Go End to End

Make sure you and your teammates have worked through your solution all the way from the start to the end. You might have lots of separate parts that fit together to make the entire solution. Make sure you can take a user all the way through your system from start to finish, from creating the first username (if that’s what the system does) to printing out the last report (if that’s what the system does). I’ve seen systems demonstrated as “snapshots” of different parts of the design that don’t give a feel for how the whole thing fits together. Make sure you have gone through the entire lifecycle of an interaction with your system.

Do Things That Scare You a Little Bit

Sometimes you have to leave your comfort zone to get the best results. This might mean approaching sponsors for help, asking people you’ve never met what they think of your idea or standing up and speaking in front of an audience when you’d really rather not. The Imagine Cup is not just about solving some of the world’s toughest problems; it is also about your growth as a person. Don’t be afraid to do these things. One of my favourite sayings is “What doesn’t kill you makes a really good blog post”. Remember that whatever happens, you’ll still be standing afterwards, you’ll have learned something from it, and maybe have a good story to tell. And sometimes you will get what you want out of the exchange.

Enjoy Yourself

The Imagine Cup is about using technical innovation to solve problems. But it is also about fun. Make sure you take time you enjoy yourself. You are with your friends, doing something you really enjoy. Ensure you make the best of it. And remember, your Imagine Cup entry is not the only great thing that you will do in your life. It is just one of the first ones.

Rob Miles
- Imagine Cup 2012 Software Design Captain

Platform Expos Debate

Lindsay West counts off the good stuff, while the panel prepare for the debate.

Three good reasons to live in Hull.

1. The University of Hull (of course)
2. Chip spice.
3. Platform Expos.

The first two are pretty much self evident. (Although the second one only really makes sense once you’ve had some fast food locally). If you’ve not heard of Platform Expos, they are the folks that run digital events to promote Hull. The last Three Thing Game competition took place during Platform Expo 2012 on the University campus. Recently there was also Platform Doha, a very successful event at Qatar University.

And today there was the first Platform Debate, themed on how to break into the games industry. We had a roster of speakers including Jon Purdy, ex Hull and now University of Bradford, Simon Iwaniszak ex RockStar and now of Red Kite Games and Paul Rayment, the PR Manager at Dubit who put together interactive games for BBC Enterprises among other customers. The discussion was led by Jamie Sefton of Game Republic, with Lindsay West doing the introductions. There was some very interesting discussion of how to get into the games industry. Some topics that emerged.

• A good portfolio (collection of things you’ve done) is crucial. And it should be content that goes beyond your coursework.
• If you send your portfolio anywhere, pay attention to presentation and delivery. Make sure it is properly addressed to the person in the company you are pitching to and make sure it is a well presented disk, in a case, with a properly printed label. It all helps to build your brand.
• An on-line presence is useful, but make sure you keep it up to date. Nothing looks worse than stuff that has obviously not been touched for years.
• Networking is hard but crucial. Going up to someone you’ve never met before and giving them your business card is really difficult (especially for a computer scientist). But you must do this. You will feel very stupid the first few times you do it, but it gets easier. And it gets you work.
• Conferences are useful, but you don’t have pay the huge entry fees to meet up with those in the business. You can often meet up with the movers and shakers just by dropping into the right hotel bar when the conference is in full swing.
• The business is going places. Things are in a state of flux, studios come and go, but there is still a need for people who can do this stuff. And it is still fun.

And so, after a couple of hours of high quality discussion we reached the end and I had to whizz off to the dentist….