Great Christmas Eve

What can you write abut a day where you just sit around and have a nice time? Nothing much. And I really like that.

Shower of no power

Here’s a Christmas Riddle for you: “When is a shower not a shower?” The answer, at least in our house, is “At 7:35 am this morning” when number one wife turned the dial and nothing happened.

Truly, there is no better way of starting the week before Christmas, with guests arriving who will presumably be expecting bathing facilities, than by standing in the bath wearing your pyjamas and dismantling a shower unit. The hope was that it was just blocked. The fear (which was actually more of a certainty if I’m honest) was that something inside (probably the outlet valve) was bust.

Turned out that my fears were justified. However, thanks to the power of the internet, a bunch of calling round and the services of a very obliging plumber, we had the replacement in and working by the end of the day. All it meant was that I was a bit poorer,

Getting Windows Phone App Reviews

One thing that will encourage potential users of your application is good reviews. However, users are not that inclined to give good reviews to programs, even when they got them for free and have used them many times.

Lee Stott did a great little blog post a while back that shows how to add a review facility to your application. It is very sensibly designed, in that it only nags once, after ten uses of the program, so it doesn’t become a pain for the user.

You could also use the same technique to add timed release behaviours to your application, so that it could suggest new things to do over time.

Steve Jobs Biography

Steve Jobs was not a particularly nice person by all accounts. I’ve never had much time for folks who are horrible to other people and then claim they do this  “just because they are that way”. But he did make a lot of things. I’ve been working my way through his biography over the last few weeks and it is fascinating.

For me the best bits are at the beginning, when he and Steve Wozniak rode the personal computer wave and built a huge company from nothing. Towards the end the story turns into a succession of product meetings and multi-million dollar deals but it is a great read nonetheless.

The Magic of Backups

What do you do when you lose your files just before the work is due in? Well, in a perfect world you’d just go and get your backup. In an imperfect one (which is were we found one student today) you find that you don’t have a backup of the files that are needed.

The good (and frankly quite amazing) news is that the Computer Services folks are a lot more careful about backups than some students. Turns out that they back up the workstations and student folders every couple of hours or so. Which meant that the chap in question was able to go down to the helpdesk, tell them his username and they were able to restore the missing files. Just in time for the deadline.

I reckon it is probably best not to factor this facility into your working process. But it is jolly nice to know that it is there.

Chilli Con Carne Flambé

Invented a new recipe for tea today. Quite simple really.

Chop a large onion and fry with a small amount of oil. Add some mince and fry that. Then add some garlic, tomato purée, a tin of tomatoes and then (and this is the important bit) leave simmering on the hob for around 45 minutes without stirring while you attempt to interface an RF24L01 Single Chip 2.4GHz Transceiver to an Arduino. Go downstairs and scrape the black bits off the bottom of the pan. Add kidney beans and serve with rice and fervently crossed fingers.

At least it all got eaten.

A Trip to the Dentist

Today it was time for a check-up of the tooth variety. I’ve long since progressed beyond having “good teeth”. Now I settle for “good teeth for my age”. Apparently, if I was 90 years old I’d have “excellent teeth for my age”. Something to look forward to I think.

Micro-Talks and Mega-Bash. And Werewolves

We tried a few new things this year for the Christmas Bash. Firstly we had some micro-talks (thanks to Microsoft for the prizes – above)  from students and staff about things they are working on. Danny Brown started with a talk about contributing to Open Source software, then we had talks about app development for Vulcan Bombers, augmented reality that puts meaning into the countryside and why you should all sign up for Hull Global Gamejam next year. I did an abridged version of my talk about hardware for C4DI which seemed to go OK. At least, the hardware worked….

Then we played Werewolf. Which I’d never done before. With a group of over 30 villagers. And four werewolves. In Lecture Theatre C. It was hilarious. I was the moderator.

I discovered two things very quickly. First thing: I found out who the werewolves were at the start of the game. Second thing: being a moderator is surprisingly hard work. Especially if you keep mistaking werewolves for vampires and asking people who had just been killed by the werewolves if they were a werewolf or not. As if.

I’d taken what I thought was the sensible decision of simplifying the game for the first run by removing some of the character cards. Turns out this was a really bad move, because it made it much harder for the villagers to discover what was going on and react to the nightly attacks. By the end we were down to one villager and one werewolf, with the inevitable and, for the villagers, unhappy outcome.

But a lot of fun was had along the way, with a break for pizza and mince pies in the middle.

There are at least two werewolves in this picture. Can you spot them? (and yes, they do show up on pictures. You are thinking of vampires, which is what I was doing a lot as well…)

Of course we had the bumper wordsearch. Once Adam reminded me to go and get it One of my abiding memories of the event is watching people put down their controllers for the latest generation games console and pick up pens to have a go searching through the letters. (You can have a go here too if you like.)

We even had a winner who wasn’t Simon. so we asked him to present the prize.

There was much boasting with “Braggart”, although I didn’t quite manage to win.

Folks really seemed to appreciate the paper based stuff. I think next semester we will supplement the Team Fortress games afternoons with Werewolf sessions and board games.

Intelligence, Robots and Big Data

What do Wal-Mart, Google and Lady Gaga all have in common? They are all fans of Big Data.

I didn’t know that until today, when Prof. Ping Jiang, who has just joined the department, gave his inaugural lecture. Prof. Jiang was talking about properly large amounts of content. Google create around 25 Petabytes of data every day (that’s a  1 with fifteen zeroes after it). Wal-Mart are registering over 1 million customer transactions an hour. And Lady Gaga (or more probably her manager Troy Carter) are getting input from 31 million Twitter followers and 51 million Facebook fans when they consider what to do next.

Big Data holds useful nuggets of information and lets you do do lots of powerful things. But the problem with big data is that it is, well, er, big. And we are not talking about sheer size here, we also need to consider the rate at which we are adding to the data, and the speed that we want to get useful things from the raw numbers.

It seems that the best way to decide when you are dealing with big data is when conventional techniques break down. If it would take your network of servers several hundred years to deliver the result of one query on your data set, then you are dealing with big data. And the only way to really deal with this is to divide and conquer by spreading the processing around as much as you can, and doing the maximum amount of work you can when you first get the data in.

Prof. Jaing took as an example the problem of machine vision, in the context of robots that can navigate around autonomously. This is a complex problem, with huge amounts of data coming in from the robot’s visual sensors alone. An intelligent robot would need to be very intelligent indeed just to be able to find its way from one office to another.

But if you spread the vision sensors around the building, getting them to perform all the motion and object tacking, you can reduce the intelligence that you need in the robot itself and lose a lot of complexity. Your robot can move a lot more confidently, as the systems controlling it can “see” much further ahead and react to changes in the environment. You are dealing with the big data coming into your system by processing the raw information as it arrives and converting it into a useful form that could be shared by all the devices navigating in an area.

It’s early days, but it did look to me like this did hold the prospect of actually having useful robots working with us.

Fascinating stuff.

Robotics Talk on Monday 16th

Don’t forget that on Monday 16th at 6:00 Prof. Ping Jiang is giving his inaugural lecture in the Middleton Hall at the University. It is on the subject of robotics and intelligence. Looks like fun, there might even be some robots in attendance…

Shelf Portrait

I’m not sure that I’ve actually got the hang of this whole “shelfie” thing.

Morning Light

You get some lovely colours during the sunrise at this time of year..

I took these with the Lumia 1020 phone. I’m needing to get my camera out less and less these days.

Fiddling with Hardware at C4DI

Jon Moss gets things started.

We had a great evening at the C4DI tonight. It was another of the “You Really Should Be” events and just to make it even more interesting I was giving one of the presentations. But first we had Jon Moss, making the point that “You Really Should Be speaking at events”. He made a great case for talking in public, not least because it is fun once you get going. He also made the very good point that the aim of a presentation is to get your audience to do something and what this is should be set out and reinforced at the beginning and the end of your presentation, when the audience is most engaged.

My Audience. Thanks for the applause.

Then it was my turn. My topic was “You Really Should be Fiddling with Hardware”, and I’d brought along some hardware that I’d fiddled with, including coloured lights that can be controlled over Bluetooth from my Windows Phone. Everything worked, eventually, and folks clapped at the end, which is always nice. You can find the slides from the presentation here.

Next up was John Polling who reckoned “You really should be working on a side project”. By side project John means something which takes you into new areas and helps you develop your skills. I like the sound of this. I’ve always found that the technical things that I’m not really supposed to be doing are the ones that I find the most interesting at any given time. By formalising this and giving an outlet for folks who want to make something different you can get happier developers and some surprisingly useful outcomes.

Finally we had Steve Fewster. who rounded things off with “You really should be - developing apps for the ‘Global Cloud Accounting’ community”. I’m not that familiar with accounting, but I do know about the cloud and how lots of business process is now moving into it. Steve, who is in the business of providing tools and services that add value for cloud users, took the line that “There’s gold in them thar hills”. In other words, the market is just getting going for people who want to bolt their ideas onto cloud based accounting systems. The system makers are keen to encourage an app infrastructure and so they make it easy to create apps and there is lots of scope for neat ideas to become the next big thing.

All in all, a very thought provoking and enjoyable evening. Thanks to C4DI for putting it together.

Mini-Open Day

We had our first Open Day of the new admissions round today. Just a quiet affair with a few select guests. I was able to show off one of my latest toys (which will get its official debut tomorrow at C4DI) and make sure that I can still remember the introduction presentation. That went fine, although I did make the potentially career damaging mistake of completely forgetting the name of our new head of department. Who was there at the time.

This is our new Head of Department, Ken Hawick, handing over goods to the winner of our Open Day prize draw. There are no prizes at all for guessing what is in the box.

Thanks to those who turned up, hope you had a good journey back.

“Keep with next” with Word

I’ve been in the lab most of today marking First Year projects. One of the things that we ask the students to do is create a user manual for the program that they write. I reckon that the manual works best if it has headings that direct the reader to particular topics. But that can cause problems….

Sometimes the heading can end up at the bottom of the page, like the rather contrived example above. If you want to stop this happening, you can right click on the heading text (in the example above “Getting a copy of the notes”) and choose “Paragraph” from the menu that appears.

Then you can select “Keep with next” for the paragraph and this means that if you have a page break in the wrong place (as above) then the heading will follow the text over the page.

If you are entering program samples, or things that you don’t want to have split over page breaks you can also use the “Keep Lines Together” setting. If you add this behaviour to styles you can get your documents to lay themselves out automatically.

Micro-Talks and Mega-Bash

We’ve got big plans for the Christmas Bash this year.

We thought it might be fun to do something more than just eat pizza, drink cola and play video games. So we have having some Micro-Talks. Then we are going to eat pizza, drink cola and play video games.

If you have done something shiny recently, contributed to a cool project, met someone influential or found a really neat thing everyone should know about then come and tell us all about it. Each speaker will be allowed 5 minutes, and a maximum of 4 PowerPoint slides, to talk about something or other. After this people can ask questions. The idea is to keep things short, sweet and interesting!

Struggling to think of something to talk about? Why not talk about:

• An open source project you helped
• A cool programming language or paradigm you’ve discovered
• A game you’ve made
• Anything tech related!

If you’re interested in speaking then please fill out this form telling us your subject:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/NTJGG3T

The fun begins on  Tuesday 17^th December at 5:15 in Robert Blackburn Lecture Theatre C (RB-LTC). Thanks to Danny Brown for setting the talks up and getting hold of the bumper haul of swag we are giving away as prizes.

Once the talking is over, the pizza will arrive at around 6:30 and we can eat and head off to play games. We will have all the attractions on the poster above and of course the mega-wordsearch with big prizes that are big.

Tickets go on sale at 2:00 pm on Wednesday 11th December in the Departmental Office.

World of Blur

I woke up today with a head full of plans, schemes and great things to do. Then my glasses fell in half as I put them on.

Great.

Of course I was equal to this, eventually. Having turned the house upside down (not literally, that would be really hard to do – especially without my glasses on) and found some less than invisible tape to mend them with, I managed to get back into gear. The metal fitting in the frame has just broken in half. Serves me right for keeping them longer than two years I suppose. The hunt is now on for my older, but rather less broken, ones that I can use while I get these fixed.

I was wondering whether, from a style point of view, I should put tape around the other side for the sake of balance?

Acer W3-810 at a knockdown price

After I buy something technical one of two things usually happens:

• They stop making it
• It plummets in price

I think with the Acer W3-810 tablet it might be both of them. Although it has only been out around six months I reckon that there is a refresh due and the price has collapsed accordingly, to a very interesting 179 pounds from PC World. This is stonkingly good value for a full fat Windows 8 tablet. Mine is now my travelling companion of choice. Eminently portable, excellent battery life for watching movies on the go and the ability to run splendid little programs live Live Write so that I can blog about what I see when I get there.

Downsides? Well, the 8.1 inch screen is not optimal if you are the sharing type, as the range of viewing angles is not the best, and the Atom processor and 2G of RAM means that it chugs a bit when running larger programs. I had Photoshop Lightroom on it for a while and the best thing you can say is that it gets there in the end. Mind you, having said that Lightroom can pretty much bring any machine to its knees just by importing a few pictures. I’ve heard of one brave soul running Visual Studio on it. Apparently it is possible, but of course with it being based on the 32 bit x86 architecture you will not be running any Windows Phone emulators any time soon…

If you are in the market for something portable and useful you could get a lot worse. If you think about it, that’s actually less money than a Nexus 7, for a machine that is actually properly productive, with Microsoft Office and the ability to print things out.

Final Tags of Fun Lecture of 2013

This is the latest design for the “Tagomatic” box. Expect a smaller one for next year.

We had our last 5:15 pm lecture today. I can’t say that I’ll miss them, although this one was quite fun. I went through the exam paper for last year (you can’t get more fun than that) and gave away four owls, including a “Golden Christmas Owl” to someone who’s name I completely failed to pronounce properly. Oh well, perhaps the next version of the “Tagomatic” can have text to speech. For those that haven’t heard of it, the “Tagomatic” is a little Gageteer powered box that reads the RFID tags of folks at a lecture and then picks a random winner from the assembled multitude. I first used it for the welcome party, where we had it allocating the free drinks, and I’ve been using it in my Friday First Year lectures to make things a little more interesting.

People have seemed to engage very well with the project, bringing along their tags and scanning them for a chance to win small prizes. I even had someone get in touch asking where they can get a tag from…. Next year I’m planning to have multiple tag readers, spot prizes and Bluetooth networking back to my phone.

It almost makes me wish for another 5:15 lecture on Friday. Almost……

You Really Should Be Fiddling with Hardware

Find out what you can do with this, and how much it costs, at the session next week.

In an attempt to stop myself just buying components and start myself actually doing something with them, I’m doing a session at the next C4DI “You really should be..” event.

I’m going to be talking about the joys of making programs that talk to hardware, and just how easy and cheap it is to get started. Expect flashing lights.

The session starts at 6:00 pm on Thursday 12th of December. It’s at the C4DI in The Fruit Market. You can sign up here.