Making Less of Rob

I've been trying to lose weight for a while. When I first made the decision I did what anyone in my position would do, which is that I bought some gadgets to do the job for me. I got a Fitbit to track my activity levels, and a set of Fitbit Aria scales to track my declining bulk.  And I waited to get lighter. 

This did not work. 

In fact it didn't work to the extent that the scales stopped recognising me as Rob and referred to me only as "Guest". I'd managed to put on so much extra weight that I was no longer me. Turns out that gadgets alone don't work. 

So I tried another extra step, which was to exercise a bit more and eat a bit less. I tried to live by the maxim "No snacks after seven pm". It wasn't easy, but after a while I got back on the radar of the weighing machine and started losing a few pounds every now and then. 

The scales are rather neat. They are hooked up to WiFi and each time you weigh yourself the numbers are sent up into the cloud. A couple of weeks ago I weighed myself and promptly got an email from FitBit congratulating me on reaching one of my goals. I think the goal I had reached was "You have got back to the same weight you had when you started the programme", but at this stage I'll take any praise, even that from a faceless piece of robot software.  The Fitbit activity tracker is neat too and did a good job of tracking my activity right up to the point where I lost it. Maybe I'll get another one when I start doing more exercise.

My plan is to get to the point where I can  put on some trousers I bought a few years ago thinking "They are a bit tight, but I can slim down into them.". We shall see.

Coloured Lights for Christmas

I've got a plan for the Christmas lights this year. On the amazing AliExpress website I found a listing for 50 pre-soldered WS812B leds in a strand for the amazing prize of around 12 quid. Post free. These are the same devices that I used in the hugely successful Wedding Lights earlier in the year. So it was out with the credit card and away I go. What could go wrong?

The plan is to make a mesh of them for the living room. I've even got permission from number one wife to hang them up. I've found this thing called FadeCandy that I can use to control them, although for testing at the moment I'm making do with an Arduino I happen to have lying around.  

Eventually I want to learn how to use Processing (a very interesting language that looks great fun) to put lo-res images and other stuff up on the wall. 

Step 1 is to make some enclosures for the lights. As supplied they are just soldered onto cable. I've come up with Version 1.0 above, which is a simple cube of white PLA along with a base that just snaps onto the back. I had a happy hour this morning designing them and test printing them and they seem to look OK. 

Step 2 will be to hang a strand downstairs and see how they look. Great fun, and much more interesting than all the other things I really should be doing. But hey, it is Sunday after all. 

Running ASP.NET on a Raspberry Pi

I'm really going to have to have a go at this. Awesome.

Christmas Bash is Coming

The Christmas Bash for 2014 is coming and it is going to be a corker. We are going to have Wii U Smash Bros 8 player, with amiibo prizes, Team Fortress 2, Xbox One, Playstation 4, board games, word searches, pizza, mince pies and a super bumper hyper mega wordsearch which might include the words super, bumper,hyper and mega.

Tickets will be on sale in the Departmental Office on the Third Floor of the Robert Blackburn Building from 2:30 pm on Monday 8th December. Numbers are strictly limited.

Blogging for Profit at the Rather Useful Seminar

I did a Rather Useful Seminar yesterday about how and why you should blog. Unfortunately I forgot to record it, but you can find the slides here.

Flashing Lights and Drones at C4DI

Today we had another of our hardware meetups at c4di. Great fun was had by all who attended. We had two activities, playing with coloured leds or creating a Larson Scanner. Ross had brought along a little quadcopter with a video camera and much fun was had with that too. I'm not saying you should get one, but if you fancy making an investment you can find it here.

Python Wrap

Python wrap sounds like the kind of dish you don't pick off the menu, or perhaps a piece of music that you really don't want to hear. But in this context I'm talking about the last of our "Wrestling with Python" sessions for a while. They have been great fun to deliver, and it has been lovely to watch people come to terms with the artful business that is programming. 

This week we were making good on our promise of a "Soup to Nuts" implementation, going from problem description to working code.  And we added some File Handling, just to make it even more useful. You can find the slides and completed code here.

We'll be running more of these next year. 

Soldering Stuff for C4DI Hardware Meetup

At the C4DI Meetup on Wednesday we are going all Christmassy with coloured lights. I've been soldering up some kits for folk to play with. Should be fun. You can sign up (if you havn't already) here. 

"Remember Me" is Well Scary

This is the perfect time of year for a ghost story. And Remember Me is a perfect ghost story. Lots of secrets and weird goings on. And a few unhappy endings. If you'e not seen it before, find a way of catching up on the whole thing before the final episode goes out next Sunday. 

New Lego Minifigures

There's a new series of Lego Minifigures out. Including a video game player and a Pizza delivery chap. Perhaps we should use these two as the emblems for our departmental parties...

Writing a Program is not a Fight

Our First Year students are busy at the moment working on their Assessed Coursework. They are implementing computerised versions of Tactical Space Cheese Racer, a board game that we've invented just for this year. 

One student came to see me today and told me that he was having problems getting the code to work. Each line of his breathless report was prefaced with "And then it does this...." as if the code was some kind of malign being that he was fighting against. 

After listening for a while I had to remind him that he is not in a battle here. The program is something that that he created, and therefore he really should focus on the steps that it follows and why it does what it does. Just poking the beast by moving code around and adding and deleting statements will not actually tame it. What you have to do is focus on the sequence of operations it goes through when it does these bad things. 

We started going through the code and finding stuff here and there that could be fixed, and by the end he was referring to the thing as "my program", which I think is progress. 

James Croft talks Imagine Cup at our Rather Useful Seminar

James Croft came to see us yesterday. He now works for Black Marble and they were kind enough to let him slip across from Leeds to give a Rather Useful Seminar all about the Microsoft Imagine Cup competition. I've been involved with the Imagine Cup as a mentor, judge and competition captain and I think it completely rocks. But I'm very old. I thought it would be more meaningful if someone who has actually taken part came along and said how good it is. Which is just what James did in a well put together presentation. 

Microsoft have done some neat things with your pathway into the competition so that you can build up your development, from pitch video to working software, over the weeks leading up to the finals and get credit, feedback and prizes at every stage. There are the usual three challenge areas, Game Development, App Development and World Citizenship. The World Final is in Seattle and involves trips to Microsoft Campus among other places. And the prizes are awesome. 

The bottom line is that if you're a student you really should engage with the competition. I say this not because I'm convinced you will win (although students from Hull have an enviable record) but because taking part adds hugely to your personal value as a developer and communicator and also sets you up with valuable industrial contacts who will give you feedback, advice, a reference and maybe even a job. It has happened. 

Anyone from Hull who is thinking about forming a team should come and see me so that we can start making plans. 

Thanks for coming and doing such a good job James. I took a video of the session but something strange has happened with the dimmed lighting in the room which has caused awful banding effects on the picture, making it hard to see. Never mind though, James will be doing a webcast of the presentation later on his YouTube channel. Follow him on Twitter and find out when it becomes available. 

Finding Nouns and Wrestling with Pythons

We did some more Python last night. Going from text to objects by means of a bit of noun-finding. Great fun (even if it did bend the brains of folks a bit). You can find the whole presentation, and sample code, here.  

Completely Mad Tuesday

Today was completely mad. It started at 6:00, getting up to grab breakfast and zoom up town to review the newspapers with Radio Humberside. Which was fun. Then over to C4DI to chat with David Burns (again on Radio Humberside) about technology, Hull and the exciting things going on at the moment. And all against a fantastic sunrise which I managed to grab some snaps of.  You can find them here.

David Burns and Jon Moss of C4DI get the wide angle treatment. With a guest appearance of my knees.  

If you're quick you can get to hear the broadcast here.  I arrive around 20 minutes or so in...

Then it was back to the department to give a 10:15 First Year programming lecture in the nick of time. Then more lectures, labs, delivering chocolate brownies to a cake sale and finally a bit of Python Wrestling. 

By 7:15 pm I was wandering around the lab bouncing of walls and muttering "Today has been great, and busy, and all, but I'd quite like it to stop now...."

C# Yellow Book on Kindle

A while back I put the C# Yellow Book on Kindle, just to see what would happen. Turns out that people quite like it, which is nice. You can get a free PDF here and of course if you are sensible enough to come and study at Hull we'll give you a free printed copy for your first year course.  Or you could buy a copy :)

I'm going to spend some time on the text over Christmas and bring out an updated version in the new year. Some of the text and program samples got a bit mangled in the transfer to the Kindle format and I want to make it a bit tidier.

But I'll be leaving the good jokes in there. Both of them. 

Grand Prix Sunday with Lights

Spent the afternoon watching the Grand Prix and making lights come on when we pressed buttons. Good times. 

Next Gen Grand Theft Auto Rocks

Grand Theft Auto 5 is a game about mostly horrible people doing horrible things. With guns, cars, planes and large ugly dogs. But I reckon it is a towering work of art too. And on the next-gen consoles it is even better.

I spent a happy afternoon watching number one son run through a few missions in the new First Person View and it really is disgustingly great. Even if you have played the previous versions on your PS3 or XBOX 360 I reckon you should get a copy for your next gen console too. 

Return of the .NET Micro Framework (Please)

I love the .NET Micro Framework. We used it for years in our teaching of embedded systems. This year, with the robots and other components showing their age we moved onto the new fangled Arduino platform.  It's nice enough, and very popular at the moment. But I really miss being able to run (and debug) C# code inside a tiny embedded device. 

But how the Micro Framework might be roaring back. Colin Miller (the chap that wrote the foreward to the wonderful book above) recently wrote a blog post about new plans for the platform. With a bit of luck, and the rise of the Internet of Things (tm), it might be that the "little platform that could" might be returning. 

I certainly hope so. 

The Day of the Shrinking Inbox

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Today I reduced the number of emails in my inbox from around 1,400 (stupid number) to around 20 (much more sensible). 

Go me.

Rather Useful Seminar: Why and How to Publish Apps

The title kind of says it all really. This week's Rather Useful Seminar was all about app publication. With special guest appearances of Cheese Lander and Rob's Rednose Game.

By popular demand I've recorded it (i.e. someone asked me to).