Four Letter Word Generator

Well, here's something completely crackers that you can buy for less than ten pounds from Tindie. It's a Four Letter word associative database all on a single tiny chip. You can ask it for a random word, and then get another word kind of associated with it. There's a blog post here that tells you how it works. 

Of course I ordered one. It arrived today in a big padded envelope, sent all the way from Japan. Next I have to build a bit of hardware to read the words out and display them. I'm thinking it might make an awesome idea generator for Three Thing Game.  The "Three Thing'omatic", I can see it now.....

Happenings in the Department

Muyiwa Olu  gave a really good (and Rather Useful) seminar this week about the Python language. It is great to see someone being enthusiastic about a platform they obviously enjoy working with. I reckon that every programmer should have a bit of Python in their lives, because it is just such a fun language, and it was lovely to see some of the features brought to life. A great presentation from one of our second year students. 

You can find the slide deck for the session here. 

Next week we have Charlotte talking about Computer Science internships and her time at Airbus Industries writing software, including some Python code...

This week we also had our first meeting of the new "Embedded Development Club". Quite a few folk turned up, if just half of them come back next week with some kit to play with then we'll consider that a win. You can find the slide deck for the presentation here. 

And tonight we have a Hardware Meetup at C4DI. It's all go.

Benchmarking the Raspberry Pi 2 in Python

Well, I went off the the Post Office and got my Raspberry Pi 2. I really wanted to find out what kind of improvements you see when you use it.

The answer is, a lot. 

Booting was snappy, and the time to launch X-Windows was quite a bit quicker (although I'm not sure of the effect of the different SD cards I was using). But things got quite conclusive when I ran a little Python profiler:

• Original Raspberry Pi B:  207 function calls in 0.017 seconds
• Raspbery Pi B 2: 207 function calls in 0.003 seconds

This is just one test, but it shows a lot of promise. Python really seems to benefit from the extra cores as well as the faster processor.

Just pootling around the internet with the browser is a lot quicker than the original Raspberry Pi, but doesn't really compare with my super cheap Linx tablet, which is on paper a broadly comparable device. I'm not yet convinced that someone looking at the Pi 2 as a desktop replacement will find it a good plan, but as a step up from the original it is fantastic.

Raspberry Pi 2 and Windows 10

News of the Raspberry Pi 2 took me completely by surprise. And then, to add to this shock I find that it is not only an awesome device, but available to buy right away. Amazing. Who do these people think they are? Apple?

If the news of a new Pi with quad core processor and twice as much RAM wasn't enough though, I then find that the new Pi will be able to run Windows 10. For free. The only word I can think of to sum up this turn of events is blimey. 

The Windows 10 support will be limited to "universal" applications, which means an end to  any dreams of running Visual Studio on a device you paid 25 quid for. But that does mean that you can use Visual Studio to write and deploy programs onto the device, which will be great. You can find out more about Windows 10 on Pi here.

The development puts a mild question mark over devices such as Galileo and Edison, which are of the same ilk, but are more expensive and have no display capability. I guess everything will settle down and find its place eventually. The two Intel devices probably have a bit more straight line speed, although the 900 MHz four core processor in the new PI is not to be sneezed at. 

Anyhoo, my Raspberry Pi 2 is presently sitting in Cottingham Post Office waiting for me to drop round and pick it up. I actually bought 2. One to give the Video Arcade Table a shot in the arm, and the other for playing with.  We really do live in interesting times. 

Update: I've had a chance to do a very quick benchmark and compare the performance of the original and the new Rapberry Pi. You can find out more here. 

Welcome Back to 08120

I actually typed this in live in front of the First Year class this afternoon, just at the start of my 1:15 lecture. I was very impressed by the silence as I was typing it. But it stayed silent when they saw what it said......

Oh well. Welcome back folks for another semester of C# shenanigans. 

HTML Wrestling

I'm presently working in a much improved Kindle version of the World Famous (in my world) C# Yellow Book. Because the book has been written and upgraded over a number of versions the text formatting is a bit of a mess behind the scenes. It's taking a while to sort out.

I changed the style-sheet to make it a bit easier to see the code embedded in the text and got a preview page that I quite like above. With a bit of luck it should be finished in a week or so.

Is this the way to Amaryllis?

Number one wife got an amaryllis bulb for Christmas. It has just produced these lovely flowers. 

Light and Pictures

They say that you don't need great equipment for a good photograph. Just the right kind of light. I took this yesterday morning when we had around 20 seconds of good light. Not long, but enough for me to get my Smartphone out of my pocket.

After a bit of tweakage I'm quite pleased with the result. Next time I'll try not to have that tree in the way, although you might say it adds a certain something to the picture I suppose. Mainly a tree.

Embedded Developers Club

Quite a few folks seem very keen to set up an Embedded Development Club in the department. And that's just the staff members. We'll see how many students turn up at our first meeting on Wednesday 4th of Feb. at 2:15 pm in room 321 (the ITMB Lab) in the Robert Blackburn Building. 

You can find out more here

Bin Gone a While

It's hard to put into words the fear and paranoia that you suffer as a result of your garden waste bin going missing after it has been emptied.

But I'm going to try wheelie hard.  (sorry)

At least it came back. And we are going to stick a large friendly number on it. Before someone else does....

Programming At Hull Web Site

Over the last couple of days I've spent some time adding content to our WhereWouldYouThink web site. This is a site that has lots of stuff that might be useful to students in general and computer science students in particular.

I'm trying to rationalise some of the support materials that we have for programming and I've attacked the problem in the only way I know how.

I've bought another domain name.....

I've set up a microsite at the address programmingathull.com. This brings together all the stuff that we've put together to help folks learn to program. This includes the wonderful C# Yellow Book and Arduino and Python content. If we make anything else useful we'll put it there too.

Festival of Daring and Excitement

Last year we had a welcome Frag Fest day for our new First Year students. It was so successful that we are doing it again. The fun starts at 11:00 or so on Saturday 31st of January and runs through to 7:00 pm, with Pizza in the middle somewhere. 

We'll have all the usual suspects, including Team Fortress 2, a Wii U Super Smash Bros tournament and even board games and whatnot. It's open to any students or staff of the department. You can find out more here.

Grimsby Global Game Jam Rocked

The Blimbu team being photographed with their prizes. 

I wasn't able to take much part in the Global Game Jam this year. Circumstances conspired to limit my involvement to transporting Hull students who wanted to take part over to Grimsby Institute, where the competition was held this year. 

From the looks of things the competition went really, really well. Kudos to the Grimsby team for running an excellent competition.  The winners of the event were Blimbu, who are Game Jam veterans and have been producing high quality games from the very first Global Game Jam in Hull a couple of years ago.

You can take a look at the game that they made in only 48 hours here.

Consoles and Blu-Ray Players

So last night I settled down to watch Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It's a fine movie. Nowhere near as good as the TV series or the book, but well worth a watch. However the picture quality was horrible. At first I thought the flickering screen and grainy image were part of a period recreation, but then I remembered it being perfectly fine in the cinema. 

I discovered, after some messing around, that game consoles don't make very good Blu-Ray players. I tried a couple of devices and the results were pretty horrid on both of them to be honest, with tearing images and lots of noise. This might be something to do with the rest of my system, but because I'm the kind of person I am, I thought I'd try getting a dedicated player to see if it was any better. 

Oh yes it was. The difference was like night and day. Much much better. And the good news is that a decent player can be had for a comparatively low price these days, not far off the price of a video game (which is how I price most things to be honest).

My advice, such as it is, would be to think beyond using your PS3 or whatnot as a player and look into getting a "proper" one. This also has the useful advantage of making it much easier to actually watch movies. Now I can just put the disk into the machine and within seconds be watching a whole bunch of trailers I can't skip. With the console I have to find the controller, wobble through a bunch of menus and, if I'm lucky, a firmware update before I get to see things that are on the disk but shouldn't be in my way.

Up until now I've had a kind of "everything is digital" mindset about things like DVD players and whatnot, but my experience has been that there is actually quite a lot of subjective shenanigans going on between the signal source and the display. 

Hatless by Degrees

Ceremony 2

Ceremony 3

There are two Rob Miles's working at the University of Hull. This can cause problems occasionally. As when you hear "We've ordered academic dress for Rob Miles to wear at the degree ceremony on Friday" and think that all will be well. 

Of course, that wasn't me. So I had to make do with a gown and cape that we grabbed from the returns, plus a hat that was strangely large. In fact I really wished that I'd spent some time practicing the Michael Jackson spin before the ceremony.  I reckon that I could have done one of those without my hat actually turning. That would have been so cool. At least I think so.

Anyhoo, hat problems aside (I gave up on the hat in the end as it kept falling off) we had a couple of really splendid ceremonies. It's always a bit nerve wracking getting everyone into line and doing the warm-up speech, but it was so worth it to see the looks on the faces of the graduates and their families. I took my usual pictures from the stage, they came out quite well. If you click through the pictures onto Flickr you can find the larger versions and seek out yourself. 

The only real snag with today was that it's put me in the wrong place to get into the Global Game Jam that is running over the weekend. Jon took a bunch of students over to the Grimsby event and I'm going to be nipping over during to see what is going on, but I don't think I'll have the time to get down and build an entry. Then again, when I find out the theme and the mood takes me, who knows..... 

WiFi Security on the Radio

You've probably seen the film "The Truman Show".  It's about a chap who is is unknowingly the centre of a reality TV show. His life is being continuously filmed for a worldwide audience. Everything around him is choreographed so that the viewers can see his reaction to events. There's a memorable sequence in the film where Truman is heading out to work and all the traffic around him is planned like a military operation.

I was reminded of the film this morning when I was trying to drive into the middle of Hull to take part in a radio item about WiFi security. Everything, and I mean everything, seemed to be happening in a manner calculated to make me late. I had a mental vision of someone in a control room speaking into a headset and saying  "OK, he's had the slow running train and the reversing bus, now lets set up the trick cyclist and red light sequence......".

I was a bit late, but they managed to shuffle things around and we had what I thought was a good chat. It was in response to a piece in the news about a seven year old girl who had learned how to hack into an unsecured public WiFi system in around 11 minutes. You can read a good description of it here.

The story had been set up by a WiFi security company (who would have guessed). The girl wasn't actually a hacker in the proper sense, more someone who could find a video on YouTube and then copy the instructions in it. Actually I feel rather sorry for her, in that she now has "how to hack wifi" in her Google search record for the rest of her life. Oh well.

But the story did hold important lessons on security. The most important one is probably that folks need to be aware of the dangers that using free "open" wifi brings. By "open" I mean the kind of connection you don't need a username or password to access. When you use these your phone, PC or tablet will frequently give you a warning, and with good cause.

The open nature of these connections means two things. Firstly it means that the data exchanged between the network and your PC is not encrypted, so anyone can see what you are doing. Secondly it means that it is child's play - literally - to make a computer pretend to be the WiFi connection and perform a "man in the middle" attack, reading the contents of each of your messages before passing them onto the network.

So, using an open WiFi connection must be regarded as fraught with risk. If you have to use a a username and password to connect things are probably OK. Lots of hotels have a little printer on reception that prints out a set of credentials that you can use for a limited time. These are probably OK. But places where you can just find the site and then connect must be regarded as rather dodgy.

If you really must use an open site (and we've all done it - including myself who has been known to install Windows Phone firmware upgrades in Starbucks the world over) then here are a few tips:

• Only visit  web sites that have https (and the little padlock in the address bar) while you are online. These encrypt the conversation between your computer and the server so that any eavesdropper will get an earful of meaningless chatter.
• You can use your banking applications quite safely, as these will encrypt the data sent to and form the bank.
• If you really, really, must log in to use sites that are not https secure, use usernames and password pairs that are unique to that site. One nasty trick that hackers have up their sleeves is to take credentials that you use in one place and then try them on lots of other ones. If possible you should really have different passwords on every site you visit to stop this from happening.
• Once you have finished, check your device to see if it has remembered the connection. Lots of phones and tablets keep a handy list of sites so that they can reuse connections if they see them again. This means your phone might try to remake the insecure connection again without you knowing. I'd advise you to delete the connection from the list to stop this from happening.

Networked devices are massively useful and we have built large chunks of our lives around them. But you also need to remember that some of this wonderful technology was not really built for the nasty world that it is being used in and make sure that you limit exposure to these horrid tricks.

Windows 10 Looks Wonderful

I wasn't able to watch much of the live presentation about Windows 10 today. We were down at Fudge having a really nice meal at a bargain price, thanks to their January seat sale (my tip, have the quiche - like a pie but without the lid, and a fantastic filling).

Anyhoo, I managed to capture the gist of the event, sneaking peeks of a live blog from the event on my phone in between courses. Which is probably the epitome of bad manners, but I really wanted to find out what was going on. 

It was awesome.

Some perspective here. I'm a Microsoft MVP. I like Microsoft stuff. So you would expect me to say nice things about stuff that comes from Redmond. But even so it was awesome.

There was a great balance between stuff that you can see fitting in with your life (universal apps that are built once and run on every platform in an appropriate way, Continuum that makes sure that you get the best experience whatever device you are using, Cortana everywhere, playing Xbox One games on your tablet/phone) and completely bonkers stuff that might just change your life completely (the Holographic headset). 

I've read up what I can on the headset and the only thing I truly, definitely know about it just right now is that I really, really want one. It is definitely a work in progress. I'm not sure that Microsoft can tell us exactly how they see it being used in the future. But kudos to the company for unveiling it as they did. If you want to watch back the event you can find it here. 

Microsoft now have compelling hardware, compelling software and real proper science fiction stuff. The next year is going to be very interesting. 

Updating the C# Yellow Book

Yesterday I got an email from Amazon telling me that readers had spotted some spelling errors in the Kindle edition of the C# Programming Yellow book. They are quite right. The errors crept in when I used the Amazon system to convert the word file into an eBook. They've been bugging me for a while.

Not that the errors have stopped my book becoming a best seller......

Anyhoo, I've decided to fix these pesky errors once and for all. I'm doing a new conversion of the text, moving it by hand from Word to HTML, and thence to Kindle.

Lots of things about the layout of the first version of the book didn't translate well into eBook format, hopefully the updated version of the text will be easier to read. It should be out in a week or so, once I've reformatted the text and tidied it up.

There's also some shiny new content that I've added to bring things up to date. 

A Tiny Bit of Snow

It wasn't the tiny bit of snow we had today that caused the problems this moring. It was the fact that it had melted and then refrozen, covering everything with shiny ice.

Frozen the movie is a nice enough diversion (although I prefer Brave which has much the same story and fewer songs). But Frozen the drive to work doesn't have much to commend it.

Made My Camera

Well, the camera I started building on Friday is now complete. The build wasn't that tricky, although I did end up making the lens assembly four times until I got it right. 

The viewfinder is kind of interesting. The view through the lens is projected onto a little screen, just like a "proper" single lens reflex camera. However, unlike a normal SLR, the viewfinder image is not further reflected inside a pentaprism.  What you see on the screen is the right way up, but flipped left to right, which took me a while to figure out. The image is also a bit dim, so you need to assemble a little screen around it to keep the light out. 

But it works. You can see to focus and compose your picture and I've loaded the camera up with film and taken a few shots. Everything is delightfully primitive and I'm looking forward to taking the film in and having the pictures processed.