Tiny Christmas Bash

We had the smallest Christmas Bash ever this year. I think this was mostly due to poor planning on my part. Our bash clashed with an excellent, and very well attended, event organised by Hull ComSoc. 

Anyhoo, pizza, mince pies, crackers and fun was had. We played a bunch of silly games, including the awesome Masquerade, a newcomer called Two Rooms and a Boom (which is great fun). Exploding Kittens, Skull and the ever popular Coup. 

There was so much going on that we managed to overrun by an hour. More bashes next year. 

Fun and Games at the Black Marble Event

Some of the audience. And some of my toys...

Black Marble are a great company. The do lots of splendid free events for software professionals. And, since they've booked a venue and sorted out all the logistics, they run sessions for schools and colleges at the same time. They get a bunch of speakers and we talk about technical and professional issues. I've been lucky enough to be invited to present a few times, in the past I've taken Una my 3D printer along, amongst other toys. 

Today I didn't really do a technical talk. Although we had some technology of course. I was more concerned with the business of making a name for yourself. My line on this is that advancing technology is replacing many of the jobs that we used to do. It seems to me that in the future you'll have to get used to changing what you do as machines get better and better at doing things that people do at the moment. This means that the only thing that will be constant during your career will be the brand that is you. I've gave lots of tips about building your brand; you can find the slide deck here.

During the talk I also touched on fun things that you can do including playing with the Arduino embeded device. I said I'd put some links to resources. The Arduino I'd recommend is a kit from Sintron which you can get from eBay. Just search for Arduino Sintron. It's around 25 pounds and really good value:

There are loads of resources on-line, once you've got the kit they send you a link to lots of them. There are some Arduino tutorials here that I wrote a while back.  You can get my C# Yellow Book here. 

I did my session twice, but I only remembered to take picture of one small part of the audience. Sorry about that. Anyhoo, thanks to Linda and Boss for setting up such a great event. Great fun.

I promised a panorama of the entire second sitting audience, here they are

If you are looking for Open Source projects to engage with you can take a look here

You can find Charlotte's Twitter feed here.

The Thrilling Adventures of Babbage and Lovelace is a Winner

One of my favourite books ever has won a prize. I blogged about it a while back and now it (or more properly the author, Sydney Padua) has won the British Society for the History of Mathematics 2015 Neuman Prize. Yay!

If you are into computing, history, maths or comics you should have this book. A perfect stocking filler for Christmas, if you are in the habit of wearing quite large, book sized, stockings. 

It really is a great book. In fact, I'm going off to have a read of my copy now. 

Space Cheese Miner Awards

Here are the finished awards, along with the super-rare "Blue Cheese" edition.....

Meanwhile....

... at a secret rocket and cheese production facility in the North of England....

... I'm making special "Space Cheese Mining" marker awards for all the folks who helped out with the First Year marking this year. I'm going to give them to Kevin, David, Phininder, John, Bailin and Brian to say thanks for their assistance in giving all of our students a great assessment experience and some splendid feedback. Guys, I'll have them for you for Monday.

Christmas Bash is Coming

'nuff said. 

Why I do my job

For me, there's nothing quite like marking a nice looking, well structured piece of code, giving  a good grade  and then asking the student "So, when did you start programming?" and then having them tell you that they started in September this year. 

Early Sunrise University Pictures

One of the few nice things about getting up in the dark is that if all is well you get to see the sunrise when you get to work. Today it was quite a nice one, and so I nipped into the library and took some pictures.

I was up at the top floor which was refurbished last year and turned into an open workspace called "The Observatory". It looks awesome, so I took some pictures of the furniture as well.

This looks to me as rooms from the future are supposed to look....

Printing in the Air

I've been doing a bit of 3D printing recently and I've had a need for some lens caps for, er, lenses that I seem to have bought recently. I found a design on Thingiverse that looked promising, downloaded it, sliced it and Una, my lovely if rather tempestuous 3D printer, refused to print it properly. 

To be honest, I've been expecting problems. I made the mistake of saying to Peter last week that I've reached the point where the printer "just prints" these days. At the time I said this I worried that I may have spoken too soon. And it looked like I was right. 

The print just refused to stick to the printing bed. The filament just went out into the air and all over the place. This is usually a symptom of poor alignment of the print head and so I spent a non-happy half an hour today getting the bed height precisely positioned. And it still didn't work. Very annoying. 

And then I noticed something odd about the print design. It seemed to be hovering in the air a millimetre or so above where it should be. Turns out that the printer was set up perfectly all along and the fault was with the design itself. I've found a different, less levitated, one and it prints out pretty much perfectly. Oh well, another good lesson hard learned....

What is Assessment For?

At this time of year we do a lot of assessment of our students. This week I'm going to be spending the best part of four days in the lab with a bunch of my colleagues, pointing at bits of code written by students and asking "What does this do?". Great fun.

You might think that we do the assessment so that we can give the students grades. True enough, but to me the assessment is more important than that. We also want to have a framework in which we can talk to each student about the programs they have written, and how to make them better. The marking scheme provides lots of hooks we can use to hang discussions about good program design, documentation and testing. 

By the end of each marking session the student will have a number and hopefully they'll have learnt a bit more about software development. Which is kind of the plan. 

Cottingham Food Festival and Hull Pie

Not a bad way to spend a Sunday lunchtime. Wander round Cottinham Food Festival, buy a pie from the Hull Pie stand and then go home and eat it. 

Lovely.

Printing Elephants

Following my success with little robots, I've had a go at printing an elephant. 

Not life size.  

Get to work early for the best photographs

Perhaps there aren't that many good reasons for arriving at work early. But I suppose that one of them could be to get nice pictures of the campus during the sunrise. 

What you need to know before you leave university...

I've written a tiny article for the Microsoft UK Developer's Blog about stuff you should know before you leave uni. You can find it here. 

Scarf Humour

Number one wife is knitting me a scarf. Today she turned to me and asked "How long do you want it?"

"Oh", I said. "I'd like to keep it".

Much Travelled Dev Day

If you've ever wondered if it is possible to travel to from Hull to Mons in Belgium, do a session at Dev Day 15 and then fly back on the same day I'm able to tell you that it can be done. Even if the day starts with a 90 minute delay before you take off and you arrive too late to make your ongoing rail connection.

Fortunately, because the people at Thalys are completely awesome, this was simply a matter of rebooking on a later train (at no extra cost) and then heading off. I got to the venue around 20 minutes before my session. You can't beat just in time delivery. I did my session, and then headed straight back for my train home, getting back just in time for bed.

Talk about a full day....

Thanks to Christophe for the picture. 

Anyhoo, the session was great. The audience was lovely, if a little bemused at the start, when I started handing out small cheese and big cheese prizes. But they soon got into the swing of things and much fun was had. Apparently it was captured on video, which will be interesting.....

Thanks to Olivier and the crew for organising the whole thing. It's actually a rather inspiring story. A bunch of developers wanted a conference in their part of the world and they just built one. They've got lots of delegates, sponsorship, a great venue in a cinema multiplex and splendid Microsofties like Andy Wigley coming along to give them sessions on the latest tech. Great stuff. A pleasure to be involved with. I'll be there next year if you want me. 

Although I might travel down the night before.....

Printing Cheese

Spent part of the evening printing cheese for Dev Day 2015 tomorrow.  I'll bet there aren't many people who can say that....

Getting Set For Dev Day

I've started working on the slide deck for Dev Day 2015. 

Well, it is next Tuesday.

I'm talking about my Snaps framework, what it does, why you'd want to use it and how it works. 

If you fancy coming along you can find out more here. 

In Praise of Older Lenses

I've got myself another camera. Surprise. And I'm definitely going to sell all my old ones to pay for it (now that would be surprise). The bad news is that the lenses for my latest acquisition look to be rather expensive. The good news is that very old lenses for it are a lot cheaper. 

For around ten quid you can get an adapter that lets you fit lenses from yesteryear.  And it turns out that way back in the past they weren't just better at making music. They could make some amazing optics too. I picked up 55 mm Canon prime lens from Ebay that is a fraction of the cost of a modern lens, with image quality which is top notch. The picture above has been heavily tweaked in a way that tends to hide the sharpness of the lens, but take it from me this thing is pin sharp. 

My new/old lens doesn't have any of the new fangled features such as auto-focus or automatic aperture adjustment. But it turns out that I really like that. The camera viewfinder does a thing called "focus peaking" where it outlines the sharp parts of the picture in yellow. And adjusting the aperture manually means that I get to preview the depth of field in the picture and see how well the subject has been isolated from the background. 

It seems that you can get lots of adapters for lenses from way, way, back - even for old Leica lenses from the thirties. If you fancy testing your understanding of photography a bit and you have a camera that supports interchangeable lenses I'd say it was worth having a go with some old glass. 

Printing Tiny Robots

I've not done any 3D printing for a while. Then, earlier this week Peter showed me some things he'd been printing and they looked rather nice. And today on Twitter I saw a link to a tiny articulated bot that looked interesting. I like designs which print all as one. The legs, arms and head are intended to be separate items which stay fitted together because they are made that way. The original model had a print time of four hours, so I scaled it right down to speed things up and get a print time of an hour or so.

I was a bit worried that this would mean that the different pieces would fuse together into a single block but with a bit of careful twisting I managed to free of all the elements and I now have a tiny figure to help me with my breakfast cuppa.