The word on the street was that today was the best day of the Bank Holiday weekend. So we headed off bright and early. And it was great.
For the first time in a while we went for a walk around the abbey. I'm quite pleased with how this picture turned out.
Harry Harrison was one of the greatest science fiction writers you've probably never heard of. He wrote a whole bunch of fantastic stories including the Stainless Steel Rat series and my favourite, "The Technicolor Time Machine" (go find it - you'll thank me later). He was particularly good at the science fiction short story.
If you fancy finding out more about his work there's a really good value pack of his stories available on Amazon. For less than a pound you get a whole bunch of content including two of his Deathworld stories.
Well worth seeking out.
The university puts a lot of effort into making the campus look good. I think it is definitely worth it.
There was a bit of racing action in the middle of the campus this lunchtime. I nipped out with a camera to take some snaps. The university has sponsored a bunch of cars as part of the Greenpower project and they were putting one of them through its paces. It looks like a great way of getting folks engaged with engineering, as well as a lot of fun to drive.
... but for how long...
I'm doing some camera shuffling again using eBay. This means taking pictures, packing boxes and posting things. I hope it all ends well. It seems to have got a lot easier to send things abroad now, one of my cameras is heading off to Spain, but I only have to worry about getting it as far as the eBay transit place, which is really nice. I just hope Manu likes it.
James came to see us today, which was rather nice. We got to talking and the subject turned to the gulf between studies and real life, and how to narrow it.
One of the things that we try to do in Hull is to tell people useful stuff that will they can use to get by in life as a developer. A problem that we have is that people think that the only use for the stuff that we are telling them is in exams and assignments to get a good mark. This is a good thing as far as it goes. And of course you should do this. We have to do the grading thing to ensure that the learning outcomes for our courses have been met.
But we really, really want people to carry those skills into the next (and indeed every) thing that they do going forwards. We're trying to start you building skills that will carry you through your professional career. I don't think you can ever say you've learnt something like programming because, if you do it properly, you are continuously learning. And you should never stop.
The good news for me is that we do get a few folks who go out into the big wide world, and come back and say "You know, that stuff you taught us turned out to be quite useful".
Who'd have thought?
Anyhoo, James is very keen to come back and do some Rather Useful Seminars on what you can do as a student to build on what you're taught, which is great. Stay tuned.
We had our final Saturday applicant day of the year today. Thanks for coming folks. Some had driven mighty long ways to sample the delights of Hull. I hope we made the trip worth while.
As usual, you can click through the picture above to find the Flickr version where you can see yourself in "slightly larger vision.."
Tone mapping bananas....
Sometimes I write blog posts to remind myself how to fix problems that I hit. In a couple of years I'll search for this problem and find this post. And then fix the problem again.
It's happened before.
I love Photomatix Pro. I use it to make my pictures a bit more interesting, and to create HDR shots. It works very well. Except that for the last week it's been crashing out when I try to save the image. Turns out to be my external plug-in memory card reader. If that is connected it gives what Photomatix thinks is a drive D: that doesn't actually exist. This does not end well, but if I unplug the reader it all just works. Yay.
For the past couple of days John has been at GDC showing off our Disruption game with its novel, pluggable, controller. We've had some reports back that things are going well. We won a place in the Alt.Ctrl.GDC novel controllers exhibit. There's a nice write-up of what we did here.
We've re-engineered the controller for the new event. We've gone for a larger box and nice, chunky cables to replace the thin ones that we used last time. It works rather well, which is nice.
By all accounts the event is going well. Looking forward to finding out more about how he got on when he gets back next week.
Two or three time a week I do a bit of rowing. And I've managed to "loop" the distance counter on the rowing machine, so that I've now rowed over a thousand kilometres.
Quite literally, go me.
If you've not watched Brooklyn Nine-Nine yet I envy you. It means you have a whole bunch of fun coming your way that you don't know about. It is quite simply the funniest thing I've seen in ages. Go. Watch. Laugh.
Spent today mostly writing stuff, which meant that nothing happened which is worthy of blogging. But I did find a nice picture for the day though.
While we're on the subject of code improvement (we were the day before yesterday) I reckon these points are all good and well made.
Went to York today. Took a picture. Apparently.
This is an interesting read. I particularly like number 4, I'm going to have to change some notes to accommodate that one.
...Melbourne is nice too....
Just been going through some of the pictures I took last year. I really want to go back to Japan again some time.
For bonus points, can you spot Godzilla?
This is not an assignment about graphic design - obviously...
Kevin and I are just putting the finishing touches to the assignment for Programming 2 for this year. We always set two different scenarios, one a game and the other a line of business app. For the game we are doing "Cross Country Ski Race". For the line of business app we are doing "Cross Country Ski Race Manager". Almost like we have planned it.
.it might not be one about UI design either..
For the game, players have to steer their player down an increasingly tortuous ski run, avoiding the deadly, and somewhat improbable, "horizontal avalanche" that seems to have erupted. Fortunately an explosion at a nearby cheese mine has left their path littered with life giving cheese which they can use to recover their strength.
For the manager application they have to track competitors, generate reports and produce a fully tested solution. Should be fun.
Simon and I had a top level meeting today. Well, we were on third floor. We decided that the next Three Thing Game will be over the night of 15-16th of April.
Registrations will open on Monday 4th April at www.threethinggame.com
I think we'll use the "Thingomatic" for this one.....
Oh dear.....
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
