Go See Zootropolis

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Who wouldn't want to go and see a picture about a cute bunny who wants to be a cop?

Actually, Zootropolis (or Zootopia in some parts of the world) is the best film I've seen in ages. Better than Inside Out. Close to The Incredibles. Just awesome.  It gives you a strong story, inventive characters and environments and a proper message. If you've got kids, take them along and then talk about it afterwards.

We live in pretty torrid times at the moment, with general nastiness being stirred up on all sides. This film is the perfect antidote to that. 

Dangerous Questions

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Last week I had to ring up PayPal to liberate some funds that they were clinging on to rather more than they should. The call went smoothly and we sorted everything out. And I've since had two emails from PayPal giving me the "Opportunity to share my feedback." Or, as I put it, do their quality control for them.

I'm a helpful soul, but I'm not sure about all this. It seems that everything I do now results in a friendly request to engage in a dialogue to discuss how well it went. Even my un-solicited calls from EE about upgrading my phone were followed by a text asking what I thought. Fortunately for them I demurred on that occasion. 

I've got two worries about this kind of thing. One is there really should be more driving good customer service than the fear that someone might get a bad review. And the other is more scary. It is all to do with what my feedback tells the company about me.

As a generally easy-going soul who has no great love of upsetting folks I tend to rate my experiences in a positive way. Since my ratings can be data-mined in the context of what other people will have said about the same operatives I could therefore be placed in an "easy going" category that might change the experiences and offers that I might get if I ring up with a genuine problem some time in the future. I've been looking fairly carefully at the disclaimers and I've not found anything that rules out this possibility. 

Perhaps I should leave a really stinking review. Just in case. 

War of the Worlds

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The eve of the war.....

The eve of the war.....

Some time ago I went to see "Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds" performed live at the Sheffield Arena. It was awesome. This year I found out that they were doing it again. In London. With a stage show. And David Essex. So I booked tickets, completely forgetting about Three Thing Game on the same weekend. 

Idiot me. 

Anyhoo, this morning we set off bright and early, arrived in good time, and discovered that in celebration of our trip the good people of London had closed the underground (or at least the Circle line that we needed), moved the bus-stops and hidden all the taxis. And the weather was a bit chilly too. Fortunately we are made of stern stuff and managed to find our way to the venue with only a bit of extra walking. 

The show was excellent. It was perhaps a bit more "stagey" than I would prefer with more expressive dancing than I think it really needed. And I've never been a fan of singing children in "full-urchin" mode. But the loud pieces were properly loud, although not as loud as the performance in Sheffield. When that one kicked off I watched the first three rows actually move backwards six feet.....

David Essex was the star, and made sure that we knew it. The rest of the cast filled their roles with gusto. Even the tripod that lurched around the stage was suitably menacing.  Great fun and well worth the price of admission.

Spring Three Thing Game Springs into Action

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Of course we had pizza - lots of pizza

Of course we had pizza - lots of pizza

Three Thing Game Spring 2016 got under way tonight. Unfortunately I'm not going to be around for the entire competition because I've rather stupidly double booked myself, but I've left things in the capable hands of David, Simon and Warren and so I know we'll have a happy ending tomorrow.

I did manage to make it for the pizza though. 

I wandered around the lab and took some pictures of some of the teams. You can find all the pictures here. 

Mike Taulty talks Universal Apps at C4DI

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I've met up with Mike Taulty a few times over the years, at the odd Hackathon or conference. I've also spent a fair while reading his blog. But I've not seen him to a talk before. Until now. 

He came along to a developer event at C4DI (which was packed by the way). He spent almost exactly an hour exploring how to build up a Windows 10 Universal Application to control a Sphero ball. At the start he made the point that Universal Applications are exactly what they say. They run on a Windows 10 platform that is now unified across lots of devices, from Raspberry Pi, through phone, Xbox One, tablet, PC, Surface Hub and even HoloLens. 

The talk served as a great demonstration of this, with the same code running on PC, Pi and phone. Mike also explained how different families of device can expose specific functions, for example a phone platform can provide an inclinometer, but a single application can be written to make use of these abilities in a context that is useful to the user.  He also touched on adaptive layout, where the designer can create display layouts appropriate to the format and size of the screen in use and then have the application automatically select the best one.

Mike also looked at the range of input options available to Windows 10 developers and by the end we had a Sphero that was controlled by speech, handwriting and even switches wired to a Raspberry Pi.

This was a great talk that packed lots into a very short time. I'm very tempted to ask Mike to come along and deliver it as a Rather Useful Seminar. 

Three Thing Game Springs into Action

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Spring Three Thing Game got going today with the "Handing Out of the Things". I did something rather tricsky, which was to give teams exactly the things that they asked for. One team, feeling rather smug about having added the word "moist" to the things, was then rather surprised to find it included in their things. Such fun. I took some pictures of the lucky teams and their things.

Development starts on Friday. Should be fun

Shame on you Uncle Joe

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While we were in Whitby a while back we bought a can of Uncle Joe's Mintballs. They are really really nice. Great to have around when you are writing code. I opened the can today and discovered something a bit naughty. In the "Good Old Days" (tm) you would find a bag of mintballs. Nowadays you have a much smaller number of flashily wrapped, individual mints. The weight of minty goodness you get has gone down from 200 gms to 120 gms. And the price has gone up slightly too. 

Shame on you Uncle Joe. Shame on you. 

Good Food at Harogate

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Last week it was gadgets, this week it is food. Who says I don't lead a cultured existence?

Anyhoo, today we headed off to Harrogate in search of cheese and other comestibles at the Spring BBC Good Food Show. There was lots of great stuff, and much fun was had trying samples. I wondered about taking a selection of disguises next year so that I can go round multiple times, tippling gin and eating cheese off toothpicks. But it is probably easier just to buy the stuff that you like, and so we did. We also went to a cooking demonstration that was very entertaining and very slick. 

Michel Roux Jr. gave the demo that we saw. The trick, apparently, is not to care whether or not your soufflé rises. Then it takes care of itself. Great day, great fun. And some great food.  

Windows 10 Leaky Memory Fix

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For some time my Surface Pro 3 has been grinding when it really shouldn't. And a check of the Task Manager showed that a process called "System and Compressed Memory" was taking up an inordinate amount of processor time. Long story short, I found that this fix worked for me. If your Surface Pro or Surface Book is slowing down you might find it useful to take a look. I've no idea what the fix does (and nothing anywhere tells me) but it has made my machine much more responsive. 

Ho Hum Gadget Show Live

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These speakers are intriguing, but I think they have got left and right the wrong way round. 

These speakers are intriguing, but I think they have got left and right the wrong way round. 

I must admit that the Gadget Show Live this year was a bit disappointing.  It isn't actually the highlight of my year, but I like to think that it is one of them. On a par with Fish Pie at the Magpie in Whitby.  But after this show it has dropped a bit in the rankings, down to perhaps home-cooked sausage and baked potato level. 

Previous shows have had large scale exhibitors such as Sony, Microsoft, Dyson and the like showing off their latest technology. This one had a lot of much smaller stands, but nothing that really stood out.  There were some 3D printers, a chance to queue for a long time to drive a Tesla very slowly a short distance and a huge number of slightly different drones. And some hoverboards. But nothing that really impressed. 

There was some fun to be had and after all, at my age a trip out is a trip out, but I will be checking the list of exhibitors very carefully before I sign up for the next one. 

They did have some BBC Microbits there though

They did have some BBC Microbits there though

Nuget source settings cleared after Visual Studio upgrade

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The title says it all really. I got all excited about the new release of Visual Studio and so I upgraded my copy of Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition immediately. The upgrade has some nice new features (and I want to use it to write Xbox One programs) but it did do one thing that confused me for a little while. It clears the source setting for Nuget.

The result is that all your Nuget fetches fail. However, it is easy to put back again by going to Tools>Nuget Package Manager>Package Manager Settings and setting the checkbox as shown above.