Hull Architecture

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I must admit that I've never really thought of a place like Hull as having architecture. It's just got lots of nice buildings.

However, I've found out a lot more about the area from this book, which even told me who designed the place I'd spent nearly 40 years of my life working in at the university.

This version was published in 2010, which means that it was just in time to be able to give the low down on places like The Deep.

It's a great reference and even has guided walks around the city. If you're coming to Hull for something City of Culture related, and you want a well written, well researched and good to read guide to where we live then it is well worth a look. 

Fast and Furious 8

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I've no idea how we ended up in the audience at one of the first showings of Fast and Furious 8 tonight. I think a Meer cat with some half price cinema tickets had something to do with it, but even so....

Anyhoo, it is a fun film. With some jaw dropping car sequences and a fantastic sequence involving a child in a baby seat plus a bunch of gunmen. And the usual mix of former enemies joining together to face a larger foe. Etc etc. It seems to me that this time the franchise has turned its attention to the GI Joe style of movie, with cyber crime and super soldier antics on top of the car mayhem. 

If you're a fan of daft films made in a universe where the laws of physics don't actually apply properly, and you like a big helping of cheese with your dialogue then you'll love it. 

NASA Space Apps Challenge at c4di Hull

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I love hackathons. I actually won a prize at one once. And at another I was part of a team that won a special "most ambitious failure" award (perhaps less impressive). I also love hackathons because they are so good for those that take part. They broaden your skills, let you try out new ideas, meet new people and stretch yourself a bit. They look good on your CV, you can talk about them at interviews. And you get to eat pizza. Lots of pizza.

I'm helping to run a hackathon at the c4di at the end of April. It's in partnership with NASA, and the winners of the Hull heats are entered into the NASA round of the competition for consideration for worldwide acclaim. There'll be a bunch of space related themes that we aren't allowed to tell you about just yet, and all kinds of fun things to do.

It's over the weekend of the 29th-30th of April. You can work all night, or you can nip home for a few hours sleep (which is what I'll be doing). We'll be working at the c4di down at the waterfront, so if we are lucky we should get a nice sunset and sunrise over the water to spur us on.

You can sign up here, and you really should. I'm after team members; get in touch if you fancy working with me.

Sorry about this

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I was gardening today. As you do. Got to thinking about the mad scientist who tried to clone himself. He used a new technique, where you start at the top of the body and work your way down. Everything was going fine until he'd just finished the neck, but when he tried to do the shoulders it all went wrong, with arms and legs in all the wrong places. Ugh. He turned to his assistant and said.....wait for it....

"I knew I should have quit when I was a head".

Goldilocks Gas Struts

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I think I'm the first person ever to write a blog post with the title "Goldilocks Gas Struts". Not that it's a first I really want. I've been improving the guinea pig cage to give it a "lift off roof". The problem with a cage that has doors at the front is that if your pigs have a sprightly nature (and ours do) then you can open the door and then find that the hairy monsters have made a break for freedom.

They quite enjoy the process of being caught. We don't enjoy the process of catching them.

I've fitted the hinges and the cage lid now opens rather nicely. That way we can do stuff in the cage without any risk of escaping pigs. And I quite like the god like aspect of removing their sky.

Anyhoo, next I need to find something to hold it open. It turns out that you can buy gas struts to do this thing, and they are very reasonably priced. They are calibrated in Newton's, which is interesting, but not particularly useful to me. I bought a couple of 120 Newton ones, figuring that the lid of the cage is quite heavy.

Not that heavy. I couldn't get the darned thing to shut. So I bought a pair of 60 Newton ones.

Which of course are not heavy enough. The lid won't stay open. What I need is the "Goldilocks" ones, which I think will come in at around 80 or so.....

Hull Pixelbots at the Hull Science Festival

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Twelve robots, six hours, hundreds of people coming. What could go wrong?

As it turned out, not a lot. While we had the occasional "rogue robot", and at one point the network decided to completely reset itself, I'm very pleased to be able to write that most of the time things worked very well. We had so many robot races that in the end I ran out of winner's certificates. But everyone left happy.

Thanks so much to my helpers, and the University of Hull for organising such an awesome event.

Hull Pixelbot Script

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I'm not sure if I'll ever get this working, but I am sure that without the language design I'll never get it to go.

I've got a tiny little language running inside the Hull Pixelbot which works rather well. All the commands are two characters and they are interpreted by the Arduino that controls the motors and sensors. And I can store the programs inside the robot EEPROM, as well as deploy them from Azure IOT hub amongst other place.

But the language is a bit of a pain to use to be honest. And there are things I just can't do. So it's time to make a proper language. I'm calling it Hull Pixelbot Script.

I've not done programming language design for a while. I'm a big fan of syntax diagrams (or railroad diagrams). To me they seem a really neat way to express the arrangement of a language. Above you can see the design for the statement element of Hull Pixelbot Script. You can see that the colour (or color) command must be followed by three values which are separated by commas, and an if statement can control a large number of statements (and maybe I could add an else later).

I made the diagrams by using a web site that takes my grammar and makes the nice looking output. It took me a while to remember how EBNF (Extended Backus–Naur form) fits together, but I'm quite pleased with the result.

Of course I've actually achieved very little, what I now have to do is build the actual code that implements the language.

But it's a start.  

Tetris by Box Brown

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I don't have many claims to fame. But one is that I once had my picture taken by Alexey Pajitnov, the inventor of Tetris and thoroughly nice man. It was when I was helping out with Imagine Cup Judging in Russia. Alexey and myself were alone in the judging room and I was trying to pluck up the courage to ask him for a picture.

Then a student came in, took one look at me and asked "Can I have a picture with you?". He was one of the competitors, another thoroughly nice chap, and he wanted a picture of himself with one of the judges (i.e. me). He asked Alexey to take the shot, and Alexey obliged. I never got a picture of me with the man who invented Tetris, but having my picture taken by him seems somehow better.

Anyhoo, I was reminded of this when I came across this awesome book by Box Brown. The story of Tetris is fascinating on a whole bunch of levels, and the presentation in beautifully drawn pictures does a great job of telling the tale. If you like video games, social history, business shenanigans or well drawn art, you should get this book.