TechEd and Mauerfall 2009

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TechEd started today. I went to  a very good session on Windows Azure first thing. Then I had to go off and sort out some presentation related bits and bobs, which was a bit of a pain as there were a couple of other sessions I wanted to see. However, once the day’s work was done we headed off the the Brandenburg gate to see the Mauerfall event.

This was a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall by the toppling of an enormous row of domino-like blocks that stretched for over a kilometre. They had all kinds of heads of state there, a full orchestra and a live appearance by Bon Jovi.

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The inside of the station

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The outside of the station

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A nice view across the river

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On the way to the gate

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Waiting by the wall

We found a good spot near the food and drink stands and began to wait. And it started to rain. And rain. After two hours in the rain I found that most of the things I had with me that I thought were waterproof, like my coat and shoes, were not. After three hours in the rain everything was wet. After four hours everything was wet and very cold.  And then it started, We had speeches from the great and the good, music, and the blocks duly fell on cue. It was a great evening, even though I have never been so cold and wet.

Project Tuva – Richard Feynman Lectures

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If you’ve not heard of Richard Feynman then you are very lucky. It means that you can have the experience of finding out all about him for the first time.

Richard Feynman was a Nobel Prize winning, safe cracking, bongo drum playing, beautiful women painting, atom bomb making genius.  Go and read Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman! to discover more.

And now you can get to see the man in action delivering a set of lectures about physics that have been put in the internets by Microsoft at their Project Tuva site. This lets you view the presentations with annotations and additional linkable content. A great way to spend a lunch hour or two.

Dreamspark Goodies

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Andy pointed me at a feature of Expression Web that does a similar job to the Balsamiq user interface designer:

http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/Sketchflow_Overview.aspx

I had a quick play and you can make diagrams and design the navigation between the forms in your use interface. However, I found it a bit more complex to use than Balsamiq (although it has to be said that it does an awful lot more, and actually lets you construct the interfaces as well as play with them).

For students the interesting thing is that it is available for free from DreamSpark:

https://www.dreamspark.com

If you are a student on an academic course (and have an Athens username to prove it) then you can get hold of all kinds of goodies here, including operating systems and Visual Studio.  You can even get XNA Creators Club memberships so you can deploy your XNA programs to an Xbox 360. Well worth a look.

Windows Live Mesh Rocks

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I’ve been using Windows Live Mesh now for a while and I must admit I love it. I now no longer have to bother about keeping files on my various machines up to date. I just have a couple of Live Mesh synchronised folders and I lob all the important stuff into there.

Live Mesh gives you on-line storage that is synchronised to the hard disk of one or more computers. Each computer runs the Live Mesh software which makes sure that whenever you change a file on one of the machines the copies on the other devices are automatically updated next time they connect to the network. It even provides a log of your activity, so you can track back what you have been up to.

Now, when I take my portable along to a lecture I don’t have to worry about putting the latest presentations onto it because I know they are already there. If I forgot the machine completely I could even use a web browser to pull the files off the Live Mesh online storage.

You get 5Gbytes of storage for free, and that is more than enough for a year’s worth of lecture notes and other teaching stuff. In fact, the service is so good that I’d pay to have more than that. If there was an annual subscription like I could put all my important stuff out there and I’d be happy to pay for that.

For students I can’t think why you wouldn’t use it. It would mean that you never lost your notes or programs, even if someone made off with your precious laptop.

Find out more at:

https://www.mesh.com/welcome/default.aspx

Useful Computer Science Links

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These are the links that I mentioned at my Computer Science introductory lecture.

Departmental Student SharePoint site:

http://intra.net.dcs.hull.ac.uk/student

08101 Module Site

http://intra.net.dcs.hull.ac.uk/student/modules/08101/default.aspx

08128 Module Site

http://intra.net.dcs.hull.ac.uk/student/modules/08128/default.aspx

Departmental Forums

http://intra.net.dcs.hull.ac.uk/student

eBridge

http://ebridge.hull.ac.uk/

Note: You will need to log into these. If the login doesn’t work try putting adir\ in front of your user ID.

Twitter

http://twitter.com/HullCompSci

Yellow Book

http://www.csharpcourse.com/

FreeSide

http://freeside.co.uk/

Hull ComSoc

http://www.hullcomsoc.org.uk/

Girl Geek Dinners

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=44205850218&ref=share

Rob Miles blog

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SkyDrive is Superb

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Fancy 25G of online storage for free? Thought so. It gets even better though. You can have public storage, private storage or anywhere in between. Everything is done via the web, so you can push files between PCs, Macs and anything with a browser. I’m getting into the habit of lobbing important stuff up there just to keep things safe.

If you have a Windows Live account you are in business. Just head up to http://skydrive.live.com and start uploading files. The biggest downsides for me are the fact that you have to drag individual files into the storage and that my home broadband makes uploading a rather slow experience.

Great stuff.

Reading Twitter Feeds with LINQ

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LINQ (Language Integrated Query) is a really neat feature of .NET which makes it very easy to work with structured data. I’d always thought this meant things like databases and stuff, but it also works with XML. This CodeProject article shows how you can use LINQ to read information out of Twitter feeds.

http://www.codeproject.com/articles/35668/How-to-Read-Twitter-Feeds-With-LINQ-to-XML.aspx

Very clever. It took me around five minutes to make a simple Twitter Viewer application based on the code given:

https://static.squarespace.com/static/5019271be4b0807297e8f404/52c5bcfce4b0c4bcc9121347/52c5bd03e4b0c4bcc91238f5/1240577347000/TwitterViewer.zip

Fantastic Blog Site

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Abhinaba Basu is a Microsoft Developer working out of Hyderabad in India. He works on the Compact Framework Team, take excellent photographs and even finds time to paint great pictures.

He has written some great blog posts about how the internals of the Compact Framework and you really should read them. If you have ever wondered how Garbage Collection works he has one of the best explanations I’ve seen. You can find his work blog here.

Clusty to the Rescue

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I’ve spent bits of today trying to get my .NET Micro Framework devices to work. For some reason I want to take my smallest PC away with me next week to Portugal, and this has meant a certain amount of heartache.

The PC is an Advent netbook. I bought it earlier this year and I love it to bits. It arrived running Windows XP, and I’ve just put the beta version of Windows 7 on it. This turned out to be really easy. I just plugged in an external DVD drive, tweaked the BIOS to make it boot from the DVD and then booted from the Windows 7 disk. I did a brand new install, wiping out the original operating system and, of course, removing the recovery partition. I don’t do things by halves, me.

The installation was smooth and surprisingly quick. The only problem was that I had to find my way to the RealTek site to locate and install the WIFI drivers, but once I did that I had the machine on the campus network with very little fuss.

That was a week ago. Since then I’ve installed Microsoft Office 2007, Visual Studios 2005 and 2008, Photoshop Elements and a bunch of other programs, all of which seem to work fine. Unfortunately, when I tried to install the USB drivers for some of my .NET Micro Framework devices, things started to get a little tricky.

The drivers that were supplied with the hardware didn’t work. I read somewhere that Windows 7 refuses to install drivers that have not been signed, and so I did some digging and found that there is magic that is supposed to switch this off.

Unfortunately it didn’t seem to work for me. I did a lot more digging and kept hitting brick walls, trying increasingly more complex searches for the drivers that it seemed like I needed and not finding anything. By lunchtime I’d resigned myself to taking my heavy old Toshiba away with me.

Then I remembered Clusty. This is a clustering search engine that I’ve used in the past to good effect.  You get your search results nicely categorised, which makes finding your way through them must easier.  I fed in the same search string that I’d been using unsuccessfully on Google and it came back with a list of hits that made it very easy to find just what I wanted. And it worked. So it looks like I’ll be writing code for tiny devices on a tiny device, which I guess is just how it should be.

SmallBasic

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If you want to rediscover the joys of writing little programs and doing fun things with computers you could take a look at SmallBasic. It is inspired by the tiny Basic interpreters that you used to get with your Commodore 64 or BBC micro and lets you write programs using a very simple language in a friendly IDE.

I’m a great believer in starting to program by keeping your focus on the algorithms and things like this can only be good. Although I’m not sure about the Goto statement figuring quite so large....

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/devlabs/cc950524.aspx

Poladroid

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I used to have a little Polaroid camera. I loved the way that the pictures appeared over time, and the strange way it had with colours. Nowadays such technology is being replaced by digital, but the Poladroid application does give you a way to recapture that old magic. It takes pictures and gives them the Polaroid treatment, right down to the borders and the way that they take time to appear. You can actually watch the image develop, and even take snapshots of the slowly appearing picture.

You can get the application from: http://www.poladroid.net/

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A couple of snaps which have been converted.

Great fun.

New Free Stuff

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The smartest thing I did last year was to give something away. The result of putting the "Famous Yellow C# book" up on the blog has been a huge increase in traffic and thousands of downloads over the last few months.

Loads of people have been in touch saying how useful it has been to them. A number of courses are using it as one of their texts and it has even made its way onto the digital bookshelf of some leading software manufacturers. And of course quite a few new typos have been discovered....

I got a query today from someone who is moving from Java to C# and I remembered that some time ago I wrote some notes about this. I put them up on this site ages ago, but I've tidied the text up, converted it to pdf and put it in a coloured cover (this time orange). You can find the new material alongside the Yellow book on the same site:

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