Shaun the Sheep Rocks

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My Media Centre PC is now settling down nicely. I've stopped using the cable that crashes it and, guess what, it doesn't crash any more. I've just ordered another gig of RAM for it which should give it a bit more room to move around in.

A tip, you can get 10 quid off any order more than 30 quid at Ebuyer at the moment if you sign up to the Google ordering thingy. I've used it twice now, I'll take money from anyone...

Anyhoo, I told the Media PC to get all the showings of Shaun the Sheep 'cos I think it is ace. It is aimed at kids, so it goes down a treat with me. Just simple farmyard antics with the character from the Wallace and Gromit "Close Shave". My present fave is the one with the bees. Catch it if you can.

Lectures, Scary Security, FPL, XNA and Sound Bites

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Today has been busy. Oh yes. It started with an unexpected lecture. We are now in week 11 of the semester, with teaching supposed to have finished at the end of week 10. But the first year students wanted more, and so I went off at 9:15 to deliver. Actually, it worked quite well, in that I was able to go through the quiz that I set last week.

Then it was back to the labs to get ready for our XNA event. Andy Sithers from Microsoft had come over to formally hand over the XBOX 360s they have given us to help with our XNA teaching in the first year. We had to set them up in the lab for the pictures, and get some stuff working. Simon Dickson and Phil Cluff from our first year came in to show of what they have been doing.

Then, after a quick lunch the presentation tool place. We all contorted ourselves into the best position for the perfect shot for the papers. Danielle Cod from Radio Humberside interviewed our head of department, Andy, Simon and Phil and finally me, in search of the perfect soundbyte. You can grab the resulting two minute piece here. Much to my dismay they seem to have left Andy and Warren on the cutting room floor.....

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This picture kind of captures the event. In the back Warren Viant, our head of department, is being recorded whilst Andy Sithers ponders the code and Simon grapples with debugging and being interviewed all at the same time....

After all this we had to dash off to an event that I had pretentiously entitled our "Software Symposium". (Did you know that symposium used to mean drinking session?). Anyhoo, the event started with a double headed presentation from Robert Hogg of software developers Black Marble and Ed Gibson who is Chief Security Advisor for Microsoft UK. The topic was safety and computers.

I'd heard bits of it before at the Black Marble event last year, but it was obviously news to the audience, who sat silently as Robert and Ed laid it on the line about just how scary things are. I managed to be both petrified about what was going on out there and relieved that Robert and Ed are going around spreading the word and engaging budding software developers with the problems posed by the wonderful connected world we live in.

The point they made forcefully and effectively is that the big problems are not down to technology, they are down to people. If we don't keep our software up to date and we allow ourselves to be bamboozled into giving passwords to cunning callers then no amount of code is going to help.

Next, and on a somewhat lighter note, the Seedlings, our Imagine Cup winning team, gave us a presentation of their entry. The First Programming Language they are working on is aimed to engage everyone with the kind of problem solving techniques that will allow them to use a computer to best advantage, whether or not they end up writing programs.

Then after a closing address from Andy Sithers of Microsoft, about the value of competition and the usefulness to students of just plain taking part, it was time to zoom off and try to find a recorder for the radio broadcast.....

Busy day.

Nature's Way...

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Today I had to reboot Vista. Not something I do very often, or by choice, but I'd just installed some new software and it needed a reboot, so off we went.

On the way back it did a checkdisk. Something about broken chains somewhere. I'd not seen this message before, but I figured out it might be nature's way of saying it was time to take a backup. I fired up the Backup and Restore centre in Vista and two clicks and two hours later I'm the proud possessor of a bunch of files on my network storage device which will probably allow me to reconstruct my life should my laptop disk decide to tip over. The next thing I'm going to do, of course, is pick a file or two at random and try to restore them from the backup. When this works I can relax.

I remember a horror story from the back in the mists of time where a system manager (not me) had a hard disk crash. He was feeling quite relaxed about this, as he loaded up his backup tapes. Ten minutes later he was feeling less relaxed, when he found that his backup command saved the directory structure, but not the files. He hadn't thought to check that he could actually get anything off the tapes that he had been carefully creating and saving for years.....

So Many Questions....

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I'm trying out something new with the First Year students. I hope they don't mind. Around this time of year thoughts turn to examinations, and I usually set up some quizzes to help the revision process.

This year I'm doing things a little differently. Rather than a set of complicated questions that take ages to work out and answer, I'm setting around 50 or so snappy "true or false" ones. The idea is that you don't have to figure out which is the odd one out, or what the question is gunning for, you just have to agree or disagree with the statement.

I'm going to send out the marked papers after the weekend and invite everyone to have a look at their answers and the right ones, and then at the end of next week I'll run a revision lecture to follow up on the whole thing.

It will be interesting to see how it turns out.

Games and Wires

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Today we had a meeting where we are setting up a pilot project to let our students run a games server on campus. Previously this has been a fraught business, with concern about bandwidth use and system management from all sides. However, after an enlightened decision from the university Computer Users Group we are now opening up some bandwidth monitored ports onto the student cluster in freeside.

This could be fun...

Drunk with Readers

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I've been using a new mechanism to make sure that the readership of these august pages is holding up (not sure what you are holding up actually, but from here it looks like your hands need washing).

Anyhoo, I've been using this new service from Google Analytics, which lets me see who has been visiting the page, what time they came, whether they were wearing a tie, etc, etc. It is very powerful. It has lots of things you can use to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising and page design, see how far most people go through your content and the like. Most people seem to arrive at my site, take one look at the opening page and then vanish at speed.

Such is life.

If you run a proper web page which actually has serious intent you should take a look at the service, I can see how it could be very useful.

There is talk of a new version, which will let you find out how many people have visited your web site on the way back from the pub. That is going to be called "Google Paralytics".

PDF Output from Vista

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I'm a happy bunny. The weather is good. The book is written. And I've got a working PDF output program for Vista.

Perhaps I'm setting my sights a bit low; other people might wish for riches or movie star looks whereas I'm happy with a bit of sunshine, a few pages of text and Primo PDF.

Mind you, according to a survey this week the key to happiness is maintaining low expectations...

Threading with Forms

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Some of our students have been having fun with threading and forms (there is a lab out there at the moment which can be solved by creating a thread which performs a task).

Threads are great, because you can send them off to do something while you get back to responding to the user, or whatever. Snag is, when another thread tries to dicker with the contents of a form this ends in tears, as the Windows system is very picky about actions like this. There is a way round the problem though, and so I've written a little sample application which shows you how to do it.

It creates a form which has a single button on it. When you press the button it creates a worker thread and fires it off in another class to do something. When the something finishes it then calls back into the form to change the text in a label on that form. You can use this as a model for whatever you fancy doing with threads. You can find the code here.