E Reader from Sony

Bought yet another gadget today. It is the new Sony e-reader. Sony have actually got around to launching the device in the UK, in conjunction with Waterstones bookstore. What made it particularly attractive to me was the way that it ships with 100 classic books on CD-ROM. I actually got the device for number one wife, who really likes the idea of having every book by Jane Austen with her at all times.

It is really nice, very shiny and the screen is lovely to read. It is based on an ink based technology which requires no power at all to retain the display. This means that battery consumption can be measured in page turns, rather than hours. The book says it is good for over 6000, which equates to quite a lot of reading.

Number one wife (and I) really like the device. I've loaded it up with pretty much everything that came with it (You can get around 120 books into the 120M ram of the device and you can also add an SD card if you want to carry a really  huge number of volumes)

The only annoyance is that the Waterstones ebook site, where you can buy DRM versions of new books, has a rather limited range of content at the moment. Also the prices are just stupid. I would expect an ebook, which has no resale value once you have bought it and costs nearly nothing to produce and distribute, to be quite a bit cheaper than the paper version. Savings of 3 quid on a sixteen pound book just don't cut it for me, particularly as these are against the advertised full price of the publication, which nobody pays anyway.  If they don't get their act together on these issues then I can see them killing off the new device before it even gets started.

Some reviews have been very sniffy, saying things like "It will never take the place of a real book.". These people are missing the point. It is not a replacement for a physical tome. I expect our shelves at home to be groaning under the weight of volumes for some time to come. What it does do though is make it much easier to have a big chunk of your library with you at all times, which is really useful. And for trips away it would be terribly good. And if they get their pricing sorted out it would be a great way to buy and read all those books that you don't really want to have in physical form. 

The device will also show monochrome pictures that actually look quite cute. And it can play audio as well, which is nice.

So nice that I got one for me as well, but you had already guessed that.

HypnoCube HypnoCute

I sooooo want one of these. Just a 4x4x4 would work for me.

Tech-Ed EMEA 2008 Barcelona

I've just found out that I have had a session accepted for Tech-Ed EMEA 2008. This means that if you sally forth to Barcelona in November you will be able to see me strutting my stuff about the .NET Micro Framework. I did a session about this in Orlando earlier this year, and this time I'll be able to use even more hardware (every time I turn around another Micro Framework board has appeared).

I'd love to see you in the audience, so if you are coming out to Spain feel free to search out the session. I'll post more details when I have them. And I'm going to be using "All New Jokes" (tm).

Underwater Magic

The University of Hull is one of the partners in the Venus Project. The aim of the work is to preserve underwater archeological  sites by making a completely accurate record of them, and provide a realistic visualisation of what they are actually like to visit. Paul Chapman from the department is giving a presentation of the system later this week, and as a taster he set it up in our visualisation suite and let us have a go on it.

Darren navigates the submersible to the site while Paul watches.

The system provides an eerily accurate version of the view that you would get from a submersible craft if you explored the sites yourself. You can move around just as you would in the submarine, and all artifacts are there just as when they were discovered.

Fantastic stuff.

Rob in the News

Earlier this year I was awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) status for another year. I was really pleased about this and the university seems quite pleased too. They even wrote a little story about it and the our Imagine Cup success over the years, with a specially taken scary photo of me in my "pyjama shirt". You can find out more, and marvel at the picture, here.

Sunday Reading

Spent a very pleasant part of Sunday reading The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents by Terry Pratchett. Absolutely brilliant.

If you've not discovered the Diskworld books then good for you, because it means you'll have the pleasure of reading them for the first time. They are written with a lightness of touch, a cleverness and a humanity that nobody else can match.

Terry Pratchett was recently diagnosed with an early form of Senile Dementia which doesn't seem to be slowing him down much just yet, thank goodness. He is truly great writer who has not been granted anything like the recognition he richly deserves in spite (or, one wonders perhaps because of) his great popularity with huge numbers of readers.

All By Myself?

Just watched the end of "Last Choir Standing", a BBC music contest thing where the title pretty much sums it up, although they had to sing against each other rather than a potentially more interesting mass brawl.

Anyway, I just can't get my head around the concept of a load of blokes stood together singing "All By Myself". Just doesn't seem right somehow.

And the best choir came third, which is even worse in my book.

EverNote is Neat

If you do anything that involves holding little bits of data and then using them from wherever you happen to be you will probably find EverNote useful.

It is a "cloud" application that lets you lob pictures, notes, web links, bits of files and whatever onto a central storage location that you can then access from your PC, Mac, browser, Windows Mobile device or iPhone.

It has some nifty search facilities, even being able to pull handwriting out of images you have captured as notes and then use them as search keys.

It seems to work really well, and you can use it for free if you don't want to upload much content. Even the paid service is not bank breaking, at $5 a month.

Whether you are studying on a degree course, running a business or just going shopping I reckon that it is well worth a look.

All in a Good Cause

Number one daughter is doing something dangerous the weekend after next and she wants to make it as lucrative as possible (at least she has learnt something from me - although not that much, because I wouldn't dare abseil from that height).

Anyhow, the event is in aid of Marie Curie cancer care. If you would like to give your support I would be most grateful. Sponsoring is very Web 2.0 easy these days, you can do it at:

http://www.justgiving.com/jennifermiles1

Dice Problem

Can you spot the problem?

I bought these dice ages ago, with the intention of taking 'Vegas by storm. One of them is loaded and one of them is not. Sneaky. Only difficultly is that the package doesn't tell me which is the loaded one.

Any ideas for tests I can perform to be absolutely sure which is the loaded die?

Get Smart

I never really saw much of the original "Get Smart" TV show. Made in the sixties, it was a moderately successful spoof of all the spy shows that were popular at the time.

Since Hollywood these days seems to be based on strip mining the past for movie ideas it was only a matter of time before they got around to making a film. Get Smart the movie is actually quite good. The original Maxwell Smart  character was a bit of an idiot. Steve Carel stars as the new one and does a good job of portraying him as more of a nerd than a buffoon, as he and Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway) take on the forces of Kaos. Some of the comedy is a bit broad, and the script creaks a bit under the weight of the big budget that seem to have been thrown at it. But there are laughs to be had and I enjoyed it a lot more than the reviews say I should have.

One thing that did irritate though was the way that the projectionist at CineWorld neglected to open up the gate on the projector, so that rather than seeing the film in proper widescreen we just got the same dimensions as we can get on the telly at home. They did this last week when we saw Hellboy as well.

I'm not sure if this is a new policy, with films being made to fit DVDs rather than cinemas, but you do feel a bit cheated. The actual print itself was pretty horrid too, with poor definition and muddy colours. I think from now on we will go to Vue in town, where they have an all digial setup which is far superior in quality.

Go to Jacob's Cameras in Hull

 Had a really good customer experience today. I wasn't expecting it, but I am very impressed. I had a problem with my little Fuji FinePix camera and I took it into Hull to see what the place I had bought it from would do for me. Turned out that they did quite a lot. Suffice it to say that they fixed me up completely, and they didn't really have to.

If you are thinking of getting a camera I can strongly recommend this shop, in the Prospect Centre in Hull. Their prices are very keen and their service is excellent.

Sewerby Park

Took a day off from worrying about water, and went up to Sewerby Park in Bridlington. Great place.

It's a grand little pile of bricks....

They were playing cricket outside the hall

It's a beautiful pitch, right on the cliff tops.

And they were playing something a little more violent inside the grounds....

Now that's what I call a garden.

Anyone know what kind of flower this is?

A Three Act Play Involving Water

Act One: "That Looks Shiny"

In which our hero visits the garage to fetch his gardening gloves and wonders why all the wood leaning against the garage wall appears to be strangely shiny. Almost as if it was covered in water. Which it was.

Act Two: "Search for the Source"

In which our hero learns the joys of bath dismantling and the use of a "Really Nice Hammer" (borrowed from next door) to take up floorboards. Finally resolved when the cold water pipe feeding the bath taps is found to be leaking.

Act Thee: (yet to be completed)

In which, with a bit of luck, a plumber can be made to appear and replace the leaky bit of pipe (how can copper just, like, get a hole in it?) and order, and the side of the bath, be re-established.

Lessons learnt from this narrative:

1. The leak is never where you think it is.
2. There is always more water than you think.
3. When catching drips  in a cup, put a little bit of water in first so you can hear the water splash to indicate it is in the right place. Oh, and make sure that when the cup is full you can actually lift it out, otherwise you have changed the nature of the problem, but not actually solved anything.
4. No weekend for Rob would seem to be complete without a spot of light plumbing.

Butterflies and Orchids

Sometimes you can't beat being in the right place, at the right time, with the right lens. Our front was covered in butterflies this morning.

And the orchids are in bloom again

..very scary looking plants...

Photosynth is Groovy

I've never had the chance to be in at the ground floor of the creation of a new kind of media before. But today I found myself watching a presentation of a really neat new technology which is now available for anyone to play with.  Photosynth has the potential to provide a new way of displaying visual information and allowing you to navigate around it by combining multiple images.

At this point I was ready to yawn, in that I've played with photo-stitching programs in the past and found them to be OK, but hardly ground breaking. But what Photosynth does is a bit more than that. By analysing the content of the images, finding the same content in each and then building a "point cloud' that describes the position of these items in 3D it manages to take all your photos and combine them into a navigable scene that recreates the geometry of where they were taken.  You can move in or out of the scene, go from place to place and get a really strong sense of being there.

There are some lovely scenes on the Photosynth site that show how this can be done properly, I thought I'd have a go at the university, so this morning on the way to the office I took around 130 pictures. I've not read the documentation, I just took loads of photographs trying to make sure that there was a bit of overlap between each. And I came up with this.

You can move around by clicking on the arrows, and also on the panes as they appear. You can also zoom in and out using the scrollwheel on your mouse.

Apparently the picture is 78% "synthy", which I think means that the system couldn't figure out where some of the pictures go. However, it is quite like being on campus, and one part, where I took a load of pictures of a flowerbed, does let you actually walk around the flowers and see them from different angles. With a bit more care, and a tripod, I reckon I could have got something really impressive.

Anyone can sign up for a Photosynth account, download the program and start building synths to upload onto the Photosynth site where you have 20G of space to share your creations with the world. Microsoft are hoping to build up a community of "synthers" - a sort of "Flickr you can walk around" and I can think of all kinds of useful things we could do with this. You could put a synth of your ebay items up, so that people can take an all round look at what you are selling. When your kids leave home you could take a synth of their bedrooms to remember them by.

I'm certainly going to get into the habit of taking along another little camera when I go out for "synth shots" and posting them up here. It is really easy to embed the synths in your web pages too.

Have a go with Photosynth. It really is great fun. And free.

Software Design

I'm still writing stuff that is intended to teach programming. Great fun,but very hard work (apparently). I'm up to the bit where I'm trying to make a game more interesting.

..but how do you detect when all the red bricks have gone?

I am recreating a game I first made many years ago in Lucidata Pascal on a South West Technical Products 6809 based microcomputer.  It is a simple breakout clone with one or two interesting touches as you go through the game. Apparently it was responsible for a lot of lost time in the Psychology department at the time I wrote it, because they had the same computers and spent ages playing it. Chris used to spend entire lunch-hours on it, holding a ruler against the screen to line up really tricky shots....

Anyway, I digress. The place we've got to is where we have a row of blocks and a ball, and we can destroy the blocks with the ball. It gets a bit boring when all the blocks have gone, so our program must detect when the last block is removed. There are essentially two ways you can do this, you can keep a counter of blocks that are left and reduce it each time you remove a block, or you can look through the blocks and see if you can find any which are still visible. But which is better?

Keeping a counter has the virtue of simplicity and makes the smallest program. However it also adds a counter variable which is coupled with the array of blocks. If the counter and the array get out of step for any reason the program will misbehave. If the program checks the array each time there is no question of this happening. In other words one design leaves the system open to bugs that could not occur in the other. I'm trying to get people thinking about the craft of software development and into the habit of worrying about things like this when they write programs.

I often get asked "What is the best way to do this in software?" as if there is an solution which is perfect in every way. I tend to reply that there usually is no such thing a best solution, there will be a fast one, one which doesn't use much memory, one which has the shortest program code and so on. To that you can hopefully add "simplest" which is the one that I tend to go for, unless I'm really worried about performance.

Hellboy II - The Golden Army

Went to see the new Hellboy movie tonight. I'm running at one movie a week at the moment. I can't see a problem with that.

Most enjoyable film. Where else can you get ancient cursers, bone eating fairies, myths, magic and Barry Manilow. 

I kid you not. Whereas Batman upped the darkness, X-Files upped the angst and the Mummy just did everything it did before, only not quite as well, the new Hellboy film goes for comedy. And it mostly works. The good news is that everything else is in place too. Scary monsters, fairly convincing baddies, great action sequences and a daft story line that resolved itself quite well but leaves plenty of scope for another sequel.

We are not looking at a movie event here folks, although there are some genuinely surprising touches, including the aforementioned singer. The director has obviously watched a fair few Harry Potter movies, along with the Cantina sequence in the first Star Wars, but the film is all the better for that.

Not a bad way to spend an evening.

Engineering Windows 7 Blog

I have a kind of love-hate relationship with Windows Vista. I love it on some machines and hate it on others. This has a lot to do with the quality (or indeed existence) of device drivers, some manufacturers seem to have got away with sticking "Vista Capable" on things that were definitely not ready for showtime. More like "Vista Culpable".

You can't blame Microsoft for all these problems, but at the end of the day it is their name on the Vista tin and I hope they get tougher with hardware makers in the future. At the moment all eyes are on the upcoming "Windows 7", which is rather cleverly not pitching itself as the answer to all prayers, the wonder of wonders and the operating system to end all operating systems. Merely something that is better than XP and Vista.

As part of the efforts to keep everyone informed of how the development is going the senior managers of the Windows 7 team (and I do mean senior, these folks report directly to the top of Microsoft) have started an Engineering Windows 7 Blog. This is actually quite a worthwhile read. It gives you a nice insight into the way that enormous software products are created, and the conflicting pressures that the teams are exposed to. I also rather like the way that they are using the same blogging tool as I do, the venerable Windows Live Writer. (although I bet they get more hits than I do).

The Brand that is You

I was talking today to someone about the success that Hull University has had in the Microsoft Imagine Cup over the years. We were discussing why it is that Hull students seem to engage in the competition whereas ones from other, lessor, universities don't.

I think that one of the reasons is that as soon as our students arrive, in one of the first lectures, I talk about "The Brand that is You". University study should be about lots of things, learning, having fun and growing. And also brand management. Students should make a conscious effort to do things that will enhance their brand. That means blogging, taking part in forums and newsgroups, and entering competitions, amongst them the Imagine Cup.

The person that I was talking to was quite surprised about the idea, but reckoned that it made perfect sense to look at it that way. With employers routinely looking up potential hires on the Internet people are becoming aware of the potential for personal damage that posting silly pictures can bring, but turning that on its head, and building a network profile that does you credit is definitely a good plan.

Oh, and by this I don't mean creating a fake persona, that would be really stupid, as you'd then have to spend great chunks of your life behaving like someone you aren't. You should just you make sure that your on-line appearance does you credit and look for ways that you can make yourself more interesting. Although this should probably not include blog posts that mention your bogeys, arrogance or stupidity. Or are just plain daft.