Ubiquitous Software

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I was having my hair cut yesterday (I was picking up number one daughter and I thought it might be good if she was actually able to recognise me) and the girl doing the cutting asked me what I did. I told her and she said that she had no real idea what computer programming was. A few years ago I would have had a problem at this point, because it used to be kind of hard to explain what computers were actually used for. Nowadays it is much easier. I just had to mention the Xbox 360 and PS3 and say that we produce students who write the games that go into them.

Afterwards I had a think about this and the way I see it, computer programmers now write the stuff that makes pretty much everything work. Just about any device that you buy with a mains plug will have a computer processor in it, as do all cars and so on.

When I started in this business we had one computer at the university, nowadays I don't think anybody knows how many there are on campus. I had no idea when I started in this business, but I'm very glad that I did, because it really is the stuff that makes the future go.

Of course, we also produce the stuff that makes it hard to print out things, but I'll let that pass for now. (Actually, and this is a  tip for all Photoshop Elements users, if you want to make a book of pictures you don't actually want to make a Picture Book, you want to make a Collage. A Picture Book is pre-formatted for an on-line printing service, whereas a collage is just a themed collection of pictures which can span several pages).

Useless Software

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Imagine you were thinking about buying a car. It had a satnav, heated seats, electric windows, a hundred and one extras that you will probably never use. It is attractively coloured and pleasing to the eye. You can almost afford it.

But it won't turn right.

Would you buy it? Me neither. And yet people are happy to buy and use software that fails just as spectacularly. I mentioned some time back my torment at the hands of some software by HP which purported to let me create albums but actually just messed me around until I removed it from my disk.

Today I've been playing with Adobe Photoshop Elements. This lets you create similar albums and, after a while, I've managed to get the images I want.

But I can't print them. That is, I can get them onto paper but the size is always wrong. I've wasted a couple of pounds worth of paper and ink. As I type this program is randomly resizing the images behind Windows Live Writer in a way that does not inspire confidence. I've tried numerous combinations of printer and paper configuration, screen preview and all manner of settings to try and get what I want, which is pictures on paper the same size and shape as the ones on the screen.

This is insane. I'm supposed to be good at this stuff. How someone less well versed in printer configuration would get by I have no idea. What you really want is a big red button that says "put these on the paper how they look on the screen". What I have got is several buckets full of confusion. I hate this. I would never let software go out of the door with this mix of complexity and uselessness.

I've had this before with various printers and programs. I M Wright has some things to say about the way that programmers always want to work on the advanced features and leave out the boring stuff like making the program actually do what it is supposed to do. How right he is.

Amazon Music Store Fun and Games

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Amazon are moving in to music distribution. Alongside books, computer games and toys you can now download unprotected MP3 files at very good prices including some albums at a loss leading 3 pounds each. So I had a go.

First mistake was to try and use the university network. So that meant a big hello to the university firewall and everything locking up and timing out. So, after a number of retries I just closed the notebook and went home, hoping that the machine would fire up and keep going on the home network.  Which it did. Problem was that I had initiated the download several times, and the rather stupid Amazon download tool insisted on fetching the same thing three or four times, just to be sure. So that was an entire evening of bandwidth out of the window.

However, once I'd got the files off the machine and tidied up all the excess copies I reckon it is a pretty good deal. The files are standard MP3s captured at 320K bps, which means that they will play pretty much anywhere with good sound quality.

Worth checking out, but don't press the download button more than once.

the Day the Earth Stood Still

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We had a great office lunch today. Good food, good company, and I also got a set of measuring spoons in my cracker. Excellent.

Then, in the evening we went out to see "The Day the Earth Stood Still". This is a remake of a classic Sci-Fi film from way back, a tale of an enigmatic alien, his giant robot and shiny spherical spaceship on a mission to destroy all human life. Oh, and a mother with issues with her stepson.

Keanu Reeves didn't have much of a challenge playing the man from outer space. The biggest surprise to me was that nobody referred to him as "Mr. Anderson" at any point in the movie.  

The plot was pretty hackneyed, but resolved neatly enough at the end. One rather striking thing was the sheer number of product placements for a film where, at the climax, every machine in the world stops working. There was one bit where the heroine picked up her LG mobile phone just before checking her Citizen watch. The camera lingered just long enough for the names of these consumer durables to register, completely ignoring the fact that she didn't make a call, and at the end of the world perhaps the last thing that you really want to know is exactly what time it is. 

As a bit of escapism with full on special effects it does the trick, but don't go expecting anything else.

Christmas Bash

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We had our Christmas Bash today. Went rather well, right up to the point where I opened the box with the game disk for the quiz, right at the end, and found that it was empty. So, no quiz. But we did everything else and much fun, and pizza was had. It is a moment of great personal pride to think that I managed to get to the point where all of the 60 or so students were full up. We nearly had food left over. Amazing. I took the big camera and loads of pictures.

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Sam gets into Half Life 2

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Drinks and nibbles (and pink christmas trees)

Thanks for coming and thank to everyone who helped out.

Video of Micro Framework Presentation

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If you have an hour to kill (and I do mean kill) you can now watch the TechEd 2008 presentation I did in Barcelona in November. This is the one about the .NET Micro Framework where I make my Christmas tree lights flash red when I add a new post to this hallowed blog. I've just managed to watch a few minutes of it through the gaps between my fingers. Hopefully you might last a bit longer:

http://www.microsoft.com/emea/teched2008/developer/tv/default.aspx?vid=70

Dare To Dream Different Round One Ends Monday Night

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If you have an idea for an embedded device there is still just time to enter the Dare To Dream Different challenge for the .NET Micro Framework.

http://www.dreamdifferentcontest.com/

The first round entry closes at midnight on Monday 15th December. You don't actually have to build anything, just pitch a good idea that you and two of your friends have had.

If you make it to the next round you get some hardware to play with, and the prizes are well worth having. You could also get help to turn your idea into a money making business opportunity.

..and if you a student from Hull the first few to show me their submitted entries will get free T shirt from the ones that I have left in the office.

More Than One Can Play on Windows Azure

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Some time back I wrote some web services for turn based gameplay on mobile devices. They provided an easy to understand lobby and game move framework which I used to demonstrate how easy it is to create web services and consume them from Visual Studio programs. I still think this is wonderful.

Now I've moved them onto the cloud. This was much easier than I expected. Once I figured how how to publish the project (thanks to http://davidpallmann.blogspot.com/search/label/Azure for the info) I had a working set of web services out there. I'm not sure how much time I'll have to play with this stuff (I'm supposed to be doing lots of other things at the moment) but I'll try to dig out and test some sample games that I wrote for this framework.

You can find out more here:

/more-than-one-can-play/

Au-Revoir Windows 7

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Or should that be "à bientôt"? I've replaced my test version of Windows 7 with my original Vista installation. I've not had any specific problems with Windows 7, in fact the whole experience has been really good. It is just that there are a few things I want to do which don't work too well on Windows 7. I can't get the Cloud development environment to work for some reason, and I'd like to have back the buttons on my MacBook.

I'm leaving 7 on the tiny tablet though, the performance hike is something that I really appreciate on that device.  If you have a machine that chugs a bit under Vista then you should think seriously about moving onto Windows 7.

I used the restore option to put back the Vista image I made a while back before I went out to PDC. I always image my machine before I take it out and about, and so all I had to do was drop back the documents directory and I'm back up to date. Oh, that and install a whole bunch of updates....

The restore option worked really well. I just left the machine for an hour or so and when it rebooted I was back in the past.

You Can't Beat a bit of Rehearsal

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Went to Doncaster today. The University of Hull validates a couple of their degree programs (Integrated Technology and Business Computing and so I had a couple of meetings to attend, followed by a presentation to their students. The meetings went well and then I had to do my talks about the University and what we do, with particular reference to projects. They were a great audience, and asked loads of sensible questions. I wish I'd taken the trouble to read through my slides before I started the talk, I'd used them before but kept having déjà-vu moments, where I put up a slide all about something I'd just said. Oh well, next time I'll give them a read through first.

Thanks for making us so welcome folks, and I'm looking forward to seeing the projects next year.

Lousy Software

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I hate bad software. It gives us all a bad name. I particularly dislike it when the program makes a job that could be simple a lot more difficult, whilst at the same time trying to seem friendly.

Yesterday I got a couple of photo album and paper things from HP. The idea was that I would print out some pictures and make some nice personalised gifts. I was further encouraged in this when I found that the package came with some HP Photosmart software that would arrange the pictures for me and put them into some nice looking templates.

That was the plan. I had this simple minded idea that I would pick pages from a template, drop pictures into them from my hard disk and then print out what I wanted.

Not so. First off the program insisted in cataloguing all my pictures. And I have rather a lot so that took a while. In fact, it got so slow that in the end I made up some directories holding a subset of my photos and turned it lose on that. Next it forced me to select from a slow moving and hard to use menu which pictures I wanted in my album. It then stuffed these into the album pages in no particular order, forcing me to move them all into the right place. I had no way of choosing the order of the pages, or deleting excess ones. But of course it saved the best bit until last.

Just as I was finishing off my design I noticed a "settings" option in the top right hand corner. Thinking that this might let me re-arrange pages or delete them I clicked it. It had some fairly useless options that were no good for what I wanted, so I tried to get back to my design. Which had vanished. All my work had gone away, without so much as a warning. Wah.

Sometimes there is great satisfaction to be had watching the uninstaller do it's business.

Zombie Fragfest

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One of these people is a zombie....

Dropped in on the Hull Com. Soc. Frag Fest today. I was in a bit of a hurry, so I didn't take my machine with me. After I saw what they were playing I rather wished I had though. It was a hilarious mod for Half-Life 2, which pits survivors against a zombie horde which increases steadily as each human player falls prey to the creeping death. I had a quick go and, needless to say, I got zombified really early on each time, but it was still great fun. I took the camera with the toy lens (of which more later) and got some nice pictures.

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Nobody who is anybody has a machine with the lid still on......