Pictures from Portugal

I’ve noticed that one way to get really good photographs is to go to nice places and take pictures of them. I’ve lost count of the number of lovely shots I’ve seen in photo books with captions like “The Rice Fields on the mountains of Jokarta look lovely just after dawn”. In this respect, Portugal is a definite win. It has this fantastic light.

Cranes on the skyline

The way into the hotel. Pity the fountains were turned off, but you can’t have everything.

The venue this year was the Instituto Superior Tecnico at Taguspark, right opposite the Microsoft Portugal offices.  I like doing sessions in Portugal. I always get a great audience. The session was all about the .NET Micro Framework, and how you can take over the world using it.

I said I’d put a picture of you all up after the session. Here you all are.

Playing with the toys afterwards…

Now, that’s some kind of font…

Outside the building.

I got back last night and staggered into bed. I’d been away just about 24 hours or so and spent 8 of those in the air. But it was all great fun. Thanks to Microsoft Portugal for setting it up.

I’ll be putting the sample code and the presentation up on my blog tonight.

Sunny Portugal

It really is. Just went out for a walk and the weather is lovely. Blue skys and warm sun. T shirt weather.

I could get used to this, but unfortunately I´m heading straight back to the UK this afternoon. I think that I´ve probably spent more time travelling than I have in Portugal, but it is worth it.

My session is in a couple of hours, should be fun.

Moving at speed

Had a fast moving morning. Damian brought a bunch of excellent fellows from Doncaster for a look round and a sample lecture from yours truly. I also treated them to a preview of the session I'm doing tomorrow and it all went very well. Then it was time for my open day talk. Sorry if it went a bit quick folks, I try to pack a lot in there. Perhaps if I got rid of both of the jokes....

Anyhoo, i'm now waiting for my plane to Portugal. Last time I did this it allwent horribly wrong and I had to call off the trip. Here's hoping for better luck this time.

Universe 2 Rob 1

I thought I was doing OK this morning. I’d gone from broken to mended, with all my demo programs for the Portugal sessions working fine. I even sent a Tweet out to Twitter bragging about this.

Big mistake.

There was just one final link in the chain that I need to sort out, which is the tiny router I carry around with me to demos. There is nothing quite like having your own little network to hand, with an address range that you know and love. And I can even use the router to find out what addresses have been allocated so that they are easy to locate from Visual Studio. Unless, of course, I lose the admin password for the thing.

Which I have just done. Or the universe has engineered for my personal torment. Or whatever.  Either way up, I foresee a certain amount of frantic pinging before the session.

Oh well, if you don’t learn something from an experience you really should not be in the game. I’m never going to brag about making something work. Ever again.

Taking Up Twittering

I've started taking Twitter a bit more seriously, just to see what happens.

Twitter is a system for "micro-blogging", where you send tiny blog posts (around 140 characters) to document the minutiae of your daily life. Steven Fry does it, and has attracted loads of "followers" who hang on his every tweet. Although I've no idea if this counts as a recommendation.  You can sign up for an account at twitter.com

I've no idea why anyone would really want to get regular updates from the "Wonderful World of Rob Miles (tm)" but if you do you can find me on Twitter as RobMiles. 

New Dishwasher Time

Talking of burning, we noticed that the dishwasher was making a crackling noise and burning smell this afternoon which stopped when we sprinted up to it and ripped its plug out of the wall socket. I think it is proper broken.

All this was made especially exciting by the fact that I was talking to number one son on the notebook at the time using the webcam, and so we had to carry “him” downstairs so that he could share in the experience, but perhaps without the smell of smoke…

Burning Fingers with the .NET Micro Framework

Spent some of today soldering. I’m not as good at it as I used to be. Or perhaps things have got smaller. Either way, I was very pleased to see a red LED flashing at the end of my efforts. It meant that I hadn’t destroyed the power regulator chip.

I was soldering pins into one of these. They are a very neat connector that take Xbee radio devices and allow them to fit onto standard plugboards. We are using these as part of our Dare To Dream Different competition entry and we want to connect some sensors.

Having carefully soldered around 20 pins I then discovered that I only actually needed to connect to around four of them. Oh well, I suppose the practice was good for me.

Clusty to the Rescue

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.

DevDays 09 in Portugal

I’m off to Portugal next week. I’m doing a session at DevDays 09 about the .NET Micro Framework. If you happen to be in Lisbon next week it would be great to see you.

First Open Day

We had our first Open Day of the season today. We had a good turnout and I managed to get through my part of the proceedings without actually falling over, which is always good. And of course we gave away a prize.

Head of department Warren (on the right) hands out the PSP 300 to Francis.

If you came along to see us, thank you, I hope you found the visit worthwhile.

I M Wright Speaks

You’ve probably heard me go on about I M Wright before. He is the “Microsoft Development Manager at Large” alter ego of Eric Brechner. He wrote the book Hard Code, which is a wonderful look at how to create software properly. He also has a blog which is brilliant. And now he has a podcast too, so you can listen to the good word rather than have to read it. You can find the file here.

University Union

Our union building has these fancy lights on the front that change colour. I couldn’t resist taking a picture of them from the car park tonight.

Great Software Engineering Sayings

I was giving a talk to the .NET Masters students today about starting a project and I made a statement I’m quite proud of:

“Every time you make an assumption, somewhere a specification fairy dies”.

With apologies to Peter Pan.

More Hull Pictures

I’m getting quite into this photography business now. It kind of annoys the person who is with me when we go out, because I keep stopping and taking photographs.

At Hull we have fishes in the pavement.

Hull Museums Quarter

For no particular reason we went for a walk around Hull Museums Quarter today. Makes a change from buying stuff up town, and I had a camera I wanted to play with. If you live in Hull and you haven’t been down there for a look round, shame on you. I’ve always liked looking around these places, and there are some quite nice bits and bobs in the Transport museum

It might have had “One Careful Owner”, but what about all the other ones?

I’ll have the oats please…

Great Principles of Computing

I’ve been watching videos during my lunch breaks over the last few days. This one is really superb. Very interesting if you are not sure what Computer Science is about.

The answer, by the way, is everything.

Mending Laser Printers with Bubble Wrap

Some time back we got a colour laser printer. The price was amazing (cheaper than the first 9 pin dot matrix I ever bought) and we got a free set of toner cartridges too. The machine (a Samsung CLP-300) worked fine when we got it, and I thought that was that.

I was wrong.

It no longer feeds the paper in properly. The paper gets so far and then it sticks. Very annoying (a tip for printer buyers, do a search for “printername paper jam” before you buy one, just in case you get loads of hits. You do with the CLP-300…).

Anyhoo, I did some more searching and came across FixYa at http://www.fixya.com/. These people serve as collectors of self help tips for hardware owners, and there were quite a few threads about my printer, including one that said the springs in the paper tray were a bit under specified. These push the paper up against the first roller on the way into the machine, and get weak over time, leading to paper jams. The suggestion was to find some stronger springs.

Unfortunately my local spring emporium was shut for the night, and so I was forced to improvise. Turns out that a length of bubble wrap (unpopped works best) rolled into a cylinder and forced underneath the tray provides just enough extra spring power to make the printer work a treat. I’m not sure how long it will last, so I’d probably better get some springs at some point, but at the moment it works fine.

GigaPan Epic

The GigaPan is a device that will let you take huge panoramic pictures using an ordinary digital camera:

I really like that kind of picture, so getting one might be a nice idea. But I think it would be even more fun to try and make one out of Lego. On the other hand, if you have 400 dollars to spare you can find out more here.

http://gigapansystems.com/system-page.html

Doh! Some one has beaten me to the idea.

What a Way to Start the Semester

The car park, on arrival today

Valkyria Chronicles

Yesterday I finished the PS3 game Uncharted. Only started playing it in October last year. Go me. If you’ve not played the game I can strongly recommend it. Very much in the Tomb Raider mould, with some great level designs.

I’ve now moved on to Valkyria Chronicles from Sega. Number one son bought a copy whilst he was with us at Christmas, and since it was a good price I bought it a couple of weeks back. It is a turn based strategy game, a bit like the Advance Wars games that are so good on the Nintendo handhelds, but with lots of personality, a strong storyline and fantastic graphics. You get to hand pick, train and equip your troops before going off to fight against the Imperial forces (I was wondering if Imperial forces have always been the bad guys, perhaps it started with Star Wars).

The game itself has a very strong moral theme, starting with just how horrible war itself is, with picture postcard villages reduced to mud and wreckage before your eyes, and normal people dragged into the fight.

I’m enjoying playing it, except for one thing. If you are not careful some of your comrades in arms get shot. I hate this bit. Fortunately you can get them treated and evacuated from the battlefield, and I’ve not lost anyone permanently yet, but it is starting to worry me that I might in the future.  I know that they don’t exist, and that the whole thing is actually a block of data running inside an unfeeling lump of hardware, but it still bothers me.