Making a Fool of Yourself the Rob Miles Way

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Turns out to be surprisingly easy. Here is your simple 7 step guide:

  1. Stand around talking after a lecture and forget that you are due in another lecture.
  2. Remember, panic and run to the lecture room.
  3. Note with surprise that your room is already occupied, and that a bunch of students are stood outside not knowing what to do.
  4. Assume that the there has been a timetabling error and apologise profusely to the students.
  5. Ring the office, and ask if there has been a timetable clash.
  6. Find out that you are in fact stood outside the wrong room sympathising with some students who you have never seen before, and that your class is in fact patiently waiting for you in the room across the corridor.
  7. Apologise to everyone. Twice.

Oh well. At least the lecture went well in the end.

Sometimes the Internet is less useful than you think

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Rob (on mobile phone in car, having waited 20 minutes to find a parking space):”So, you haven’t got any left in stock, despite me having specifically reserved one online before coming up town?”

SalesPerson:”No. Sorry about that. You can have the one that has been out in front of the shop if you like…”

Rob: “No thanks.” (sound of muttering and reverse gear being engaged…)

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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Girl Geek Dinners at Hull

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Girl Geek Dinners started in London some time back. The idea is to give girls who are interested in technology an occasion where they can get together and chat about life, the universe and everything.

The idea has now spread all over the world. We even have them in Hull now. The department is sponsoring the next one which will be in mid-October. If you want to find out more, there is a Facebook group “Hull Girl Geek Dinners” which you can join. If you are at Hull you should also keep an eye out for the posters that will be going up soon.

Start of Semester

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Everyone seems to have come back to Hull, which is nice. We have even had quite good weather today, which makes the whole thing even more pleasant. The corridor has been full of queues as people wait to register.

Being a new student seems to be a succession of standing in a queue to get a piece of paper that tells you to go to another queue and so on. As you go you accumulate lots of more bits of paper until at the end of the day you have a whole bag full. Then you sit through sessions where people tell you stuff that seems important but you probably aren’t taking in because you are concerned about being in the right place now and getting to the right place for the next session. And so on.

Don’t worry. It will all come right in the end.

Fingerprint Removal for Beginners

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I was doing some vacuuming today, as you do. The machine sucked up a couple of ball bearings (no idea where they came from) and proceeded to rattle like mad.

As an engineer, I knew how to fix this. I removed the little cover over the pipe and turned the vacuum upside down so that the bearings would fall out.Unfortunately, while doing this I left the machine plugged in. The biggest design flaw with our Dyson is that it is very easy to catch the power button and start it off. Which is just what I did next, with my finger still stuck inside it.

Apparently my screams were quite impressive. Number one wife even heard me, and she was downstairs on the telephone at the time. She snapped instantly into action “Rob’s just made a really strange noise” she said to the caller, and continued with her conversation.

When I got my digit out the end of the finger was all shiny, just as if it had been polished by thousands of strokes from a rotary brush. Which is not surprising really. It was also very warm. After I held it under the cold tap for a while it started to return to something like normal size and colour, and I think that no real damage has been done. I can still play the piano as badly as before I’m sure, and typing speeds seem unaffected.

The biggest worry is that it is one of the fingers that they check at US airports before letting you into the country. I wonder what they do if they discover that one of your fingers no longer has a print…

Getting Set for University

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This time next week the university here will be a different place. At the moment the place is quite busy with people feverishly finishing all the building work we have been having done. Next week the place will be packed with students, new and old. And just about everyone will be bringing a computer with them. Here are some tips that you might find useful:

  1. Make sure that you have all your updates installed on your system. It doesn’t matter whether it is a Windows PC, a Mac or a Linux netbook. Find out how to check for updates and get everything up to date. At some point you will want to connect your machine up to a campus network of some kind, and if you don’t have all the latest security patches you may be vulnerable to infection.
  2. Do something about viruses. At the very least make sure that your Windows PC has Windows Defender installed and running, and that the databases are up to date. If you want to install an anti-virus program don’t feel obliged to spend a lot of money, the AVG free anti-virus program is good and will cost you nothing. Get it from http://free.avg.com/. Please don’t spend huge amounts on some of the more expensive ones. The benefits are dubious and they also have annual renewal charges too.
  3. Take a backup of your machine before you come, and leave it somewhere safe (perhaps even at home). Find out how to use the backup software on your machine and take a copy of everything. Use one of these cheap external hard disks that you can pick up for around 35 pounds or so from places like http://www.ebuyer.com/ or Staples, or even Tesco. That way if it all goes horribly wrong when you get to university you can recover your precious music, videos and other stuff. Once you have the backup habit, take one every month or so.
  4. Don’t spend huge amounts on other software before you come. Most universities (including ours at Hull) have deals that get you some programs that you need cheaply.  The same goes for books. In the computing field they are rather expensive, and you don’t want to pay a lot for a book and then find out that it is only used for a small part of the course. You can check the books out in the library, and you might also find that there is a second hand book sale on your campus where you can pick up the required volumes from other students quite quickly. You might also want to form a little cartel with fellow students to share books between each other and spread the expense (this is also neat because it can also give you a ready made study group).
  5. Get a usb memory stick (at Hull we give them out free to first year students when they arrive). Keep backups of all your work on it. You can also use it to take files into the university to work on. You will get some filespace on the university network, but it will not be an enormous amount, and having your files always with you is useful. Put a file on the drive with your contact details (just your name and phone number) so that if you lose the drive people can find out who to return it to.
  6. Get some free on line storage. I like Windows Live Skydrive: http://skydrive.live.com/. This gives you 25 GBytes of space which you can access from anywhere on the web via a browser. The major limitation is that files can’t be more than 50M in size, but this is a perfect place to lob all those important essays and program source files. You’ll need a Windows Live account to use this and the uploading and downloading of files is all via browser which is a bit of a pain but there is a tool called Gladinet: http://www.gladinet.com/ that is supposed make this storage available to your applications although I’ve not used it. You can also use Skydrive to make your files available to other people. The access is controlled via their Windows Live Accounts and you can just email them a link to the download location or folder you want them to have access too. If you have more than one computer and you want to make sure that files are up to date on all of them you can use Windows Live Mesh for that: http://www.mesh.com/. Mesh gives you another 5G of free online storage and you can even synchronise files to Windows Mobile devices.  Anyone who just stores their important files on their laptop hard disk is an idiot. These services are free and mean that you can get at your files from anywhere, and you will not lose them.  If you want even more online space take a look at DropBox at http://www.getdropbox.com/.
  7. Make sure you have insurance for all your nice toys before you set off to university. Don’t plan to sort it out when you arrive. It would be terrible if they got stolen or damaged before they were insured. Take a look at cover from student specialists like Endsleigh: http://www.endsleigh.co.uk/student-possessions.html (if anyone knows any cheaper deals feel free to let me know and I’ll update this post)
  8. And finally, don’t forget to bring all the mains leads and power supplies for your toys…..

Dulux PaintPod Review

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This weekend I had a lot of wall and ceiling to paint. And the local DIY chain had an offer on the Dulux PaintPod. So, of course, I bought one. It has buttons and lights, and motors. How could I resist? The idea is that a little pump in the paint reservoir pushes the paint through a pipe to the handle, where it is transferred onto the paint roller. Then, when you have finished painting, you add some cleaning water, the process goes into reverse and the machine cleans itself and the roller.

And it mostly works. The best bit was when it was pumping the first bit of paint through the clear pipe up to the roller, I loved watching the paint travel down the clear plastic tube. I think this is where the BBC 3 people got the idea for their new logo. Once the paint gets to the handle it is then supposed to be magically transferred onto the roller and then you can paint with it.  This is where it gets a bit sticky. Put too much paint on the roller and you end up wearing it. Put too little on and you are just pushing a roller up and down a wall for no reason. If you are painting onto the same colour (as I was for the ceiling) it seemed to work fine, mainly because there wasn’t much to do. The cleaning process mostly worked too, with the bulk of the paint being removed automatically.

Life got harder when I was painting a different colour. Getting enough paint onto the wall was really tricky, and although I could paint a lot faster without having to pause and refill the roller and tray, I think it took me one more coat than I would have needed by hand. In fact, for the final coat I went back to a hand roller.

I don’t think I’d recommend one if you are planning changing the colour of your room. If you have a lot of one colour you want to refresh it might be a good idea, but I must admit I think I got on better with the old familiar roller and tray.

Chain Reaction….

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Sunday: Go out and look at chairs and sofas. Find exactly what we want at a good price. Buy it.

Monday: Decide that since we are changing the furniture we should really change the decor.

Tuesday: Someone wants our old sofas.

Wednesday: Old sofas now collected, downstairs looks strangely empty (as well it might).

Thursday: Decide since downstairs is clear we can paint the walls and ceiling.

Friday: Buy new fangled painting machine and 15 litres of paint.

I’m really looking forward to the weekend…

Satnav Software is Rubbish

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There are a number of great mysteries out there which may never be solved. The Riddle of the Sphinx, The Mystery of Life, The Appeal of Chris Evans.  There are also others which are a bit closer to home, one of which is Why SatNav software is so universally appalling? 

I’ve used quite a few different solutions and, with one exception, they have been the programs that have come closest to making me hurl the device across the room. One program had the habit of crashing every time you added a favourite location. Another was so hard to use that I never actually figured out what it was I had done to enter a destination address. A third failed to make reliable Bluetooth contact with the GPS device (made by the same company as the software), meaning that you had to indulge in a bout of “Serial Port Roulette” each time you turned it on. That was also the software that would forget all its useful settings and addresses if the battery in the device ever dared to go flat.

Once they got going these programs usually managed to do the navigation part quite well, but it has always annoyed me that they were so badly written, with such poorly thought out user interfaces. I was reminded of this today when I got my wife a satnav program for her iPhone. I thought it would be a useful thing to have, and allow her to navigate even when out of range of cell towers. I even dared to hope that by now the developers would have fixed all the things I hate about such programs.

Not so. The program had an arcane and tricky installation process and followed that up with a user experience that goes completely against the lovely iPhone interface (even managing to implement a stupid alphabetic keyboard with an annoying click you can’t turn off). It ran slowly and lumpily for no good reason and then crashed without warning. As a final parting shot it managed to put our house in the wrong town. I wonder if I can get my money back.

Please someone, anyone, one of the proper software companies, bring out a satnav program that just works properly and is easy to use.  It is not impossible, I do have one satnav system that is wonderful in just about every respect. Unfortunately it comes attached to a rather large dongle in the form of my car, but it does serve as a reminder that it can be done…