We started the day with breakfast at Lowell's. If you ever go to Seattle you should just go there. Have anything, it is all great.
Good view of the bay too. I thought I’d take some pictures of signs.
I don’t think the sisters look that happy…
The lady in the red blazer came up to me as I was standing in line to check in for the flight. “Would you like me to find you a seat with more legroom?” she asked. Would I??? With a flourish of boarding passes I was moved to a seat that they had been keeping for tall people. Wonderful. The flight itself was very smooth and much shorter than expected, so I arrived feeling, if not as fresh as a daisy, certainly not as the crushed flower I thought I’d be. Hmm. Perhaps I’d better work harder on my similes in future.
Anyhoo, during the flight we had a good view of the coast of Greenland, and so I took some snaps. I’m here for the MVP summit which starts on Monday, in the meantime I’ve been meeting up with people I know and forgetting to remember their names. Great fun.
Friday at 5:15 pm is not really an auspicious time for a programming tutorial, but we do our best. Considering the horrible hour there was a pretty impressive turnout today, and we did have fun. We were drawing text with XNA and playing with multiple draw operations to get fake 3D effects.
Great fun. Hull students, you can find the clock code in the lecture content for week 4.
Quick test for all you programming experts. Will this stupid code compile?
public int InfiniteLoop()
{
while (true)
{
Console.WriteLine("Loopy");
System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(1000);
}
}
Note: All the namespaces are in place and the WriteLine and the Sleep are perfectly legal calls.
Turns out that it compiles just fine. The compiler is smart enough to work out that the method will never complete because it contains an infinite loop. This means that although the signature of InfiniteLoop defines it as returning an integer the compiler just says "Since the method never ends I'm not going to worry about it not returning a value when it says it should".
I'm not sure I agree with this behaviour. I saw it in the lab this morning and it surprised me. I would expect at least a warning, in case I'd put a loop in when I didn't mean to.
The compiler doesn't fail to compile programs containing unreachable code either, although this does produce a warning.
This is the lucky prize winner from the Open Day today. We had another great crowd.
These are some of them. Thanks for coming folks, hope you learnt something from the trip. I was asked if I had any ideas for things to do over summer to prepare for starting a Computer Science course. So I though I’d put some thoughts together.
First thing is to make sure you get good grades in your exams in summer. I’d hate to think that time spent playing with computers caused to you fail those. But once you’ve done your exams I’d advise you to get hold of an introductory text on programming and have a go. You can get our First Year course here:
There are links to my Windows Phone programming notes and also a version of my XNA book which you can download. If you are still a student I’d advise you to head off to Dreamspark and get hold of some free software. If you are not a student you can get free versions of Visual Studio here:
http://www.microsoft.com/express/
I wouldn’t try to do too much, but I would read the yellow book and try to get a feel for programming and what it is all about. A clue: it is not really mathematics, it is more about organisation.
This one is worth knowing about. If you are a student who wants to create things like 3D models for XNA games you can now get Autodesk software, including AutoDesk 3D, for free from those lovely people at Autodesk. The over also extends to academic staff. Wonderful stuff. Find out more here:
I was doing a lecture this afternoon to the first years and, frankly, it wasn’t going well. The microphone was not working, which meant I had to shout, and I’d not uploaded my slide deck correctly so I had to wait for my little laptop to download the presentation from Live Mesh. Then I fired up my first empty XNA project to show the class how it worked and was rewarded with this.
Not good. Id used the machine to write Windows Phone games with no problem and I’d never seen that message before. Fortunately we were near the end of the lecture and so I just showed that I could in fact get Windows Phone to work and then everyone had to leave.
Someone at the back had shouted “Use Reach” but at the time this hadn’t registered. Later, I took a look at the project settings:
Turns out that if you have fairly simple graphics hardware, like the one in my little laptop, it can’t handle the HiDef graphics and you have to select the Reach option for Game Profile.
I did this and everything worked, so I should be OK for tomorrow.
The Internet is an amazing place. I was looking for help because the backup battery in my Yamaha sequencer is flat and I happened across this lovely little video. The original track is worth seeking out too.
The six Bronte children had a pretty raw deal in many respects. Their father, Patrick, lived long enough to see every one of them die, along with his wife and, from the look of the church graveyard, loads of the local population. Haworth in the nineteenth century was a world apart from the neat town it is now, with squalor and disease running rampant.
The three Bronte sisters grew up watching loved ones die around them, starting with their mother and two sisters. That they chose to escape into a made up world of stories is not terribly surprising. When they grew up they took this story telling into the wider world and produced a collection of books that was like nothing before.
I’m not a great fan of their writing, but I do like going to the Parsonage in Haworth where they grew up and wrote their greatest works. There are only a handful of rooms in the small building, but actually being in the room where Charlotte wrote “Reader, I married him” is pretty darned cool, although I did rather spoil things for number one wife when we were in the shop on the way out and I pointed at a row of paperbacks saying, in tone hushed with awe, “Hey, they wrote books as well!”.
I also insisted on buying a genuine Bronte Parsonage combination spirit level, torch and screwdriver tool. Apparently Emily used to use one just like it it to change the batteries in her digital watch. Or something.
Getting to Haworth was made much more interesting by the unexpected arrival of a large amount of snow overnight. This made driving great fun and meant the first thing we had to do in Haworth was find somewhere that sold wellington boots. On the other hand, it did make the pictures nice. And I was lucky to see a steam train arrive at Haworth station. (although of course you know that Haworth was not actually connected to the railway network until some time after the death of the sisters, who had to travel to the station at Keighley when they wanted to go to London to meet their publisher).
Of course I took a camera, and a bunch of pictures.
Genuine bona-fide steam train
Platform
Haworth rooftops
Fairly quiet for a Saturday..
Haworth graveyard
Train home
A couple of rules for night driving:
Never mind, at least we got there eventually.
Just finished my Windows Phone Rock Star session. Now I can put the guitar back on the wall. Thanks for being a great audience and staying to the end. Some great questions too. You can find the sample code here.
There were some questions. If you are not based in the ‘states and are wondering how to get the tax side of things sorted you can find some interesting information here:
http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/19464.aspx
When I figure out how to do it myself I’ll put a post up explaining what I did.
You can find my Blue Book (and my Yellow Book) here:
Having hardware fun today preparing for the lab tomorrow when some of our second year students will get control of my little Micro Framework robot. We are writing serial port code that we are sending through the Xbee radio interface to make the robot dance across the carpet.
I love my job.
Early morning guitar shop.
I did another paper review for Radio Humberside this morning. It seems that I’m doing a lot of early rising at the moment. And there is a surprising amount of traffic at 6:30 in the morning.
Anyhoo, we had fun talking about some tech stuff and Twitter. I tweet as RobMiles and Andy Comfort, the breakfast presenter, as andycomfort (which shows we both have the same level of originality I guess).
Andy even let me have some time to chat about PlatformExpo, which is going from strength to strength. It all happens on 27th March and you can find out more here:
We are going to have the results of our 24 hour game development competition, live interactive music and art, demos of 3D technology, digital showcases and I’ll be giving a session about Microsoft Kinect – having not slept the night before. One of those rare occasions where the audience has to keep me awake….
I’m treading the virtual boards again. There’s a Microsoft Certified Career Conference on Thursday and I’m doing a session about Windows Phone development. You can find out more, and sign up, here:
http://www.mscareerconference.com/
The title of the session is “60 Minutes Rock Star: Find out how to become a Windows Phone Rock Star”. It as at 2:30 pm GMT. I might even get my guitar of the wall and lay down some riffs.
Then again, I might not….
I’m really pleased that I took the camera on the trip yesterday. Loads of photo-opportunities. Here are a few more. The rest of the images will appear over time I’m sure.
They had this in the Computing Museum. It is of special importance to me, because it is how I wrote my first programs. It is an IBM card punch. We wrote our program on coding sheets which were then punched onto cards and handed them in to get them run. We used to get three runs a day. I started writing Algol 60 like this, before too long I was using run length encoding to produce Snoopy calendars on the line printer. Happy days.
I had one of these too. A tin calculator that was almost as fast as writing things down on paper.
Then I got one of these. Somewhere in the loft I have “Boots the Chemist” branded slide rule…
This is an ICL (International Computers Limited) 2966 mainframe computer. There is almost as much computing power here as in, say, your MP3 player. The disks on the front can store 80MB each. To put that in perspective, that’s around enough to hold one MP3 album in reasonable quality. We had something similar at the university for a while.
They even had some model railways on display. This is fairly heavily “Thomas the Tank Engine” themed.
Little People
Finally, for now, one of the great highlights. This is the office where Alan Turing used to work. Apparently he used to chain his mug to the radiator so nobody would walk off with it. You really should find out more about the chap. One of the cleverest people there has ever been and an object lesson in how horribly countries can treat their heroes.
We’ve been meaning to go to Bletchley Park for ages. Today, thanks to the efforts of Emma, we managed to get there. It meant that we had to set of really early from Hull, but nobody minded that much.
This is us, gathered in the “Music” room for a briefing. If you don’t know about Bletchley Park, you should. It is how we won the Second World War. All the way through the war this place was effectively a “decoding factory”. Great minds like Alan Turing figured out how to break the German cyphers and an army of engineers, technicians and clerical support staff produced thousands of decoded messages every day. They even managed to build the first electronic computer to read the messages sent by German High Command.
The secrets of what went on in this unassuming country estate only started to come out in the nineteen eighties, over forty years after the end of the war. Now you can walk around, meet up with some of the people who were there and see the machines that were built to crack the codes.
This is what we were up against. A battery powered, portable encoding machine called “Enigma”. By a cunning combination of a plug board and encoding wheels this mapped whatever the user typed onto a meaningless sequence of letters. All the receiver has to do is set up another Enigma machine with the same arrangement of plug board and wheels, type in the encrypted text and out comes the original. The encrypted messages were broadcast so that anyone could receive them (including us) but unless you knew the settings of the the sender all you would see is guacamole.
However, the clever folks at Bletchley Park built machines that could try thousands of possible settings of the machine, looking for stock phrases and exploiting the few weaknesses in the Enigma machines. These devices, called “bombes” (apparently because the Polish mathematician that first thought of them did so at an ice-cream shop and bombe is Polish for a type of ice cream) would click through combinations looking for a “stop” which might be the code settings for that message. And it worked. On an industrial scale. Thousands of people worked on site receiving, analysing and finally sending a steady stream of intelligence back to UK commanders.
Not content with cracking “every day” signals they then moved on to cracking encrypted teletype signals used for high level communication. These were manually transcribed onto paper tape which was then analysed by an electronic computer called Colossus, the world’s first.
This is the five hole paper tape containing the incoming message. This was decoded by hand from graphs of the teletype signal that were read by human eye.
The front of Colossus
Some of the valves
Some of the wires….
That it worked at all was astonishing, nobody had built anything of its complexity before. But work it did, on one memorable occasion the UK high command was able to read messages before they arrived at their German counterparts.
Bletchley Park is also home to a Museum of Computing and a whole host of other interesting exhibitions. But these are for another post.
We clambered aboard the coach just as the museum closed and made our way back to Hull. Great day. Thanks again to Emma for sorting it all out.
We had a couple of presentations in the department today. Team Yellow and Team Purple (Tentacle?) gave the initial presentations for their group projects. To say that the teams had been working together for a week or so and it was their first stand up together they did very well.
One thing that did stand out though was some of the phrases that were used and this brought home to me how you need to be careful how you talk in front of an audience, particularly if you want to convince them you know what you are doing.
For example take the phrase “User Friendly”. It is all very well to say “We are going to produce a user-friendly solution”. You want to convey that you think this aspect of a system is important. However, saying it like this is pretty much meaningless. The customer is not expecting you to produce something that is “user-hostile”, but the phrase could also be expressed as “We’re not going to make something that acts as if it hates you”.
It is far better to say what you are actually going to do to solve the problem. “We are going to closely involve the end user in the design and implementation so that they find the system easy to use.” is a much better way to express your intentions. Take a similar approach when you talk about security. Rather than saying you think something is important you must say what you are going to do about it.
The other thing that came out from the presentations was partly my fault. I’d said earlier that it is very important to make the customer aware of those aspects of the system that you are not going to implement. For example, you might be expecting the customer to back up the data rather than providing data backup as part of your solution. You need get this over, but I’m not sure you should have have a slide with the heading “Things we are not going to do”. It is far better to say things like “The server infrastructure that you are using will be used to back up our data along with that from other systems”. This puts the responsibility in the right place without sounding like you are avoiding work.
If all this sounds a bit like the dread “marketing speak” then I’m very sorry about that, but I do feel that it is important that you make sure that things you say are backed up with a some kind of action plan and you should avoid sounding negative about your intentions.
When I had my iPhone I used to enjoy browsing the App Store and downloading and playing with little programs. You could pass an hour or so spending a couple of pounds on things that caught your fancy, searching for that neat app you could show of in the Tea Room the following day.
Windows Phone Marketplace is nowhere near as full as the App Store, but it has now reached the point where I can go in there and pull out some diverting programs. Here are a couple I’ve found recently. Both are free and both are fun.
This gives you your own personalised fireworks display on the phone, that you can drive by tapping the screen. There is a good range of different firework types and colours with satisfying explosions and even haptic feedback (the phone vibrates when the fireworks go off). You can capture images of the displays and also use any picture as the backdrop. Great fun, if totally useless, and free. Search the Marketplace for Fireworks.
This program is excellent. It is a dictionary of British Slang. If you want to know the true British meaning for words like Gazump and Wally you can use this program to find out. It also defines some words that you might not want your kids using, but it might even be useful for those of you around the world not from these shores, and it is very amusing for us locals too. Another good, free app. Search the marketplace for “British Slang Free”.
The first “Lucky” winner of a copy of my book. Sorry about the picture, I didn’t take it.
We had our first Admissions Open Day of 2011 today. Thanks for coming folks, hope you enjoyed the day. I did my talk and then at the end we had a prize draw for a copy of one of my XNA books. I was going to have a second prize of two books, but I couldn’t find any more….
Some more of the assembled throng. Hope you had a good journey back.
In celebration of my new book those nice people at O’Reilly asked me to share some words of wisdom on their Answers site. I’m not normally known for being wise. I actually asked my dentist to put in some wisdom teeth the last time I had a check-up. However, if you want to find out what I came up with you can go here:
http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/2456-robs-tricks-and-tips-for-a-better-programming-life/
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
Begin to Code with JavaScript is now available for purchase and download. You can find it here
