Name the console

Well? Can you?

Last Chance for Free Food

If you want to come to the Finalists BBQ and get some free meat (vegetarian options will be available too) then you need to get your tickets from the departmental office before the end of tomorrow (Wednesday 23rd). The BBQ is open to all 3rd and 4th year students (1st and 2nd year students don’t need to worry as we’ll be doing something similar next year and the year after).  It is on Monday 28 May in Sanctuary from 2.30 pm to 5.30 pm.

If you prefer free pizza (or want to have both) the Microsoft Windows 8 developer camp will end with free food too. It’s on Wednesday June 6th and you can sign up here:

http://hullwindows8.eventbrite.com/

Teaching in “Sometimes Useful Shock Horror"

If any of my students ever want to bring me a completed exam script I’m always happy to “mark” it in front of them. Quite a few take advantage of this and it really helps their grades (folks on 08120 – there’s still time before Thursday)

I’ve spent some time today going through answers and I’ve noticed something that worries me every time I see it. Some of the answers were just about spot on, but didn’t leave me with the impression that the student giving them really knew what they were talking about. It was as if they were just giving responses that they had learned, rather than speaking about something they understood. Now the thing is that this approach probably works fine if you are learning about Kings and Queens of England, but it is very different when we are teaching something that we really want you to apply. A lot of the stuff that we are teaching is intended to be applied to solve problems.

The thing to remember, if you are stuck in this revision thing, is that it is much more sensible to put effort into trying to understand the topic that it is to work really hard just remembering things. I never really got to grips with the piano because I was too “lazy” to learn how to sight read music for my left hand. So I’d just learn the left hand bit in time for the lesson that week. Of course, eventually this technique broke, when I found that the next exam had a “sight reading” test.

Learning to program is like this. You can learn “If a class implements an interface it must contain implementations of all the methods specified in the interface for it to be possible to create an instance of that class”. Or you can work out that we have interfaces so that we can build systems that deal with objects in terms of what behaviours they have (these are the methods specified in the interface) rather than the class hierarchy that they are part of.

Knowing the former will get you half the marks in the exam. Knowing the latter will let you create a mechanism whereby all the objects in your solution, the receipts, customer records, addresses, invoices and product descriptions, can be sent to a printing process that just asks them to print, and doesn’t care what type of object they really are because all the objects implement the iPrint interface which contains a “PrintToPaper” method.

If you want me to go through any of this stuff please come and see me and I’ll be happy to do just that. You can also post questions on the forum, and use the Twitter tag #08120Revision for quick questions. And don’t forget that we are not telling you this stuff so you can reflect it back to us in exam answers, we are telling you this stuff so you can use it to make things work.

I always find it amusing when students come back to me after a while on the course and say “That thing you taught us, turns out it is actually useful”.

Well, duh.

Thwaite Gardens Open Day

Last year we went to Thwaite Hall gardens. And this year we went again. The weather was nowhere near as nice, but the grounds themselves were just as amazing as ever. I find it really hard to believe that this area of woodland, complete with lake, is just round the corner from where we live. I think last year’s pictures were better, but that didn’t stop me from having another go.

There are apparently some very rare trees here, but to me they all just look lovely.

One of the greenhouses.

Very Short Fiction

There was a thing in the paper last week about writing really, really, short stories. I thought I’d have a go. With apologies to Arthur C. Clark…..

I asked “How do you manage to avoid being found out?”. The wizard smiled and said “Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology".

Scary Phone Calls

Had a very scary phone conversation today. And made a fool of myself too. It started with a letter on the mat when I got home. “Please ring the Barclaycard fraud hotline” it said in letters that weren’t particularly large and didn’t sound that friendly either. It was signed by someone whose name I forget. But when I rang the number, that person answered. The man himself.

This totally threw me. Barclaycard is a big company. I really didn’t expect to get straight through to the person who wrote the letter. And only yesterday I’d had a phone call from someone at “Windows Support” anxious to tell me about a virus that he knew was on my computer (although he didn’t know my name – asking only to speak to “The person who lives at your address”). Anyway, the chap from Barclaycard started asking me security questions and I started thinking about a scam model where you send someone a letter with a phone number on, get them to ring the number and then ask them for some security questions. And so I asked “How do I know you’re from Barclaycard?”. This threw him. After a while (during which he must have thought some interesting things about me) we decided that I should ring the number printed on the card and talk to them instead. I thanked him and rang off.

I called back on what I now thought would be a proper number and it was all above board. A company I had bought something from a while back had suffered a security breach and my card was therefore “under suspicion”. I get a new card soon, with a different number.

It struck me afterwards that what I did was almost sensible. If the bank is going to spend effort making sure I’m who I say I am, then I should probably put some effort into making sure it really is the bank I’m talking. Although next time I’ll just check the website first.

Please Do Learn to Code

Tuesday night was not a happy one in the “Land of Rob”. First off I read this post from Jeff Attwood which argued that it is pointless for “normal” people to try and learn to program. Most depressing. Then I watched some of The Matt Lucas Awards Show, a rather vacuous and self-congratulatory program where the “celebrities” were invited to identify the subjects they hated most at school. One said “Maths”, another said “Computer Science”. They followed up with examples of why they hated the subjects so much, and even brought on an obviously very talented maths teacher just to make fun of her. Ugh and Ugh.

Two sides of the same coin. An expert telling non-experts not to bother learning their subject and two apparently “successful” people who seemed proud of the fact they hated the same subject. Two rules I work by:

1. Never be proud of your ignorance.
2. Never dismiss those who you think know less about something than you do.

The only great thing about this is that today Scott Hanselman, a proper computer person and almost a celebrity, turned up with the perfect response in his blog.

Update on 2012-05-17 14:14 by Rob

This post from Alfred is pretty good too.

Computer Science Finalists BBQ

We will be having our first ever Department of Computer Science Finalists’ BBQ this year on Monday 28 May in Sanctuary from 2.30 pm to 5.30 pm.  All year 3 and year 4 students and staff can turn up and get free food. (which might not include any of the items in the picture above)

If you fancy coming along you can get a ticket from the Departmental Office (you need a ticket to get the food).  I’ll be there, of course, because to me the best tasting food is free…..

Phones 4 U Do Customer Service

I rang my dad last night. Mentioned my new phone, as you do. “I can’t understand you.” he said. “It’s simple”, I explained, before going into great detail about the complex financing infrastructure that I had carefully put in place so that he would appreciate that I was not being profligate with money and was putting into place all those rules of fiscal good behaviour that he had taught me. “No” he replied “I can’t understand what you are saying, your voice is distorted”.

I rang myself up (one good reason for having a landline). He was quite right. I couldn’t understand me either. Turns out that my lovely Lumia 900 is brilliant at everything except making phone calls. If you turn the volume up during a call then the sound gets progressively more broken up until you hit the level 7, at which point you sound like a dalek with a bad cold. Oh dear. It looks like it is a problem with the noise cancelling part of the device picking up sound from the speaker and trying to cancel it, and then getting stuck in a loop. Whatever it was, not good. From the posts on the Nokia forums there are a few folks having this problem. While I can solve the problem by not turning the volume above 7 I’m not particularly happy with this solution, the worst thing being that I sound fine to me, it is just the person at the other end that can’t hear anything sensible.

So this lunchtime it was off down to Phones 4 U in Princes Quay, where I bought it. Fortunately the problem is really easy to demonstrate, and they were happy to make a swap for a working device. They were very good about this, and so I was left with just one more problem to solve. On Saturday I’d linked my Zune Pass to my new phone (mainly so I could get the new Garbage album onto it). You are only allowed to change your Zune Pass devices once a month, and so I was worried that I’d have to wait another 28 days before I could carry Shirley Manson et all around with me again. Not so. Zune support has an interactive chat mode that works very well. Rather than hanging around on call waiting you just wait for the message window to open and then type in your question. Up and sorted within five minutes.

I’m a bit sad that I lost a lunch-hour sorting out a problem that should not have arisen. But I’m very pleased that Phones 4 U and the Zune people responded so quickly and constructively.  Marks and Spencer could learn from them.

Going the Distance

This came up on the car this morning. I had to stop and take a picture, as I’d come over all “IBM PC”.

Nokia Lumia 900

The guy serving me in the chip shop on Friday caught a glimpse of my Lumia 800. “Good phone that.” he observed. “A mate’s got one. My iPhone is up for renewal soon and so I thought I’d get one as well”. Smooth move.

I really like my Lumia 800. The latest update has removed the only real issue I had with it, the battery life is now excellent. Of course, I’m selling mine now. On Saturday I went up town to not look at, and definitely not buy, the new Nokia 900. Which you can get in White at Phones4U. So I didn’t go in. And I didn’t look at it. And I definitely didn’t want one. But then…..

Having done all the maths and looked up the price on ebay of Lumia 800’s I concluded that if I sold my old iPhone (which I’ve been keeping for mainly sentimental reasons) and my Samsung Omnia 7 plus a few other bits and bobs I could run out even on the deal if I bought an unlocked device. Particularly as the chap in the shop uttered the magic phrase “It does tethering”. This means I can use the phone as a WIFI access point for any other devices that want to talk to the internets on the move. Tethering is promised for the Lumia 800, but my reasoning here is that it is not guaranteed that all carriers will enable it. However, if I have an unlocked device I can just turn it on and it will work. Which I have, and it does.

There is nothing wrong with my Lumia 800 at all. All the problems are with my eyes and fingers. I find the screen just a tiny bit too small to read easily and the keyboard is just a bit too tiny for my lanky fingers to find their way around. It is on eBay at the moment and I’ve had some expressions of interest already.

Changing phones was not too bad. Microsoft Exchange made sure that my address book moved over with no problem. All the pictures from the phone are already on Skydrive. The only real problem is that I’ve lost all my SMS conversations, but I can live with that. The Lumia 900 is properly lovely. I might even show it to the bloke in the chip shop.

Tight–Loose-Tight

I don’t usually regard The Apprentice as a ready source of business acumen. Still less The Apprentice You’re Fired. But a couple of weeks ago they had a chap on, forget his name – think he runs a chain of restaurants, who said something I thought was very sensible. He talked about his philosophy for team management. He said that he used a “Tight – Loose – Tight” approach.

• Tight – get your team together and make sure that everybody is absolutely clear about what you are all doing, the part that each person must play in the enterprise and what they must deliver.
• Loose – let the people get on with it. Don’t interfere with what they are doing or insist on doing it “your way”. (He made the point that this requires quite a bit of bravery and trust on the part of the project manager)
• Tight – once everyone has done their bit, get the team together and make sure that everything has been done and have got where want to be.

I quite like these ideas, I think they are probably enshrined in a management textbook somewhere, but I don’t know much about management, I just try and get things done and make everyone happy.

Marks and Spencer and the Inverse of Service

I’ve mentioned the book The Thank You Economy before. If you are in the business of providing things for other people you should read it. One of the central tenets of the text is that you should regard a failure on your part as a chance to show just how good you are in “failure mode”. The idea is that if you shine in this aspect of the business then you can create your own evangelists. At the very least you will prevent people from moaning about you in blog posts.

Marks and Spencer have not read this book. Or at least the lady serving us today hadn’t. We were returning something that had broken. And we were told that “Because it is part of a two part set we have both parts so that it can go back to the suppliers”. Now, from a Marks and Spencer business process point of view this probably makes sense. But from a “Customer with a broken thing point of view” it sucks. It meant that we had to go home, find the other bit, and come back again.

I hate it when people try to make their problems my problems. It is not my problem if someone sells me something that subsequently breaks. It up to them to fix it. If they immediately try to bat the issue back to me I reckon this is wrong. In the end of course, being British, we meekly went away to find the other part, but if I’d been on my own, without the civilising influence of number one wife, and there hadn’t been a queue of people waiting behind us, I think I would have had a go at getting a happier outcome there and then.

The item in question was not expensive and there are much worse things that can happen to you than having a dodgy customer service experience. However, the thing that most upset me was the sense of an opportunity being missed. Rather than making happy customers (who they presumably want to come back some time in the future) they have made us a bit less inclined to shop there and look somewhere else next time.

Windows 8 Camp at Hull

On June the 6th we are having a Windows 8 Camp at Hull. The aim is to get students building Windows 8 applications and to help this along Microsoft are going to come up to see us and get things started. If anyone at Hull fancies getting involved then they can sign up for here:

http://hullwindows8.eventbrite.com/

The format will be the same as the Windows Phone Camp earlier this year, and there will be pizza…

Along with the event Microsoft will also be selecting applications and games produced by students to be fast-tracked into the Windows 8 Marketplace. Places for this are strictly limited and each proposal will be assessed individually. If you want to get involved with this, step one is to join the Windows 8 developers Linkedin Group for UK developers http://linkd.in/ukw8apps. If you are a student and you aren’t on Linkedin you should be. Once you have signed up and joined the group you can start putting together ideas for a Windows 8 program to pitch.

Samsung Series 7 Slate Rocks

I blame Black Marble. A week or so ago Robert (Boss) Hogg and Steve Spencer from the company came over to see us and give a presentation on professional software development. Very good it was too. As we were chatting at the end of the session the conversation turned to tablets. I mentioned the Samsung Series 7 Slate that I fancied and Boss said “Oh, we have a few of those. Found a very good price on the internets and Samsung are doing a “VAT back” offer that makes them even cheaper”.

And that was me sold. I had to sell some cameras and lenses to get there, but for a price slightly higher than a fully loaded iPad I’ve now got a really proper portable tablet. It has an i5 processor and 4G of ram, which makes it the second fastest machine I own. The only slight snag is that it has a small-ish 64G internal SSD, but since I’ve been using Live Mesh and Dropbox to store my data I’m used to making do with carrying fairly small amounts of data around with me. At the moment I’ve got pretty much all the software I need loaded up along with data and I’ve still got over 20G left. If I want to take some movies with me I can put them onto a micro SD card and pop them in the slot on the top. I can also be very confident it will play anything without conversion because at the end of the day its a PC.

One standout feature is the Wacom pen support. There is multi-touch of course, but I can also write on the screen surface with a digitiser pen. I can’t really put into words how good this is. The OneNote program, which I’ve always liked but never had the right platform for, suddenly comes alive. I can convert my dodgy handwriting into text and search it, and put my documents into Skydrive for instant sharing. Taking notes in meetings will never be the same.

The tablet also comes with a docking station which gives me HDMI video out and a second USB port (could really do with more). I’ve got at least four hours of use out of my first charge of the battery.

Last night I put Windows 8 on it, following the instructions on the Samsung Windows 8 Preview site. The only really scary bit was deleting every partition on the disk so that I could get the installer to complete, but after that everything went well. And it just works.

I love my iPad, but I hate using it to create anything larger than an email. The Samsung gives me a touchy interface that makes it easy to consume data, plus raw power and a productive environment and all my familiar tools. And a fantastic pen based interface. This and Photoshop would be awesome.

This machine has even replaced the twisty tablet in my affections. I reckon this is a little slice of the future and when Windows 8 launches and these become the norm there is going to be a second wave of tablets coming along, but these will be properly useful.

One note of mild warning: There has been a bit of kerfuffle about problems with the screen glass coming away from the bezel. Some people have had problems with this, particularly with early versions of the hardware. Mine doesn’t look like it is prone to this and the rate of reports of the problem are dying down a bit at the moment. It is hard to make things this small and slim without there being some manufacturing issues. I remember that my first iPhone 3g wasn’t exactly well stuck together, with an overlap on one edge that made the sides not quite flat, but it worked fine for the time that I had it. However, if you are buying one second hand I’d advise that you take a careful look at what you are getting.

Hull Programme and Module Catalogue

Here’s a trick, if you want to take a look at what we teach at Hull and how our courses fit together you can take a look at the university module catalogue here.

https://www.courses.hull.ac.uk/

You can search by course code or department and get the learning outcomes and assessment mechanisms for all our modules.

Think of the User

I’ve jut spent the day in the programming labs looking at first year work. When I go to bed I will not be counting sheep, but Sweepy Cleaner games and Bank applications.

Some of the work was astonishingly good. One thing I did notice though was quite often the applications (I’m thinking mainly bank here) were a bit hard to use. Sometimes to achieve an action you had to move to a menu, type something in, press a button, click a confirm dialog and then click another dialog to acknowledge a message that you’d done the task. I often made the point that if there were 1,000 bank accounts to be entered these actions would add up pretty quickly and lead to a bunch of very unhappy users.

If you are making anything with a user interface you must show it to some users. Saying “I did it this way because I thought it would work the best” is not really a recipe for success. Getting someone to use it, or using it yourself for a few transactions will quickly bring home whether or not an application is easy to use.

Weather Flow for Windows Phone

There are loads of weather applications for Windows Phone. Today, on a whim, I bought one. Weather Flow looks lovely. It also has really nice Live Tiles. There are only two things I don’t like about it. It can be a tad slow to find the weather information (although nothing terrible) and it doesn’t have exactly where I live on its list of locations.  Worth a look though.

Recovery For Idiots

I’ve just invented a new policy for all those important disks that you get with cameras and computers which become so important when you subsequently try to sell your old stuff on ebay.

As soon as I get them I’m going to throw them in the bin.

I’ve just spent a chunk of the day looking for a set of mysteriously vanished drivers and they would seem to be completely lost. If I’d chucked them away as soon as I got them, rather than put them “somewhere safe”, I’d be in the same position as I am now, but at least I’d have not wasted all the time getting here.

Don’t Buy Dodgy SD Cards

Some time back I bought a couple of economically priced cheap SD cards. They were rated at category 10 (the fastest you can get) and were huge (32G). They were from a shop based in the Channel Islands who have sold me good stuff in the past. I can’t precisely recall their name, but I seem to remember that they are open all week.

Anyhoo, one failed shortly after purchase and the other has developed the interesting ability to turn filenames into guacamole and move datestamps into 2315. Having thought about this properly I’ve decided that perhaps I should have spent the same amount of cash on cards that were around a half (or perhaps even a quarter) the size but were from companies that I’ve actually heard of. It is very unlikely that I’ll wander out and take 650 pictures in a single trip (even assuming I’ve got enough battery power to do this).

I’ve come to the conclusion SD cards are one area where false economy will not just fail to save me money, but also raises the possibility that I might not get my pictures back home.