Oyster Festival
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I’ve never been to an oyster festival before. And I’ve never had oysters from the BBQ before. Both were great.
New Orleans Saturday Morning
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My cure for jetlag is to try and get eight hours sleep each night. Snag is, that we went to bed so early that we had completed our sleepings by four thirty in the morning today. Oh well. Best plan is to get outside into the sunlight and wait for the body to catch up. So we did. Turns out that there is not much happening at seven thirty in the morning, but we did get to take some pictures.
These places were open.
Why we are here.
Heading for TechEd New Orleans
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Atlanta Airport has a nice ceiling.
After the excitement of yesterday, today I had to get up bright and early, or at least early, and head off to Manchester Airport to fly to New Orleans.
Such is life. The flights were smooth, everything worked and by the end of the day we were happily ensconced in the hotel. I’m really regretting not being around for the Three Thing Game finals but it was not to be this time. Simon has done a great job of finishing off the competition and you can find out what folks thought over at Hull Comp. Sci. Blogs.
Indeed.
Three Thing Game and Summer Bash
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A whole bunch of teams with their things.
We got our first ever “in week” Three Thing Game going today. We ended up with 18 teams, which was great, and included one from Boss Alien. I’m kind of in a hurry packing for my trip to New Orleans leaving tomorrow (Simon is taking over tomorrow to do the proper work) but I thought I'd post some pictures.
We had the usual routine of things, programming and Pizza. I made a pass through the lab and took a bunch of pictures. You can find them here. We also had a Summer Bash, lots of fun playing “The Resistance” and “Braggart”.
And now I’m off to bed. Which is more than the teams in the Fenner Computer Suite are doing….
C# Yellow Book in Persian
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I was very excited to hear from Rasoul Mohammadi that he and his friends have been busy translating my C# Yellow Book into Persian. You can get an english copy from here:
I’ll post a link to how to get the Persian version (poetry) when it becomes available. Great stuff.
Rob at TechEd 2013
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I’ve finished my preparations for TechEd 2013. I’ve written the presentations, developed a bunch of new demos (including something that involve cheese and something that doesn’t) and also also created a custom Lumia 820 case using the Nokia design on Thingiverse. I’ve printed out a couple in white and they don’t look too shabby. I’ll be giving one away at each of my sessions next week. Come along and be ready to answer questions if you want to win.
If you are coming along to the conference, and want to know when all the Windows Phone sessions are (including mine) then here’s the info. See if you can spot which ones I’ll be doing:
6/3/2013 1:15PM WPH-B202 The Phone That Has Everything the Enterprise Needs: Windows Phone 8
Rob Tiffany 383
6/3/2013 3:00PM WPH-B205 Top Down Guide for Developers: Windows Phone 8
Larry Lieberman 383
6/3/2013 4:45PM WPH-B204 Radical Perspectives on Mobility Strategy
Kuleen Bharadwaj 383
4/2013 8:30AM WPH-B201The Power of Collaboration: Integrating Windows Phone with Microsoft Office 365, Exchange and SharePoint Online
Alan Meeus 383
6/4/2013 10:15AM WPH-B304 All Aboard for the Future of HTML5 Mobile and Hybrid Web Apps for Windows Phone 8 and Windows Tablets
Rob Tiffany 383
6/4/2013 1:30PM WPH-B309 The Windows Phone 8 Networking Survival Kit
Andy Wigley 383
6/4/2013 3:15PM WPH-B303 Build It Once For Both: Writing Code and Designing for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8
Matthias Shapiro 383
6/4/2013 5:00PM WPH-B302 Secrets of Using Background Agents for Windows Phone 8
Rob Miles 383
6/5/2013 8:30AM WPH-B203 Mobile Security in the Enterprise: Windows Phone 8 Answers the Call
Alan Meeus 383
6/5/2013 10:15AM WPH-B308 Using C and C++ in Your Windows Phone 8 Applications
Maarten Struys 383
6/5/2013 1:30PM WPH-B305 Developing Large-Scale Enterprise Mobile Apps for Windows Phone 8 and Windows Tablets
Rob Tiffany 383
6/5/2013 3:15PM WPH-B301Speechifying your Windows Phone 8 Applications
Rob Miles 383
6/6/2013 8:30AM WPH-B207 Manage Windows Phone Enterprise Apps
Robert Hoover 383
6/6/2013 10:15AM WPH-B306 Support Your Demanding LOB Apps With SQLite and Windows Phone 8
Andy Wigley 383
6/6/2013 1:00PM WPH-B307 Creating Windows Phone 8 Apps for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013
Jeremy Thake 383
It looks to me like room 383 is basically Windows Phone Central. I’m also going to “Ask the Experts” on the Tuesday (I’ve actually got some questions) and I’ll be on the Windows Phone Booth (sounds appropriate) on Wednesday and Thursday morning. Drop by and I’ll tell you a really funny joke. Perhaps.
A Japanese Walk
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Tokaido is a game where players seek rest and good experiences while travelling the “East Sea Road” in Japan. It is a nice twist on the board game format and has beautiful artwork on the cards and the board. I didn’t manage to win, but hey, it’s all about the journey, right?
Hull Waterfront
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We had a sort of plan to go to the seaside today. Then we figured that lots of other folks would have that plan too. And so we went for a walk around the waterfont at Hull. We went past the deep and round the old town, had a fantastic Beef and Stilton sandwich at McCoy’s and then staggered home to play some silly Table Tennis in the garden.
Shopping in Leeds
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Went to Leeds today and bought some trousers. And took this photo of one of the arcades.
Big Risk–Big Reward
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I’ve spent a lot of the last few days sitting in on Seed exit interviews. These are actually great fun, although they are also very hard work. They are part of the assessment process for our MEng students. Essentially we get them to write a case for the marks that they think they deserve, and then they come to see us and try to justify them. For more details of the kind of things we are about, take a look at this blog post from Tom.
Anyhoo, the meetings take around an hour each and they can get pretty intense. Students put very strong arguments that they should get 5 out of 5 for a particular category, and we have been known to revise their scores up as well as down. One of the assessment categories has to do with planning. This is always an interesting issue. I made a point of heading straight for the Risk Assessments that we get the development teams to produce for their projects. These are supposed to set out the major risks to a successful outcome of the project.
Managing risk is a very good plan in a project, most of the projects that fail do so because of a failure to identify and track the things that could go wrong. But sometimes folks didn’t seem to quite get the whole story. Most of the Risk Assessments covered things like data loss, changes to personnel and the like, but some missed out the most important risk of all.
“What if we can’t get it to work?”
It is not unknown for a project in real life (and our projects are as close to real life as we can get them) to fail on this one. The system can have a beautifully crafted user interface, a carefully targeted audience and snappy marketing but if it doesn’t work, all this comes to naught. If you ever, ever, get into a development project you should make it your business to put this in the Risk Assessment and then track it. Maybe the Risk can be removed really quickly, once you’ve built a working prototype. Maybe it’s a slow burner, when you have to do a bunch of work and wait on other people before you find out whether it is a workable proposition.
I make this point as often as I can, and I often get the response “Well, Duh! The project is all about making this thing work, why would you add this as a risk?”. That’s true, but I know about projects, and people, and that defect in human nature that tends to push tricky things away into the distance where you don’t have to think about them too hard. Much easier to design that pretty user interface than work on that nasty interrupt handler code, or whatever.
With experience you learn to identify the “stoppers” in a project; the things that, if you can’t make them work, render the project a failure. These go onto the Risks and are tracked regularly to make sure that nothing in the project is built on sand. By the end of the meetings I think that the students we saw had taken this point on board, which I think is a one of the many really useful outcome from this part of the course.
Future Imperfect
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Everyone should read this:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/may/19/driverless-cars-pilotless-planes-jobs-human
The future that is described is quite believable and rather worrying. Particularly if you drive a lorry for a living.
Three Thing Game and Summer Bash
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We are trying something new this year. A Three Thing Game during the week and synchronised with the Summer Bash. Worst case we get the summer to recover. Best case it should be fun. All the action takes place over the 30th and 31st of May. We have a Thing Auction at 1:00 pm on Thursday the 30th of May, a Summer Bash starting at 4:30 in the afternoon of that day, and judging and presentations starting at 3:00 pm on Friday 31st. You can find out more about Three Thing Game here and Summer Bash here. With a bit of luck, I might find you at both.
Finalists BBQ
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We had our Finalists BBQ today. This is pretty much the last free food that students get out of us (except perhaps for the sandwiches at the Degree Ceremony reception in July). Plenty of folks turned up to avail themselves of the various forms of cooked meat (which were all delicious) and talk about old times.
There are some more pictures on Flickr, you can find them here.
Thanks to Warren for paying for it all.
Thwaite Gardens Open Day
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We’ve been to Thwaite Gardens Open Day a few years in a row. We had the best weather a couple of years ago, last year was a bit iffy and we weren’t too hopeful about this year. But in the end it was nice and bright, and the sun even made a guest appearance. The Friends of Thwaite Gardens spend all year making the place look lovely and then we come along, take photographs and have tea and scones.
Thwaite Student Hall. If you live here you get all this loveliness thrown in.
You wouldn’t believe this was right in the middle of suburbia.
Some plant or other (gardening was never my strong point).
We bought some plants for our garden, and we’ll be back next year. If you live in the area you really should go along.
Star Trek into Darkness
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Went to see "Star Trek into Darkness" today. It is truly splendid. Great story, great ending, nods to the original series and film. I'm looking forward to seeing it again, so that I can get more of the references.
The only part of the film that didn't work for me was the uniforms that they all wore to the inevitable dressing downs that Captain Kirk gets from time to time from which ever admiral takes against him. They were really stupid. Think Russian Army circa 1960 mixed with Pan Am flight attendant 1970. But apart from that, excellent film. Go see it.
Update on 2013-05-21 15:14 by Rob
Hmmm. Re-reading this post reminds me of the old car that I used to have with the broken headlights. Most nights it used to be a case of "Start Wreck into Darkness".
How to Fail your Assessed Course Work
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First a note. We don’t have many people that actually do fail their coursework (although, years ago I did manage it by using a variant of this technique involving punched cards). But over the years I’ve seen enough of these to be able to produce a comprehensive guide. This is the sequence that I have found works very well when it comes to failing a software development project. Just follow this fool proof set of instructions for guaranteed failure.
- T-minus 8 weeks: Assignment distributed. Decide to ignore it for now. Put on desk.
- T-minus 4 weeks: Happen to find assignment under pile of dirty socks. Take a quick look. Seems easy enough. Decide to do it later.
- T-minus 2 weeks: Find the assignment again and experience a mild twinge of panic when you look at the submission date. But no time to do it because other coursework is due in now.
- T-minus 1 week: Decide to complete entire program by performing herculean development effort over the coming weekend. Feel much better. Go to pub to celebrate.
- T-minus 2 days: Fire up Visual Studio and write 300 lines of code in one sitting. Which won’t compile. And actually you’ve no idea what it does. Stay up until 2:00am trying different combinations. Ask a chum who has just come back from the pub to take a look. He suggests adding a bunch of curly brackets and semi-colons. Code now compiles and runs. But you still have no idea what it does. Fall asleep at desk and wake up after six hours with key shaped bumps in your cheek.
- T-minus 1 day: Program now fails to compile again after you pasted in some code that you found on the internet that looked like it might do what you want. Decide to seek help. Post a plea for help in a question on Stack Overflow.
- T-minus 12 hours: Check Stack Overflow for answers. “SuperDev99” thinks you should use recursion. “P-Guy” thinks you should really use Python. “Troll95” posts that all C# developers are ugly and stupid.
- T-minus 6 hours: Having had no sleep for 20 hours you decide to re-write the entire system from scratch. It seems like the only way. You write another 300 lines of code. That won’t compile.
- T-minus 1 hour: Program now compiles, but it is alternating between crashing instantly and causing the computer to lock up. Check Stack Overflow again. Find that someone has posted a complete solution to your problem. In Prolog.
- T-minus 10 minutes: Submit program that compiles, runs and prints “Sorry about this” in large friendly letters on the screen. Oh well. There’s always the resits.
Now, of course, nobody actually does all of this. Although I’ve managed most of these tricks at one time or another. Please, please, if you get some coursework, frontload it. Have a crack at the code as soon as you receive the specification and then play with it in the run up to the due date. You don’t have to write all the code at once (in fact this is a bad plan) but you should keep noodling along with the system over the weeks leading up to the hand in. And seek help if you hit problems.
The internet is often very useful, but beware of using downloaded code. Often you end up trying to use some code you don’t understand to solve a problem you don’t understand and getting errors that, wait for it, you don’t understand. Much easier to take your problems down to the lab or to the person in charge of the coursework and get them to help. If you want to post questions, use the forum or departmental Facebook group. At least the folks there will have an inkling of what you are doing and why.
By the end of my university career I was getting reasonable marks for coursework, and this was mainly down to a “starting early” technique.
Nokia Champ Rob
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I found out last week that I've been appointed as a Nokia Developer Champion.
I'm not sure if it is for those WAP pages I used to write for my Nokia 7110 (I actually had a script that would read my email and convert it into WAP so that I could read my mail on the move), but it is rather nice.
Thanks to those of you at Nokia who thought enough of me to make the award. I hope I prove worthy of it.
Bill Bailey at Hull City Hall
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Playing classical music on car horns. And why not?
I saw Bill Bailey a few years back when he came to Hull. And today we saw him again. It is amazing to think that one person can entertain a building full of people by just standing there and being funny. But he can. If you get the chance to see him on this tour, just go. Great stuff.
Deal Extreme for Extreme Deals
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If you are looking for anything electronic, and lots of things strange, then I can reccommend these folks. They have a huge range of stock which changes by the hour and includes lots of exotic and interesting components. They price things in dollars and their delivery is free (but very slow, allow four weeks). You can pay with PayPal, which is nice too.
I had a need for a little USB hub and network thingy and these folks were able serve up just what I wanted, at a very sharp price.
