Hello from Paris

Pointing the fat lens at the tower

Well, this is nice. I'm in Paris for the Microsoft Devices and Networking Summit 2015. A chance to look at some very interesting embedded stuff. In Paris. What's not to love. The hotel is just down the road from the Eiffel tower. So of course I headed over there.

I took the stairs

Not a bad place to reach your steps goal....

I love the Eiffel tower. Fantastic place. And great for photographs too. If you want to see full size versions of the pictures you can click through to the images on Flickr. The conference starts tomorrow. Can't wait.

I love these telescopes

View from underneath

Not a bad view from the balcony

Very nice reception

Just got back from a great reception on the 11th floor of the hotel. There were splendid views of the tower from the balcony, and huge glass windows that let give you a great view of the surrounding neighbourhood - but proved quite hard to walk through. Even though I tried. Talk about making an impression.....

I'd love to have stayed longer, but it turns out that I'll be updating module descriptions for the rest of the evening. In Paris. Such is life.

Read "The Innovators"

For the past few weeks I've been working my way through "The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution" by Walter Isaacson. It's a great history of computing, all the way from the letters of Ada Lovelace to the spelling mistake that made Google what it is today.

If "The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage" have whetted your appetite for a book that gives the full story of the machines that underpin so much of our lives you should read this book. Well written and well referenced, with some great background material.

Humber Bridge Cross

We did our Humber Bridge cross for Christian Aid today. We've been doing these for ages. The very first one we did was so long ago it involved a push-chair...

The weather forecast was not great, so we were fully decked out in waterproof everything, but in the end it was just a bit windy, but with some lovely clouds. I took the camera with the fat lens, which made for some interesting pictures..

Happy as a piece of cardboard

Just finished marking the first year assessed coursework and I'm as happy as a happy shaped piece of cardboard packing. Thanks to Jon, Phininder, Septavera and Mike for all your help. 

C4DI Hardware Meetup - You Should Come Along - Really

If you live in the Hull area and have any kind of interest in technology there's a very good chance you'd enjoy a C4DI hardware meetup. They are first Thursday of every month and we have a mix of folks who like playing with computers and hardware and stuff. This month we had a Raspberry Pis of various flavours (which sounds wrong but it's right), flashing lights, amazing embedded devices you can get for less than a fiver and some brilliant discussions amongst other things.

Keep an eye on the Hull Meetup site for the next one.

Monument Value for Windows Phone

For quite a while I've been looking at the game Monument Valley on iPhone and Android and wanting to have a go on my Lovely Lumia phone. 

And now I can.  If you've not seen it before, its a beautifully presented puzzle game with heavy nods to M C Escher.  If you have a Windows Phone (or indeed any other kind) it is well worth a look. 

Student Led Teaching Awards

I was very pleased to find out a while back that I'd been nominated for an award for Innovative Teaching in the Student-Led awards run by the University Union at Hull.

Anyway, tonight was the night when the winners were announced at a  posh dinner at Staff House on the campus. I wore my new suit (no-really) and we had a really lovely time eating and drinking between announcements. I didn't get the award, but I'm really honoured to have made it to top four.

Thanks very much to the students who nominated me and to the Union and University administration for for organising such a splendid programme. 

Recognition Failure at Skidby Mill

Went out for lunch today at Skidby Mill. Very nice. Thought I recognised someone I knew, but lacked the confidence in my identification to go over and say hello. Oh well, sorry Emily. I think it is time I got some new glasses. 

Qwirkle is Fun

If you like dominos you'll like Qwirkle. And if you've not played much dominos I still reckon you'll enjoy it. Players take it in turns to lay down blocks and make lines of matching colours and shapes. We spent a happy hour or so playing the game today.

Cut Price Robot Kit

These are all the bits that you get

I was up town visiting the Red5 gadget shop today (who'd have thought it) when I noticed they had robot kit at substantially less than half price. Of course I bought it. And I've already got plans for spending the money that I saved. Go me.

The robot is big version of the Hexbug tiny ones. It is remote controlled and is able to act intelligently. Sort of. A bit like me.

It's supposed to be suitable for 8 years and upwards, but I reckon you'd really need to be a few years than older than that or have a grown up assistant. There were a few stages where I could have used some help myself. Some of the parts are very similar to each other and their alignment is very important, something you only find out when you've built it and it doesn't work properly. Also the instructions can be hard to decipher, my advice would be use the ones you can find on the web site and zoom in on them a lot.

Reviews online are mixed, and I can see where the bad ones are coming from, but the robot is certainly impressive once it gets going. It has a definite preference for tiled floors, carpets cause it to get a bit stuck because its feet dig into the pile and make turning difficult. However, for the price I paid I reckon it is good value and building it was not a bad way to spend a rainy Saturday afternoon.

Windows 10 on Raspberry Pi

Windows 10 on Raspberry Pi works. In fact it works very well. You can deploy programs from Visual Studio 2015 into the Pi and they just run. You can even put breakpoints in the code while it is running, and remotely debug your code over an IP connection. Just like the "Good Old Days" (tm) when I was putting.NET Microframework code into embedded devices all those years ago. Except that Pi applications have proper .NET behind them and I can build a user interface using WPF.

The hardware connections are abstracted into classes, just like they should be:

const int LED_PIN = 5;
var gpio = GpioController.GetDefault();
GpioPin pin = gpio.OpenPin(LED_PIN);

This makes a pin that the program can use to interact with the outside world.

pin.Write(GpioPinValue.Low);

This sets the pin low.  A program can read and write the status of the pin and bind to events that fire when the pin changes state. This makes embedded development really easy.

Installation was smooth enough, although you'll need a PC running Windows 10 with Visual Studio 2015 RC to get started.

The walkthroughs are well written and accurate. You can get started here:

http://ms-iot.github.io/content/win10/SetupPC.htm

 One tip, if you have any problems getting Visual Studio to work after installation go to this page:

https://dev.windows.com/en-US/downloads/windows-10-developer-tools

Scroll to the bottom of the page and install "Standalone Windows SDK for Windows 10" and "Microsoft Emulator for Windows 10 Mobile". This fixed a few problems I had with stuff not installing properly.

I'm properly excited about this. I'm going to have a go at getting my Galileo to run Windows 10 as well. There are also bindings for frameworks that can talk over Bluetooth to Arduino devices.

Update: Turns out that Galileo doesn't run Windows 10 core, it uses the previous version of Windows. Apologies for any confusion.

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: Buy it

This is a completely brilliant book. The illustrations are fantastic and the research that backs up the content is exemplary. The book starts with the tragic and true story of Ada, Countess of Lovelace and her involvement with Charles Babbage, a 19th century inventor obsessed with the idea of using machines to perform mathematical calculations.

Ada has a background story that you really couldn't make up and the tale of how a poet's daughter became the first person on the planet to really think about what a computer could do is a compelling one.

Once the facts have been dealt with the action moves on into a parallel "Pocket Universe" where Lovelace and Babbage have built their huge steam-powered "Difference Engine" and are using it to solve mysteries and fight crime.

There are even jokes about cheese.

The narrative is littered with historical quotes and insights into maths and computing theory and gives a great introduction to what computers are about and where they came from. At the back you find get a series of appendices that supply plenty of historical context and by the end you really feel for the characters, in both their real and imagined forms.

Everyone should buy this book. It's just wonderful.

Avengers: Age of Ultron

Avengers: Age of Ultron is great big daft movie with mostly loud bits. There is a plot, and it mostly works. And you should go and see it. And buy popcorn. Lots of popcorn.

Vetinari Clock Complete

Tonight I thought I'd build my Vetinari clock. It's a silly thing, but great fun.

Lord Vetinari is a character in the Discworld series of books by the now sadly deceased Sir Terry Pratchett. Vetinari, a powerful ruler of the largest city on the Discworld, has a clock in his waiting room which is designed to unnerve people by ticking irregularly. However, it still keeps accurate time. 

You can get a kit of parts to convert any quartz controlled clock into a Vetinari clock. It uses a PIC microcontroller to generate a sequence of 32 pulses of different lengths which give the appearance of randomness. But the clock still keeps time accurately.

I ordered mine a way back and, after my expensive trip to Ikea on Sunday, I finally got a clock mechanism I thought worthy of the conversion. Tonight I put it together and carefully connected the outputs from the circuit to the driver coil in the clock mechanism. It works a treat. If you are a fan of Discworld who likes soldering you might have some fun with this.

Hmm. Perhaps a video of the clock would make more sense....

LED Table

So, I bought at Hatten table at Ikea yesterday and today I popped a 32x32 LED array into it. I'm quite pleased with the result. I think I'll have to make some proper mountings for this and put a Raspberry Pi in there too. Oooh. Project.

The Mist in the Mirror at Hull Truck Theatre

Some time ago we went to see The Woman in Black. Great play. Go see it. The movie is apparently OK, but for proper scariness you should get to the theatre.

Anyhoo, the author, Susan Hill, has also written a book - The Mist in the Mirror - which has now been turned into a play. We went along to the Hull Truck last night to see it. Very good fun.

For me it wasn't as scary as the Woman in Black though. I think some of this is because the play is an adaption of a book. Books can have as many characters and locations as they like, because words are cheap. But a play needs actors and scenery and stuff. The company did a great job handling the number of different people and it was worth seeing just for the way that the staging worked, but when the same bloke turns up as the third different character in a row you start to notice this and it detracts a bit from the suspense.

The Woman in Black works well because it was written with these constraints in mind and for much of the play it is just two people, but for this production I just thought there were too many moving parts.

I didn't find the story worked that well either I'm afraid, with a whole bunch of exposition at the end that didn't really tie things up.

But having said that, I really enjoyed the night out. Hull Truck is a great venue and it was nice to acquire a bit of culture.

Springing a Leak

I hate water. I'd rather wire up a hundred mains plugs than do anything involving plumbing. Well, perhaps not a hundred. But certainly lots. Today I thought I'd to something simple involving pipework. And of course it all went wrong. After all, it does involve water. Hate the stuff. Have I mentioned this?

We have this fancy water filter thing under the sink and I figured it might be a good idea to replace the filter cartridge. Well, it has been a few years. So I carefully researched the item, bought a couple (in case I break one fitting it) and then successfully made the swap. In five minutes.

I was very impressed with me, as was number one wife. That was, until a puddle appeared under the sink. Turns out that the filter replacing shenanigans  had caused a completely different part of the plumbing to start leaking. I can only think that I must have dislodged something hair-triggered under there. I've tightened things and bent them into a position where I think the leakage has stopped, but I'm now researching replacement bits and bobs to fix the problem properly.

Some time ago I bought a flood alarm from Maplin. This is a little circuit that you can put under your sink and it will sound the alarm if it detects water that shouldn't be there. I got it because we had a rather unpleasant homecoming a while back involving a flooded kitchen. I never got around to fitting it though. I worked out that the only real difference it would make would be to change "coming home to a flooded kitchen" into "coming home to a flooded kitchen and an unpleasant buzzing noise".

I'm now researching Raspberry Pi powered solutions which would mean that in the event of a leak I could receive an email which says "You are going to come home to a flooded kitchen...", which might be an improvement I suppose.

You know you're making progress when you start a scrap folder

I'm doing some writing at the moment. V. exciting. I've spent some time playing with ideas and I've got something that I'm almost happy with. And one consequence of this is that I've opened a "scrap" folder for the project.  Turns out I never feel I'm making progress until I've started throwing things away. 

It might just be me, but my first attempt at something complicated is not usually much good. It's only when I've tried a few things and thrown them away that I feel I'm getting anywhere.

My scrap folder is a big part of this because one of my golden rules about working is that I never really throw anything away. Instead I create a scrap folder and throw it in there. Two reasons for this. The first is that these days I don't think anyone is ever really short of disk space, so deleting things is not necessary. The second reason is that it might be that my "better" idea is actually a worse one, and I need a way back to where I was.

I could use source code control for this I suppose, but since the work is really a collection of documents and bits and bobs it feels a bit like overkill. So I just make a folder called scrap and drop things in there when I don't think I need them any more.

Cortana Speech Library Helper for Windows Phone

I've been playing around with voice controlled adventures ever since I discussed them with someone at a Techdays session a while back. To make life easier I've now made a little helper class that takes away all the hard work from making simple speech enabled applications for Windows Phone. You can find out all about it on the Microsoft UK Developers pages here.

Hope and Glory Coffee at C4DI

Something different at C4DI tonight, with a visit from a bunch of folks from Hope&Glory coffee. I'm not much of a coffee aficionado myself, but number one wife is, and so we both headed out to find out about roasting and blending and whatnot.

Turns out that there is a lot more to this than I thought. Apparently coffee is second to oil as the most valuable commodity traded worldwide, it originated in Ethiopia and has been round the world since. It takes many years training to acquire the ability to properly discern different types of bean and there are only sixty or so people in the UK with the highest level of ability in this area. One of them is from Hope&Glory and we had a fascinating session where she showed off an iPhone controlled coffee roaster and talked about the business of sourcing the right beans, how they are prepared, what happens during roasting and lots of other stuff.

Then we took a look at different ways you can take your ground coffee and make it into a drink.

This was my favourite way to make a brew. In fact, it might turn out to be my favourite way to make any drink ever. It involves naked flames, steam and vacuum power to make a really nice cup of coffee. Heated water is forced up into the top container to mix with the coffee grounds. Then you take away the heat and as the steam in the bottom bulb cools it contracts and pulls the liquid back down through the cloth filter.

A great way to end a dinner party methinks, as long as you don't burn the house down. You can get all the kit from Amazon for around thirty quid. I've ordered mine. Much more exciting than a video game and actually cheaper. I was tempted by this amazing device but I think it is probably a bit expensive even though it looks enormous fun. If you aren't sure how to make any of this stuff work there are some rather nice howtos on brewing on the Hope&Glory site.

We left after an hour or so of learning about coffee, clutching a sample pack of beans. There are three different types of bean available from the Hope&Glory site. The prices are reasonable for coffee this nice and they do free postage, with the packets designed to fit through your letterbox and be waiting on the mat when you get home.

I still don't really think of myself as much of a coffee drinker, but after tonight that could change...