To be continued.....
So I spent a very happy chunk of today making a drawing robot that very nearly works. I got the kit as my big Christmas present. This drawing robot needs a bit of calibration and I need to stop the paper wandering around the desk, But it was all lovely.
I hope you had as much fun as I did.
..and here it is...
The Photon is a neat little embedded device a bit like the Electric Imp I played with a while back, but a bit cheaper to get started with. You write C code in your browser and the program is deployed over WiFi to the device. The hardware is very like the Arduino. The programs can communicate via the cloud using web requests and there are also bindings for If This Then That.
To be honest, I've not done much with it, but number one son has had a play and things it's quite neat. The only concern I have with these systems is that you are a bit dependent on the cloud backend. I've got a collection of cloud enabled devices that are now just paperweights, and I worry that things like the Photon might go the same way. Having said that though, for the price it is a lot of fun.
The weather yesterday was horrible and nice by turns. I took this picture during one of the nicer parts. I've just pulled if out of the camera and I'm quite pleased with the result.
Baxter the robot came to see us today. He's an interesting fellow. Vaguely humanoid, with a flat screen display that can show a pair of peering eyes and resiliently driven arms that mean he can work alongside humans without inadvertently knocking off heads, poking out eyes etc.
We had a great demo of what he can do, which turns out to be rather a lot. We are looking at involving him in some future research, it would be great if we could get him on the staff at some point.
I'm thinking robot lecturer. Oh yes.
I've been playing with old lenses on my camera for a few weeks now. And yesterday I spent a massive 19 pounds on another one. This is an elderly, but still excellent, Canon zoom lens, probably from the 1980's. It has that lovely zoom action where you pull the barrel towards you to zoom in. One of the things that a long focal length lens will do for you is compress perspective, flatting everything together. You can see the effect at work above, where the church, which is actually quite a lot further away than the other items in the picture, looks a lot more prominent in this picture of Cottingham lights. Great fun.
The lens also took a pretty good picture of part of our tree.
Global Gamejam is awesome. Fact. If you're serious about game development, or just want to have a great time writing code and/or making things, then it is a great thing to get involved with. Iv'e been to a few in my time, and many years ago Simon and I helped organise the very first one in Hull.
I'm pleased to be able to report that the next GameJam is at the end of January and Adam has got the registration site up. The event is running as part of Platform Expos 2016. For Hull students the timing is really nice, as it comes towards the end of the inter-semester gap week, so it won't affect your studies. Although it might help you get a job in the games industry if you do a really good entry.
It can happen.
I've signed up for FameLab. I think you should too. Being able to handle yourself in front of an audience is a terribly useful skill. If you are going to start, it's best to start small. FameLab gives you three minutes to fill with something scientific that you feel passionate about. The Hull heat is on the third of February 2016 and you can find out more and sign up here.
I'm going to speak about why Computer Science is the most important subject of all. Should be fun.
Turns out that making useful software is surprisingly tricky. Take "Magic Marker", the program that we used last week to help out with the marking of the first year coursework. It was simple enough to write, it just finds the coursework from a archive downloaded from the university learning environment, sets up a spreadsheet for the marking process and then puts all the comments back into the correct format for upload. I made it last year and it worked fine. For me.
This year I built it out a bit for use by five markers working in parallel. My plan was to slightly extend the program to merge back all the marked work. This turned out to be surprisingly tricky. Not because of the difficultly of the task, I had the code working in double quick time. The thing that caused the grief was that if you introduce more moving parts into a system the number of ways it can fail goes up exponentially.
This is something I've experienced before. It takes you ten minutes to code up the bit that does the work, and a day to cope with all the fiddly ways in which the program can go wrong. For example, at one point in the assessment process you have to copy the mark from the spreadsheet into the marking took. Of course I forgot to do this for a couple of folks and so my program got upset as a result. So I had to figure out how to mitigate this and then build it into the workflow.
The good news is that having lots of students provides a great way to shake down the solution, and I now have a solution that will be useful going forwards. But this took a bit more coding than I expected. Remember, when you are writing code that the "Happy Path" will probably take you around 10-20% of the development time.
When you are designing the workflow for a system you need to identify all the ways that it can go wrong and then specify what should happen in each. This is something that I tell everyone on the Systems Analysis course, and perhaps I should have followed my own advice a bit more at the start of this job.
We had the smallest Christmas Bash ever this year. I think this was mostly due to poor planning on my part. Our bash clashed with an excellent, and very well attended, event organised by Hull ComSoc.
Anyhoo, pizza, mince pies, crackers and fun was had. We played a bunch of silly games, including the awesome Masquerade, a newcomer called Two Rooms and a Boom (which is great fun). Exploding Kittens, Skull and the ever popular Coup.
There was so much going on that we managed to overrun by an hour. More bashes next year.
Some of the audience. And some of my toys...
Black Marble are a great company. The do lots of splendid free events for software professionals. And, since they've booked a venue and sorted out all the logistics, they run sessions for schools and colleges at the same time. They get a bunch of speakers and we talk about technical and professional issues. I've been lucky enough to be invited to present a few times, in the past I've taken Una my 3D printer along, amongst other toys.
Today I didn't really do a technical talk. Although we had some technology of course. I was more concerned with the business of making a name for yourself. My line on this is that advancing technology is replacing many of the jobs that we used to do. It seems to me that in the future you'll have to get used to changing what you do as machines get better and better at doing things that people do at the moment. This means that the only thing that will be constant during your career will be the brand that is you. I've gave lots of tips about building your brand; you can find the slide deck here.
During the talk I also touched on fun things that you can do including playing with the Arduino embeded device. I said I'd put some links to resources. The Arduino I'd recommend is a kit from Sintron which you can get from eBay. Just search for Arduino Sintron. It's around 25 pounds and really good value:
There are loads of resources on-line, once you've got the kit they send you a link to lots of them. There are some Arduino tutorials here that I wrote a while back. You can get my C# Yellow Book here.
I did my session twice, but I only remembered to take picture of one small part of the audience. Sorry about that. Anyhoo, thanks to Linda and Boss for setting up such a great event. Great fun.
I promised a panorama of the entire second sitting audience, here they are
One of my favourite books ever has won a prize. I blogged about it a while back and now it (or more properly the author, Sydney Padua) has won the British Society for the History of Mathematics 2015 Neuman Prize. Yay!
If you are into computing, history, maths or comics you should have this book. A perfect stocking filler for Christmas, if you are in the habit of wearing quite large, book sized, stockings.
It really is a great book. In fact, I'm going off to have a read of my copy now.
Here are the finished awards, along with the super-rare "Blue Cheese" edition.....
... at a secret rocket and cheese production facility in the North of England....
... I'm making special "Space Cheese Mining" marker awards for all the folks who helped out with the First Year marking this year. I'm going to give them to Kevin, David, Phininder, John, Bailin and Brian to say thanks for their assistance in giving all of our students a great assessment experience and some splendid feedback. Guys, I'll have them for you for Monday.
'nuff said.
For me, there's nothing quite like marking a nice looking, well structured piece of code, giving a good grade and then asking the student "So, when did you start programming?" and then having them tell you that they started in September this year.
One of the few nice things about getting up in the dark is that if all is well you get to see the sunrise when you get to work. Today it was quite a nice one, and so I nipped into the library and took some pictures.
I was up at the top floor which was refurbished last year and turned into an open workspace called "The Observatory". It looks awesome, so I took some pictures of the furniture as well.
This looks to me as rooms from the future are supposed to look....
I've been doing a bit of 3D printing recently and I've had a need for some lens caps for, er, lenses that I seem to have bought recently. I found a design on Thingiverse that looked promising, downloaded it, sliced it and Una, my lovely if rather tempestuous 3D printer, refused to print it properly.
To be honest, I've been expecting problems. I made the mistake of saying to Peter last week that I've reached the point where the printer "just prints" these days. At the time I said this I worried that I may have spoken too soon. And it looked like I was right.
The print just refused to stick to the printing bed. The filament just went out into the air and all over the place. This is usually a symptom of poor alignment of the print head and so I spent a non-happy half an hour today getting the bed height precisely positioned. And it still didn't work. Very annoying.
And then I noticed something odd about the print design. It seemed to be hovering in the air a millimetre or so above where it should be. Turns out that the printer was set up perfectly all along and the fault was with the design itself. I've found a different, less levitated, one and it prints out pretty much perfectly. Oh well, another good lesson hard learned....
At this time of year we do a lot of assessment of our students. This week I'm going to be spending the best part of four days in the lab with a bunch of my colleagues, pointing at bits of code written by students and asking "What does this do?". Great fun.
You might think that we do the assessment so that we can give the students grades. True enough, but to me the assessment is more important than that. We also want to have a framework in which we can talk to each student about the programs they have written, and how to make them better. The marking scheme provides lots of hooks we can use to hang discussions about good program design, documentation and testing.
By the end of each marking session the student will have a number and hopefully they'll have learnt a bit more about software development. Which is kind of the plan.
Not a bad way to spend a Sunday lunchtime. Wander round Cottinham Food Festival, buy a pie from the Hull Pie stand and then go home and eat it.
Lovely.
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
