We went to see the latest Bridge Jones movie today. It's good. Nothing much that you might not have been expecting, but very well done. Happened across this rather nice sunset view from Princes Quay. Not a bad result for a phone camera.
Did some tidying up today. The experience with my office has taught me a valuable lesson.
"If you don't know you've got something, you might as well not have it"
I've been looking for things I didn't know I had, and then chucking them out. It's going quite well, what with two trips to the tip so far.
This is one thing that I definitely know I have, and so I'll be keeping forever. It's my prized Sony TC-270 tape recorder. It might not look much, but thanks to its snap on speakers and ability to play music for several hours non stop (and quite loudly) it made me, if not a god amongst men, at least someone who could get the party started in my younger days.
Apparently it was made at a time when all silicon transistors was something to brag about. It contains about twenty or so.
Update: Done some digging. Just 18 transistors and 4 diodes. Your phone probably has several million. And they're silicon too.
I took this picture in Chicago and I've only just got around to fiddling with it. I think it would make a good album sleeve picture (if we still had albums and sleeves).
There were some scooters down at the Hull Marina today. The Hull Scooterists were heading off on a charity run and they'd gathered in the sunshine before setting off. Some of the scooters were awesome. I took some pictures and of course the shot I really wanted to get came out blurred.
Note to self. Just because it looks sharp on the camera screen doesn't mean that it is actually sharp.
But these lights came out OK.
Well, that's it. My office is eerily empty. I've filled around thirty bags with rubbish and I've handed my keys in. Technically I'm still on the payroll of the university until the end of the month, but I'm not really working here any more. It's been very strange to watch the people around me planning for a whole bunch of things that I'm not going to be part of.
I'm going to miss so many things about the university, particularly the staff in Computer Science and our amazing students, but I've got one or two silly plans (some of them involving cheese) and I'm looking forward to seeing what happens when I start with them.
Of course I'll still be blogging. And maybe even the odd podcast and other things. The new C# Yellow Book will be out next week (apologies for the delay, it's been a busy week) and I've got some other ideas in the pipeline. It's going to be rather liberating to be able to spend time on stuff that I find interesting, and you can be sure that I'll be writing all about it.
Click through for the full 360 degree experience....
We had my "leaving do" today. Organised by Helen with her customary efficiency and good humour. There was tea. And cake. And great people. I been working at the University of Hull. But the folks I've been working with are what has made it worth sticking around for 38 years.
They are all awesome. I made this point as I said thanks to everyone for my lovely leaving gifts (posh pens, a silver photo frame and a lump of credit to spend on gadgets at Amazon. They know me well...
Some things in life I worry about. But as long as we have such a wonderful bunch of folks who care about what they are doing, the future of Computer Science in Hull is in great hands.
I've mentioned the Amazon Echo before. It is rather nice. Up until now the only way to get one was to import it yourself, which is what we do. Works a treat, as long as you are OK with only knowing the weather in Seattle.
Anyhoo, after my positive review Amazon have decided to release it in the UK. Which means all kinds of useful UK services including trains, news and weather. I'm not completely sure how much of the american version will work once there is a "proper" version of the device in the UK, but even with it's slightly truncated feature set we've found it pretty useful.
This is what my office looks like just now. In three days it has to be completely empty.
Deep breath.....
We got the latest copy of the C# Yellow Book back from the printers today. We had a whole bunch of copies printed for the new first year course, and to give away on Open Days.
This is the "Cheese" edition. The changes are mainly evolutionary. Thanks to everyone who contributed comment and pointed out mistakes. The pdf version will be going live later in this week. Then I'll update the Kindle version.
Went to Dalby Forest today. Wonderful place. I came over all artistic and took the above picture of the trees reflected in the lake.
A Hull Pixelbot needs a pixel. The clue is in the name. Actually, having played around with it for a while, I think it needs a lot more pixels. I started using the 16 pixel rings but I found these both easy to destroy and rather pricey. An expensive combination. So instead I've tracked down these 12 pixel rings on AliExpress. They are slightly larger than the 16 pixel ones, they have fewer lights (the clue's in the number folks) but they work very well.
And you can get five of them for eight pounds 17 pence, post free from China. Result. Mine arrived last week. Unfortunately I wasn't at home at the time, so they were sent to the Post Office parcel depot for me to pick up.
In "The Good Old Days" (tm) the depot was on the side of the Post Office where I live, so I could have my parcel after a short walk. Today, thanks no doubt to "the total commitment of the Post Office to a quality parcel delivery and collection experience for all its customers", the parcels must be picked up from a depot which is a thirty minute drive away, with a tiny car park and, from the postcodes I heard being given by the folks ahead of me in the long queue, serving the entire city of Hull.
Ugh.
If the Post Office is in any way concerned about losing its parcel business then this is exactly the way to go about it. Nothing wrong with the two poor folks serving the queue of about 20 people that had accumulated by the time we got there on Saturday morning - they were making the best of a bad job, but only a person powered by a spreadsheet could have come up with such a stupid and inconvenient "improvement" in the way I get my post.
We had a great time at the c4di hardware meetup last night. We had some more new faces drop by, including one family who were out for a walk around the waterfront and just came into see what all the fun was about. This was great for me, as I was able to try out some HullPixelbot arenas that I'd made up.
The idea is that you get a robot, an arena and a programmer interface that makes the robot move and turn. And then you have to navigate the robot from the start to the finish.
The one on the left is quite simple, except that you don't know what the numbers used to control the robot actually mean.
Anyhoo, we managed to navigate the above arena and make the robot stop in exactly the right place. Then we moved onto a more complicated one and then I got clever, tried to make the robot retrace its steps and had it turn the wrong way and nearly fall off the desk. On well.
The great news for me is that the folks who happened to drop by left with a kit of parts for the robot chassis and the intention to come back with a completed robot for the next Hardware Meetup.
If you want to come along the meetups are open to anyone who fancies a bit of hardware fun and games. You can sign up here.
I really like The Conversation. It's driven by content produced by academics from around the world and it provides a good read on a huge variety of subjects. Occasionally they ask me to write bits and bobs for them. I've just written something about what happens when you reboot your computer, and why you have to do it. You can find the text here.
If you want to hear me talking about reboots, and telling one of my favourite jokes in all the world, you can find me on the Conversation Anthill podcast here.
And, just to prove that I'm a complete media mogul, you can find a printed version of the article in the i newspaper today too.
Well, that was fun. Turns out that you can drive down to Reading, do a TechDays session and then drive back all in one day. It was quite hard work, but it was nice to visit Thames Valley Park again. I've been there quite a few times over the years.
Anyhoo, the session was a hoot. Thanks to Martin for doing an excellent job of keeping me on the straight and narrow. The sessions were all recorded and should be released onto Channel 9 later this week.
I'm doing a presentation at TechDays Online tomorrow. So of course tonight I'm working on the code for the final demo. I've got three copies of Visual Studio running above. One talking to the robot controller Arduino, another driving the robot network esp8266 and a final one building the Universal Windows Application that will control everything. I've not had so much fun in a while.
I'm on tomorrow at around 4:00 pm. Tune in and find out how far I got........
..the robot with two brains....
I've just found, to my great delight, that although the printed copy of my new book is not yet available, it is now available on Amazon Kindle.
Of course I've bought a copy. I might even get a fraction of the price I paid back again.....
I've only got as far as Chapter 3, but I'm liking it so far...
The software for the Hullpixelbot is coming along nicely. I'm using the amazing esp8266 chip to provide a WiFi connection to the robot and network them all together. Snag is each robot (and whatever we use to tell them what to do) needs to know the network address of all the other robots.
There's a technology known as mDNS that is supposed to make this easy. It's a local area network version of the Domain Name System that ties the internet together. It uses cunning broadcasts so that systems can find themselves and exchange messages. It's also the basis of the Apple Bonjour zero configuration networking, and there's now an api you can use with Windows 10 Universal Applications to allow them to find and use devices on the local network.
I couldn't make it work. I tried for a few days and then I used an old software development trick. I asked someone for help. That someone was number one son, who actually took the trouble to read the DNS documentation and tell me what I was doing wrong. And we fixed it.
During our investigations we used an awesome tool called Wireshark. This can capture all the packets on a network, and then provides a set of fantastic tools that let you decode the messages. I think it's great fun to play with, even if you don't have a problem to solve. There's something fascinating about seeing all the messages bouncing around the cable.
The good news is that we'll be able to appear with a bunch of Hullpixelbots, turn them on and have them all find each other and be found by other machines. I'll publish the software when it's in a state fit for the outside world.
I do like York Minster.
Smoke alarm with free advice to would-be artists
During recent household decorating shenanigans we lost our Smoke Alarm. So I bought a replacement, what with not wanting to wake up dead one night. The new smoke alarm is probably very good at detecting fire. It's definitely very good at detecting steam. It went nuts after I'd had my shower, much to my annoyance. It's in exactly the same spot as its predecessor, which was no problem at all.
A quick search of the Amazon reviews found that yes, this model is known for steam powered false alarms. Incidentally, the reviews for smoke alarms were an interesting read. There were lots of reviews mentioning how small and neat the alarms were, how quickly they were delivered, but hardly any along the lines of "If it hadn't gone off that night when the bread maker started to smoulder we'd all have died in our beds...."
However, the good news is that a proper search of the area turned up the original (and a lot newer looking than I remember) alarm which has been fitted with batteries and is now working a treat. At least I think it is.
Went out to take a picture of the sky tonight but I missed the actual sunset bit, and I'd forgotten I still had the fish-eye lens on the camera.
Oh well.
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
