DDD North was super awesome

The best conferences are the ones where you go and learn a bunch of useful stuff and also like to think that you’ve told a few folks useful things that they didn’t know.

DDD North yesterday was one of the very best. I was blown away by the quality of the sessions, the enthusiasm of the audiences and the sheer good humour of the whole event. I learnt a whole slew of new stuff; from IoT development tools that you can run from you laptop through Mob based development techniques, some nifty .NET library tricks and a lovely take on how to use generics in C#.

I even presented a session of my own which I hope taught people a few new tricks. I was so engrossed in my bits and bobs that I totally failed to take any pictures (which is most unlike me and a measure of the quality of the occasion).

And to make it even better, it was in based in my favourite university and old stomping grounds in Hull, so I just had to get up, grab breakfast and tootle down the road to take part.

Hats off to the organisers for making it all work, the sponsors for paying for great food and a lovely setting and the speakers for taking their time out to spread knowledge. You could pay an awful lot of money in conference fees for an experience nowhere near as good as this one.

If you ever get the chance to go to one of these in the future, you really should.

DDD North is today and I've presented

Sorry for the lack of picture of the audience. I seem to keep forgetting to take one. Anyhoo, the talk has been and gone, the audience were very polite and everything I showed seemed to work. Which was nice.

You can find the slides here.

DDD North is tomorrow and I'm presenting

I’m getting rather excited. It’s DDD North tomorrow. Four tracks of excellent computing content crammed into the lecture theatres in Hull University. A whole day of splendid sessions.

And one from me.

I’m on at 2:30 pm in Lecture Theatre A in the Robert Blackburn Building talking about Azure Functions, Air Quality and a bit of LoRa. I’ve just finished the slide deck and the demos. Should be fun. If you happen to be on campus at Hull you really should come along. I’d love to see you.

Azure Functions with Azure IoT Hub

I really like Azure Functions. I love the idea that you can write pure code that sits in the cloud and just runs. Sometimes all you want is a thing that takes in some data, does something with it, and spits it out somewhere else. You don’t want to build and manage a server, set programs to run on startup, bind them to events and so on and so on. You just want a piece of code with a name and an address.

I’ve been using Azure Functions to capture MQTT messages and store their payload data. This turns out to be extremely easy to do, until you deploy your function in the cloud. Then it stops working. And you scratch your head and wonder what stupid thing you’ve done. You scratch your head, turn on lots of tracing and eventually find that the function is failing on load.

It turns out that one of the configuration items, the connection string to the IoT Hub that the program is using, is not passed over to the settings in the cloud app. You have to manually create the setting for the application and then set it to the required value. Then it all works. Wonderful.

Making the cloud cry

I spent a big chunk of today playing with Azure Functions. They’re awesome. However, at one point I discovered that I’d made the wrong kind of function, and I had to delete it from the Azure Portal.

When you do this you get the sad little message above, with a crying cloud. Awwww.

Digital Teaching Week 2

If you;re on my Digital Technology course today you can find the slide decks here. If you’re not on this course, then don’t bother looking.

Hololens 2 and Kinect for Azure

Microsoft have been busy. And yesterday night they announce what they had been working on, with a new Hololens device and a cloud powered reprise of an old favourite.

The new HoloLens looks lovely. It is apparently more comfortable with the processing power (which is completely contained in the device itself) at the back of the device to improve balance. It also has a neat “flip up” mechanic that makes it easy to get out of the augmented reality it gives you. They’ve also announced a major improvement in the single, principle issue I had with the original device. The augmented display (the computer generated bit that is laid over your view of the world) is now around twice the size of the original, vastly improving your field. of view. Which makes the virtual elements much more impressive. And, as a final flourish, the Hololens now also includes eye-tracking, so the device can work out where you are looking, which should greatly ease interaction and reduce the amount of hand waving you have to do to attract its attention. It looks like another wonderful device that I can’t afford, having a business oriented price tag of around 3,000 dollars.

However, with a bit of luck it might encourage lots of people upgrade, leading to a flood of cut price Hololens 1 devices going onto the market. I wouldn’t mind that at all…

The second big announcement was of the return of the Microsoft Kinect sensor, at a slightly less eye watering (but still clearly business focused) 399 dollars. I loved the original Kinect senor so much I wrote a book about it. For the second sensor I created the awesome Carbonite machine that used to sensor to make a 3D printable object of you embedded in carbonite. The first Kinect was, at the time of release, the fastest selling peripheral ever. Microsoft had high hopes for its successor, in fact for a while it was impossible to buy an Xbox One without getting a Kinect as well. Unfortunately the device never really lived up to is promise on the home front, and the Kinect sensor was quietly retired a while back.

But industry has always found the KInect very useful, and so Microsoft has brought it back. It has the same depth sensor as the Xbox One version, which is fine by me, but that is paired with a much higher resolution video camera and a bunch more microphones. It’s a great way for generating spacial data that can then be processed in the cloud. I’m really pleased to see it back again, and might even see if I can afford to get one to play with.

Hornsea Mere Pictures

We went to Hornsea on Friday. The weather was strangely nice. This might be “Fake Spring” but I’m liking it.

So are the ducks…

Presenting with Surface Go

If you look very carefully at the audience picture for my AI Frenzy talk on Thursday you’ll notice that in the bottom right hand corner you can see a tiny slice of my Surface Go. I’ve used it for presentations in the past and I thought I would again. This time I was running PowerPoint, Visual Studio and the Machine Learning app that I was demonstrating. It worked just fine. I was very keen to show people that you can use such a lowly machine to deliver presentations and it worked just fine. I love this little machine. It is properly portable and properly useful.

AI Frenzy Screencast now available

I’ve recorded a screencast of the presentation that I gave for Barclays AI Frenzy. Such fun.

AI Frenzy at c4di

We had a Barclays AI Frenzy with Codepen Hulll tonight. There was plenty of frenzy in my session, where I built a complete Machine Learning application in around 12 minutes. There were also a bunch of other great sessions from Sherin Matthew who gave a splendid overview of the field, Aparna Garg who showed a lovely example of an advanced AI application and Neil Gordon who talked about research at Hull University and how companies can work with it. 

If you want to see my sample application and the presentation you can find it on Girhub here.

Red Nose Day 2019 is live

II’m doing another Red Nose Day lecture. This time I’m talking all about Air Quality. In Rhyme. Just because it’s important doesn’t mean that we can’t have the occasional (and I do mean occasional) laugh when talking about it.

I’m going to talk about good air and bad air, and then describe how you can get involved and build your own air quality monitors and use them as part of the awesome Connected Humber Monitair project. It might even be interesting and useful, as well as raising some proper cash for great causes.

And David from Eagle Lab Hull is going to bring along some donuts.

As usual, entry to the lecture will be free, but you may have to pay to get out. If you can’t make it to the event then you can still contribute here. And there will be a video. Oh yes. And if I hit my funding target I will wear a tutu. Again.

You can read more about my illustrious Red Nose Day career here.

Digital Teaching Week 1

I had a great time teaching some digital stuff today. I said at the time that I’d put the slides and stuff up on the internets, and here it is.

I also mentioned some links to useful Karnaugh Map videos, they are here:

Slow and Steady Prints the Best

What failure looks like…

I’m doing some 3D printing to make cases for air quality sensors. I know that 3D printing is one of the slowest way to make a case and I’m going into Hull Makerspace to play with their laser cutter this week to see if I can make stuff much more quickly, but I happen to have a 3D printer and it seems sensible to use it. However, it has not been plain sailing….

I’m using some new filament, and when you do that you have to learn the right temperatures to work with it and how friendly it is. The new stuff has not been very friendly. Mainly because it didn’t want to stick to the print bed. The print bed is the surface upon which the printed object is laid down by the print head.

When 3D printing the most important stage of the print is putting the very first layer on the print bed. If this doesn’t stick, everything else is going to end up a like a ball of wool (see above). And I couldn’t get the new filament to stick properly. Even after spending ages adjusting the bed level and height, changing temperatures and adding adhesive I’d still get terrible results.

I’ve found that the key to success is to print the first layer very slowly, giving it time to take hold. The snag is that slow printing takes ages. Fortunately the latest versions of printing tools have come to my rescue. The latest version of Cura (the magical tool that I use to convert 3D models into printer commands) lets you set the speed of the first layer print.

There are so many print settings now that the settings process also contains a search function. If you search for “speed” you can find the initial layer print speed settings as shown on the left.

If I use the settings shown I get quite astonishing levels of print adhesion. In fact I can do away with glue completely and print onto smooth glass, which gives a fantastic finish.

I’ve now gone from having a problem getting the print to stick to having a problem getting the printed piece off the printer. But I’m very happy with that.

DDD North 2019 is coming to Hull

If you’re in the Humber area (or if you’re not and you don’t mind a bit of travel) there’s a splendid developer event happening here at the start of March. The Developer Developer Developer (DDD) North conference has a whole bunch of wonderful sessions and a fantastic venue (The University of Hull).

I’m giving a session too, all about Air Quality and Azure Functions. It’s going to be fun, I’m really looking forward to it, and you should too.

You can register here. It’s free.

Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt

Went to London today. Took a nice picture from the train (see above). We were going to a video game exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Videogames: Design/Display/Disrupt is excellent.

It’s good to see video gaming getting to the stage where they are deemed worthy of such analysis. The exhibits have been carefully chosen to show different aspects of how games are created and the care that their creators take. My favourite quote went along the lines of “Making a video game is like combining the hard bits of building a bridge with the hard bits of writing an opera”. Quite so. You need the underling structure along with story, atmosphere and presentation.

At the very end were a whole bunch of “home made hardware” powered games which were excellent and gave me lots of ideas for building things.

Well worth a trip to London for.

Drain Unblocking Etiquette

Truly an amazing device

Arrive home on Valentine’s Day to hear the three little worlds that can change your life: “The toilet’s blocked”. Oh well.

The thing with tools like drain un-blockers is that you can only find them when you don’t need them. And so it was on this occasion. Fortunately we have awesome neighbours who are much better at keeping track of their stuff than we are. They were able to lend me a device like the one above. It really is wonderful. You pump air into the reservoir and then release it into the blocked pipe using the trigger. After a couple of blasts we were good to go. And all in time for tea.

What with me being so flushed with success (as it were) I kind of lost track of the fact that I’d borrowed next-door’s sink un-blocker and stuffed it down our toilet. I’d washed it carefully and all, but still….. So it was on to Amazon to track down a clean replacement. It arrived today and I’ve dropped it round. Now, between us we can just about handle anything.

Free Sony Photo Editing with Capture One Express

If you want a really good way to edit pictures, and you happen to have a Sony camera, then I can strongly recommend Capture One Express from Phase One. You can download it for free and it works very well with the raw format from Sony cameras.

I took the picture above on the way into c4di with my venerable old RX100 this morning and used Capture One to straighten it, light up the foreground a bit and sharpen some of the edges. I’m really very happy with the result.

One other neat trick, is that if you’ve got a camera like the RX100. It is very interesting to search a place like Thingiverse for your camera type. I’ve just done that and turned up a whole bunch of bounce flash adaptors, filter rings and cases that look like they might be worth printing out and using.

HEY Children's University at c4di

Can you spot the bug in the light flashing program?

We had some children from HEY Children’s University to see us at c4di today. We did some talks for them up in the boardroom on the 3rd floor, with a fantastic view of the estuary and the deep. They were all sitting comfortably in the posh leather seats and spreading their notes around the big polished wood table.

I really hope that they get a taste for it. I want to see them in this building in a few year’s time pitching ideas and meeting customers.

I did some robot coding with them, starting with making a light flash red and blue. And some of them managed to spot the bug in the program above, which was awesome.

Barclays AI Frenzy at c4di

Just a quick heads up about an event that I’m speaking at. We had a call about the content yesterday and it all looks very interesting.

And there are free refreshments.

If you want to know more about Artificial Intelligence, see whats happening in the area and meet up with like-minded folks to talk about how you can use the technology, you should come along to the event next week. At’s at c4di on Thursday evening. I’m doing a demonstration of how easy it is to take some data and then build an application that uses AI. You can sign up here.