Is it OK to write retrospective blogs?

Is that what we call a diary?

While you wrestle with those profound statements I'll just put down for the record that today I flew to Barcelona but I am writing this on Wednesday 2nd of July. That will help.

Why fly to Barcelona? Well, a Hull team of students is taking part in Microsoft Imagine Cup competition. They have created (in eight weeks and for the Pocket PC) an application which is designed to be useful if you, for example, find yourself stuck in an airport at half past ten at night, not speaking a word of the local language and having no idea where anything is or where to go.

Which is kind of ironic, because at half past ten tonight I was......

If I had Mercury (and a WIFI connection) I could have entered my problems in English and had my Pocket PC speak the text in Spanish. I could have found my hotel in the database and obtained a map and directions.... At this point I'm sounding like a salesman and should just direct you here.

Anyhoo, got hooked up with the rest of the gang and we decided to hit the town centre

I'm presently assembling my (retrospective again) Barcelona Diary which has pictures of the trip.

Suffice it to say that I am now ensconced in Barcelona, waiting nervously for the tomorrow and hoping that we can get our application set up and looking good for the judges on Monday

 

If you don't like the style of this blog, you can always go for the Mr. T. Version.

The talk seemed to go OK. There were around 40 of them and they laughed in all of the right places. The talk was at my old school. They've painted it a different colour, but I suppose you must expect some changes after nearly thirty years... Kept close to the door and actually used the ice breaker joke (don't ask).

Only problem was that someone there knows one of the Imagine Cup team and heard me say nice things about the team and the project. The word is out that I said something nice about a bunch of students. This will probably ruin my cred. in the department....

Presently packing for Barcelona (it's a tough life...). I've checked the internet for weather information and I'm taking warm pullover, thick socks, water proof, gloves etc. I think there may be something wrong with my farenhieght to centigrade conversion, but you can't be too careful... I'm also taking the camera so there will be a tiny travel web site when I get there.

 

Spent the day at a Research Away Day where we are planning how/what we do in the department in terms of research. Gave the shortest presentation, which was well regarded for that reason at least...

Some very good ideas, and some interesting research going on. Nice to have a day when you can just talk about one thing and we seem to have made some quite good decisions.

Giving a talk at a school tomorrow about the joys of engineering and stuff like that. I'm going to write some C# live in front of an audience. Creating computer programs in front of a whole bunch of people is always good for a laugh. It is most rewarding when people who have never written code before go; "Huh. Is that all there is to programming - I thought it was really difficult". I'll let you know how I got on tomorrow...

I'm just wondering what would happen if I filled in tomorrows blog today? Would it come true? Is there scope for a Twilight Zone type of story where everything I write about actually happens? I'm tempted to fill it in, but a little scared of the consequences....

 

Still thinking about "the seven signs of aging". Wonder if there is one for every deadly sin. Cut to the "Sin/Aging Mapping Meeting of the International Standards Organisation":

First Drone: "Well, gluttony to fat is easy enough"

Second Drone: "Yes, but what about fat babies? You have to think about the potential for litigation"

First Drone: "Yeah, but babies aren't old."

Chairman: "OK, Fat to Gluttony. Now, moving on to green skin for envy....."

In between writing a press release for the Imagine Cup entry from Hull I've been playing with another new toy/idea. It is a really neat way to create Shockwave Flash files and it is free (for 15 days anyway) from Swish.

It lets you create some really impressive text animations and other effects. I'm using it to implement a little promotional idea which I had some time ago. It probably breaks lots of university house style guidelines but I quite like it:

Take a look at wherewouldyouthink.com to see what I mean. I might expand it some, if time permits.

 

Another day, another dollar.

Start with a Staff Meeting (ugh) then do some programming (yay) and then compose some legal letters (don't ask). Round off with some more programming (yay) and then watch some telly and go to bed. It's a plan, but perhaps not a life plan.

Still grappling with the PIC to get the ADC to work with the interrupts. With great power comes great responsibility. Or, to put it another way, if you get it a bit wrong it just sits there and grins at you. To go from a world of breakpoints, single stepping and watching variables to debugging with a flashing LED is a bit of a pain, but at least all the problems are of my own making. I've got it to almost work, which means that there is a nasty timing issue which cause the program to run fine for a few seconds and then go bananas. Ongoing....

Got Sky on in the background. You can buy some cream or other which "combats the seven signs of aging". Hmmm. Seven signs. I think that one of the signs is you can't remember what the seven signs are. In that case they can solve the problem just by printing the list on the box. I'm going to have a look next time I'm in Superdrug and see how many I've got.

Hah. Found the problem. The program was fine (as if I could doubt it). However, if the PIC programmer is plugged in it causes bad things to happen. Things along the lines of memory corruption and other bad karma. Unplug the programmer before running the program and viola (if you like string music).

Moral of story: It isn't always Rob's fault (although this makes a good starting point)

 

And so, after a long absence, I'm back with more ramblings.

I'm probably going to re-host the blog if I can figure out how a rather spiffy .NET blog program works.

As I said to someone earlier today; I'm trying to make my life more interesting by starting a blog so that I can do interesting things and then write about them.

Perhaps I'll do that tomorrow. For now I'm just sitting here wondering why it is called "Victoria Sponge" cake.

Oh, and I'm updating my "C for PICS" CD-ROM. This has been selling steadily (a college in Finland has just bought a site licence) and so we are updating it. This means that I'm writing embedded assembler and C for a machine with 4K of program memory and around 300 (yes - count them) bytes of memory. And loving every minute of it. If you've never written code like this then you really should have at least one go at it. There is something very liberating about being in total control of the hardware, with nothing between you and the thing what does the doing.

More tomorrow, when I've figured out how the ADC works under interrupts.