One of the problems of writing a blog is that it brings home to you the repetitive and empty nature of your existence. Anyhoo, went shopping and bought a bunch of inkjet cartridges and paper. Despite my tirade against them, I still quite like inkjet printers for getting good quality marks on paper. I've been using a venerable old Deskjet 840C for quite a while to get pictures out and with the right paper (I favour Ilford Photo Printasia) you can get some really nice results. I've been meaning to print out a bunch of pictures and today seemed as good a day as any.

I've just recovered from an interesting foible on the part of the printer, in that if I connect via the USB port it gives up half (or a quarter or two thirds or sometime) way through the output. It seems to choose to play this particular trick when I'm producing quality output on expensive paper with lots of ink. It took me around six sheets of the stuff to discover that if I went back to the parallel port all would be well. If you've had a similar problem I'd advise you to try this one. I think the parallel port is probably a bit faster as well.

In the evening we watched "Grosse Pointe Blank" which was mildly diverting but not quite as good as I was expecting. The idea (Assassin returns to High School reunion) was neat but I think it could have been taken a bit further. It seemed a bit slow moving to me. Perhaps my attention span is starting to contract...

 

A debugging tip. Doesn't always work, but when it does it pays dividends. If you get an error in a program paste the whole error message into Google and do a search on it. I've done this a few times with various strange messages which the software manufacturer's site knows nothing about and it has come up trumps more often than not. If you are lucky you end up at a forum somewhere and find that someone else has had your problem and it has been sorted out. It has even been known to work with compilation errors, although I'm not sure I should suggest it to my first year Java class....

 

Back at work. Writing stuff for the .NET course. We actually have a class of students signed up and so now it is time for us to deliver on our side of the bargain. I always plan to have everything ready well before the students arrive - and I always fail to do this. I think that I need the pressure of the timescale to actually get myself together. Anyhoo, I know exactly what I'm going to say in the lectures, it is just a case of getting down to writing it up. I've just got hold of a noise cancelling microphone/headset and so I might try some dictation to the Tablet. My mate Ian reckons that it works OK but I always find it terribly embarrassing to do. It took all my willpower to get through the training phase. I'll let you know how I get on.

 

Took a day off and went to Whitby today. Whitby is a seaside town just north of Scarborough on the east cost of england. Famous for Whitby Jet (black stuff they make jewelry out of) and Dracula, who is supposed to be buried in the churchyard. Super little place, with a wonderful drive there over the hills to get there. Also has its own ISP. If you have never been I urge you to go. The seafood is super, the beach is a good one and you get a lovely seaside town atmosphere. Also, if you are lucky and you get the mist rolling in off the sea etc. the place becomes dead eerie in a supernatural kind of way. And you can really imagine that the count is out stalking the little winding streets with an urge for blood...

For some reason Whitby also has a whole heap of sweet shops selling all those things which you thought had gone away years ago, including gobstoppers and a wide range of tooth threatening materials. You can also get Uncle Joes Mint Balls, which number one son is addicted to. The tins are nice as well.

 

Did some reviews of student year in industry reports today. These are from students who have spent a year of their course working for a company. They have to report back on what they have been doing, and we mark it up as part of their programme. One of the students has been working on the construction of a simulator intended for use in a nuclear power station. He has been decoding how the existing system works (which is apparently easier than reading the documentation) and then writing a system to work against it. This is scary, real world, stuff and kudos to the chap doing the work. Goes to show what second year students can get up to...

 

Something of a breakthrough today. Number one son has been happily using his shiny new notebook for all kinds of things, but has noticed that some games behave very badly. Today we got a copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator (or Simulatore as the billing sheet rather fetchingly described it) 2004. This worked fine, except that the instrument panel was just a brown shape on the screen. Apparently there are a number of switches and dials in the front of the plane which are kind of important to your average pilot.

Nobody seemed to know the answer to this one, until I spoke to Derek. He has been using a laptop for all his university work for a while and was well versed with the problem. It seems that laptop manufacturers change the internal references for the graphics hardware so that standard drivers don't configure themselves correctly. Result, all kinds of random behaviour in graphics mode. He provided the solution in the form of links to a couple of sites: http://www.warp2search.net and http://www.geocities.com/Madtoast/. The latter provides a neat program which will build an inf file which makes the drivers happy, and now all is well. Take a look at these sites if you want to get the best out of your notebook's graphics hardware

Oh, and FS 2004 is great fun. You even get to try and fly the Wright Brother's first plane. This would be quite a good party game, in that it is great fun watching people try to stay in the air for more than three or so seconds...

 

I'm a bit nervous about writing this bit, since I don't want to put anything in the Blog which will make you, dear reader, think any less of me. However, having considered the fact that this would probably not be possible anyway I thought I'd come clean. The fact of the matter is that I don't like gardening. There, I've said it. You could never call me "green fingered", unless I've been dealing with a tin of appropriately coloured paint. As a professional programmer I take pride in finding solutions, creating them and applying them to a problem. Just once. This would not seem to be how gardens work. You can spend hours digging, mowing, trimming, and hoeing to get a garden which passes inspection - that is you can, I'm going inside to play a computer game or write some software.. The problem is that six months (or even less) later you have to do it all again. And you have a sneaking suspicion that in the long term the weeds are going to win anyway.

I have broached the subject of concrete, gravel or other technologies to ease the gardening burden but these have all met with strong resistance from those in absolute power. The fact of the matter is that we have to have a garden with growing stuff in it. And our garden isn't even that big. And you can do the whole thing over in less than a day. And I still don't like doing it. Ho hum. I have been told that I will learn to like gardening as I get older, and my perfectly manicured lawns and interesting shrubbery will be a source of endless joy. I remain to be convinced on this one. I'm tempted to call on some of my gardener friends, the ones who get me round to fix their computers. I'm wondering if the line "My garden's crashed, one moment it was working fine and now it's full of green stuff which looks like it might be a weed. I know you like gardening - could you come round and mend it please.." would work...

The reason for this tirade is that, of course, today I had to do some gardening. A bush in the front flower bed has been causing offence and it is time to terminate it with extreme prejudice as the CIA would say. Calling the "thing" a bush is paying it rather a complement. It is more a collection of bushes which have undergone a number of mergers and acquisitions to become a composite. It was therefore great fun to remove. The discovery of a highly thorny species lurking in the thicket half way through the removal process, which went through my gardening gloves like a hot knife through butter, only added to the occasion. But I had the last laugh. If you think my day was bad, then the assorted items I removed from the ground and took to the tip had an even worse time.

The only problem we have now is that we have to find something to fill the hole which has been created. This means a trip to the garden centre to find something to bury..