Home Sweet Home

And so, after a gentle rumble up the motorway, arrive back in lovely Hull. Very pleased to be back. Kids OK with their presents, house where I left it, keys still work in the lock. All is well. And so to more sleep.

 

Stolen Time

Not sure what happened to Friday. Lost a big chunk due to time zone readjustment and the rest seemed to go on sleep.

 

Hero Worship and big time queuing

In the morning they had a talk by the guys who made the Common Language Runtime. This is the thing which underpins the way that programs work in Microsoft .NET. Kind of important stuff. But the wonderful thing was that the creators came over as just regular guys who really knew how to do this stuff. These are they:

When we went to the exhibition floor it had gone! The stands closed yesterday and, less than 24 hours later the whole place had been stripped.

So, back to the hotel for one last time and some photographs. Apparently our hotel actually features in The Matrix Reloaded, right at the end. We're going to search out the scene in the DVD.

Then a quick stroll down the "walk of fame" on Hollywood Boulevard. Which is a bit like Blackpool but without the charm and imagination. And just who on earth is he?

Actually, "The Preston Foster Appreciation Society" is now the name of our drinking club. You can find out more here.

Tempting, but | don't think I'll bother...

At the end of the day we had to catch our plane home. Which was not fun. Los Angeles is the second largest city in the USA. It has a large airport. With two security screen lines. Which translates to "rather than having a nice sit down while you wait for your plane you have to queue for three hours". The good news was that the flight back was very smooth and quick. And I had lots of loverly legroom 'cos they moved me into Business Class owing to my superior stature..

 

Some good stuff - and some bad

Went to the keynote presentation by Microsoft Research today. They are doing some very interesting stuff on how computers are used. We saw some neat graphics stuff, followed by a very interesting presentation about how the computer can manage your relationships and information about each other.

And then we saw a video about the use of Tablet PCs in education. The video starts with a black and white sequence of a lecturer giving a class about Public Key Encryption of messages (this is how information can transferred secretly moved around networks). The material was being presented in a very boring way and the students were doing the usual student type things in this situation, reading, fidgeting, digging tunnels etc. Then, with a burst of colour, we are in a new Tablet PC enabled world. Same teacher, same material (but with Powerpoint slides rather than a squeaky overhead projector) and every student messaging and discussing as the class goes on.

The thing which irritated me beyond belief was that the content and presentation of the information being conveyed was still boring as far as I could tell. With all the interactivity, pretty colours, and bouncy music the subject matter was still as dull as dishwater. Perhaps I was missing the point (I'm famous for doing this) but the message I took away from the video was that a whole bunch of Tablet PCs, network connectivity and messaging can compensate slightly for boring stuff.

I've been teaching for a while and pride myself on being quite good at it. I'd back myself and a chalkboard against anybody working with all that that machinery. However, and this is the interesting bit - if you added a bit of teaching imagination and that technology the things you could achieve would be truly amazing. The only snag is that I've no idea how you'd do it and it would probably take me five years to figure it out. Best to let our kids tell us how to use the technology - as usual.

There was some other neat stuff with Tablet PCs to follow, including one demonstration where handwritten diagrams came alive according to equations that had been sketched down next to them. Again, impressive, but I'm not sure how you would make it useful in a teaching context as described.

Then we went for a mooch round the exhibition floor. Had some interesting chats with some of the people behind the Longhorn filing system (which looks rather nice) and the Longhorn positioning system (which looks very nice and treads heavily on the toes of one of my Final Year Projects - but Microsoft weren't to know...)

In the evening we went on to a party at Universal Studios Theme Park which was very nice. Free food and beer, no queues, wonderful stuff. Went on the Terminator ride and the Shrek 4D one. Both great fun.

Where do you want to go today?

 

More Good Stuff - but beware the jetlag

I managed to make it to three presentations today. The first was about data synchronization with Longhorn. It looks very nice. There is continuing evidence that the key consideration of the design is "how do people want it to work" rather than "how can we make it work" and this seems to be underpinning all of the Longhorn stuff. The idea that stuff just arrives at the right place at the time that you need it is very compelling.

Then we had another presentation from Don Box on the Indigo part of Longhorn. This emphasised how much the design of the interactions is under pinned by a service based approach, and showed how easy it is to construct connections between programs using this technology.

Finally I went to a talk about the upcoming location based services that Microsoft is releasing. These will let you use a variety of technologies to find out where people are, put them on a map and then offer them services relevant to that location. Good to see that a lot of attention has been paid to the privacy part of the system. You can get a message each time someone tries to find out where you are. There's another presentation on this tomorrow which will be worth a look. Interesting that people are now attaching mobile phones to valuable pieces of equipment so that they can track them around the country!

And then I went home to bed. I find that I get the jetlag around three days into a trip. The first couple of days I can run on adrenalin and reserves, but at day three all I want to do is sleep. Staggered back to the hotel in the middle of the afternoon and got a couple of hours of shut-eye prior to going out to a very posh restaurant (Campanile, 624 S La Brea Av, Los Angeles) which Fabien found on Google. Good on you Google. The menu was astonishing. I understood every other word on it - just about. In that situation you go for tried and trusted solutions and so I had the steak. Which was enormous. And delicious. I didn't eat it all unfortunately (I'd like to meet the the person who can and shake them by the hand - or perhaps not..) but what I did have was excellent. They had a bottle of wine which cost 3,300 dollars.

A clue, I don't think it is the bottle of "Thunderbird". Then a cab back to the hotel and wonderful sleep.

Good book alert. Found a really good book on C#. At first glance it is not particularly good value. I know the first quarter of the material anyway and most of the pages have loads of blank space on them. But it is wonderful because it just tells you how to do stuff. Previously my weapon of first resort was the Nutshell book on C# (which is still a good buy). However, this just gives you all the api stuff and don't cover all the neat things you can do with C#. This book just tells you how to do all that, from ASP to Web Services to Office Automation. Not an enormous amount of material on each, but enough to get started. It also has coverage of the new features in version 2.0 of C#.Take a look at C# Programming Handbook by Gregory S MacBeth from Apress.  

Bill Speaks - and Longhorn is good

After the profundity of yesterday, back to the pictures and captions... Got on the bus at 6:30 am for an interesting ride to the convention centre. We've never been the same way twice..

On the way there we went past a theatre showing some very funny stuff...

And so to the convention. And Mr. Gates struts his stuff:

Now, as anyone will tell you I'm not easily impressed. New whiz bang things come along and I go "Yeah, but what does it do for me? - I'm still using the same 5% of the features of Word which I've been using for the last ten years." (I suppose this is not quite true, I'm a bit of a sucker for the latest gadget - but stay with me on this). Longhorn has stuff which really makes me go "I could really use that". Loads of stuff. I went round the Getty museum yesterday. It looks fantastic from the outside. Everything around it has been put there for a good reason. And there is some really neat stuff inside. That's Longhorn. I'm pleased to have been here at the start of something this big. Because it will be big.

After Bill started things off there was a kind of double act which presented features and showed how easy it will be to use them from software. After yesterdays musing on the nature of Computer Science this threw me a bit. There are issues about design, complexity and knowing what happens underneath, but now I'm not sure just what you need to know to use this stuff. And what is the relevance of hardware knowledge to all this? I've no idea just at the moment, my only feeling just right now is that we need to expose our students to this stuff.

The hardware question was kind of answered in a superb talk by a chap who has been implementing Microsoft Spot devices. These are a bit like "super pagers" in that they subscribe to services and receive messages from FM transmitters around the country. They are based on a couple of chips, rather fetchingly called "Stan" and "Ollie". Stan does all the radio stuff whilst Ollie is an ARM chip who runs the programs.

They are using the .NET framework to make this go, in a system with only a few hundred K of memory (around a thousandth of the memory in your PC). It was very refreshing to hear a chap talking about memory limitations, processor speed issues, battery life and interference. Then at the end he put the icing on the cake by announcing that the devices would be available as tiny controllers for use in teaching. Dude! I'm not convinced of the business case for the Spot devices - my Smartphone can do the same kind of thing with SMS messages - but Microsoft now have a .NET embedded device which you can program at a high level and put into just about anything. This could be as big as Longhorn, but perhaps over a slightly longer term.

Rounded the day off with a talk about the Indigo part of Longhorn. Indigo is the bit that links systems together in Longhorn. You send a message to another system to make it do something for you. Very persuasive talker this chap. Some good one liners. Everything in the future will be service based. This is good stuff. I've spent enough time grappling with objects to know that this is the way to go. And it is all going into our Software Engineering course....

Got back to the room and then out for a pizza. Make mine a tall and frosty one (obviously)

And finally, walking around outside the hotel we come across some motivational paving.

I feel sorry for the agent. More techno babble tomorrow...

 

Too Posh for Me - and some profound thoughts

This has to be the poshest hotel I've ever been in. The minibar has its own checkout counter (no - not really) and the room has a cordless phone. I'm going to see how far away I can get before it stops working. I wonder if it would work in Hull?

I've signed up for an internet connection from the room (obviously) but the deal comes with free local and national USA phone calls. If only I knew someone in the USA to actually ring up.

The minibar is amazing. In a sprit of enquiry and starvation I purchased a small bag of nuts. The system can detect when the bag is removed and gives you 30 seconds to replace it. If you don't it bills your room automatically. I've no idea how the sensor works. Think I might challenge David to a game of "Minibar Chardonnay (price 12 dollars ) Chicken" - once I've worked out the rules, This is the obligatory view from my room shot:

That little white blob just above top centre is the Hollywood sign....

After breakfast (I'm starting to like yoghurt - which is scary) we went up to the Getty museum. This entailed a cab ride (everything in LA seems to involve using the road) and a trip up a little tram to get there. We were blessed with amazing weather and the place is, amazing. Anyone who knows me well will know that words don't fail me often. Well they do here. Outside amazing architecture and views. Inside fantastic paintings and sculptures. Blimey.

This is just one view of the place. I have another fifty or so, equally as good. After lunch (I had some Microbrewed Soda from here) we went to place called Fry's. This is a huge electronics shop. And I mean huge. The outside had a spaceship crashed into it.

The motif continued inside (where you weren't allowed to take photographs) and had a whole bunch of set pieces. And I was so impressed I didn't buy anything.

Later in the evening we went to a discussion panel about teaching programming. Due to the LA traffic we arrived too late to hear the bulk of the session, but what we heard was very interesting. The lecturers there were preoccupied with the same issues that we grapple with at Hull. The field of computing changes so fast that teaching it is very tricky. You have to decide whether or not to teach the latest stuff. If you do, you run the risk of missing out on important fundamentals. If you don't you may not be equipping your students for the future. I kind of take the middle ground here, you have to deliver some core skills, and work on giving people the ability to pick up new skills as they go through their careers. And you have to inform people of the fact that they will have to do this.

I learnt to program using punched cards (no - really). We got three runs a day of our programs; four if we were lucky. You got quite keen on "right first time" because for a two week project you probably only had around fifty or so attempts to get it working. I think these days many programmers use that many goes in a singe session! I've lost count of the number of operating systems and application programmer interfaces that I've had to work with over the years. And of course now we have objects and stuff which plain weren't around when I started. And yet I seem to do OK, as do most of our graduates.

There was some discussion about how much low level stuff to teach (sorry if this is boring you folks - but it is what I do for a living..). The question is interesting and scary. Does a programmer need to know how a computer actually works? Does a driver need to know the precise details of the workings of the internal combustion engine? I have a problem here, in that for various sad reasons I like knowing how things work. The interval between acquiring a new toy and taking the back off to see how it works is usually pretty short in my case. And I kind of worry about programmers who don't have that interest. It's probably not fair for me to do this, but there you are. We teach hardware at Hull and keep trying new and inventive methods to make it more interesting. I think at the end of the day you'll find that the most successful racing drivers are those who know how their cars work and can discuss them with their mechanics...

One other thing that was interesting was that the man from Microsoft told us their solution to this problem. They try to hire smart people. They have figured out that their business moves at such a rate that these folks have the best chance to keep up. Go for a Microsoft job and you will be confronted by a whole bunch of puzzles and brainteasers apparently. And the really cunning thing is (hope I'm not giving too much away here folks) is that they are not massively interested in whether you solve the problem. They are interested in the approach that you take, and how you try to prove that your solution is valid. I think their priorities are "Can we work with this person?", "Are they smart?","Are they focussed?" and "Do they have useful skills?". In that order. Any Microsoft bods reading this feel free to contact me to put me right, but I know that if I was hiring - that is the order I'd go for as well...