Tiny Cameras

Bought a really cheap digital camera and some sticky velcro stuff. On the next calm day we are going to strap the camera to our radio controlled plane and try to take some pictures from the air. The camera we bought (fifteen quid from Maplin) has a video mode which records continuously for 8 seconds. Since most of the flights of our little plane last a lot less than that I am quite hopeful that we will get some results. Now we need a really calm day to try everything out. I'll post anything that comes out...

 

The Joy of Friday

I quite like Fridays, had some good project meetings and one about the new lab. Note: I am not starting to enjoy meetings - it is just that I've managed to hold a few which actually achieved things (now if only I could bottle that and sell it).

 

Longhorn Lunacy

Number one son has now put Longhorn on all his machines; presumably to improve his "street cred." The truly scary thing is that he has removed Linux from one of them to do it (although he claims this is just until the latest version of Mandrake comes along). The effort has been broadly successful, with the exception of his laptop, where installing Longhorn has blown away the network settings for the Windows XP installation alongside it (which is very strange - investigations are continuing). However, good news on the driver front, in that Windows XP drivers seem to work fine with Longhorn up to now, and he reports that Longhorn is "almost useable" in this way - several years before release. He is presently reading the programming manual and getting his head around the new version of Visual Studio. Me, I'm doing useful, earning type stuff for the program that cannot be named...

It pays to increase your word power dept:

Deja Foo: The feeling you have seen this martial arts movie before.

 

Bonfire Night, bring on the explosions

Back in harness. Voice still not fully cured, but loud enough to keep the First Years entertained in the Java lecture. Did references, objects and primitives today. Went quite well, thanks to some unscripted help from one of the students who asked me all the right questions. I'm still a bit frustrated by the Java primitive/reference approach and I'd just got everything sorted (objects can do stuff but are managed by reference, primitives are well, primitive, and are managed by value) when someone asked "what about strings?". Strings are immutable objects. They work like objects, but behave like primitives when you assign them. Just got all that sorted when someone asked about the string pool. Arrgh! All good questions, but I hope I didn't lose half the audience in the process of answering them...

And then home to do some work on "the product which cannot be named". Went OK, but I was somewhat distracted by Armageddon going on outside. In the Good Old Days (tm) you celebrated Guy Fawkes night by setting off a few disappointing little squibs in the garden and going "Ahhhhhh" whilst doing this. Then back in after 20 minutes for drinkies. Nowadays people seem to rush out and purchase items of heavy ordinance and set them off over a week long period. Our back garden was like a war zone, with bangs and flashes from all directions. Some of the larger ones made the whole house shake. People should know better.

However, I must come clean and admit that I have been guilty of this kind of thing in the past. In order to celebrate the passing of the Millennium myself and Geoff invested in a "one shot" firework the size of a packing case. We were determined to avoid all that "light it, run away, find it has gone out, light it again, go Ahhh and then repeat 20 times" business by having something which was fully automatic. We kept the thing out of sight until the evening in question, where we actually took the trouble to read the instructions which went something like "Light blue touchpaper and retire 150 feet". Which is a little tricky in a 20 foot garden. Undeterred we put the thing as far away as we dared and lit it anyway. Most impressive. Something like an artillery strike in a box. The thing went off for around five minutes, with rockets ricocheting off the trees and bouncing back towards us in a most interesting manner. What I saw was very good (but I was hiding round the corner for most of it). And then, for some reason which I've never understood, the entire house filled with white smoke and both of the toilets were occupied for the next hour. What a night.

 

Most Valued, that's me

And so to a meeting of Microsoft Most Valued Professionals. Very interesting and opinionated bunch of people. And boy do they give Microsoft a hard time. And boy to Microsoft like it. I've come to a kind of conclusion about Microsoft. If you say good things about them or their products they like you. If you say bad things about them or their products provided you back them up with reason and example they like you even more. Because then they can address the issues and fix them. We had a talk on security and we really gave the Microsoft chap some stick. And then he came back for more. With a smile on his face.

I know this sounds very Microsft lacky-like, but they really do seem to care about the problems that people have with their systems and how they can improve matters. But I would say that. They gave me a nice pen.

Met up with a very nice chap, Hi Chris, who told me that we can upgrade our Smartphone Development System to Smartphone 2003 ourselves. Which is very, highly, hugely, interesting since this will let us write .NET programs and run them on it. We were going to send the phone back to a nice bloke at Microsoft but if we can do it in Hull that will be really good. I'll let you know how we get on.....

Also saw a presentation about Microsoft Media Centre, which is a sort of "super Tivo" which lives under your TV and provides some nice features like video recording, music indexing, picture display, and a hairy Windows XP box which will play games. Since the demise of Tivo in the UK I've been wondering how I'll be able to manage my telly viewing in the future and it seems like this could be the answer. All I need now is the 800 quid to buy one....

And so back, bleary eyed, to Hull. I wonder if my voice will work tomorrow.

 

Where has my voice gone?

Lost my voice. Started at Los Angeles Airport (they stole my voice along with three hours of my life I'm unlikely to get back - If I ever have one of those near-death experiences where your whole life flashes before your eyes I'm going to ask that the LA Airport bit be edited out..) and by Gatwick I'm walking round going "Gelding, Foal, Bay, Shire" (yes - it's the Hoarse/Horse Whisperer) - tada!

By today I can sort of speak, but not in the proper lecturer manner. Fortunately the lecture theatre that I'm using has a wireless mic and amplifier, so I can bounce my gravelly mumblings around the place to some effect.

And thence to Reading for a meeting of Microsoft Most Valued Professionals (of which I am one - hem hem). Spent an evening in a Travelodge. Which was nice enough and very well heated.

 

Shoehorning Longhorn

Longhorn is the code name for the new Microsoft operating system. What it will eventually be called nobody knows. Windows 2006 or Windows YP are possible's I suppose. Anyhoo, now have a copy of the thing to play with. So we try to put it on a machine which has a tiny (4 Gbyte) hard disk. To its credit, the installation worked fine and we have our first (albeit slow) Longhorn experience. However, when we try to install Visual Studio (which will actually let us create programs for this new system) we run out of disk space. Not surprising, but I now have to track down a bigger hard disk. The man from Microsoft said that it was quite possible to run Longhorn on your "proper" machine, but I am a devout coward in this respect.

I'm going to be running a "Longhorn Log" on these hallowed pages to let you know how I get on. At the moment I like the new system a lot, but mainly because I haven't tried (and probably failed) to do anything with it yet.....