Saturday Madness

Rather than go down town in Hull and spend money I haven't got on things I don't need we decided instead to go to York. And spend money we haven't got on things we don't need. Actually, some things we do need. Number one son has a requirement for an interview suit and so we have the fun and games of the "Fitting Room of Marks and Spencers" - a place of doom and despondency if ever I saw one. Find one that fits. Buy him a shirt and his first proper tie (which I will now have to teach him how to do up). At last, something that he can't do but I can....

Bit depressed to find that the only shop in York where I could buy clothes (owing to my extreme stature height wise) has now gone to be replaced by a place which sells wedding dresses. Which wouldn't even fit me. Ho hum. At least I have Internet Shopping.

Our way out of the car park was temporarily barred by the duck army, which seemed to be on maneuvers:

 

Upgrade of Fear

Hmm. Firmware. Scary stuff. Half way between hardware and software it lurks inside devices and makes them tick. If you are not sure what firmware is, it is the bit that makes your mobile phone wake up and do the right thing most of the time. Firmware is fine, and most of the time you leave it alone. Except when you want to upgrade things. We have a Smartphone 2002 which we want to change to a Smartphone 2003. This means upgrading the firmware in the phone itself. And that is where the fear comes from.

Upgrading firmware means copying files with strange names into memory and then turning the device on with two buttons held down and your left leg cocked over the chandelier. Upgrading the firmware holds the potential to turn your nice phone into an attractive paperweight, since if it fails it is very unlikely that you will get it going again. So it is not entered into lightly. However, because I am brave and strong and know what I am doing I decided to have a go. And anyway, the phone doesn't belong to me.

The good news is that it worked fine. I now have a Smartphone 2003 (this will only be of interest to people roughly as sad as me - but there you go). I'm especially pleased because this makes it possible to write C# programs (my favourite kind) and then run them on the phone. Stay tuned for a whole slew of stupid programs, I'll let you know when they are ready.

The outside looks the same, but on the inside it's all different.

 

Missing a Trick

Final revision lecture with the First Year Java course today. I went through an old exam paper with them. Put the paper up on the screen. In the top corner was the date of the paper: "Session 2002-2003". I wish I'd thought to change that to "Session 2003-2004", i.e. this session. It would have been very funny to watch people notice, realise and start telling their friends that they were looking at the real paper. It reminds me of a nasty type from years ago who used to leave genuine looking exam papers lying around in the photocopier room. Mind you, if it gets people to pay attention and work at the subject then it is probably worth it.....

No picture today, it gets dark too soon these days...

Increase your word power dept:

Budwiser: the feeling of increased knowledge that you get from drinking large amounts of American beer.

 

My Brain Hurts

Not in the least hung over from yesterday. Oh no. Still revising with the First Year. Methods and objects today. More code writing in front of a live audience. We managed to make a CoOrdinate object which could print itself out and tell you how far it was from another CoOrdinate instance. All good stuff. One of the students spent all night queuing at the opening of the new Dixons to get a Camcorder at reduced price. He brought it along to the lecture and it is very shiny and nice. I think I'd pay the extra sixty quid or so and have a night in bed - but then again I've already got a camcorder so "questions would be asked in the house" if I turned up with another one. The man with the camera then proceeded to video my lecture, which is deeply scary. I've no particular problem with that - as long as he managed to capture my "good side".

Went to a seminar this afternoon about the brain. Professor Jim Austin from York was telling us how he is trying to figure out how the brain works at a level which will allow him to build computers that work the same way. The snag is that the brain breaks just about all the rules you normally work by when building a computer. Jim made the very interesting point that when you make a computer to run programs it must be completely correct and totally reliable at all times. However, when you make a computer to run like a brain it must be OK for bits to go wrong, because that is what happens in real life. Because there is a huge amount of redundancy (spare bits doing the same thing and comparing results), feedback (using the outputs from a chunk to make sure that the inputs make sense) and parallelism (all this happening in different parts at the same time) the brain mostly works and thought happens. Or at least I think it does.

Then time for home.

 

The Joy of Coding and then Down to the Pub

Sometimes I worry about myself. I just enjoy programming that bit too much. David has written a super lab exercise for the .NET MSc students. It involves fetching picture postcards from a server and displaying them. He's created a web service on which the postcard objects can be stored. Well, I had to have a go at the lab myself and so I fired up Visual Studio and off I went. Cue around 45 minutes of fun and frolics whilst I got the user interface all sorted and stored and fetched the pictures. Apart from a misunderstanding on my part and a versioning issue with Visual Studio (basically, don't use the old one folks) it all went swimmingly. I love using web services. There is something magical about running a program on one computer which fetches goods and services from another, with all the hard work being done for you behind the scenes.

Perhaps even more worrying, I've started listening to Radio 2.

And then down to the pub. Usual bunch of suspects. Conversation turned to the upcoming visit of George Bush. The BBC reports that, as a security measure, there will be "600 armed snipers" deployed around London. Pete wondered how many unarmed snipers would be used. And just what would an unarmed sniper do? We reckoned they just shout "Bang, you're dead" very loudly. On a point of honour, we were the last ones in the pub and, although not actually chucked out, they seemed very pleased to see us go....

 

Hungry Man Blues

Forgot my lunch today in fine style. That is, I put it in the hall, said to myself "Don't forget your lunch Rob". And then drove to work without it. Lunchtime arrives. "Oh, I must have left my lunch in the car. I've not left it at home because I remember reminding myself not to". Walk out to car. Lunch not in car. At this point the true height of my stupidity hits me like a tall stupid thing. Wah.

Managed to give the first year lecture over the sound of my stomach rumbling. We are deep in "the revision zone" for exams in a few weeks. I'm trying to give folks strategies and stupid things to help them remember the truly important things about the Java programming language (that is the things that they might get asked questions about in exams). If primitives are animals and objects are birds then strings are bats. That is a string behaves a bit like a primitive (because it is immutable) but it is really an object. Perhaps you had to be there.

And I'm afraid I've been too hungry to take any pictures. But I did get some good work done on "the system which cannot be named". Dragging between trees? Easy.

 

Blogligations

I've invented a new term (see above). It is the feeling of obligation that bloggers feel towards their readers (who actually may not exist). I'm aware that there are several issues out there which I haven't addressed recently, including the 800 things I know (only got two so far) and a number of record reviews. Ho hum. Maybe I'll get round to them later.

In the meantime, a new service:

Unretouched Photos Department

Famous French Attractions: Mole in Rouge