A Poet's Progress - Rob Miles's's' Blog

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Sat, Nov 29 2003

White Tie and Blue Teeth

My new phone (which is getting a bit of a panning at the moment in some quarters - not entirely fairly) sports a Bluetooth connection. I really like the idea of transferring information to and from the phone without any wires. Infra red is OK, but it is a bit slow and I don't like having to aim things at each other. I've had a TDK Bluetooth adapter for a while but of course my new phone doesn't work properly with it. And anyhoo, it belongs to the company and not me. So, as Maplin had an offer on a teeny tiny Sitecom adapater I jumped at the chance. Works really well. There is something really cool (to me anyway) about writing and debugging code inside the phone itself with no visible connection between the phone and the computer. I haven't yet started wandering round the house to find out what the range is like - but I probably will.

Meanwhile, in the shopping centre the Santa's Elves are plotting something....

 


Fri, Nov 28 2003

Friday off my mind

What can one say about Fridays? Had some project meetings (although I'm telling the students to concentrate on exams and coursework just at the moment) and got on with some bits and bobs around the place. I did some more work on "Programming your Smartphone with cheese". The more time I spend fiddling with .NET programming on Smartphone the more I like it.

Music Report

Some time back (August 26th to be precise) I filched a bunch of CDs from my daughter and ripped them onto my Creative Jukebox (I know that everyone cool has Apple IPODs these days - but I've had Jukeboxes for nearly three years - well before the IPOD was invented..). I was going to get back to you and let you know what I thought of them from a middle aged Steely Dan fan point of view. Here are the verdicts:

Rooney: Irritating guitar west coast jangly guitar rock with just enough tune on some of the tracks to make you keep listening. Not worked too well for me though. I like my instruments played properly

Delta Goodrem: Now this is quite good in a tuneful, angst ridden Britney Spears kind of way. Stands repeated listening.

Michelle Branch: Good in a slightly more bouncy way than Delta.

More later. I'm compiling a "music to program by" playlist - soon to be advertised on TV. Let me know if you have any favourite tracks....

 


Thu, Nov 27 2003

Admissions

We are starting on our admissions round again. This is where people sensible enough to want to attend Hull University Computer Science Department come along to find out what it is like. We have changed our approach slightly this year and now have an open meeting with parents as well as a taster lecture on games programming. And, just to see what happens, I've added a wordsearch.

For some time we've given out a special newsletter, updated for each afternoon. I though it might be fun to do something extra. So I added a wordsearch, one of those grids with words that you have to find. Just to give folks something to do while they wait. Well, the results were amazing. I went into the room where everybody was, and it was like an exam. Everyone was concentrating madly on the thing, and we had someone complete the whole search (and win a rather nice Microsoft pen for their trouble). The afternoon itself went very well, and all concerned seemed to enjoy it.

Waiting at the level crossing. Yes, my car is very old...

Spent the evening working on the Smartphone with cheese project. I'm trying to get a while ahead so that I can be sure how the sequence will turn out. Or perhaps I'm enjoying it too much. I'm just finishing off reading the keyboard and I'm moving on to sound. What kind of sound would a piece of cheese make when it hits a breadstick at 20 miles an hour? Time will tell.

 


Wed, Nov 26 2003

Smartphones with Cheese

You know that Smartphone that I got. It's really nice. You can write programs for it. So inspired by this am I that I've decided to write a little Smartphone programming course just for games. We are going to use .NET and the Compact Framework. And lots of cheese. To get you started you can take a look at here.

If you follow the course you might be able to write programs which do things like this:

I'm not sure precisely why I'm doing this. At the moment it seems like fun. But that could change. Anyway, get it while it is going. And let me know if you like it.

Spent quite a lot of time today trying to make my piece of cheese move smoothly over the tablecloth. As well as preparing for the Admissions Afternoon tomorrow. You mean you're not coming?

 


Tue, Nov 25 2003

Yet Another Phone

True confession time. On Saturday I also got a new mobile phone. I look at it this way. I don't drink, smoke or chase women. Therefore I can buy gadgets. It has been argued that drinking, smoking and chasing would be cheaper (I'm not convinced), but I can't help who I am. Anyhow, I dropped into the Orange shop just on the off chance that latest Smartphone, the E200, had arrived. Of course I wasn't going to buy one - I just wanted to admire it. But then I saw that the keys all light up with this really cool blue colour. And it has a camera. And Bluetooth. And Smartphone 2003 software so I can run .NET programs I've written on my phone. And before I knew it I was walking out of the shop with another toy.

It was the blue keys wot did it.

This has actually benefited nearly all the family one way or another. Number one son gets my old SPV for Christmas (which he has been hankering after for a while) and number one daughter gets my Nokia 7650. Both kids can now send and receive colour pictures and play fun games etc. But I got the best phone.

The E200 is lovely. The display jumps out and smacks you in the eyes it is so clear and sharp. The user interface seems a lot more snappy (probably because the phone has much more internal memory). The range of programs supplied with the phone is much wider. You can record video sequences. You can make a picture of dancing crabs appear when someone rings you up (very useful). The phone itself is lighter and slightly more stylish. The keys don't hurt your fingers as much. The joystick is a bit of a step back from the joypad on the old SPV in my opinion, but it works OK. The synchronisation with Outlook is as good, but now you have more control over the process. In short, like I said, it's lovely. If this is how Microsoft Smartphones are going to be, bring them on....

Spent the evening trying to write some silly games involving cheese, in between scanning slides.

 


Mon, Nov 24 2003

Only Slightly Broken

Sorry about the break in service folks. Caused by a problem at my (non) service provider which meant I couldn't get access to the pages to update them. All fixed now (I think the bloke who can do this stuff has come back from his long weekend away).

Anyhoo - joys of Monday. Did a bumper lecture loading today because the .NET crew are limbering up for their exams and so I had to invent some past exam questions and then go through them. For two hours. Went OK, and I actually saw some lightbulbs come on during the lecture. Serves me right for leaning on the light switch, ho ho. And then on to the First Year, who asked me lots of questions I couldn't answer. Not because I don't know (of course) but because I didn't deliver that bit of the module and I'm concerned if I tell it how I think it is this might not go down well in the exam. At the end I managed to muddle through and make it to lunch.

Spent the afternoon brushing up on the presentations for our open day. We are adding lots of lovely pictures and using the university presentation style. But the jokes remain the same.

I call this one "early morning pie shop".

 


Sun, Nov 23 2003

Scanned Laughter

Been meaning to buy a transparency scanner for a while now. David lent me an Olympus one which, despite being a few years old, worked a treat. The only problem is that it only works with Windows 95 and takes five minutes per slide. In search of extra speed I've invested in (note that this sounds so much better than bought another toy) a scanner with a transparency head. The quality is not quite on a par with the older system, but the speed and colour depth is pretty good. I'm now going to go through all those colour slides I took when I was a young strip of a lad and make them into DVD based shows. This is kind of a fireside, winter evening kind of thing where we can wallow in nostalgia and cocoa in equal measure.

The first slide I scanned with the new scanner came out blurred. And I mean really blurred. Cue around half an hour of head scratching, adjustment and frantic optimisation of the scan process. Of course the slide itself was blurred (in the old days focusing the camera was something you did - or forgot to do - by hand). Oh how we laughed. I'll use some of the old pictures to augment the meagre picture ration on these here pages.

Around half past eight there was a kind of kerlunk, and the mains power dipped on and off for around half a second. All the computers in the house (and there are a few) promptly reset and I could hear muffled curses from upstairs as chunks of work and hard earned gameplay went west. At least our power kept going. Down the road Derek enjoyed an hour of powerlessness. Apparently candle lit dinners are all very well, but only if planned that way.

 


Posted at:Tue, Jun 15 2004 07:24:55 PM by Rob

Contact rob@robmiles.com