Hurrah for Gardening

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..

Turn Down the Heat

Normal (ish) Saturday.

Spent some of the afternoon fiddling with a recalcitrant computer with a penchant for overheating. I'm not terribly pleased with the solution (turn the clock speed down) but it is only temporary and at least it helped diagnose the problem.

Encarta Power

This year Microsoft decided that I was a "Most Valued Professional for 2003". Very nice of them, and much appreciated. Not quite sure what I did to deserve this (in a good way) but I intend to try and do it again for next year. Anyhoo, one of the things that you get is a wad of "Microsoft bucks" to spend at the company store, which is a slick, online setup. I've bought a whole bunch of books about programming .NET and a copy of Encarta on DVD. I've got a kind of theory that Encarta plus Tablet PC is a really good idea, especially considering that you can run the product without the disk installed.

And that is how it is turning out. My tablet is now a kind of "super encyclopedia" which I can use anywhere. The book model works really well and the WIFI networking means that I can download updates to the content. But I haven't got to the best bit yet. I fired up the mapping part and opened up a view of Northern Europe, which shows Great Britain amongst other places. The best bit is that only four cities are displayed on the GB map, London, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Hull. And Hull is where I live. Ha. Eat your hearts out Leeds, Bradford, Manchester and Milton Keynes. A small victory, but significant I feel.

As for Encarta itself, great fun and very useful. The 360 degree views are super, although I'm not sure why they have a view of a wine cellar in France. Nice barrels though....

Tidy Desks and Sick Minds

Spent today writing new material for .NET. I'm also tidying my office. I'm working at the rate of one full wastebasket per day. I reckon that by Christmas I might have the place looking reasonable. (anyone who has actually seen my office will agree with this).

I was going to take a set of "before and after" pictures of the place, but then I was worried about anyone seeing them. I'm going to settle for an "after" photograph which will be available at the end of the year.

Fools Rush In

Installed Office 2003 Beta 2 today. Thought I'd do a proper job and told it to overwrite the original installation. So far my faith has been justified; to the point where apart from the jazzy colour scheme (which I think is a bit retro and jars with the Windows XP colours) I'm having difficulty detecting what changes have been made. I'm looking forward to using the new Powerpoint, where you can have speaker notes and things on your laptop screen alongside the actual presentation on the VGA output.

However, I think the other changes will appear by osmosis as I find new little bits and bobs. They say the main thrust of the changes centre around group working - so I'm presently working on getting a Windows Server 2003 machine of my own to play with at work. Sharepoint looks really interesting.

Marking Time

Spent the day exam marking. Urgh. Some very inventive answers out there. Not right, just inventive. Note for anyone attempting an exam - making things up in an exam situation never works. Your ideas of what the answer might be are massively unlikely to happen to map on to the truth...

Had a ripping evening. Borrowed a bunch of CDs from the daughter and loaded them onto my jukebox. (all legal and above board). I'll let you know what I think of Rooney, Delta Goodrem, Turin Brakes, Michelle Branch, Mark Joseph, Let Go and the like later. Listening to Rooney at the moment. Not bad. Not as good as the Wallflowers though.

I'm getting bored with Kat the Pirate. She keeps getting her ship sunk underneath her and the islands are starting to look very similar. And if I have to fight one more skeleton.....

Cheap is Good

And so to cheap video games. Bought "Pirates : The Legend of Black Kat" for ten quid (english pounds) on Saturday. Think it was some kind of fall out from the very good movie of almost the same name (but not related in any way - except that you do get to fight skeletons). I wasn't expecting much. It is a first generation XBOX title which had indifferent reviews when it came out. However, it is actually quite fun in a throw away kind of way. The sea battles are quite nice (especially when you've upgraded your ship and got a few extra canons on board) and the land based hacking and slashing is not too bad. The game is not in the Tomb Raider category (unless you compare it with the later releases - ho ho) but it passed a few hours in a quite pleasant manner. It suffers from "glass wall syndrome" in that sometimes you can't go that way because the darned thing just picks you up and places you back somewhere else, and it is starting to get a bit samey: Find a map to an island. Go there and blow up the enemy town. Go ashore and fight something. Get another map to another island. Repeat.

However, and this is my point folks, for ten quid I could have gone to see two movies, bought a couple of packets of fags (which would be really stupid since I don't smoke) or four or so pints of beer. In terms of the entertainment offered compared to that lot a cheap video game like this is quite good value. I can probably unload it for a fiver to someone else, and so it could end up costing me even less. So, if you want a means to while away a bank holiday a cheap game is not such a bad idea.

Croquet. Fun and Evil

Another day of visiting, drinking and eating. Managed to get in some croquet. If you have never played croquet you are missing out big time. A minute to learn. A lifetime to master. It is a game where you don't actually have to be made of pure evil to succeed, but it does help with the strategy side. I've been baffled for years by the fact that nobody has released a computer based croquet game. I see it as some kind of proof that computers are a force for good. Anyhoo, managed to win....

Fun is Fun

Quiet day. Went shopping followed by a trip out to drink and eat with friends.

Bought a cheap video game, but I haven't had time to play it yet. Too busy enjoying myself.

Spaced Good

Fairly quiet at work. We have an English institution called a "Bank Holiday" coming down the tracks on Monday. I think this means that most people head off early on Friday to make a long weekend even longer. Of course we hard working, resolute folk are immune to such distractions. And anyway, I bet all the roads will be dead busy.

Got a pressie yesterday. Something to do with having been married for a long time. Series 2 of Spaced on DVD. I feel that I'm probably too old to like Spaced as much as I do. It is very contemporary, very well put together and very funny. I'm rationing myself to 2 episodes per day at the moment - but it has that rare quality that means I will be able to watch them oodles of times afterwards anyway.. Buy it. Now. Find out more at this fan site (which is excellent in itself).

Pirates and Portables

Finished off my fixes to the layout mangler. Now works fine. Spent a huge chunk of time just to get back to where I started. But the design is much cleaner and more flexible. I'm a bit peeved that I didn't think of this technique at the start, but sometimes you have to try to make a design work to find out if it is any good or not. And the new design is almost a work of art.
I have this sort of vision of the future, where computer programmers are recognised as creative artists in the same vein as Leonardo Da Vinci and people will be scouring the hard drive archives of the world for a "genuine Miles listing". They will then marvel at the superb layout, the apposite choice of variable names and the wondrous use of abstraction, interfaces and inheritance which the great programmer has brought to bear on the problem...

I'm not sure that this will happen (oh, alright I am sure that it won't), but I like to think that my code would stand up to such scrutiny if it did...

Also bought number one son his new portable. After trying to purchase an Apple Powerbook from the reconditioned store. Note for future customers: it only opens for a few hours each week and has this strange habit of saying there is nothing there when it opens, and then stuff suddenly appearing (and selling out instantly) somewhat later. Not being that keen on spending hours each week refreshing the browser to catch a machine (or watch as someone else catches it) we eventually bought a PC based Notebook. From a toyshop. If you want a keenly priced, fully featured laptop you should take a serious look in Toys R Us. Their range of Medion systems is just about unbeatable. And the machines themselves are great. This should give some concern to "proper" PC vendors, as things like laptops are now becoming commodities which can be sold by anyone. As for the new machine; I suppose it is just a matter of time before he has Linux running on it - but there's no accounting for taste...

Went to see "The Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl" tonight. Great fun. Smashing special effects. Johnny Depp was very good. If you want to find out what kind of pirate a permanently sozzled Mick Jagger would make (or if you just want some pure entertainment) I'd advise you to go and see it.

Pay for Your Mistakes

It pays to improve your word power dept: Moribond - noun: secret agent who hasn't been out much lately.

Spent all day paying for a silly mistake what I made. I've produced this rather nifty layout manager for .NET. It is designed to take the place of the lovely GridBagLayout which is provided by Java. We are using it in "the product which cannot be named" so that we don't have to place things like text, edit boxes, displays etc, on the windows by hand - and the windows can scale and resize themselves properly.

However, when I created it I made a bad design decision. Bad decisions have a way of coming back to haunt you - especially when they are in the underlying design of your system. I was getting to the point where I was spending more time thinking of ways to get round the problem (i.e. add more and more kludges) than it would take to fix it. So I fixed it. Made a simple change to the design and got around 900 compilation errors for my trouble, which I then had to work through and fix.

By the end of today I am down to 300 errors.

As for the fault, comparatively trivial, but very annoying. I made the layout information a property of the window component, not the other way round. This seemed OK when I wrote the first version, but when you want to start making components and deciding where to put them afterwards (which is what you end up doing) you are in a big mess. You have to invent "dummy" layout items just to keep the system happy (which is a kludge). The design now works the other way round. Layout items are assigned components to manage. We can easily change what appears on the screen and everyone is happy. And I've got backache...

Coding and Chain Saws

Busy day. Writing material for the new .NET degree. Nothing improves your understanding of something more than writing a course about it. And you think of such weird things. I was trying to thing of a nice way of introducing managed code (sorry if this is a bit techie but hey, it's my job).

Managed code is where your program is not allowed to actually touch the hardware. It is a bit like me getting someone else to cut down the tree with the chain saw. Rather than Robert firing up the huge power tool and removing his arm along with the tree I would say "Cut that tree down please". This is safer for me, and also good news in that if I say "Cut down that tree over there" the guy with the saw can tell me that I don't own that tree, and anyway it is actually a telegraph pole. Anyhoo, you should now have the idea that a managed program just sits on top of something and tells it what it would like to do. The thing underneath (aka the environment) then does the operation if it is sensible.

Managed code is a big chunk of how Microsoft .NET makes sure that programs behave themselves. In this sense I guess you could call it somewhat "cutting edge", even though the idea has been around for a while. The funny thing is (to me anyway - but I'm a bit sad in this respect) when I started looking back to the first widespread managed code environment I hit upon good old BASIC, beloved of home computer users many years ago. A BASIC interpreter takes each instruction from your program, decides what to do and then does it. In this respect I reckon it is pretty managed in its approach. And the writer of one of the most popular versions of BASIC was a certain Mr. Gates, whose company you may have heard of.....

Also found time to go down to the pub with the usual suspects and discuss important issues such as.... oh, I can't remember. But I do remember laughing a lot.

Bloggers Guilt

Psychologists have just identified a new mental condition which is called "Bloggers Guilt". This afflicts people who, for no good reason, have decided to place personal, narrative, details on the web (this condition is called "Bloggermania"). The guilt kicks in when the subject has not posted anything in the blog for a while (perhaps even for good reason like not being near the internet) and intensifies over time. The subject then thinks about all the ways that he/she can atone for their sins in the form of flashy graphics, loads of pictures or just an improvement in narrative style (as if).

Hmm. Anyhoo, it has been a while, but I am back now. I'll post some stuff about where I've been and what I've done when I can work out where I've been and what I've done, but for now all I can say is sorry folks and it won't happen again (at least until next year..)

Rant alert: I read in the paper that insurance companies are introducing a new technology in their call centres which is used to detect illegal claims. Apparently the software can tell when the customer is telling whoppers. I think this is rather scary. I mean, what would happen if they left it switched on by mistake: "Of course madam, we'll have someone round to sort out your claim in a couple of hours" - sound of alarm bells, machines shouting "LIE LIE LIE" in background.... However, the really funny bit was when they tried to justify their new system with the statement that someone had made a personal injury claim for losing an eye five times. Now call me old fashioned, but I don't actually think that you need new fangled technology to sort that one out. All you need is to work with other insurance companies to keep records of who you pay out to. Then add a line like:

IF NUMBEROFEYESLOST > 2 THEN PRINT "ILLEGAL CLAIM"

.. to your software somewhere and all should be well.

Mystery Man

The missing week starts here. What did Rob do? Where did he go?

A Break for a Hiatus

I've always liked the word hiatus. I think it ought to mean some kind of violent event: "Calling all cars, hiatus outside the courthouse". However, it doesn't, it means a break or interruption in service - like what this blog is heading for. I'm going somewhere where the network connection may be flaky for a while. I'm leaving the blog to the tender mercies of number one son
Incidentally, I've also always liked the word miasma. Until I found out what it means that is. However, my favourite word (and also the favourite of loads of people) is serendipity - which I only found by mistake..

Normal service - or what passes for normal - will resume in a little while.

And Now For....

Best buy of the week dept: Managed to snag a copy of "Another Monty Python Record" at a discount price. If you have not heard any Python then you are missing out big time. And their records are great. Just listening the "The Death of Mary Queen of Scots" I had tears running down my face. And not because I'm from Scotland.

More Power to My Elbow

I really like Windows XP. It spends its time doing nice things for me. But today I did something really horrible to the poor operating system. I've been chugging along with a Pentium 800 for a couple of years and most of the time it has done fine. However, if you start doing things with DVDs you pretty soon find that you need a bit more under the bonnet. That and the fact that I was in danger of having the slowest PC in the entire family - including the laptops!

So, down to Quaytech (a local bits and bobs supplier) and away with an Athlon, a motherboard, and a wodge of RAM. Then I did my horrible thing. I opened up the machine, replaced the mother board and rebooted. Windows XP starts up and finds that everything (and I mean everything) has been moved around. It is like coming home and finding the bed is now in the kitchen. XP throws a hissy fit and then falls over. So far, so good. Now I do the clever thing. Boot from the distribution CD and do a repair installation. Same kind of install, although with bits missing 'cos XP knows some of the answers already.

At the end of the install the system just boots and I'm back to where I started. Everything is in the same place and it all works. Only one thing left to do, and that is install the updates. So it is off down to windowsupdate.com (which is very upset and insists on 23 or so installs) and away we go. Slight hiccup here, in that the machine persists in crashing during the update. No matter, simply download the administrative install (which runs entirely on the machine) and away we go.

I now have exactly the same machine, only three times as fast and with double the memory. I tried something similar with Windows 98 a few years ago and lost an entire weekend picking up the pieces. Kudos to Windows XP for this.

And now for the health warnings: I was pretty sure that it would just work since I had done something similar before. However, I also made quite a few backups before I embarked on my escapade, and I had a fallback position with a spare machine to get me onto the internet and keep things going. So, if you are going to try this I would say that it is possible, but remember that thing can go wrong as well as right.

Wot Larks

We are setting up a new computing lab and for some reason I (ahem) am in charge of sorting most of it out. The builders are in and we are nervously looking at schedules and trying to make sure that everything is in a position to go live in mid September when all the students come back. It is kind of important, in that 150 or so workstations are not the kind of thing that we can easily do without. Today was something of a crunch time, in that we had to perform the timetable allocation between the four departments involved.

I was all set up for a marathon meeting and a bit worried as to whether we could sort it out between us. In the end it worked out swimmingly. Rather than a bunch of people fighting over resources and trying to get the best deal for their department we had instead a bunch of people all trying to solve the same puzzle by changing the shape of their pieces as we went along. In the end everything fitted together and we have what looks like a workable first draft of a timetable. I'm not saying it was fun particularly, but it was constructive all the way, which is wonderful in itself. Thanks folks.