01.Blogs :
RobMiles  
Programming, gadgets and life as a lecturer in a UK university.

February 2005 - Posts

Your Name in Bricks
Sunday, February 27, 2005 7:42 PM
If you have a few quid to spare you might think about using the Lego Brickalizer:http://shop.lego.com/shopmosaic/default_s.asp?This lets you upload an image to be used to make a mosaic from Lego bricks. The Mosaic ends up as a 44 x 44 bitmap which you
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Narrative Challange
Friday, February 25, 2005 11:42 PM
Is programming like writing stories. Discuss? A well constructed story has a sequence of events in which everything happens for a reason and nothing is out of place. Does that remind you of something? I have always been a fan of the short story, especially
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Technorati and Spoke Categories
Friday, February 25, 2005 11:58 AM
Aha! Works fine. So people, if you want your Spoke posts to be indexed on Technorati all you have to do is use the category mechanism. I'm going to do this from now on, and we will see what happens.
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Technorati Two
Friday, February 25, 2005 11:39 AM
OK. Now I'm trying again. The first tag worked OK. (you can search Technorati for SpokeMagic and find the post from yesterday). But it is supposed to work with blog categories too (which makes much more sense).So let's try this.
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Technorati Trivia
Thursday, February 24, 2005 7:49 PM
It looks as if my Technorati thing is sort of working. The link in the previous post is not the magic. The magic is in the tags that I have to add to the posts so that the Technorati spider can find them and add them to its index. Then, when someone else
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Animal Crossing
Wednesday, February 23, 2005 11:19 PM
Bought a game for the Gamecube today. Only played it for a while but it looks fun. It is called Animal Crossing. You just move into a world and do stuff for other animals. So far I've delivered some furniture, planted some trees and posted a letter. Everything
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What Price?
Tuesday, February 22, 2005 10:04 PM
Yesterday I got asked how much to charge for some work. Deciding the price of a job is really hard. One book says you decide how much it should cost and then multiply the value by three. That sounds about right to me, since I have always under estimated
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Technorati Test
Monday, February 21, 2005 5:04 PM
I'm trying to get Technorati work with spoke. Let us see if this works....Technorati
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Snow Joke
Sunday, February 20, 2005 8:05 PM
We had our first proper snow of the winter today. I'm pleased that we've finally had some, even though it seemed to melt quite quickly.Now my garden looks as good as everyone elses!The forecast is for more over the week. I hope they are wrong. Snow at
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Photo Fun
Saturday, February 19, 2005 5:20 PM
I've been playing with the camera again. What do people think of this?And what is it a photo of?
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Things that annoy me
Friday, February 18, 2005 8:36 PM
I've got a lovely Smartphone. It does every thing very well. (yesterday I beamed contact details over IR for the first time ever). However, some things it does too well. Sometimes I go to dial a number and the message "SpeedDial was broken and has been
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Fun and Games at GEN05
Thursday, February 17, 2005 8:25 PM
So at 12:30 today we all boarded the charabang to head off  to the Microsoft GEN05 event at Leeds. Lured by promise of goodies and info in equal measure the Hull posse was in good sprits as the coach rumbled down the motorway. I took
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You want to Slide5?
Wednesday, February 16, 2005 7:50 PM
OK. Today I'm launching slide5. This is a conference for UK based student developers, particularly those who are thinking about using Microsoft mobile devices, Smartphones, Pocket PCs and Pocket PC Phone Edition. I'm presently tracking down speakers and
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Does everything need to be centred?
Tuesday, February 15, 2005 11:05 PM
Just made up some draft flyers for a conference thingy I'm organising (more later). I looked away from them and then looked back and I noticed that the text and the logo aren't quite centred. I can see why, the design kind of dictates this. But it is
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Warring Software
Monday, February 14, 2005 8:26 PM
My MSN search toolbar thingy continues to impress. The worst problem at the moment is that I forget I've got it, and use lots of slow, manual, searches when I could just use it to get straight to what I want.That and the fight it had with the spyware
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But did it work?
Sunday, February 13, 2005 11:07 PM
Went to see number one son in Durham. Left him a little present which I bought yesterday. It is a little box around the size of a matchbox. You switch it on and leave it in the victim's room. When the light goes out it makes a noise like a mosquito. When
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Gone Shopping
Saturday, February 12, 2005 5:55 PM
Went up town this morning to buy this and that. Nothing of great consequence, but one thing which might be interesting. I can't say what it does yet, but I'll let you know if it works..... Took a picture, but it didn't come out as well as the place looked
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Wiki Whacking
Friday, February 11, 2005 9:20 PM
I'm trying to set up some wikis for this and that. I've an idea that a Wiki might be a good place to perform a co-operative project. Flexwiki is a good place to start if you are after a wiki, and it doesn't need a database to support it. I've got
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Useful Free Software
Thursday, February 10, 2005 9:09 PM
I've been using the Microsoft Spyware Beta for a while now and I like it a lot. It just sits in the toolbar and stops bad things from happening. Well worth a download in my opinion.While we are on the subject of good freebies from Microsoft, I also like
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Portable Media Centre Fun
Wednesday, February 09, 2005 11:11 PM
I've had the Portable Media Centre for a while now and I must say it has grown on me. I've got around 240 albums, 15 movies and 1,500 pictures on it. Since I upgraded the firmware I've noticed something strange about the battery. It doesn't seem to go
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del.icio.us - but what is it for?
Tuesday, February 08, 2005 9:28 PM
I've signed for something that I'm not sure I'll ever understand how to use, with a most confusing name: http://del.icio.us/. Richard has signed up too, and we've both also got things on Technoarti. This is all part of the brave new word of the web, semantics and
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CP Test Fun and Games
Monday, February 07, 2005 10:41 PM
We started our CP test training today. Around 40 students turned up for the first episode, which was nice. We are going to have to work quite hard as the material is wide ranging, but it is very interesting stuff. I'm setting up a Wiki to support the
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Find Your Star Sign
Sunday, February 06, 2005 6:47 PM
If you want to find out what star sign you should have been born under, take a look kere:http://www.cryptoclast.org/Opinion/astrology/reverse_astrology.htm
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Frag Fest II - Ducks
Saturday, February 05, 2005 8:24 PM
The guys from Com Soc excelled themselves today. Last semester they organised a really good Frag Fest. Today they did an even better one. They had more people, more performance and an even slicker setup. I turned up late (not at all to avoid the
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Bop It Power
Friday, February 04, 2005 10:46 PM
Some years ago I got a game called Bopit. It is a bit like Simon says, but with an electronic voice that tells you what to do. The game went all over with us. We even played it during the great eclipse of 1999 (what fun that was - on the line of totality
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Setting Targets
Thursday, February 03, 2005 9:33 PM
We are starting off on our Certified Professional teaching in the department next week. We are all going to cram for course 70-300 (.NET Architectures) and see if we can pass it. It is not part of any taught course, we are doing this because it will be
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Scary Flaky Drives
Wednesday, February 02, 2005 11:15 PM
Some things are guaranteed to make me nervous. One of them is a computer doing something different from last time. Yesterday my office machine refused to run my Class Server client. I ran scandisk and the program works fine now. For some reason this is
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Conscious Computers
Tuesday, February 01, 2005 7:23 PM
Had an interesting IM conversation with one of our students a while back. The question posed was: "Will we still need programmers in 20 years?". A very profound question. One way to look at it is that I can only think of two professions that we will *definitely*
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