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

April 2005 - Posts

Frustrated Photographer
Friday, April 29, 2005 9:46 PM
Pesky family. Drove all the way to see dad today and they wouldn't let me stop to take photos. It was a lovely evening and I had the big camera in the boot. And they wouldn't let me stop. Some silly nonsense about not stopping on the motorway. Humph.
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Funny Sites
Thursday, April 28, 2005 10:23 PM
Couple of funny sites. If you want to sample life from the Dark Side, take a look at Darth Vaders Blog. It is particularly amusing if you run it through Gizoogle like I did here.
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Slide5 is on the way
Wednesday, April 27, 2005 8:58 PM
So my little conference is picking up speed. I've got a web site and a conference blog. I've also got a little challenge for my more distant readers. I want a photograph of my Slide5 poster as far away as possible from Hull. The most distant picture
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Bringing My Machine to It's Knees
Tuesday, April 26, 2005 9:21 PM
I've had a new machine my office for some time. It has plenty of memory and quite a fast processor. I've never really made it suffer. Until today. The combination of a Virtual PC runing Server 2003, Outlook, Word, Powerpoint, Visual Studio 2003, Visual
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What Can You Write in 20 Minutes?
Monday, April 25, 2005 7:00 PM
I'm writing some bits and bobs for the Smartphone at the moment. I've been given some little games to play with and I'm making them into articles. For one of them I thought it might be nice to create a glowing cursor type thing. This is not hard to program,
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A Nice Place to Work
Friday, April 22, 2005 8:14 AM
One of the nice things about working at the University of Hull is that you get views like this when you come into work:
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Free UK Mobile Development Conference
Thursday, April 21, 2005 3:55 PM
Preparations for the mobile development conference are coming along nicely. I'm amazed how far in advance you have to plan these things...Anyhoo, if you are interested in finding out how the plannig is going I've started an msn space which will hold a
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You Should Code4Fun
Wednesday, April 20, 2005 11:10 AM
I've just happened accross Coding4Fun. What a wonderful idea. I write programs for fun. Some people make models of matchsticks out of lots of little Eiffel towers; I code for fun. There are a whole bunch of people out there who do the same and this site
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Writing Specification is Good for the Soul (and the product)
Monday, April 18, 2005 9:07 PM
Spent a big chunk of today writing the specification for a little program that Peter and I are writing. The customer was rather surprised to discover that I was going to spend around a third of the development time writing the spec. I'm quite happy to
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A House Full of Gadgets
Saturday, April 16, 2005 7:28 PM
Microsoft are opening a house full of gadgets for a while in London. Movers and shakers (and MVPs - which is how I get included) are going to be treated to a tour of the facilities and given a taste of the way the future is going to be.Do I want to go?
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Parking and Marking
Friday, April 15, 2005 9:34 PM
Another day looking at projects and exams. Drove down to Doncaster and they had got me a reserved parking space. Everyone else is "P. Smith" and "J. Jones". Mine always says "Rob Miles". I'm not sure why, but I really like that. But I don't think that
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Read This
Thursday, April 14, 2005 3:11 PM
Found a very nice article about the importance of writing code that is easy to understand. Take a look here.
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Got Gizmondo
Thursday, April 14, 2005 8:10 AM
My Gizmondo arrived yesterday. Spent a big chunk of the evening playing with it. A Gizmondo is a hand held games machine powered by Windows CE with Nvidia graphics hardware, GPS and GPRS. So it can play music, videos, games, find out where it is and then
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Off The Wire
Tuesday, April 12, 2005 9:11 PM
Had all kinds of plans tonight. Set up a web form to handle registrations for Slide5. Grab some stuff from my office machine and get it working. Send some emails and update the blog. Usual stuff. Unfortunately I've only just got my ADSL back since it
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Pop Quiz
Monday, April 11, 2005 7:53 PM
I was listening to a track on the way home from work today (isn't random play a wonderful thing). The following lyric line leapt out at me:Take your girlfriend by the earsAnd play upon her darkest fearsGive me the song and artist and win another virtual
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Jack Dee Live
Saturday, April 09, 2005 9:45 PM
Went to see Jack Dee live tonight. Very funny. He is a british comic with a nice line in dead pan humour. He's no small mimic or actor too. He is presently touring the UK and so we toddled down to City Hall to see him. We were quite near the front so
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Interfaces and Abstract Classes. And why not?
Friday, April 08, 2005 9:13 PM
Been teaching more programming. Today we did (amongst other things) interfaces and abstract classes. People have problems with these. Here my technique. There are just two things you need to remember here:Product is a great name for an abstract class.IDoEdit
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Back in the Twilight Zone
Thursday, April 07, 2005 8:13 PM
We got the pinball machine back again tonight. After replacing the connector it turns out that the fuse had failed as well. Just as we were poised to take the board off the back panel and look for broken PCB tracks I had the idea of metering all the fuses
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Back With Ideas
Thursday, April 07, 2005 8:09 AM
Just got back from a Microsoft MVP Open Day. In the Olde Days (tm) if you wanted to be invigorated (and probably make a bunch of new contacts) you'd probably head down to the local spa. I reckon that going to a Microsoft event works just about the same
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Train of Thought
Monday, April 04, 2005 8:49 PM
I was doing a lecture for the first year C# course and was talking about design with objects. From the business point of view I'm trying to get a seqeuence of design actions together into a little train of thought. The sequence goes like this: Identify
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Live Drama
Saturday, April 02, 2005 9:20 PM
I'm back in Hull after a brief break. Came back to a credit card bill and a broken pinball machine. Paid the bill and now I'm after an 0.156" 11 Way connector header with Friction Lock to fix the machine. The old connector had quite literally burnt out.
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