Windows Phone 7 debugging on the device...

A few moments ago I posted on this blog that I had updated to Mango and that I needed to get the phone registered for development.

Well, That process took all of twenty seconds. I created an Hello World app from a panorama template and uploaded it to the phone where it is working just fine and all in the space of a few minutes.

Contrast that with my initial experience of putting an application on the Apple iPhone some while ago and the difference is clear.

I find myself in a strange situation. I really like Apple products. I also really like Microsoft products and I don't suppose I have a net bias for one or the other (ha ha pardon the pun) but that experience tells me that when one works with Microsoft developer tools, the process of getting the job done is secondary to the process of deciding what you want to do. This is almost the opposite with Apple development where the walled garden approach extends to the heavily fortified and guarded potting shed that stands in the corner of the garden.

I might just be tempted to ressurrect Trakkus now that I have all three platforms to develop upon.

Windows Phone 7.5

Well, what a rigmarole. I tried to apply a firmware update and bricked my Samsung Omnia 7 phone. Luckily the machine has a crash recovery mode and I managed to find a procedure and all the files for unbricking the poor thing. I will admit though that for a moment I was feeling a bit upset at having trashed my phone. Anyway, all's well that ends well and now I have WP7.5 build on the machine.

The next step is to recognise the phone as my development device and start cranking some Mango code for this puppy.

Siri

So funny. Siri understands "Make it so" as confirmation of a task.


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AI class midterm

Just got my scores for the AI class midterm exam. Well. I'm not pleased with myself because I feel that I put in a lot of effort for a 59% score on the exam. I attempted all of the questions but I missed out on some stuff that I feel I should have been able to get right.

I didn't realise when I started out that I would become so invested in the class but the work put in by the professors and particularly the attitude of Sebastian Thrun whose cheery and encouraging videos show that he is teaching a subject for which he has enormous passion. That makes for a great teacher.

I suppose that I have suffered from the bad luck of having my PC go totally haywire in the last week and being forced to spend a couple of days rebuilding and reinstalling all my stuff again. Still, I blame no one but myself for my mediochre score.

Bob Powell must do better.....

My bad...

The home button on my wife's iPhone 4 died recently leaving her much loved companion a useless cripple. I thought I would be clever and replace the button as I had successfully disassembled and reassembled my iPhone 3G to replace a battery and an earphone socket and replaced a broken back glass on her one.

I ordered the button from some dude on eBay and set to work with my big magnifying glass light and my tinest screwdrivers. After carefully following the instructions and laying all the components out in order of disassembly I finally put the home button in, rebuilt the phone and...

The blasted screen looks like all the ink has run. I'm guessing I screwed up the connections to the oled panel somehow but it has faded colours, lines and bits missing BUMMER!!

I had to go buy an iPhone 4S but I'm cagey, I restored Chrissy's backup to my own iPhone 4 which is only a couple of weeks old and I'm keeping the 4S for "important development work" ;-)

BUSTED! Speed of light gets a ticket!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15791236

Ok, so maybe still not dramatic? Maybe wrong? Maybe someone's huge cock-up like they didn't take account of the rotation of the earth or some dumb thing but this story is set to run and run.

Don't you just love science?

Octogig up and running

So my new PC is up and running and currently installing Windows 8 Developer preview in a virtual machine. The VM has a couple of processors and 2 gigs of RAM dedicated to it as the real motherboard board has hardware virtualization and I can't see any difference between running Win8 in a VM as opposed to directly on a machine.

I had a moment of panic when my old hard-disk wouldn't unlock with the Bitlocker encryption key but I discovered that they don't like working over USB very much so I slapped it on a spare SATA cable and now the old disk from Quadratic is a spare drive on Octogig.

I'm really peeved because all this faffing about made me miss out a question on the AI class homework 5. The I was unable to complete the questions. Ah well, Stuff happens...

Big ugly stupid box

but four cores, 8 gigs and hardware virtualization. Ahh well, I suppose one takes the rough with the smooth, as the bishop said, watching the actress smear the pineapple liberally with butter.

Saying goodbye to QUADRATIC

My original quad core PC...

Metro, a home away from chrome

Looking back, the geekiest thing ever was the introduction of the bevelled edge on a window. Just the merest hint of three-D and every morsel of geek DNA screams out for drop shadows to reinforce the ever present hint of morning sunshine that the window bevel shading suggests. Reading that stuff however is a pain and the use of bevels, drop shadows, halos and so on did nothing more than show off that one had a graphics card capable of colour gradation.

When reading, there is nothing more pleasing to the eye than the impression of a beautifully cut font. The simpler the font is to read, the better. The famous Swiss Font, Helvetica and its rip-offs, Verdana, Segoe et-al are icons of the dying years of the first electronic century. A time when designers ruled and were tasked with creating easy to read signage in busy metropolitan transport systems. Signage that was textually unambiguous and that was easy to understand by the droves of foreign tourists that passed through the great transport halls.

The Bauhaus design movement and the Swiss font sought to bring uniformity and simplicity to advertising so that the message became clearer and the nuance of that message relied not upon the typeface to imply class or style but to simply and firmly deliver the advertising slogan. The printed word became the vehicle upon which rode the fortunes of capitalism. Capitalism’s one true message delivered by capitalism’s one true typeface.

A hypertext document, web-page to the likes of you and me, has the possibility of being clean and simple to read but it requires elements of visual cues which tell the reader that the text is indeed a hyperlink. In the past, because we could, UI designers have reinforced the utility of onscreen controls by making them look like photorealistic representations of real things. Washing machines and other appliances sometimes had buttons moulded from clear plastic with the text pressed into the back of the button and painted or illuminated. We emulated that with gel-buttons.  We like to see buttons that sink down when we press them because that’s the way they work on our Hi-Fi systems or microwave ovens.

Can we express complex user interfaces in a clear and unambiguous manner without resorting to visual gimmickry? Can we return to the UI of GEM and the Apple Lisa while still retaining the ability to deal with situations far more complex than those systems ever dreamed of? In some way, I hope so. Maybe Metro can help with that.

Finally had enough...

of my sick computer. Although its a quadcore, trying to run VMs on it is a pain because it only has 4 gigs of RAM and that's all the board will take. I can't shoehorn more in there so my machine is unexpandable.

I'm going to buy a new motherboard that I can put at least 8 gigs of RAM in and another four core processor to run it then see if I can make sense of running all these VM's Also, I can repurpose my old machine to run Windows 8 full time and maybe make inroads into the Metro stuff.

I'm hoping tht by tomorrow I'll have the new beast up and running.

Opting

Google will serve you advertisments according to your demographic information that it may infer from sites you visit. According to my demographic, I am male. Ok, that's acceptable. My demographic also suggested that I am between 24 and 35, cool, I'm 51 but I am young at heart. I like tech, cars and apparently, Ukrainian and Phillipino girls for fun and friendship. Hmmm... I like them so much that the grinning vacuous wenches seem to appear on every AdWords served page I visit.

Strangely, as I've mentioned in this blog before, I actually believe in the ad-driven process because I really like the idea that I can get my searches for free and that someties I may be presented with an advert that I will follow and even make use of. I've certainly bought software online after clicking through an advert and my purchase of a Honda Jazz (Fit if you're in the USA) car was also influenced by ads after I had spent time looking for details on japanese cars.

I went through the process of redacting my demographic as inferred by Google yet still the wenches appear. In desperation I opted out entirely for a day or so but now, after a pang of guilt and no desire to have to pay Google for searching for my antique Sinclair Spectrum 48K or RM-380Z to complete my collection of retro-computing hardware, I am opted back in so now my new demographic info will accumulate again.

Well Google. I've been married for almost thirty years to a seriously sexy blonde who knocks the spots off you're wenches. Also, as a father of children who are now approaching their late twenties, I can't imagine a worse situation than being in a poor sad old man mid-life crisis situation with a twenty four year old kid who would be as frustrating to talk to as my own children sometimes still are.

If I start to get more and more dating site ads I'll opt out for ever and block your miserable cookies till the day I die. That's a promise.

Apple Vs Microsoft

I recently installed the Roslyn bits on my machine, a process that has totally screwed my PC. My Visual Studio install progressively ceased to function, reinstalling it was no help. Programs run slowly and IE crashes all the time. I discovered that there are no system restore points on my machine! A circumstance I found more than bizarre because I added restore points explicitly before adding several new programs. I have also used the iobit uninstaller which creates restore points automatically before uninstalling anything. Where did they go? Well it seems that Windows 7 has a bug that deletes all restore points when rebooting. Joy. My machine is utterly knackered without the possibility of restoring it to sanity even though I made every effort to protect it.

Here's my experience with my Mac and my iPhone. I wanted to update my mac hard drive so I got an external hard drive, plugged it in and enabled Time Machine on the drive.
Next day, I took the hard drive out of the Mac Mini, Plugged in a new one and booted up. My whole OS, all my files, all my work was restored to the drive in a matter of a couple of hours and I continued as before with a new 500GB hard drive as my root drive.
Later, I deleted a bunch of files by mistake because I don't really know how to drive the Mac apart from as a user. Time machine put them all back instantly, Phew! Today, IOS 5 update over the air effectively "bricked" my phone which had to be restored to factory settings. Less than 10 minutes after the phone came back to life, the cloud backup had been restored and my phone was working perfectly again with all its files and settings intact and I haven't even plugged it in for months.

I have always been and will continue to be a Microsoft user because I make my living with their systems. I am a great exponent of their products, reccommeding them to others all the time but I'm sorry to say, that when the chips are down and the disaster strikes, Microsoft has a great deal to learn from Apple.

Even more Virtual PC

Don't try to install the virtual machine additions. They bluescreen the VM.

More Virtual PC 2007...

Sadly VPC 2007 won't let me install a 64 bit Windows 7 inside it but it seems happy with the x86 version.

Virtual PC 2007 running on Windows 7

In desperation to repair my seriously sick PC and un the situation where I cannot reformat and reinstall my work PC due to the requirement for some paid-for software that I have lost the install CD's for, I decided to use a virtual PC to run Visual Studio which is so busted it won't work at-all these days.

All the problems started when I installed the Roslyn CTP. Flash quit working immediately and now, Visual Studio has progressively failed such that it's unuseable. Windows Forms designers won't load screens or controls, no intellisense etc, etc.

I was inspired to simply set up a virtual machine using Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 downloaded from MSDN but after installing it, it refused to run due to compatibility issues with Windows 7. After much head scratching and a bit of thread following I discovered that Virtual PC 2007 will run just fine on Windows 7 as long as you uninstall the Virtual PC update in the programs and features control panel.

It seems that VPC 2007 and this update don't play well together. After removing it I was able to set up a new Virtual PC VHD and OS without further ado.

Metro, the phone - desktop dichotomy

Metro is all about clean and simple design with an engaging experience for the user. I wholeheartedly agree with that principle and applaud the fact that Microsoft has at last brought graphic design to the public face of the operating system. The look and feel of PocketPC / Windows CE et-al was always firmly based on desktop and that was surely a mistake. Small form factors, low resolution screens and intermittent usage demands a clear and concise way of presenting data.

Web design principles are too informal, too loose, for an operating system so although web sites are eminently usable and can be design works of art, the need to provide a consistent experience for users across a broad range of applications does not allow the unrestricted use of web design principles in a phone application.

Windows Phone 7 / 7.5 / Metro answers that requirement in a way that provides both the design simplicity and the ordered operating system expectations of the developer. This means that to design a good Metro application, one must follow the design guidelines.

Interestingly enough, the design guidelines for Metro have been made partly because of hardware design limitations for systems with limited memory and processor power. A Panorama application should have no more than five screen widths of content for example. Joy of joys, reduction of content implies fewer active controls on the page - a great design principle anyway - and also serves to reduce processor load for controls that do more than just display visuals.

How then does Metro translate to the desktop? Well, although the session yesterday was clearly phone oriented, the idea of reduction of complexity, user centric usability and ease of navigation is something missing from desktop applications. As a developer of desktop line-of-business applications I see that there must be a clear decision made whether one chooses to go the more conventional application design route or the Metro route.

On more capable systems such as those having flat panel displays and desktop type processing power, Metro us an ideal choice if, and only if, your application is aimed at consumers. By "consumer" I mean a consumer of services provided by the system, rather than a creator or power user. Metro is a beautiful glossy presentation window for all the complicated stuff you don't need your users to worry their pretty little heads about. Metro should absolutely not be the choice of UI for your next line of business application unless of course you are using untrained chimps to actually run your business.

Morning sessions at Paris WP7

Metro apps use a particular design style. Very clean and minimalist. Having one foot firmly in the print industry, I can relate to the Swiss style of simple graphics and clean typography.

I was just about to suggest to the presenter that the film Helvetica was a good reference for this design style when he asked the audience how many of us had seen it. About four hands went up in a crowd of about a hundred and fifty so a low percentage. Personally, I love that film even if it is a little obscure. If you haven't seen it and you're interested in modern graphic design it's a must-see.

Metro is clearly a response to graphics on a low resolution system. Keeping graphics clean and simple makes for good readability on a small form factor regardless of the fact that the phones are quite capable of running computationally demanding three dimensional games.

The days of gel buttons, drop shadows, bevels and halos are over, at least for the moment and frankly, I breath a quiet sigh of relief at that news.

For the phone, Metro is an obvious solution. Metro on the desktop is great, if you never use your PC for anything other than running the apps behind the super large icons or tiles. Metro is definitely not a system for those who make their living with the computer and who need access to deep functionality.

The starkly clean lines and supersaturated colours don't play well with complex tasks.

I was frankly disappointed at the same old same old of the application structures of all the demos. Once again, we are shown the wrong way to create a solid application. Too much intelligence in graphics with lots going on in the code behind. When will MS realise that demos should reflect the real world requirements of software and actually teach best practices from the outset.

Corrina B's design session was informative and showed of the ease with which an application can be crafted by a practice designer using Blend. Again though, I found her session, while fascinating, to be too full of minutiae and not as clear as the clean design that she was trying to promote.

More from me on this subject tomorrow as the 250 mile drive home was a pip.

Windows Phone 7 day

I'll be blogging and tweeting live today from the Windows Phone dev event at the Microsoft offices in Paris.
Follow me on twitter @bobpowell1



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Location:Allée du Bord de l'Eau,Paris,France

Grrr.. template cockup!

'nuff said!

Maker madness.

How to create a low cost maker lab.

Hardware:
  PC: The one you might be using to read this blog?
  Mac: as above:
  Arduino open source hardware: @ $20 ebay and various vendors (the hardware of choice)
  PIC microcontroller starter kit: @ $40 from Microchip (PIC controllers end up more bang for the buck than ATMEL)
  Parallax 32 bit multicore microcontroller @$25 from Parallax (Serious power but a wierd programming concept. not at all mainstream and needs understanding.)
  Hand-held digital oscilliscope: @$50 from ebay (optional but a really excellent tool to have)
  Soldering iron: $20
  Various small tools, screwdrivers, wirecutters, etc.

Software:
  Microsoft Visual Studio express: Free...
  Arduino development system: Free... (Mac or PC)
  PIC development system: Free with PICKit mentioned above
  Parallax dev kit: Downloads for free from Parallax Inc.

Optional:
  If you can wangle a full version of Visual Studio get the VisualMicro Arduino development addin. This is brilliant BTW.

You can literally get going with programmable electronic coolness for the price of a half-way decent lunch in a restaurant near you someplace.

Fusion of WPF, Arduino and other cool stuff from Jeff Albrecht

Jeff has some cool projects going in the Arduino space, notably SAMI, his Semi Annoying Mechanised Intruder that is a wheeled robot based on Arduino hardware that has various sensors. Watch a video of SAMI here...

Jeff recently adopted the code I created to draw Lissajous figures using WPF on a bitmap buffer to show the ping returns from the ultrasound sensors on his robot.

For me, these sorts of projects are the most facinating. Sitting in a technology space such as Windows or Mac or iPhone or Arduino is one thing but when we can so easily merge and fuse these technologies, especially in the context of the maker and hobbyist culture, we begin to see the possibilities of what a hands on approach to tech can provide.

I really think that the computer revolution is coming full circle because the availability of development equipment that would have cost thousands just a few years ago can be had for literally a few tens of dollars or sometimes for free today.

Interest in hands on programming, repurposing and reprogramming is rising amongst tech savvy young folks again. I can see exiting times ahead for innovation and understanding in the years to come.

AI-Class.

I do believe that the planning portion of this weeks AI class is even more annoying than the logic portion.
I started my career as a teacher and I know that if I presented a class as poorly as Prof Norvig's last couple of efforts I would have lost students in droves. They would have all bogged off to the pub!

Friends of mine...

Great work!

http://www.nemrod-software.com/new/

Congratulations China.

On the successful docking of your space hardware. This is a great achievement and deserves praise.

Shame on the United States and Europe however for imagining that more earthly financial matters preempt the space race. There are no more frontiers on Earth. The only direction for the human race is up and out into the solar system.

Vast resources, more than have ever been dreamed of by all the oil tycoons of this world, oceans of fuel, entire planet masses of metals, precious elements by the billions of tonnes are just sitting there ready for exploitation if only the powers of the world would make the effort to go there and get them.

Complacency and the belief that "we are the greatest" is the worst possible attitude to take in the face of what is coming. The United States and Europe must fight to maintain its power, not over the earth but over the solar system and the universe.

If we leave the planet we must work to ensure that a balanced perspective leaves it with us...

AI class.. not so much fun today

The explanation of propositional logic and particularly the uninformative waffle about first and higher order logic has been the most obtuse of the course so far.
If you want to educate people, don't write a lot of crummy and abstract examples and waffle about them in some little known dialect of Klingon!

AI class. Light dawns..

When I was a little kid I hated math because I couldn't see a use for it. My grandfather, who was an expert toolmaker, began teaching me trigonometry when I was seven or eight and in those days we used a slide rule to do the calculations. The great thing about slide rules is that they give one a sense of accuracy given a magnitude.
Later, when I became interested in computers, I wrote programs that used little math until I became friendly with a chap who showed me that even seemingly simple problems can benefit from some clever mathematical shortcuts.
Later still, I became interested in 3D graphics and wrote a rather cool, even if I do say so myself, 3D modeling program to generate the scene lists for Polyray and POV ray-tracers. I admit that i worked too hard on that problem and although I succeeded, the path was painful and full of nasty kludges.
Now I am taking the Stanford AI class and Doc Sebastian is introducing me to a lot of math I have never needed or even thought I might need one day. I will admit I'm finding it hard and I wish that I had spent more time discovering the math when my brain was young and fresh.
All that being said however, I'm finding this course a really interesting and enjoyable challenge. I have been frustrated from time to time but as I go through it I find myself understanding it more and more and really enjoying the course content.
My poor old neurons are getting a good workout but its definitely fun fun fun!!!

Rhetoric

Syrian president Predicts an earthquake. Hmmmmmm

Maybe Mr al-Assad should remember Iraq's leader being hanged after the "Mother of all battles" or Muammar Gadaffi being "sodimised with a knife or a pole" before being shot in the head by a disgruntled citizen.
Despotic north african leaders seem to have a miserable record when it comes to their survivability after spouting warlike rhetoric.

The old saying that discretion is the better part of valour may be even more applicable in these interesting days.

Al-Assad... SHUT YOUR GOB AND GIVE UP!!!


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Sir Jimmy Saville

Respect.


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How odd that reviewing my blog I find this post. He fooled so many...

Gesture user interfaces

Many people "speak" with their hands using gesture to reinforce the context of what they are actually saying. Recent innovations such as the Kinect system from Microsoft could enable these gestures to be parsed and to provide user input. Generally, such gestures are subtle inputs which are directed at the peripheral vision of the observer, the listener in the conversation.

Recent moves toward more overt gestural input, such as drawing shapes in thin air or waving one's arms about in "Minority Report" style ate interesting in principle but will undoubtedly present problems for users with regard to repetitive strain injuries sustained from attempting to make precise control movements in a 3d input space.

I recently fitted a light in an awkward place and the strain of trying to do up small screws while reaching in front of me into a restricted space was considerable. This would effectively be the kind of input that a CAD operator might have to repeat while creating a precision drawing for some physical object in a 3d design space.

I think that gesture input will be most useful when used to reinforce the nuance of verbal commands, somewhat similar a to our own innate gesture recognition systems we use as humans every day.


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Hallo Norge.

Du representerer den nest hyppigste besøkende til bloggen min. Enda mer enn Amerika. Fortell meg hvorfor, la meg komme kommentarer.

Hello New-Zealand!

My blog stats are surprising because you guys seem to be the most avid readers of my external monologue. I'd love to know if its because my ideas appeal to your cultural senses or if you have a particularly high interest in the sort of technical posts I make or if you read my posts with that irresistable sense of horror, like someone who privately watches awfully embarrasing soaps or ABBA concerts behind closed doors.

I will admit that I am very much interested in the idea of coming to the antipodes to live and to work. I'm finding the northern hemisphere a bit strange at the moment. I have relatives in Australia and they all rave on about how wonderful life is down there. I know also that Australia is not New Zealand, don't think I'd confuse the two. Anyway, my Australian audience is way down my list of readers.

Please feel free to leave me a comment or two. Except that is if there's just one sad Kiwi stalking me by reading my blog hundreds of times a day...

Science is sexy again!

I can fully see why science program's with stuffy old professor types or middle aged spinsters were not high on the viewing lists. Hienz Wulf, Robert Winston; you can take 'em or leave 'em.

The latter day gurus however are a different proposition. My wife and teenage daughter will sit for hours apparently engrossed in a science program presented by Brian Cox and both my sons and I greatly appreciate a good education by the likes of Alice Roberts or Kate Humble.

I'm amazed that the concept took so long to take off..

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Shutting down a Metro app

Metro apps take up the whole screen. The ones in the examples have no menu and no way to shut them down. If they play stupid distracting music, they continue to play stupid distracting music even when they are in background mode. This makes the UI incredibly frustrating to use.

Why not respond to the Escape key?

If you need to close down a Metro app, for the moment you need to use the Alt-F4 key combination which, I must admit, I haven't used in about ten years!

I can see this being a long and painful road.

Case in point...

Look at this example of an application using the Metro UI:

There is no discernible indication that the "Pick feeds" text is actually active and invokes an action. The link actually brings up a set of podcast feeds but floating the mouse over what seems to be a title has the effect of an almost indistinguishable darkening of the colour. I suppose in reality that the choice of float-over colour was one made by the application designer but when moving to a totally new user interface model, there should be a rather more noticeable change.

I'm all for subtlety but there is a limit below which subtle becomes obtuse.

Metro has me gnashing my teeth

The developer preview of Windows 8 includes the Metro interface that mimics the touchscreen interface of the Windows Phone 7. I'm actually very pleased with Metro on my Samsung Omnia 7 phone and I actually prefer it as an interface to that of the iPhone however, the desktop equivalent seems to be absolutely horrible to use in a desktop environment.
The way that apps take over the screen is touted as a wonderful feature that enables one to give the app full concentration but when said app has no obvious escape route, the multitasking habits of the seasoned desktop user demand a little less insistence from the application and a wee bit more compliance. I have a touchscreen PC in my kitchen upon which I am tempted to install 8 and gather feedback from the all encompassing demographic of my very diverse family who will test it to death in every mode of utilization.


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My new desktop...

Windows 8 / Metro developer Preview

A bit of a radical change just to get Flash working but hey-ho...

Windows 8 Developer Preview

I haven't even booted it up yet and I am already annoyed. Why?

"Getting devices ready 56%" Getting devices ready????? Where the hell did you go to school?

They say first impressions count. I am in a continuing downward spiral of despair.

Flash sucks even more!

So now this miserable crap works some of the time. If I hit a page full of flash ads, the page loads, pauses for a few moments and continues showing the flash ads just fine. If I hit youtube or some other flash video page, the vid begins to load and then the little busy icon freezes and the page dies.

I've uninstalled all of Roslyn, all but a few of my apps, reinstalled Visual Studio and the service pack, uninstalled flash N times and reinstalled it, run registry cleaners and so-on and it still dies on me.

I've been (almost?) a week now with a partially functioning PC. I might just have to wipe it.. :-(

What I really want...

is a jailbroken iPad running Windows 8 and Metro. Mwwwhahahahaaaaaaa...

Nostalgia...

ain't what it used to be.

Kick 'em when they're down.

In response to Gary Stix's article in Scientific American http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2011/10/24/steve-jobs-a-genius-yes-a-role-model-for-the-rest-of-us-no-way/

I say that it's a particularly brave thing to kick a chap in the nuts when he's so dead that he can't come back and smack you in the chops! Hey Gary.. What did you do to change the world today?

Steve Jobs is very newsworthy I'm sure but the use of his name for no other reason to get your miserable article published in a respected journal isn't really kosher. If you really want to have a go at Steve, borrow your cousin's boat and row across to see him!

Flash sucks!

I'm somewhat unhappy at the moment because last week I downloaded the Roslyn CTP to my PC which installed just fine. Trouble was I was using Visual Studio to develop some objects in my prototype SigmaBinder library to do probability calculations and Bayesian network calculations for the AI class. VS continued to work but my flash player now crashes all browsers that I tried it on. I struggled for a while watching the lessons on the Mac and trying the math on the PC but it was so frustrating that I decided to uninstall VS and everything that had been installed with Roslyn to no avail. No matter what I tried Flash still continues to crash and I can't reinstall it. I don't really want to reinstall Windows now as I have a couple of programs that I need and for which I have damaged the install disk. Anyway, the upshot of the story is that I missed the deadline on the AI class homework.

AI class AARRGGHH

Just doing the Bayes network part and the test for having cancer given that you get one positive and one negative result. It seems that actually doing a correct calculation is not good enough. Had I done a sloppy calculation and got his miserable result I would have got the question right.
I think if I was paying for this course I would be unhappy at the quality of it and indignant if their question marking during the quizzes had some bearing on my future as an applicant in the workplace.

Bushisms abound in the nucular age

I am watching a program in which Marcus De Sautoy, a bona-fide mathematician, is explaining the recent findings of the OPERA experiment. This program is produced by the BBC, THE bastion of correct English that has the task of protecting the English language against erosion by colonial pollution and teenage text-speak. As I listen I shudder in absolute horror as this supposedly learned man repeatedly speaks of "nucular" physics and the "nuculus" of atoms. He has less credibility than a brain dead Vally girl! I despise him!


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Roslyn arrives

Albeit in CTP form, Roslyn, the new Microsoft "Compiler As A Service" (CAAS) system is the first step towards the realisation of ideas from the tantalising talk that Anders Hjelsberg gave at PDC in 2008. This video is of Anders' talk on the future of C#. The video is one hour and ten minutes long and just the very last ten minutes (time code 58 minutes) talks of using the compiler as a service to dynamically generate executable assemblies at runtime using the compiler as a dynamic tool.

As you know, the process of developing code can be a laborious one with iterations which require constant feedback. You also probably know that code generation isn't new and has been with us for some time but until now, the possibility of an automated, iterative and self adjusting system of code generation has been almost impossible.

For a long time, dynamic code generation and even the principle of self modifying code has been a very touchy subject amongst programmers. To some it is complete anathema while to others it has been an excruciatingly difficult yet necessary task with tools that were not well suited to the job.

Roslyn aims to bring the techniques of automated code generation into the mainstream by providing a set of services that enable that develop and feedback cycle to become part of the running application process.

The first public iteration of Roslyn is available now from the CTP servers. It runs on Visual Studio 2010 and the length of time taken to bring this to the CTP stage, almost three years after the talk Anders gave in 2008 is a testament to the difficulty of getting this right.

Self rewiring electronics.

Oh, you mean like neurons?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15351071

If data be the food of...

Well, everything really, then eat-on.

Historically, creating or capturing data has been a costly task because sensing, or reading or collating the information usually required expensive setup or large scale organisation or both. A network of weather stations for example is a logistical problem only available to huge rich organizations like governments. Trawling through written records of statistics was a lifetime task for not much usable data. Today however, things are really different. The sheer volume of data being generated and the ways to refer two or more seemingly disparate data sets to one another is becoming cheap and possible.
Phone privacy is a big issue today and people seem to have a fear of how data might be used against them. Recent revelations that the iPhone was collecting cell-tower positions was seen, rightly or wrongly, as an intrusion on a person's right to not expose their wherabouts.
I strongly believe however that the more data is available in all forms then the better life will become and the more the individual will be protected.
Telephones are being given more and more sensors. A temperature, pressure and humidity sensor on a large proportion of telephones would generate so much real-time data for weather prediction that the expensive networks of weather sensors we maintain today would simply not be needed and the sheer volume of data would open up huge possibilities for correlation of seemingly unrelated events with that information. Perhaps every mobile phone should be equipped with every type of sensor its possible to squeeze into the package. We could seed the environment with millions of cheap sensor packs by including them on the pages of magazines and even embed them in fast food packages.
More data would mean more anonymity, not less. Modern man needs to accept that his whereabouts are pretty much known all the time if he wants to participate in society. Those that don't wish to participate are often wierd anyway so society can probably do without them. Floods and floods of data would serve to make an individual's contribution far less interesting. Like the importance of one fish in a shoal of sardines.
As we generate more data, our lives will be affected by it to a greater and greater extent. It would be foolish to try to stop it because the benefits already far outweigh the inconvieniences.

Time travel

Might be relatively simple but would you want to go back a second in time and find yourself 240 miles above the earth or a minute and find yourself past the orbit of the moon or a million years and be floating alone in the depths of interstellar space? Time travel is probable. Calculating where you want to be when you get there is highly improbable.

AI class homework 1

I have no clue how but I got 82% correct even though I felt I had done badly. Ok, I suppose there must be a lot of 100%-ers out there but I don't feel bad about that.

AI class /again/

I hate the format of the AI class. The guy said its difficult so if you get a question wrong you can look at the explanation to the question. The dude waffles on with a complicated explanation of something or other and then the solution, which might be nice to look at and let sink in for a couple of seconds disappears at the same moment that his last pen stroke ends.
Perhaps if these guys applied some of their own intelligence principles to the presentation it'd be less frustrating and more educational and interesting!

Windows Homegroup Sharing

It's not often I get absolutely fuming mad with an application or some aspect of my IT setup but if anything is guaranteed to drive me to total flip-out mode its that ridiculous heap of steaming DUNG called Windows Homegroups.
I have a large house. It has four staircases to go up and down, there are computers in the bedrooms, in the workshops, installed in the infrastructure of the kitchen, even in the garden. The house is almost 400 square meters of floor space and the furthest computer in the network is about 50 yards away from the central hub so having one printer or one scanner is a pain. Hence we have the now tamed and subservient HP printer in the main living room, an epson inkjet in my workshop and an epson laser printer in the office.
The trouble is that one can go through all the required steps to erase and re-initialise homegroup membership on all the machines in the place and within a week there is one machine or another that can no longer access a printer or a scanner or connect to the media server. This means that to reinitialise one machine requires an almost complete reset of the whole system and so all the machines in the network.
Windows Homegroup utterly and completely SUCKS!!! In order to make it work, all the machines have to be on the same workgroup, ok, not difficult, and on a familiar network with all the clocks syncronised and then everyone within a one kilometer radius of your house has to put their left index finger in their right ear and stand on one leg in a bucket of icy water before you can print a blasted test page!
Once you comply with all this, one or other machine decides to invent a new network connection which throws the whole lot off kilter and you have to start again.
Microsoft. Get your bloody act together and sort out homegroups! This is for non-technical people to use and its too dammned complicated and unreliable.

Baelzebub.com

Check out Baelzebub.com. The Evil Search Engine. Whatever you type in it always finds the most evil or wicked results.
As the internet is made of cats and fluffy bunnies I tried those first..
Its all just good clean fun.

Dennis Ritchie

It seems like this is a bad time for groundbreaking computer pioneers. Maybe its a mark of maturity for the industry that the people that effectively invented our business and the way we use our machines are dying. Dennis Ritchie was a brilliant fellow who literally wrote the book on modern programming. I still have a copy of K&R on my bookshelves, right alongside my copy of Stroustrup's book on C++ and they are both still referenced from time to time..
As someone in his fifties, I've worked in the industry from it's infancy. I went from learning about valve radios and televisions from the context of a TV repair engineer because there were still many vacuum tube TVs in the mid 70's, to designing discrete transistor amplifiers and creating computers with 4004 and 8080 processors.
I guess that we'll see the great names of the computer industry pass away more often now. I really wonder if there are any new names that will create as much change in the future or whether the next generations of those will be like the Zuckerbergs of this world who have merely used the tools of others to create an idea that captures the imagination of a chunk of society. Ok, so he's rich but his fame is a crass celebrity style recognition of the same type as that of someone like Madonna or Lady Gaga. I don't suppose I'll have any copies of Mark Zuckerbergs books on my shelves alongside the others that have had true value for so many years.

Up!

DSL back on again! Its not fibre optic but at almost 8mbps its waaay better than it was before considering i'm out in the countryside far from the nearest DSLAM.

AI class at Stanford

I signed up for the Stanford AI class and got notification that the class has started and the first videos are available. Well, this might be so but one would have thought that a proper AI system would be able to see that there are many requests from iPad users and re-encode the video so that flash isn't required.



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Steve Jobs

I think that in the history of computing there can only be a handful that have had as much influence as Steve Jobs. I just can't think who they might be at the moment.

Update from the shed...

What’s going on then? Well, I have returned truly to my roots and I am working on electronics projects that will be available soon online and possibly in a store near you.

As I mentioned some time ago, the announcement that Google were adopting the Arduino open-source hardware platform for Android phones smacked me in the forehead like a well-aimed Cricket bat. I’ve never been a great proponent of open source but the idea of open source hardware somehow pushed my buttons (see what I did there?) Anyhoo, hacking, making, re-purposing and general interest in electronic hardware fiddling has resurfaced in a big way recently. Even in political circles, a realization that so many people are consumers of “stuff” and yet not many have the faintest inkling of how that stuff really works. Eric Schmidt tore the British Government off a strip for allowing education to bypass technical subjects (and rightly so Eric!) so now there is a scurry to create classes that teach programming in schools.

I am about to don my grandfatherly hat now and say things that I shuddered to hear when my own grandfather spake them many years ago. He said (and I reiterate) “Young folks of today have no clue of what it was like in my day, we had to….”  and then he went off on a long rant about bicycles and motorbike engines and how to make a steam engine out of discarded tin cans. I feel the same way about kids who consume XBox 360 games or Facebook apps without the slightest understanding of how a computer program functions or having never had to sit through the annoying whistle of a Sinclair Spectrum program that one wrote oneself loading via tape-cassette.
I began my career as a radio and T.V. engineer fixing things that still had vacuum tubes in. I had to know what a triode valve did and how to do the math to allow me to bias one correctly. Later, I wrote software in assembly language which drove the MIDI equipment I had designed and today, I have come full circle because I am still looking up the functions of TTL and CMOS integrated circuits to complete my designs for electronical gizmos that I am creating.

Lately, I have become aware that the desire for real understanding has surfaced again. We want children to learn Ohm’s law and to be able to actually program the computers that they use. Why? Because if we don’t, the next generation of electronic design engineers will suffer the same fate that this generation’s chemical engineers have suffered. There won’t be enough young people to take over the task of designing and building tomorrow’s iPad or tri-corder or whatever is needed. This is scary. I challenge you to find 10 people that you know and ask them what a spark-plug does. If more than four of them even know that one goes in a car engine I will be surprised. Then ask them where a nand gate is used…

I have begun a series of videos, soon to be released, that show how to make clever stuff with things like Arduino or PIC or Propeller microcontrollers. I have proven to myself that I can program an Arduino using Visual Studio 2010 and that I can use cheap or even free tools to create seriously cool electronics. There is a new move towards comprehending our complicated world and simplifying it in such a way that kids can grow up in it without thinking that they must consume but cannot control. The time for re-understanding has arrived. Be part of it!

The more I use Visual Studio the more I'm impressed by the way it outshines other development systems. The surprising thing is that I use Visual Studio for writing software on all sorts of platforms, not just Microsoft ones.
Currently, I am using VS for writing code to run on Arduino boards thanks to the Visual Micro addin.
Visual Studio can manage makefile projects easily as well as the VS solution files. This means that given the right makefile, one can edit and compile all sorts of code on the same IDE.

Parallax

I just took delivery of two PARALLAX P8X32A Quick Start boards. These micro-controller boards have 8 32 bit cores each. 

I’m thinking parallel programming of some kind of complicated sensor mechanism.

Arduinos in the kitchen!

Had a couple of days of pure fun. I have been having a new kitchen fitted and one of the requirements from my wife was a touchscreen PC for recipies and streaming radio built in to the cabinets.
This was duly done with a nice little Asus touch screen running Windows 7.
The PC fits in a frame that hangs nicely in the 600 mm wide cabinet that is really designed to take a built in fridge and behind it there is a lot of unused space. I fitted an electrical socket in there to power the PC and the under-cabinet lighting (All LEDs) and wondered if the PC could be used in some home automation applications too.
I had an Arduino board hanging about and a relay adapter which I have assembled into a big PVC junction box. There are three mains sockets on the side and the arduino can switch mains power to each socket in response to a message sent to the USB port.
I have written a little program on the PC that sends commands to the arduino to turn the sockets on and off so now the lighting in the kitchen is all driven by the touchscreen.
The family are now realising the potential of this and have asked for an alarm clock that will start the coffee machine at 6:50 so that coffee is ready by 7:00 AM.
Wake up and smell the arduino...

So, now I'm impressed.

After a hard day upgrading the Mac I thought I would sit in front of the box for an hour and rewatch an episode of Stargate Universe just for a break. I fire up the PC in the living room and ITunes shows the list of episodes on my library but when I tried to play it; nothing.
Checking on my library, the three pilot episodes have been deleted. I know they were there someplace but in the reorg of my Mac they got trashed.
I'd never actually used Time Machine in earnest before so I was pleasantly surprised at the ease with which the backups were found from a few days ago and restored not to their original positions but to the new directory where I had placed the iTunes library.
Time machine is a brilliant bit of kit!


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Big Mac Day

Installing Lion and the new version of Monotouch as well as Xcode 4 and such began to push my 80 gig hard-drive that the Mac Mini came with to its limits. Moving my iTunes library off of the main disk helped but still didn't give me that feeling of security that a nice large disk provides. I could have shopped for a terabyte drive but on rooting around "chez moi" I discovered a 2.5 inch SATA drive with 500 gigabyte capacity and thought I might swop out my main hard drive and replace it with that.

I attacked the hardware side of it with confidence having already upgraded the memory in the machine some while ago so apart from my fifty plus year old eyes having trouble with tiny screws (tip, don't get any older) I was ok.

Rebooting the machine was uneventful, inasmuch as nothing happened, but after I plugged the old main drive into a spare external drive case, the machine booted with no problems.

I downloaded Carbon Copy and did a brain dump of the old drive to the new one then rebooted. Two hours start to finish for a Mac Mini hard-disk upgrade including drive cloning was a seriously hassle free experience. Could I have performed the equivalent on a PC in as short a time? I really do wonder.

Thanks to Carbon Copy it definitely went smoothly. My donation is on it's way!

Stats...

My blog stats seem to indicate a preponderance of traffic from the Russian Federation. One hopes it's programmers and not spam robots or hackers.

MonoDevelop on Lion

I installed OSX-Lion on the Mac at the end of last week and consequently updated all my Mac dev-tools. The latest version of Xcode 4 is far more of an integrated environment than before but unfortunately, the process of UI development for the iPad or iPhone when used in conjunction with MonoDevelop and MonoTouch isn't a clean one.

XCode has changed the way that outlets are connected and have opted for a code modification system that requires an actual Xcode project to be used. MonoDevelop hasn't as yet taken this into account, they are working on it, but this has rendered my ability to develop for the iPad to a very limited state.

I guess I need to concentrate on the C# aspects and wait for MonoDevelop to catch up.

Scroll wheels

I am now a fully integrated Mac and PC user. I found however that motor planning plays a part in one's Mac/PC experience because I am constantly annoyed that the Mac scroll wheel works counter intuitively. As a UI designer, the concept of scrolling the mousewheel towards me immediately equates with pulling the scroll-bar down, on a Mac, the process pulls the page down, effectively scrolling up.
When I switch from one system to the other with my handy-dandy TrendNet KVM switch I have a moment of confusion before I get reoriented again.

------------

I reckoned that there must be a setting for this and so there was. On the Mac, the mouse options have a checkbox one can select.

Back to work...

A couple of hectic weeks away in the Rhone Alps and camping with the family for a few days and I'm back to find my web-site broken and a pile of stuff to do.

OS-X Lion is installing on the Mac Mini as I type and I wil probably be upgrading the hard-disk in that machine to something more suitable for requirements. At least one Terabyte, possibly two if I can find a small drive with a big capacity to go in it. I just put a 1 terabyte external drive on it but have decided to use that for a Time Machine drive.

My site is broken because of what seems to be a problem with the global.asax being denied permission to run. That is still under investigation by the admins at Brinkster.

More later. I have to update all my stuff..

Web site broken

The component I put in place to translate HTM requests to ASPX requests on my website is broken,

Unfortunately at this second I am on holiday in the Rhone Alps with limited connectivity and no development system to try fix the site.

All .htm pages were recreated as .aspx pages a while back.

Sorry for the outage.

Mac webcam

Macs are so easy! I just found a Logitech USB web cam and plugget it in to my Mac Mini so I could use FaceTime and...

NOTHING!!

So, ha ha a Mac can't recognize or use something as simple as a USB webcam?

Hmmmmm.

Apple OS-X on an intel box?

I have become an Apple fan simply because the stuff they produce is great. I like the iPhone and iPad hardware and I am willing to pay for it. I have however been kind-of blackmailed into buying a Mac Mini box because I wanted to do development work on their platforms. Don't get me wrong. I love the Mac Mini too but despite the fact that it's neat and pretty its really just a well thought out but expensive PC clone with a security chip in it. I could throw away the OS and install Windows on it if I wanted. As I could Linux or even Google Chrome.

So, here's the thing. Apple are still trailing market share behind Microsoft. Why? Not becuse OS-X is bad. It's really quite good. They trail Microsoft because the Apple Mac is a western world toy for rich folks who can afford do drop a couple of hundred bucks or even a couple of thousand bucks extra for a sexy white box, cool design and a pretty white logo that is as technologically useful as the "swoosh" on Nike shoes.

Apple just made a big deal about the low cost of upgrade of their OS to Lion. 29 bucks gets you all the cloud enabled goodness but in spite of the fact that OS-X really is competittion for Microsoft Windows, Especially for the non-professional user, they will never break out of the niche market unless Steve Jobs announces that OS-X Lion or whatever the upcoming iterations will be called can be installed on a cheap box that a family in Bangladesh can afford.

We have an OS-X that can run on Intel hardware. Go the last step Steve. Kill the Trusted Platform Module and see how real compettition will drive an industry that doesn't need to innovate much at the moment.

Pour rend mes ex collegues jalous...

Je me réveille à 9 heures (environ).
Un de mes chers enfants me donne une tasse du thé.
Je prends mon iPad pour lire mes e-mails reçu pendant la nuit, je réponds à quelques une des mails, surtout celle qui m'apporte du business.
Je me levé à 10:30 (environ) et je prends ma douche, un p'tit toast et de la marmelade pour p'tit dej.
Je bosse un petit peut sur mon appli Android just pour me familiariser avec le mode d'utilisation.
Un p’tit facebook pour voir les délires de mon frère ce weekend.

Cette semaine déjà j'ai:

Réparer mon gros onduleur qui est capable d'alimenter mon ordi pendant une heure si nécessaire.
Reconfigurer mon environnement de dev PC et MAC avec un seul clavier, souris et écran
Ecris un appli Android en utilisant VS 2010

Aujourd’hui je vais m’installer avec tous mes matériaux dans mon abri de jardin tout climatisée ou je vais bosser et qui est tout près de la piscine si jamais j’ai besoin cet été.

Le seul bruit est le vent ou la pluie ou de temps en temps un coq qui chante (je vais peut-être le manger plus tard si il m'embête plus)

Paris, La Défense, le train, le bruit, les abrutis dans leurs voitures et dans le bus, le "bur" me manque tellement PAS que je ne sache pas comment je peux supporter tout cette calme.

Ha ha ha, bonne journée a tous!

The best environment for mobile phone development?

I am currently working on an appplication for iPhone and iPad. An application for Android phones and an application for Windows Phone 7.

One might imagine that changing between Objective C to Java to C# and Silverlight languages would be a mental challenge for an old chap like me. One could also assume that having a handle on the various API's that each system requires such that the aforementioned old chap could develop a well architected application on all three platforms would be a bit of a challenge too. The reality however is a bit different.

For all three platforms I use the same development kit, the same programming language and the same familiar set, or subset, of the API's I have been very comfortable with for the last ten years. You see, I use Visual Studio 2010, C# and .Net for everything.

I am able to create between 80 and 90 percent of the code using nonspecialised C# and the rest of the system, intractions with specialised APIs or the various graphics systems required by the different platforms. can be done using the Mono versions, MonoTouch or MonoDroid.

So, the conclusion for me at least is that Visual Studio 2010 is by far the most useful development system no matter what platform I am developing for.

Monodroid splash screen

If you're interested in such things I just answered this over on Stack Overflow...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6560675/monodroid-splash-screen/6588089#6588089

One screen or two?

It seems that the norm for development systems has been a multiple screen approach for a few years. I have currently come to challenge that view thinking that one screen can suffice if the resolution is good and the aspect ratio is wide, say, 16 by 9.

I have a particularly interesting development setup requirement which implies that I use both a PC and a Mac simultaneously. Until a few days ago this implied rolling my chair from one end of the desk to the other and physically switching machines.

I tried a remote desktop approach which was ok but not as responsive as I had hoped due partly to the wireless network. Finally, I found a TrendNet keyboard, mouse and video switcher that seems to have done the trick.

So, my setup which I have begun to develop for Windows Phone 7, android and iPhone / iPad has a wide ratio LG screen, a Mac Mini, a quad core PC, a single keyboard and mouse and removes the need to scoot up and down the office on my wheelie chair to get to the other keyboard. It has the other advantage that my Mac Mini detected the fact that that stylishly White yet, to me, esoteric Apple keyboard, which is unwell since I poured tea into it anyway, has been replaced by a single ergonomic Microsoft 104 key keyboard that I am more used to working on and hence more productive.

My only problem was the fact that the LG screen only has a single audio input so my solution to that was to connect the Mac to the screen and the PC to the line-in of the Mac and to use this free LineIn program to retransmit the PC sound to the screen speakers.

So now, a simple click of the button on the KVM unit switches from Mac to PC and back all on the same keyboard and mouse. An added bonus is that I am now saving the cost of running two other screens which is going to be a bonus when my 100% off-grid power generation system comes on line in the fullness of time.

FREE AT LAST!

Well, the corporate lifestyle is OK. I admit it's well paid, but for someone who has spent so many years working on my own exiting projects and not worrying about office politics or how further up the ladder one should climb, the strain of working full time in heirarchical companies has taken a toll.

Yesterday was my last day with my last client in Paris. I've had offers of work but I've decided to go back to my roots and begin to create innovative software for many diverse platforms. Working in a more disconnected mode will give me opportunities to be with my family for longer too.

So, even though I will be taking on short consulting contracts and serving the needs of customers when no-one else will do, my role as CTO at Daraize Technologies is taking a more visionary turn and I will be responsible for broadening the scope of their offering by creating some new and useful stuff.

Right now I'm working on ideas with Peter Gabriel blasting out of the stereo!

Bob is back!!

IPad 2

I am currently ramping up my mobile device development capabilities with accounts in the Apple, Microsoft and Google app stores as well as development kit and new hardware to test on.

Yesterday I finally took the plunge and bought an iPad 2 with which I hope to do a tablet version of the first application I have in mind.

I find it difficult to express the perfection of the experience that Apple provides when one opens the box and the thing you just Paid a small fortune for works perfectly, smoothly and integrates with your life as if you had always had one. Am I gushing? Well, maybe I am. Congratulations to the Apple team and thanks for a joyous experience!

I am mortified to say that my Windows Phone 7 experience has not been so wonderful. If things don't start going right a certain MVP not far from me might be tempted to write unkind things about the company he has supported for so many years.

DropBox

I don't often do recommendations but I just started using DropBox for online storage. I am really impressed with it and usage is free!
Basically, DropBox gives you an online storage space that synchronises automatically to a folder on any machine you use.
I am currently using it to synchronise files between my Mac and my PC for when I do iPhone and Windows Phone 7 development. I am using Monotouch for the iPhone part and so all the common .Net code gets synchronised via my DropBox.

Check it out here for a free no-strings-attached account !!

3D and Quantum Physics

It is said that Albert Einstien had an advanced spacial awareness and a sense of three dimensions that enabled him to imagine the structure of the universe. He also had the mathematical chops to prove this thought experiments afterwards which certainly helped his credibility.

Extending that idea a bit, and supposing that both matter and antimatter were created in equal measure in the first billionths of a second of the early universe, one could also imagine that the properties of the antimatter were all diametrically opposed to the properties of ordinary matter. The theroretical gravitational carrier particle, the Higgs Boson, would have it's antimatter counterpart and, theoretically, its effects would be reversed.

A common line of thought in physics is that gravity is attractive over short distances and repulsive over large ones. Correspondingly, anti-gravity would be repulsive over short distances and attractive over large ones.

Going back to the idea of three dimensional space then, we could imagine that at the moment of the big bang and for some time after, as the matter and antimatter were near to one another the antimatter would form a sort of shell around the matter. This would repulse to continue to maintain a sort of container around the early universe and the antimatter would all remain on the outside and expand space in front of it as it went.

As the universe aged and the distances became large enough, the antimatter began to attract and so is even now pulling the universe apart in all directions. This would explain both the lack of antimatter and the expanding state of the universe.

Technically, that expansion should continue to acellerate and spread the universe thinly. This accounts for entropic heat death.

As to the rest of the missing universe. the dark matter, it is inside the black holes which are more numerous and larger than was once thought,

Now, if only I could do the math. I might get a Nobel!

I wonder if Stephen Hawking reads my blog?

Windows Phone 7 keyboard

My experience with Windows Phone 7 continues with some thoughts on the quality of The on-screen keyboard.

Maybe my thumbs have taken on some motor programming thanks to the iPhone keyboard but I find the Microsoft OSK layout to be very hard to use. Fatfingering the wrong character is too easy and the cash register feedback that pops up like whack-a-rat is too lrge and unsubtle enough to make me want to position my finger lower on the key which seems to exascerbate the situation.

Arduino and android, a match made in heaven?

As an electronics designer from aincient times and having been playing with arduino systems for some time I find myself hugely inspired by the news of Google's open hardware accessory initiative based on arduino designs .
I am currently working on two arduino projects. A power control system for an autonomous house and a cruise control for my Land Rover. Sadly project 2 is on hold as the Landis needs a new clutch. The ease of programming and simplicity of the ATMega microcontroller design makes this an almost perfect match for a smart accessory choice.
I was looking for a way to return to my hardware roots and this seems to be an ideal opportunity .

Ceres and Vesta better than Mars for a first try.

While the technical achievement of a mission to Mars would be phenomenal, the danger involved in such a mission would be huge in comparison to those that didn't require descent into a deep and unforgiving gravity well.

Mars is also known to be arid and has a poisonous atmosphere so there would be a need to take every ounce of air and water required for the whole trip even if recycling was good..
Furthermore, the explorers of old didn't launch themselves on a journey into the unknown with a high probability of no return without first trying things out in more familiar and friendly local waters.
It's relatively easy to get a spacecraft down onto a planet. You can fall mos of the way. You just have to be travelling slowly enough that the last few feet are not a problem. Getting up off the planet later is however an enormous challenge.

A mission to Ceres in the asteroid belt would pose far fewer problems however. Ceres has water in the form of ice and so air, fuel and drinking water would be far less of an issue. Even rocket fuel can be manufactured by electrolysis using sunlight so a mission to Ceres would require far less material to be taken with the mission and the duration of stay could be longer and simpler.

We may not discover quite so much on such a mission but it would be far more useful from the point of view of learning how to do an interplanetary voyage.

Finally, getting off Ceres at the end of the mission would be a walk in the park in comparison to trying to loft a spacecraft from the surface of Mars back to orbit safely.
I strongly recommend manned asteroid missions before manned missions to Mars or anywhere with a significantly steep climb out.

Seeking Julie

On Saturday March 5th 2011 My family and I went to Mont St Michel in France. It was a beautiful day and a lot of other people had dcided to take the trip also. I had remarked to my wife that there were a lot of japanese tourists around that day, stylish girls and thin young men, all having fun.

We picnicked in a walled garden near the top of the mount and my children played hide and seek in the bushes and rocks of the garden.

They were befreinded by a little Japanese girl of two or three years who came and picknicked with us, much to the amusement of her parents. The couple were a young man of European and Japanese extraction who spoke good French and a young woman in her twenties. He told me that the little girl's name was Julie, a coincidence because my own daughter's name is Julia.

They were obviously on holiday so one supposes that they returned home sometime during the last week or so. Now, I am haunted by the vision of that beautiful child and her young strong parents and I wonder what may have become of them given the awful circumstances of the recent days. I just hope that they extended their holiday or live in the south west away from tsunamis and radiation.

I would dearly love to know that they were well.

Design tutorials

I have absolutely no artistic talent but I fervently wish that I did have.

I see the web sites and applications that are created by those designers that instinctively know how to assemble colours, images and layout into something that is intrinsically pleasing to the eye and I become purple with jealousy.

Well, like me, you may have the artistic talent of a gnat and all the creative abilities of a turtle but you'll have no excuse whatsoever for saying that you don't understand how to create a UI experience with Blend because now you can use this great site to learn step by step how to utterly fail to be talented and stylish in your UI design.

http://www.microsoft.com/design/toolbox

Do not track considered harmful

Despite ones desire to remain anonymous these days it is important to keep sight of the fact that participation in any civilised society must come at the price of some loss of anonymity. In years gone by, a postal address was new and scary to some yet America's mail system was more influential than any other single factor in the stabilization of the frontier into a country. 
Having a telephone number requires a loss of anonymity that we accept even though some of us don't publish our number in a directory. We might still be reached by officials and the agents of the phone company as well as by robot random diallers. 
The Internet makes the hackles of the privacy advocate rise even more quickly, especially when the subject of tracking cookies and targeted advertising is broached.
I believe we are walking a fine line today between a vibrant, open an competittive internet and one that is far darker, closed and oppressive. Strangely, the thing that may stand in the way of vibrancy and unbounded freedom is privacy. 
Today, the internet is interesting because it makes a whole heap of money for loosely regulated businesses. Businesses that enable new technologies and new freedom of access to almost unlimited and ubiquitous information and all you have to do in return is put up with a few adverts. I don't suggest that unbridled advert targetting is a good thing but i certainly do think that if privacy stopped the advertisers fron spending then companies like Google would cease to enable free and instant access to everything possible. Without a little loss of privacy, maybe, the only people willing to share information would be our governments and we all know how much we can trust those guys to give us free and instant access to all the information we want. 
Opt in to freedom. Allow the advertsers to track your netwok usage a bit. Sure, become net savvy, limit what they know if you think its important but don't demand strict regulation or tight control from your government. Privacy is important but freedom is more-so.