Hull Architecture

I must admit that I've never really thought of a place like Hull as having architecture. It's just got lots of nice buildings.

However, I've found out a lot more about the area from this book, which even told me who designed the place I'd spent nearly 40 years of my life working in at the university.

This version was published in 2010, which means that it was just in time to be able to give the low down on places like The Deep.

It's a great reference and even has guided walks around the city. If you're coming to Hull for something City of Culture related, and you want a well written, well researched and good to read guide to where we live then it is well worth a look. 

Fast and Furious 8

I've no idea how we ended up in the audience at one of the first showings of Fast and Furious 8 tonight. I think a Meer cat with some half price cinema tickets had something to do with it, but even so....

Anyhoo, it is a fun film. With some jaw dropping car sequences and a fantastic sequence involving a child in a baby seat plus a bunch of gunmen. And the usual mix of former enemies joining together to face a larger foe. Etc etc. It seems to me that this time the franchise has turned its attention to the GI Joe style of movie, with cyber crime and super soldier antics on top of the car mayhem. 

If you're a fan of daft films made in a universe where the laws of physics don't actually apply properly, and you like a big helping of cheese with your dialogue then you'll love it. 

c4di Video

Dileepa made this lovely little video about the c4di. I'm in it for around two seconds, blurry and in the background. Just how I like it. 

NASA Space Apps Challenge at c4di Hull

I love hackathons. I actually won a prize at one once. And at another I was part of a team that won a special "most ambitious failure" award (perhaps less impressive). I also love hackathons because they are so good for those that take part. They broaden your skills, let you try out new ideas, meet new people and stretch yourself a bit. They look good on your CV, you can talk about them at interviews. And you get to eat pizza. Lots of pizza.

I'm helping to run a hackathon at the c4di at the end of April. It's in partnership with NASA, and the winners of the Hull heats are entered into the NASA round of the competition for consideration for worldwide acclaim. There'll be a bunch of space related themes that we aren't allowed to tell you about just yet, and all kinds of fun things to do.

It's over the weekend of the 29th-30th of April. You can work all night, or you can nip home for a few hours sleep (which is what I'll be doing). We'll be working at the c4di down at the waterfront, so if we are lucky we should get a nice sunset and sunrise over the water to spur us on.

You can sign up here, and you really should. I'm after team members; get in touch if you fancy working with me.

Sorry about this

I was gardening today. As you do. Got to thinking about the mad scientist who tried to clone himself. He used a new technique, where you start at the top of the body and work your way down. Everything was going fine until he'd just finished the neck, but when he tried to do the shoulders it all went wrong, with arms and legs in all the wrong places. Ugh. He turned to his assistant and said.....wait for it....

"I knew I should have quit when I was a head".

A Quick Trip to York

Had a quick trip to York today. Took the bendy lens, so that I could get all of York Minster in one frame. I think it sort of worked...

Douglas DC3

The Douglas DC3 is one of my favourite airplanes. They stopped making it in 1942, but there are still thousands of them in use today. I'm not sure you could say the same about the cars of the same vintage.

c4di Hardware Group

Another good night of discussion at the c4di hardware group. I always leave the meetups with lots of ideas of things to do. We'd love to see you too. Find out about the next meetup here.

C# Yellow Book in Bulgarian

Hot on the heels of the Korean translation, I've just heard from Dimitar Minchev that he's completed the translation of the book into Bulgarian.

You can find the text here.

Thanks so much to Dimitar for his awesome effort.

Goldilocks Gas Struts

I think I'm the first person ever to write a blog post with the title "Goldilocks Gas Struts". Not that it's a first I really want. I've been improving the guinea pig cage to give it a "lift off roof". The problem with a cage that has doors at the front is that if your pigs have a sprightly nature (and ours do) then you can open the door and then find that the hairy monsters have made a break for freedom.

They quite enjoy the process of being caught. We don't enjoy the process of catching them.

I've fitted the hinges and the cage lid now opens rather nicely. That way we can do stuff in the cage without any risk of escaping pigs. And I quite like the god like aspect of removing their sky.

Anyhoo, next I need to find something to hold it open. It turns out that you can buy gas struts to do this thing, and they are very reasonably priced. They are calibrated in Newton's, which is interesting, but not particularly useful to me. I bought a couple of 120 Newton ones, figuring that the lid of the cage is quite heavy.

Not that heavy. I couldn't get the darned thing to shut. So I bought a pair of 60 Newton ones.

Which of course are not heavy enough. The lid won't stay open. What I need is the "Goldilocks" ones, which I think will come in at around 80 or so.....

Elvington

We went to Elvington today. I love the place. Aircraft and history in equal measure. And the weather was lovely.

Hull Pixelbots at the Hull Science Festival

Twelve robots, six hours, hundreds of people coming. What could go wrong?

As it turned out, not a lot. While we had the occasional "rogue robot", and at one point the network decided to completely reset itself, I'm very pleased to be able to write that most of the time things worked very well. We had so many robot races that in the end I ran out of winner's certificates. But everyone left happy.

Thanks so much to my helpers, and the University of Hull for organising such an awesome event.

Always Check the Batteries....

These are the parts for my newest robot, made of a clear blue plastic. She's called "Crystal Masie" (perhaps my favourite robot name of all) I spent two hours today modifying software to try and improve the performance of her distance sensor, which didn't seem to be working as well as it should do.

Then I found out that I was using batteries that were a bit flat.....

Hull Pixelbots at Hull Science Festival

Hull Science Festival is awesome. And this year it's going to be even awesomer (if that's a word).

I'm going to have a whole bunch there on Sunday. You can come along and have a go at racing them, or just watch them dance. There are some tickets left, you can sign up here.

Hull Pixelbot Script

I'm not sure if I'll ever get this working, but I am sure that without the language design I'll never get it to go.

I've got a tiny little language running inside the Hull Pixelbot which works rather well. All the commands are two characters and they are interpreted by the Arduino that controls the motors and sensors. And I can store the programs inside the robot EEPROM, as well as deploy them from Azure IOT hub amongst other place.

But the language is a bit of a pain to use to be honest. And there are things I just can't do. So it's time to make a proper language. I'm calling it Hull Pixelbot Script.

I've not done programming language design for a while. I'm a big fan of syntax diagrams (or railroad diagrams). To me they seem a really neat way to express the arrangement of a language. Above you can see the design for the statement element of Hull Pixelbot Script. You can see that the colour (or color) command must be followed by three values which are separated by commas, and an if statement can control a large number of statements (and maybe I could add an else later).

I made the diagrams by using a web site that takes my grammar and makes the nice looking output. It took me a while to remember how EBNF (Extended Backus–Naur form) fits together, but I'm quite pleased with the result.

Of course I've actually achieved very little, what I now have to do is build the actual code that implements the language.

But it's a start.  

C# Yellow Book - Korean Version

I love, love, love this cover. It's far better than anything I've come up with. It's for the Korean version of my C# Yellow Book. It's been out for a while, but today was the first time I managed to find it on the internets. You can get it from here. I'd love to have a copy, I'm going to see if someone can send me one.

Tetris by Box Brown

Tetris: The Games People Play

By Box Brown

I don't have many claims to fame. But one is that I once had my picture taken by Alexey Pajitnov, the inventor of Tetris and thoroughly nice man. It was when I was helping out with Imagine Cup Judging in Russia. Alexey and myself were alone in the judging room and I was trying to pluck up the courage to ask him for a picture.

Then a student came in, took one look at me and asked "Can I have a picture with you?". He was one of the competitors, another thoroughly nice chap, and he wanted a picture of himself with one of the judges (i.e. me). He asked Alexey to take the shot, and Alexey obliged. I never got a picture of me with the man who invented Tetris, but having my picture taken by him seems somehow better.

Anyhoo, I was reminded of this when I came across this awesome book by Box Brown. The story of Tetris is fascinating on a whole bunch of levels, and the presentation in beautifully drawn pictures does a great job of telling the tale. If you like video games, social history, business shenanigans or well drawn art, you should get this book.

Success through Failure

Just finished writing a lecture for a session tomorrow in the university. Yiannis has invited me back to give a session about starting a business, so at 1:00 tomorrow afternoon I'm going to be back on the campus talking about "Success Through Failure".

Looking forward to it.

Ziggy Stardust Live

Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars is one of the best albums ever made. Fact. It says "Play Loud" on the album sleeve. Good advice.

Tonight we saw it played live by Holy Holy, a band containing the original drummer, "Woody" Woodmansey and long time Bowie collaborator Tony Visconti. Singing duties were taken up by Glenn Gregory of Heaven 17 fame.

It. Was. Awesome.

The band were "really tight" (to coin a phrase), with Woody's rock steady drumming underpinning some brilliant musicianship. Glenn Gregory is not David Bowie, and didn't try to pretend to be, but sounded great as himself. There was no messing with the material, no added flourishes or frills, and the rendition was all the better for that.

They played the whole album, in order, and then moved on to other classics, including a fantastic version of "Life on Mars".

There's a strong Hull connection to this work, several of the original Spiders from Mars, including Woody, were from the city. Not surprisingly the venue was packed, the music was well loud and we left with our ears ringing.

Fantastic stuff. If you get the chance to hear these folks, just go.

Splatoon Switch Taster

Managed to find a few minutes to play the trial of Splatoon for the Switch today. Nintendo had earmarked a few hours during the day for a multiplayer tester of the gam, although whether this was cunning marketing or proper testing we'll never know. We could have had a go at 3:00 am, but instead plumped for the early evening slot at 7:00pm.

The game was great fun. Everything worked and the switch (in handheld mode) was well capable of keeping up with the action. Half way through I turned off using the motion system to aim the gun, which I think helped, but I definitely need more practice. There were sometimes people worse than me, but there were always people better.

In fact it's inspired me to dig out the game on the Wii U and have a blast with that.