Humber Bridge Toll System Shutdown

The minic system in the bridge control room

Little known fact. Since 1998, if you have driven over the Humber Bridge and paid a toll then you have been interacting with some software that I wrote. Ian Bell and myself produced the instation and minic software that has been keeping track of bridge crossings and toll takings. We worked with Siemens Road Traffic Controls who put the hardware into the booths, our code kept track of mis-registrations and printed out the totals tables. It’s been working ever since, with a mid term upgrade and a little problem when it lasted longer than it was supposed to.

And today, just after 5 o’clock in the afternoon, I turned it off forever.

The final moments

The system is being replaced by an altogether more up to date one, which allows for toll payment without stopping, special rf badges and all kinds of new fangled things.

It seems like less and less of my software is being used in the world. For a magical time a few years ago programs I had written were putting datestamps on Budweiser beer and Cadbury’s Roses, passing part programs into machines that cut wing-spars for aircraft, measuring winch lengths on trawlers and flushing toilets in the Reckit and Coleman test labs in Hull. Happy days.

Possessed by Animal Crossing New Leaf

Oh well. Animal Crossing New Leaf has sucked me to its world. Last week I went to visit number one’s town, today I’m saving for the down payment on a house and I’m looking forward to tomorrow night at 7:00 pm when there is the firework display of the year.

Pluggable USB 3 Docking Station

Can you spot the difference between this one and the other one. Turns out that I can’t.

My home version of “one usb to rule them all” arrived today. I used my own money to buy this one (just got paid) and I was feeling rather smug, in that I had got it for thirty quid less than the university had paid. Clever me.

Or not. Turns out this is not exactly the same. It only has one video out port, rather than the two that the office device has. The documentation mentions two ports, but that is because there is an adapter in the box, which allows the single port to be used with two different kinds of monitor.

Oh well. It’s not as if I have two monitors at home, or the desk space to stand them on. And I’ve noticed that the DisplayLink software, while quite splendid in that it just works, does steal around 5% of the processor. Which means that two monitors would take a much bigger chunk.

Everything else works just fine though, and it really is nice just to have one plug to worry about. If you regularly connect your laptop to your desktop I reckon this is still a really good bet.

Accessing Windows Phone Settings from code

I’ve discovered that one way to make sure that I remember how to do something is to drop it into the blog. That way I can go find it when I forget. This time it is the code that you use to open up the connection settings dialog page in Windows Phone 8.

ConnectionSettingsTask connectionSettingsTask = 
                                  new ConnectionSettingsTask();
connectionSettingsTask.ConnectionSettingsType = 
                                  ConnectionSettingsType.Bluetooth;
connectionSettingsTask.Show();

This will do the business. You need to include the Tasks namespace:

using Microsoft.Phone.Tasks;

There are options that you can use to open up the WiFi, Cellular and Airplane modes.

Whenever I open the Airplane mode I always want the phone to say

“Surely you can’t be serious?”
”I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley”

Century 21 Comic Strips

As well as the Pacific Rim book (Pacific Rim? Sunday’s Post. You mean you’ve not been to see the movie yet. Shame) I also got a collection of Century 21 comic strips. We used to get TV21 magazine every week, and after dad had finished reading it I was allowed to take a look.

Anhyoo, the Thunderbirds strips were always the best. They were illustrated by Frank Bellamy who was the only one who seemed to be allowed to put his name on the strip. With good cause. I still reckon this was some of the best comic art ever. Don’t believe me? Grab a copy of the book and take a look. There are actually only a couple of Thunderbirds strips in the book, but the other ones are a good bunch too.

And I’ve just found out that there are lots more available too, which could prove expensive…