DevDays Geek Night

I’m presently limbering up for Geek Night at DevDays in Amsterdam. I’ve got bits of the Micro Framework running and we just have to fit everything together. I love doing Geek Night presentations, I’ve even made a video to promote this one, which you can find here: http://tweakers.net/advertorials/geeknight.

Update on Thursday, April 30, 2009 at 01:02PM by Rob

Just noticed that if you read Geeknight quickly it looks a bit like "Geek Knight".

"Forsooth my lady, now that I have slain the Worm of Conflicker and defragmented thy hard disk, perchance you will accompany me to a Grand Banquet at the Hut of Pizza?"

..or something.

I was a bit upset to find that geekknight.com has actually been taken.

Inaccurate Clocks

The clock on my Windows Desktop updates the minute hand every minute. Which is fair enough. However, it does this at the end of each minute, which I think is wrong. It means that for the last thirty seconds of each minute the clock is more than 30 seconds wrong. I reckon that the minute hand should move to the nearest minute when it becomes the nearest one.

Or am I just being too pedantic, and should really turn the second hand on? (and then fret about the clock being more than half a second out…)

SkyDrive is Superb

Fancy 25G of online storage for free? Thought so. It gets even better though. You can have public storage, private storage or anywhere in between. Everything is done via the web, so you can push files between PCs, Macs and anything with a browser. I’m getting into the habit of lobbing important stuff up there just to keep things safe.

If you have a Windows Live account you are in business. Just head up to http://skydrive.live.com and start uploading files. The biggest downsides for me are the fact that you have to drag individual files into the storage and that my home broadband makes uploading a rather slow experience.

Great stuff.

Meccano Makes Good Programmers

When I was a kid I had a Meccano set. I had some Lego too, but at the time all you could make with that was houses and not very realistic vehicles. The Technical Lego and Mindstorms stuff was years away in those days, and besides Lego stuff was too easy to put together, and fell apart too quickly.

Meccano wasn’t like that. Getting the nuts and bolts together could be murder. It was especially unforgiving of mistakes. Picking up the wrong kind of part early in the build often meant you had to spend ages undoing your painstakingly constructed model. The instructions were good, but you often had to use a lot of deduction to work out which bit you needed to use, and how it really fitted. On the other hand, Meccano was tough. It even survived the day that I decided some Meccano roller skates would be a good idea.

I was reminded of all this when I got to play with some Meccano recently. Number one daughter got one first, and I just had to follow suit and get a little Meccano model of my own. And then spend a couple of happy hours putting it together.

When I think about it, this was very good preparation for a programming career. Programming languages and their libraries are not known for tolerating mistakes, and you often end up taking to bits what you have just built, because you get to the point where you discover it just won’t work that way. And with Meccano, as with programming, if it ends up wrong it is pretty much always your fault.  And, just like Meccano, every now and then you build something you really like.

Nice Looking Hull

This is the middle of Hull. No, really.