Writing Sunday

Ah. That would be chapter 15 then.

Nintendo DSi

As a reward for finishing off Chapter 14 I went up town and had a look at the new Nintendo DSi. This is an update of the Nintendo DS which has been around for a while. This has a couple of cameras, bigger screens and can play music off an SD card (although not MP3 songs). GameStation were doing a trade in deal on the old DS Lite which brought the price down to something sensible and, since I happened to have my old DS Lite and power supply with me (what are the chances of that eh?) I got a less shiny new black device.

Very nice. The new larger screens look excellent, and the camera games and audio games are great fun. I’m told that the battery life on the new devices isn’t as good, but I’ve not noticed this yet. The only real problem is that, as there are no DSi games out there yet, the machine doesn’t really represent much of an advance on the old DS, but it does have a faster processor and will also support the download of games into memory (it has 256M) and also SD card.

I downloaded a couple of games from the online DS store via the home WiFi, along with the free browser which works quite well (although it ran out of memory showing my Gmail pages) and so long term prospects are promising.

And Zoo Keeper has never looked so good.

Writing Friday

I’m making a new version of my XNA text. You can pre-order it, which is kind of scary since I’m presently finishing off the writing bit.

Today was mostly Chapter 14.

Funny Way to Run a Railway

Got into a conversation with a web design company today. They had asked permission to use one of my pictures on Flickr (which was nice of them) and mentioned the site they were building.

I had a quick look and the site was really swish. Well designed and with nice content. But I noticed that one of the pages did not render quite correctly with IE8, my current browser of choice. I’ve been quite happy with IE8, although it has to be said that sites don’t always look right with it. Perhaps this is due to it being more standard than they are, but I’m not sure. Anyhoo, I tried the page with Safari and it seemed to look OK so I pinged the company my findings.

They came back to me and said “Oh, that’s interesting. We don’t usually test our sites with IE8 or Safari.” I found this very surprising. I’m not sure if a shop would do very well if it has window display that was only visible to blondes, or put everything on a high shelf where only tall people could see it (although I’d be OK on both counts of course).

If I was running a web design company I’d make it my business to ensure that the site worked correctly with everything. Of course one day, in a distant utopian future, we might have some web standards that would mean browser compatibility was no longer an issue, but for now it is – and I would have thought that would be standard practice to worry about this kind of thing.

Live Code at the Humber Bridge

The clocks changed on Sunday morning. In the UK we started British Summer Time, which meant that a sinister government plot resulted in 60 minutes of my life being stolen overnight. We had to put the clocks forward of course. One year I tried to assert my independence from this time base tyranny, but it didn’t work that well, and I was late for everything (or early, I forget).

Anyhoo, many years ago I wrote some software for the Humber Bridge that is part of their toll management system (Ian and Nicky did the rest) and my bit is in charge of making sure that the clocks get put forward and back. Because the software had to go quite quickly I implemented a little look-up table with the dates hard wired into the code. And then I forgot all about it.

Of course this weekend my little table ran out, and today I got a call from Neil at the bridge because their system was living in the past. So it was out with the Windows 95 system that I used to create the software, a quick extension of the table and down to the bridge to install it.

We use a system by Siemens to talk to PLC machines in the Toll Booths. It has a wonderful ability to let you update the code while everything is running. This is because the software is designed for process control, where you sometimes can’t turn everything off just to put new versions out there. So I was able to add the new code (which I’d already tested on my laptop) and then watch as the clock pinged forward to the correct hour.

The table now works to 2012. I’ve set an appointment in my diary to remind me to get in touch with them well before then, so that it doesn’t happen again.