Wednesday, September 5, 2012 at 08:18AM 
I was up bright and early today to review the papers for Radio Humberside. One of the nice things about being up town at 6:45am (and there has got to be at least one) is that you can take pictures of the town in the early morning sunshine.
Life Tuesday, September 4, 2012 at 07:31PM For the next week my fabulous book about the Kinect is being promoted by those lovely people at O’Reilly as part of their “Back-to-School special. You can save up to 50% on Books, Videos, Courses (and of course my book) for one week only. Find out more at http://oreil.ly/SUPaaT
Monday, September 3, 2012 at 07:21PM 
Today I was reading a post from James which linked through to a list of “20 Controversial Programming Opinions” that folks had posted on Stack Overflow. It is worth a look, if only to foster debate about the subject.
I’ve not got a problem with any of the statements to be honest. Some of them make more sense in particular contexts, but none of them are outright daft. I think most of them boil down to:
If you are using something make sure you are doing it for the right reasons and for the right effect. Adding comments, drawing use case diagrams, writing unit tests etc etc should not be things that you do “Because you have to”. In the right context these techniques are crucial. If I’m meeting a customer for the first time and I need to have something that will serve as the basis of of discussion a Use Case Diagram is essential. But if I’m writing a quick, single purpose, application then there is no need for that level of detail.
The bottom line is that before you use something you should consider why you are using it and how it will add to what you are building. Don’t feel bad because you haven’t used a design pattern, or written thousands of unit tests. Just ask yourself how much the user likes what you have made, and how you can make it work better.
Sunday, September 2, 2012 at 10:40PM 
The Hope and Anchor at Blacktoft is a great place to go for a meal by the river. If you are really lucky you might get a sky like this in between courses. And a dirty great boat going past the window (which I failed to rush out and take a picture of).
Just make sure that you set your SatNav up with care. My score so far is “Attempts to find the place: 2. Went straight there: 0”.
It is also a great place to go if you like Laurel and Hardy. Go along and find out what I mean. And have the roast beef Sunday Lunch. Lovely.
This is another view, using the Painterly 2 filter from PhotoMatix.
food, restaurant Saturday, September 1, 2012 at 09:48PM 
I’m never sure whether my hobby is photography or “Buying cameras, using them for a bit and then selling them for a loss on ebay”. Either way, while I do take a lot of photos I also do a bit of camera shopping. Today I was in a camera shop asking about a camera I was thinking of investing in. I never say buying, that sounds like I might actually lose money on the deal.
Anyhoo, we find the camera and one of the assistants appears and offers to show me the device in action. Which turns out to have a flat battery. “Typical” says the assistant, although typical of what I’m not sure. No, they don’t have any charged batteries lying around. No, they don’t have any other versions of the camera, just the one on display. No they won’t give a discount if they sell the display camera. The best they can offer is to charge the battery and I can drop back later to take a look.
I wouldn’t mind but this is the third time I have had this kind of experience. Shop 1 the camera battery was flat. Shop 2 the battery wasn’t flat but they didn’t have an SD card that I could use to store pictures that I’d taken to test the camera. And now I get this.These are just random shops I’ve walked into around the country. They were not all in the same chain either.
The camera I was looking at wasn’t cheap. And I was fairly serious about buying it. If I was selling in this position I’d make sure that every camera was fully charged first thing in the morning. I’d have a pocket full of the relevant batteries and SD cards that fitted. I’d even go as far as having a bunch of sample prints that I’d taken to show any potential customer what each camera could do. I’d have a sensible policy on selling display models, even a modest discount might have sealed the deal.
The one way that these kinds of shops can compete with online shopping is on service. It is rather upsetting to find that they are not really trying on this score either.
Life 