Hello from Windows 8

Windows 8 proved very easy to install. I believe in starting from a clean slate (sorry) so I backed up my entire machine last night and this morning at 8:30 I started the upgrade by booting from a CD, deleting all the partitions from the disk and starting from scratch. I had the machine working under Windows 8 well before 9:00. Looks very good so far. One thing to be aware of (although this might just be me). We have an eduroam WiFi network at Hull which is authenticated using a self signed certificate. When you connect to it you sometimes get a message saying that the certificate is not as secure as it might be, and do you really want to do this. You just have to say OK to continue to connect.

When I first installed Windows 8 this didn’t work. The machine just refused to connect to the university WiFi. It knew that the password was correct, but it didn’t give me the option to ignore the certificate. However, once I’d connected via the wired network, and logged onto the machine with my Windows Live account it worked perfectly. It might be the case (although I’m really just guessing here) that Windows 8 insists on having a “proper” login before it will enable the option to ignore certificate errors like this. I’d love to know if you have hit this problem too, so put a comment on the end of this post if you get problems.

As for me, I’ve installed Windows Essentials and got Live Writer working (hence this post). Next it is on to Visual Studio 2012 and the other stuff.

Bye Bye Live Mesh

Microsoft have released the latest version of Windows Essentials. When you start to install it you get the dialog above. The title “One Last Thing” is interesting, it is a kind of “By the by, we are about to take something away that could break your way of working” statement. I’m pressing Cancel just at the moment.

The writing has been on the wall for Live Mesh for a while. Pretty much ever since SkyDrive started doing the same kind of thing, i.e. let you transparently share files around your computers and back them up in the cloud. I’ve been a fan of this ability for ages. If you take any (or indeed all) of my machines and throw them in the river I won’t necessarily thank you, but I can take such vandalism in my stride because I use Live Mesh to sync all my work. Getting a new machine is quite relaxing for me as I just have to introduce it to Live Mesh and all my data appears as though by magic. The only restriction here is that Live Mesh limits you to 4G of file space in the cloud, but since we are talking about working data here (all the other important stuff is back home spread over a bunch of disks) 4G is fine.

It’s unfortunate that Live Mesh is going. The SkyDrive replacement works the same way, although it only synchronises via the cloud apparently. With Live Mesh two machines would directly exchange files if they found themselves on the same network. Live Mesh also provides a Remote Desktop feature which SkyDrive doesn’t. There have been a few complaints on the interwebs about the demise of Live Mesh. I think this is really a bit unfair. After all, it’s not as if it was a service that anyone has paid for. If someone gave you an apple pie every day for a while and then stopped it would be rather unfair to complain. Particularly if they then offered you a rhubarb crumble instead. If you want a premium service you can go for DropBox, which is excellent but not as cheap as I would like.

As for me, I’m presently copying my files from my Live Mesh folders into SkyDrive shared ones and I’ll press OK as soon as I’ve got all the files in place.

Update on Thursday, August 16, 2012 at 08:45AM by Rob

There is actually one feature of Live Mesh that I will really miss though, and that is the way that you can only synchronise certain folders with particular machines. On my "disk space challenged Samsung Slate" I only synchronise the files that I really need to have available on that machine, saving precious storage space.

When I switch to Skydrive I'll have to sync my entire Skydrive folder, camera roll and all, which will lose me a few GBytes. On the other hand, Skydrive gives me more space, so I guess we are back to apple pie vx rhubarb crumble again....

IR Blasting

I’m working on content for next semester at the moment. One of the modules that I deliver is a second year course called 08249 Electronics and Interfacing. In this module we get to fiddle around with robots and stuff. Last year we created a controller and a slave robot. To send commands between the two devices we were using wires link the two together.

Next time I want to use infrared instead. This has proved quite an interesting challenge. Infrared is “light you can’t see”. The wavelengths of infrared signals are outside the range of the human eye, although some cameras can see them (as you can see above), where the LED appears to be lit but to the human eye it is off. I’ve actually taken pictures in the dark using an infrared sensitive camera (most mobile phone cameras pick up IR) and “painting” with a TV remote control…

However, f you want to use infrared signals to transfer data you can’t just shine an infrared light at a receiver. This is because sunlight contains lots of infrared. The receiver would not be able to distinguish the remote data from sunshine. So remote controls use modulation to make their signal stand out from the background. Modulate means change up and down. Rather than shining continuously a TV remote flashes the control signal on and off 38.000 times a second. The receiver detects signals which are changing at that rate and ignores any others, so that it can filter out background noise. This is a bit like a sailor who can tell a flashing lighthouse lamp from the light of the moon.

If you buy an infrared receiver device it will have this demodulation behaviour built in to the hardware, which is very useful. Unfortunately you don’t get this when you buy a transmitter. An infrared LED (a light that shines with infrared light) just works as a continuous light source, and so you can’t use it directly. Fortunately the .NET Micro Framework has a number of tricks that you can use to make a modulation signal. So I connected an infrared e-block to a GHI FEZ device and got started. And I found it doesn’t seem to work very well.

The reason (as I found by using my phone camera) is that the infrared led doesn’t shine very brightly. When I took a look at the circuit I found that the IR led is connected directly to the output from the microcontroller. The microcontroller can’t produce much power, and so the light was very dim. This is the same as what would happen if you connected a big speaker to the headphone output of your phone. Because the headphone output can’t deliver much power, the sound produced would not be very loud. They’ve probably designed the circuit this way so that it is fine for short range communications, but can’t produce signals that could travel a long way and affect other devices.

I don’t care about that, I just want more power. So I took a look at the visible LED e-block. This has a transistor to amplify the signal from the FEZ controller and provide more power. I decided that it would be worth swapping the visible LED for an infrared one. So I did this. Actually this part is quite funny. I very carefully took the LEDs off the two E Blocks using a solder sucker and lots of patience, and then, equally carefully, I soldered the infrared led back onto its original board. Idiot. Fortunately I managed to unsolder it again and, as you can see above, it does work and I can send an infrared signal a reasonable distance (although I’d like to send it further).

Next step is to create some kind of message protocol to send commands to a robot. Infrared commands are not very reliable (that’s why your TV remote repeats them continuously when you hold the button down) but I reckon we should be able to send enough to tell the robot what to do. Great fun.

Update on Wednesday, August 15, 2012 at 04:05PM by Rob

Ha. Sorted. I can now send pulses of different lengths to the robot and make it move and stop. Later we can start using pulse position modulation and maybe even serial data.

How to get more Blog Traffic

Danny Brown, one of our students, is celebrating his 10,000th blog reader. Well done sir. I tell all my students to start doing things, and get a blog out there about what they are doing. I seem to remember that Danny had a blog before he came here, but I note that quite a few Hull students are now active bloggers. You can find out what they are up to at http://hullcompsciblogs.com/ There are some really good blogs to follow up there covering everything from Raspberry Pi to video games to Gadgeteer.

I’ve been blogging for very many years and do it for fun. Although it is nice to get traffic as well. If you want some tips for a successful blog, well, here are some of mine.

Track your users. If your blogging site doesn’t provide tracking of hits then install something like Google Analytics. It costs nothing and it gives a great insight on how much activity you are getting. This can be quite depressing, but it is always useful to know when you have done something that attracts interest.

Make sure you have metadata that makes sense. I’m not going to suggest Search Engine Optimisation as such here, just common sense things to help people find you.

Integrate your blog with social media. I use Windows Live Writer (part of Windows Live Essentials) for creating blog posts. That provides plug-ins that I can use to tweet and post on Facebook when the blog is updated. You can use If This Then That (an amazing service that I must devote a proper blog post to later) to do this for you automatically. And remember that comments on your posts will not arrive on your blog posts, they will now often arrive as Likes on Facebook or Tweets.  This means that if you want to have a dialog with your readers you have to go out and look for their comments.

Some content gets a lot less interest that others. The absolute best content you can create is stuff that solves problems. If you make posts that tell people how to do things then you will get a lot of traffic as people find your answer and link through to it. You will also get traffic via search engines. Pick a subject you know a bit about, or are learning yourself, and put up blog posts with answers to the problems that you hit. One reason Danny has had so much success is that he has provided some neat technical answers (with all that a reader needs to solve the problem) along with the other content. Readers might not care about the place you went last week, or what you think about the current government, but they do like being able to solve problems. The only downside with useful content is that such readers are “fair weather friends” who will bump up your traffic for a day or so, before it drops back down again. The way to address this is to put plenty of stuff on your landing page that will encourage them to look around and find other things to read.

Enjoy your blogging, keep it regular and leave the readers thinking that you like talking to them. You don’t need to post every day. Only a fool would do that. But a regular blogging heartbeat is a good thing. If you take a break don’t worry, or feel like you have to “fill in the gaps”, just come back with a good post and it will be like you never went away.

Olympic Closing Ceremony–Wish You Were Here

I wasn’t at the Olympic Closing Ceremony. Wish I had been. I normally hate these kinds of things, seeing them as overblown feasts of self congratulation.

This one was different. It was great. Even the music was amazing. All of it. And when they started with the intro to “Wish you were here”, and then, at the end when the guy on the tight rope shook hands (see 70’s Pink Floyd album cover reference above), well, words fail me.

I’m pretty sure that there will be someone on Radio 4 tomorrow moaning about the way that the whole thing showed “nothing about what being British really means”. (actually I’m very sure, I’m writing this on Monday morning and I’ve just heard it).

What daft thing to say. To me the whole Olympics thing has been about Britain saying “Actually you know, we are pretty good at lots of things. Including putting on a darned good show.” Well done Team GB. At every level.