Please Do Learn to Code

Tuesday night was not a happy one in the “Land of Rob”. First off I read this post from Jeff Attwood which argued that it is pointless for “normal” people to try and learn to program. Most depressing. Then I watched some of The Matt Lucas Awards Show, a rather vacuous and self-congratulatory program where the “celebrities” were invited to identify the subjects they hated most at school. One said “Maths”, another said “Computer Science”. They followed up with examples of why they hated the subjects so much, and even brought on an obviously very talented maths teacher just to make fun of her. Ugh and Ugh.

Two sides of the same coin. An expert telling non-experts not to bother learning their subject and two apparently “successful” people who seemed proud of the fact they hated the same subject. Two rules I work by:

1. Never be proud of your ignorance.
2. Never dismiss those who you think know less about something than you do.

The only great thing about this is that today Scott Hanselman, a proper computer person and almost a celebrity, turned up with the perfect response in his blog.

Update on Thursday, May 17, 2012 at 03:14PM by Rob

This post from Alfred is pretty good too.

Computer Science Finalists BBQ

We will be having our first ever Department of Computer Science Finalists’ BBQ this year on Monday 28 May in Sanctuary from 2.30 pm to 5.30 pm.  All year 3 and year 4 students and staff can turn up and get free food. (which might not include any of the items in the picture above)

If you fancy coming along you can get a ticket from the Departmental Office (you need a ticket to get the food).  I’ll be there, of course, because to me the best tasting food is free…..

Phones 4 U Do Customer Service

I rang my dad last night. Mentioned my new phone, as you do. “I can’t understand you.” he said. “It’s simple”, I explained, before going into great detail about the complex financing infrastructure that I had carefully put in place so that he would appreciate that I was not being profligate with money and was putting into place all those rules of fiscal good behaviour that he had taught me. “No” he replied “I can’t understand what you are saying, your voice is distorted”.

I rang myself up (one good reason for having a landline). He was quite right. I couldn’t understand me either. Turns out that my lovely Lumia 900 is brilliant at everything except making phone calls. If you turn the volume up during a call then the sound gets progressively more broken up until you hit the level 7, at which point you sound like a dalek with a bad cold. Oh dear. It looks like it is a problem with the noise cancelling part of the device picking up sound from the speaker and trying to cancel it, and then getting stuck in a loop. Whatever it was, not good. From the posts on the Nokia forums there are a few folks having this problem. While I can solve the problem by not turning the volume above 7 I’m not particularly happy with this solution, the worst thing being that I sound fine to me, it is just the person at the other end that can’t hear anything sensible.

So this lunchtime it was off down to Phones 4 U in Princes Quay, where I bought it. Fortunately the problem is really easy to demonstrate, and they were happy to make a swap for a working device. They were very good about this, and so I was left with just one more problem to solve. On Saturday I’d linked my Zune Pass to my new phone (mainly so I could get the new Garbage album onto it). You are only allowed to change your Zune Pass devices once a month, and so I was worried that I’d have to wait another 28 days before I could carry Shirley Manson et all around with me again. Not so. Zune support has an interactive chat mode that works very well. Rather than hanging around on call waiting you just wait for the message window to open and then type in your question. Up and sorted within five minutes.

I’m a bit sad that I lost a lunch-hour sorting out a problem that should not have arisen. But I’m very pleased that Phones 4 U and the Zune people responded so quickly and constructively.  Marks and Spencer could learn from them.

Going the Distance

This came up on the car this morning. I had to stop and take a picture, as I’d come over all “IBM PC”.

Nokia Lumia 900

The guy serving me in the chip shop on Friday caught a glimpse of my Lumia 800. “Good phone that.” he observed. “A mate’s got one. My iPhone is up for renewal soon and so I thought I’d get one as well”. Smooth move.

I really like my Lumia 800. The latest update has removed the only real issue I had with it, the battery life is now excellent. Of course, I’m selling mine now. On Saturday I went up town to not look at, and definitely not buy, the new Nokia 900. Which you can get in White at Phones4U. So I didn’t go in. And I didn’t look at it. And I definitely didn’t want one. But then…..

Having done all the maths and looked up the price on ebay of Lumia 800’s I concluded that if I sold my old iPhone (which I’ve been keeping for mainly sentimental reasons) and my Samsung Omnia 7 plus a few other bits and bobs I could run out even on the deal if I bought an unlocked device. Particularly as the chap in the shop uttered the magic phrase “It does tethering”. This means I can use the phone as a WIFI access point for any other devices that want to talk to the internets on the move. Tethering is promised for the Lumia 800, but my reasoning here is that it is not guaranteed that all carriers will enable it. However, if I have an unlocked device I can just turn it on and it will work. Which I have, and it does.

There is nothing wrong with my Lumia 800 at all. All the problems are with my eyes and fingers. I find the screen just a tiny bit too small to read easily and the keyboard is just a bit too tiny for my lanky fingers to find their way around. It is on eBay at the moment and I’ve had some expressions of interest already.

Changing phones was not too bad. Microsoft Exchange made sure that my address book moved over with no problem. All the pictures from the phone are already on Skydrive. The only real problem is that I’ve lost all my SMS conversations, but I can live with that. The Lumia 900 is properly lovely. I might even show it to the bloke in the chip shop.