Hanging Out, Messing around and Geeking Out

danah boyd (deliberate lower case here) is a researcher who ponders how the networks are changing our lives and the way we do things.

She is the co-author of a book which contains a set of case studies that investigate how different people live, learn and work around the networks of the 21st century. I’ve just started working my way through it, and I’m finding it very interesting.

Everything Digital is Rubbish

Sometimes it seems to me that progress is made on the basis of one step forwards and two steps back. Today the DAB radio in the kitchen stopped working. It didn’t go a bit mushy (which is what the old analogue FM one did). Instead it went all staccato, and finally expired completely. I’ve had this happen before. I think it doesn’t like trees full of wet leaves, or something. Never mind, I thought, we can get digital radio on our TV.

Except we can’t. Some trickery at FreeView has seen all our TV channels break and move around, so that now the radio stations hardly work and I had to buy a new tuner to get the Media PC in the living room to work at all.

I wish (and remember this is a gadget person talking here) that we didn’t always move into new technology before we have actually got them as good as the ones they are replacing. Music players have only recently caught up with my old walkman, in that they now have the ability to resume playing where they left off.  Digital radio (and TV for that matter), were sold on the basis of more channels (which I don’t really want) and better quality (which was a lie).

Oh well, I suppose they will catch up eventually. We dug out the old analogue radio and that seems to work.

Hull Photos

I’m sticking with my plan to post a new picture each day. Today I took the camera up town and took three, I can’t work out which is the best one.

Autumn Trees

Flags

Hats, Gloves, Scarves and Socks

Flying Home from Berlin

Had to go home today. Flying on Friday 13th. Can’t see a problem with that. But first a last trip to TechEd.

I could have won this, but in the end I didn’t.

We went to the last session of all, which was a great presentation about using constraints and automated test to improve program reliability. Anyone who has talked to me about programming for more than a couple of minutes will know that I am very keen on Test Driven Development, but it is rather a chore to write the tests, and often you just want to add elements to the code so that the resulting system will not let you make a mistake. If an age can’t be negative why not just have a way of putting that into the code?

.NET Version 4.0 includes Contracts that let you set out things like this, and looks like a great extension to the framework. Find out more here. If you want to write your unit tests automatically you could take a look at Pex  which will run your code, watch what it does and then generate suitable test behaviours. It even goes as far as making fake versions of built in library functions to properly replicate a testing environment.

All this is very interesting. I also went along to some sessions on the new dynamic elements being added to C# which let it bind more easily to languages which “make up” typing as they run. This is a great way to knit solutions out of lots of cooperating objects but goes against the grain of a strongly typed language like C#. It seems to me that we are travelling into the future in two directions at once. On one hand we have dynamic systems that fit themselves together as you use them (great for web mashups etc) and on the other we have systems that are strongly typed, constraint powered and properly tested (great for nuclear power stations).

Oh, and the flight home was fine, albeit a little windy.

F#, State Diagrams and Racing Cars

I went to a session today about F#, which is a functional language. This is a very interesting way to write programs and is now entering the mainstream as part of Visual Studio 2010. Well worth a look.

I also had a wander round the exhibition hall, which is huge.

These folks are doing really interesting stuff. They have developed a way to take state diagrams (a nice graphical way of showing the behaviour of a system) and use these to produce code. They can even animate the state diagram and allow you to set breakpoints in the application controlled by it. Great for embedded control, and just about anything controlled by a state machine. Which is just about anything really. Great Stuff.

I didn’t have a go, but I really wanted to…