Talking to the future

What will you send?

How was your day?

Have you been shot at, gassed, beaten up, had your girlfriend kidnapped, been fitted with a TV camera and made to shoot the mayor?

Thought not.

Trip Hazard has. New installment coming soon.

Private Agenda

My new-fangled PDA has got Microsoft Voice Command in it. This is a totally wonderful application that lets you use speech to control your life. It is like having a little person inside the device that you can ask to do things like place calls, tell you what is coming next, play you music and so on. It works extremely well, and is pretty unique amongst these things in that it does not require any voice training.

My PDA therefore presently announces all my appointments in a robotic American voice and will also read me the heading of incoming urgent emails, when they arrive.

This is all very useful, but all my appointments are pretty boring. I think I'm going to set a few more interesting ones so that in the middle of an Information Services Committee meeting my device can go "Bing Bong - Secret Weapon Briefing in fifteen minutes" or "Bing Bong - Tony Blair call at four o'clock" or "Bing Bong - Kill them all. Do it now. DO IT NOW!!!"

Update on Friday, December 1, 2006 at 09:18AM by Rob

Alas, I chickened out. But I was the only bloke at the meeting not wearing a tie. Go fashion rebel me.

Robs Laws

I was talking in a Software Engineering lecture today about "Rob's Laws" amongst other things. I think it is time these were finally written down.

1. Any given computer is too slow. No matter how fast you think it is when you get it, after a while you will think it is too slow.
2. Any given project will take longer than you think. Even (or especially) if you allow for this. The only exception to this rule is a project you won't get paid for, or one where you have massively misunderstood the requirement and are therfore doomed.
3. A program that is useful will have bugs in it. The only programs that can be proved to be correct are too small to do anything that you might want.
4. A highly successful, fully working, system which contains hardware components will just about always have a massive "kludge" somewhere in the middle of it. This is the bit that has to be there, otherwise it won't work. Nobody will completely understand why it has to be there, or what it does, but they do know that if you take it out the system stops working.
5. A customer will never ring you up and tell you their program is working fine. Never. If the phone rings, it is always bad news. Silence either means they haven't got round to testing it yet, or it is working fine. At the point where you think it has gone quiet for long enough for it to be definitely working the phone will ring and they will tell you they've just got around to testing it and have found something they don't like.
6. As soon as you assume something about what the customer wants you are doomed. For sure.

Update on Saturday, December 2, 2006 at 08:48AM by Rob

Hmmm. I've been thinking further about this. I reckon that law 4 is probably a bit harsh. I think it applies to projects involving hardware (they do seem to need this level of magic) but not always to straight software ones.

Does this make sense?

Yesterday I bought an extra large aerial for our WIFI router at home. This should help us get good network reception in the living room. I can recommend these, the one I got was from Maplin and cost 15 quid, which means they are probably available for a bit less elsewhere.

Anyhoo, it works well, but I'm a bit confused about one thing. The aerial comes with a magnetic base, so that you can easily stick it to your fridge or whatever. 

Great for a quick and easy way of mounting I guess, but I'm not sure how sensible it is to put a device designed to send and receive radio signals right next to a big lump of metal. Very strange.