Saturday, November 24, 2012 at 08:29PM [Note: These posts are being made retrospectively. At the time I didn’t really feel like writing much, but I really want to get this stuff down just so I can remember it later.]
We went out today for a walk. Apparently walking is good for me. And cheese probably isn’t. Such is life. We went over to Manna in Cottingham, who do a really impressive hot chocolate, among other things.
Life Friday, November 23, 2012 at 09:58AM 
Well, that was fun. What I’ve had is referred to as an “elective percutaneous coronary intervention” The doctors used lots of these medical terms as they were working on me. I asked about this and they told me not to worry about what they were saying.
Unless one of them said “Oh shit”.
Anyhoo, it looks like it was a “find the problem”, “fix the problem” kind of procedure. One of the arteries in my heart was pretty much blocked apparently and the piece of stainless steel chicken wire that they inserted (actually a 2.75x32 Promus Element Plus drug eluting stent) seems to be working. I’ve now got a “non-tight feeling” in my chest which is actually rather strange. I’m back home now with a list of things that might go wrong in the 7 days and stuff not to do.
I’m going to be off work for a week or two, but hopefully when I get back I won’t be using the lift as much.
Life Wednesday, November 21, 2012 at 08:38PM 
This man speaks the truth. Most of the time. I think.
We had our latest Rather Useful Seminar today. Simon told us all about Unity, a game creation framework which you can drive using C#. The great thing about Unity is that it lets you target a variety of platforms and it is cheap to get started. The seminar was great, I’ll put the slides up later.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012 at 08:25PM 
I first saw a Livescribe pen last week. It looked very interesting, and so on Saturday I invested in one. (note that I never buy gadgets, I invest in them.) This time though I think I have invested in something really useful. If any part of your life involves taking notes (like for example as a student) then you should take a look at this device.
The hardware is fairly plain on the outside. A shiny black pen with a little OLED display, a single button and sockets for usb and headphones/microphone. You can write on any paper of course, but if you write on the specially printed blank pages that you can buy from Livescribe the pen will remember what you wrote. You can then upload your scrawlings onto a computer. So far, so conventional. But you can buy the paper in the form of bound books. Each of these is uniquely identified so that when you upload the pages they are already automatically filed by page number and volume. The pen tracks which book is which, so you can chop and change and it all just works. If you fill a book and buy a replacement with the same number you can archive that volume on your computer and start afresh.
So, at the moment we’ve got a device that will store and index stuff that you write. For me that is very useful. I like to write things in meetings, but I end up just losing those notes afterwards. With Livescribe I can keep track of what I’ve written and go back to it much later on my computer. The pen knows the date and time, so I can go back to notes I took at particular points in time. But then we turn on the microphone in the pen and things get really interesting. Now I can record audio of a meeting and synchronise it with my notes. Tap a sentence in my notes and I instantly hear what was being said when I wrote that. Flip the process around and I can record interactive presentations. Livescribe will even host these for me for free (up to 500M of content).You can even plug in stereo headphones with built in microphones to record what is happening in binaural stereo.
I’m impressed with the device and its potential. It is not that expensive to get on board. The fact that you need special paper is a bit irritating, but if you have a colour laser printer you can print your own blank paper and the books and notepads are not that expensive and well made. You can even get post-it notes that you can bring to life with audio extras. It also works with Evernote, which is something I’ve yet to explore. You can also load applications onto the pen, use it to make a piece of paper into a piano and buy a program that will convert your handwriting into text. You can find out more at Livescribe. Worth a look.
Gadgets Monday, November 19, 2012 at 08:22PM 
One of the Second Year courses that I help deliver is our Software Development module. As part of that we put our students into teams and get them to write some software for a picky customer. They have to deal with dodgy legacy software and the fun and games that is associated with working as part of a team.
One of the rules that we have is that everyone in a team should write some code. Not all of it, but some of it. One of our worries is that in a team of 6 people we might get a couple of folks who will say “We’re the best programmers here, we should write all the code” and then go ahead and try to do just that. This is bad in many, many ways.
For a start, they might not be the best programmers there, just the ones with the biggest egos/mouths. For another thing, they might not be able to do all the work with just two people. But most importantly, if they are the best programmers around, and they could write all the code they should still not try to do it. Because from a learning outcome point of view they are missing out on a huge opportunity.
If the “great programmers” just churn out the code all they’ve done is reinforce their high opinion of themselves. But if instead they decided to piece out the work sensibly and then spend some of their time mentoring those who are less confident coders so that everyone gets better at development, then they are picking up an incredibly valuable skill. The ability to teach people stuff is really useful, even if you have no intention of going into teaching. When you try to explain something to another person you have to try to put yourself in their position and then find a context which they understand, into which you can put the information you are delivering.
The skill of being able to explain something to another person is very valuable, and it is just the kind of thing that employers are looking for. It also makes you more confident in interview situations, just because you are better at talking to people.
So, don’t think that offering to write all the code is “taking one for the team”. It is more like “taking one from the team”.
