Shelf Portrait

I’m not sure that I’ve actually got the hang of this whole “shelfie” thing.

Morning Light

You get some lovely colours during the sunrise at this time of year..

I took these with the Lumia 1020 phone. I’m needing to get my camera out less and less these days.

Fiddling with Hardware at C4DI

Jon Moss gets things started.

We had a great evening at the C4DI tonight. It was another of the “You Really Should Be” events and just to make it even more interesting I was giving one of the presentations. But first we had Jon Moss, making the point that “You Really Should Be speaking at events”. He made a great case for talking in public, not least because it is fun once you get going. He also made the very good point that the aim of a presentation is to get your audience to do something and what this is should be set out and reinforced at the beginning and the end of your presentation, when the audience is most engaged.

My Audience. Thanks for the applause.

Then it was my turn. My topic was “You Really Should be Fiddling with Hardware”, and I’d brought along some hardware that I’d fiddled with, including coloured lights that can be controlled over Bluetooth from my Windows Phone. Everything worked, eventually, and folks clapped at the end, which is always nice. You can find the slides from the presentation here.

Next up was John Polling who reckoned “You really should be working on a side project”. By side project John means something which takes you into new areas and helps you develop your skills. I like the sound of this. I’ve always found that the technical things that I’m not really supposed to be doing are the ones that I find the most interesting at any given time. By formalising this and giving an outlet for folks who want to make something different you can get happier developers and some surprisingly useful outcomes.

Finally we had Steve Fewster. who rounded things off with “You really should be - developing apps for the ‘Global Cloud Accounting’ community”. I’m not that familiar with accounting, but I do know about the cloud and how lots of business process is now moving into it. Steve, who is in the business of providing tools and services that add value for cloud users, took the line that “There’s gold in them thar hills”. In other words, the market is just getting going for people who want to bolt their ideas onto cloud based accounting systems. The system makers are keen to encourage an app infrastructure and so they make it easy to create apps and there is lots of scope for neat ideas to become the next big thing.

All in all, a very thought provoking and enjoyable evening. Thanks to C4DI for putting it together.

Mini-Open Day

We had our first Open Day of the new admissions round today. Just a quiet affair with a few select guests. I was able to show off one of my latest toys (which will get its official debut tomorrow at C4DI) and make sure that I can still remember the introduction presentation. That went fine, although I did make the potentially career damaging mistake of completely forgetting the name of our new head of department. Who was there at the time.

This is our new Head of Department, Ken Hawick, handing over goods to the winner of our Open Day prize draw. There are no prizes at all for guessing what is in the box.

Thanks to those who turned up, hope you had a good journey back.

“Keep with next” with Word

I’ve been in the lab most of today marking First Year projects. One of the things that we ask the students to do is create a user manual for the program that they write. I reckon that the manual works best if it has headings that direct the reader to particular topics. But that can cause problems….

Sometimes the heading can end up at the bottom of the page, like the rather contrived example above. If you want to stop this happening, you can right click on the heading text (in the example above “Getting a copy of the notes”) and choose “Paragraph” from the menu that appears.

Then you can select “Keep with next” for the paragraph and this means that if you have a page break in the wrong place (as above) then the heading will follow the text over the page.

If you are entering program samples, or things that you don’t want to have split over page breaks you can also use the “Keep Lines Together” setting. If you add this behaviour to styles you can get your documents to lay themselves out automatically.