I want a trombone

I want a trombone. I've wanted one ever since I saw one in a shop up town at around 11:30 today. And only 99 pounds too. I'm sure that a trombone would give me that air of cool which has so far eluded me. I could be "discovered" in my office playing really cool trombone riffs (if that is what they are called) like Riker in Star Trek Next Generation. Actually, I think that people would know I was playing the trombone long before they opened my office door though.....

Anyhoo. I still want one. Unfortunately my wife has other ideas and instead we have bought some garden furniture. Which cost the same as one and a half trombones (not that I want the half as well). I'm sure I'd work really hard at learning to play it, and it is bound to be easier than the guitar - for a start you can't play more than one note at once so reading the music will be a no brainer. And if I don't get round to practicing it would look even cooler hanging on the wall. Next to my guitar.

How to succeed in a programming course

Spent most of the day marking first year practical work. By gum, some of our students can program. And some should have sought help before submitting. Most people have done enough to pass, which is nice, but they could have done some much better if they had come to see me (or even posted on the forum) when they hit problems.

I can see stuff of real potential, bogged down by little problems. "I would have finished this bit but I couldn't figure out how to do the ......". Some things you don't have to figure out. You are allowed to ask.

If you want to succeed in your programming practicals here are a few good ground rules from someone who's been around the block a few times.

1. Read other folks code. You can learn a lot from it. And it is not copying (unless you use cut and paste of course)
2. Think about it before you write it. Just whacking some code in and debugging it into life is a mugs game. Instead, map it out on paper, write a sequence of steps in english which would work for you. Then convert this into your chosen language.
3. Design for test. Figure out how you are going to prove it works (or doesn't) as you create your solution, not at the end.
4. Explain your problems to other people. They might not know the answer, but the act of explaining the problem often solves it.
5. Don't be afraid to seek help. You will not appear stupid. Everyone who can program has been there at some point. And generally programmers like helping each other.
6. Never give up. Persistance is a recurring theme with good programmers. Having said that, don't be afraid to walk away from the problem for a while. If you've not solved it after 30 minutes it is unlikely that you'll solve it in two hours. Instead take a time out and go and do something else. Nine times out of ten the answer will pop into your head as soon as you stop thinking about the question.

Now, if only I could get the splash screen on my Smartphone app. to work properly.....

Sasser and Viruses

My brother in law has the Sasser virus. His shiny new portable is now seething with the darned thing. I've send him a CD-ROM with a killer program, an anti-virus suite and Zone Alarm, but it is very irritating when these things happen. I keep wondering whether other fields of human endeavour have suffered as much from human stupidity. Did we really have people who, two years after the first railway was invented, decided to have some fun by dropping rocks on the tracks in front of trains just to see what happens? I suppose we did have Luddites, but they smashed the machinery becuase they thought it might take their jobs.

Perhaps in the "Good Old Days" (tm) folks were too busy with the more urgent aspects of staying alive, having a roof over their heads and not dropping dead from whatever plague was doing the rounds. Nowadays most of this is a given, and so there is enough slack in the system for going to Britney concerts and writing viruses (not that people who go to Britney concerts are the virus writers - but you know what I mean).

I've no idea how we solve it. I guess we need to make sure that we have the latest software (if my brother in law's machine had been better prepared before he got it there would not have been a problem). Perhaps we should insist that, just before a machine is shipped or sold over the counter, it is connected to windows update and prepared for the horrible world out there. This would not stop new viruses but it should help things a bit. I for one would think that such a move would give a vendor a nice sales advantage - I'd prefer to buy a machine fully prepped rather than spend a couple of hours of my time bringing it up to scratch.

Disks. Wah!

Spent most of today preparing media for my wonderful "Fullmarks" marking program. This is the all singing, all dancing, annotating masterpiece which will make marking this coursework really easy and fun. The program seems to do everything now, but I'm sure that after 150 labs I'll find something new it needs to do. But back to preparing media. I'd asked the students to submit on floppy disk or CD-ROM. Bad move. Out of 150 submissions, around 20 won't read on my machine.

And I've just remembered that I hate floppy disks. Horrid, creaky things with read errors. And now I hate CD-ROMS as well. Horrid, creaky things with read errors. It might be that my machine in my office is a bit old, but I would have expected better performance than this!

The thing that really annoyed me (hmm, this might just be a rant) was the way that Windows XP (a wonderful operating system in just about every other respect) completely freezes when you put a CD-ROM in the drive. I've no idea why this is, and I know that older versions of the operating system were better in this respect.

Anyhoo, I now have 120 or so things to mark. I'll let you know how I get on.

Oh, and the funny pick and mix display was selling Lego bricks of all things! You could by a cup full of just red ones if you wanted. And the car, count the number of wheels that you can see....

Collectormania

Went to Collectormania yesterday. Caught the bug from number one daughter, who dragged me to the last one in search of hobbits. This time things were a bit quieter, but still very busy. The name of the game starts with getting signatures of notables, in this case two of the Star Trek doctors. I'm not normally that star struck (although I expect people who meet me to be of course). But to meet in real life two people I've seen on the telly and big screen was rather neat, and more than made up for the pain of getting up at 5:15 am to make the three hour drive down to the show.

I also made some careful purchases of collectable items (at least that is how I'm rationalising them), which I'll post details of as soon as I've dared tell my wife what I've bought...