Bob Powell's External Monologue

Kodak, a case of the Xerox's

2012-01-19T18:21:00.002+01:00

When Bill Gates was a young programmer he worked for Steve Jobs and Apple. This was when Apple had begun work on the Macintosh and the first commercially available GUI. Apple didn't however invent the Windows, Icons, Mouse and Pointer WIMP system. Xerox did at their PARC facility in Palo Alto where a young Steve Jobs was mooching around seeing what the big boys were doing. The truth was that

ASP.NET button mouseover image change in javascript

2012-01-19T10:03:00.000+01:00

The story so far: I wanted to do something very simple. I have a web-site that needs multi language capabilities so, I store all my site text in a database and pull it out using the country code of the client browser. This means for example that I could have a button with "About" in English and "A Propos" in French. I also wanted a mouseover effect for my buttons to provide a little bit of visual

Star Trek X-Prize

2012-01-15T14:34:00.000+01:00

Well, it had to happen. Strangely I was just expounding the possibilities of such a device to my wife, Chrissy, just a few days ago. Qualcom and the X-Prize organisation have put up a ten-million dollar prize for the team who succeeds in creating a "Medical Tricorder" similar to the type used by Doctor Leonard McCoy in the original Star Trek series. The device should weigh no more than 2.2 kilos

Virtual Box VM portability

2012-01-14T13:10:00.000+01:00

I am researching possibilities for my new portable development setup that I will be installing on my new laptop. Experience has shown me that weight and battery life are more important than processor power for laptops I use in demos and presentations so I have ordered a Macbook Air 13" system. I will be leaving OSX intact on the machine and probably dual-booting Windows 7 too but as an

The shame of Apollo

2012-01-12T09:01:00.000+01:00

There are ten billion earth-like planets in our galaxy and we haven't even got a moon-base! The US have dropped the ball by doing ultra-safe ultra-expensive space exploration and have lost thirty years of initiative that we could have had to safeguard and enrich our species.

Great Mango video tutorials here:

2012-01-12T08:41:00.001+01:00

http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Mango-Jump-Start/Mango-Jump-Start-01-Building-Windows-Phone-Apps-with-Visual-Studio-2010

Code Year

2012-01-06T19:00:00.000+01:00

This is a great idea. Shame its just JavaScript though. This is something I've thought necessary for a long time. Perhaps something more generic would be a useful thing to do as well. I've been following the progress of the RaspberryPi foundation as you probably know. The UK government was roundly chastised by Sergey Brin for failing to ensure that high school students had programming skills.

Its all just ones and zeros

2012-01-04T15:38:00.001+01:00

Visual studio 2010 running on Octogig editing an Android app using MonoDroid. A second instance of Visual Studio editing an Arduino project A virtual machine running Windows 8 and a new Metro sample in development MonoDevelop running on the Mac doing the iPhone version of the aforementioned Android App I never got diversity like this working in a bank!

Welcome to 2012! Granular Programming.

2012-01-03T08:53:00.002+01:00

First of all, I wish a happy and prosperous new year to all readers. Here's hoping that 2012 will be far less "interesting" than 2011 was. I guess we can only hope? So, today's topic is "granular programming" which is a term that does exist at the moment but which I believe is the term that is underused in the context of modern software architectures. For some time now, I have been using a

Idiotic Eureka Moment!

2011-12-27T20:33:00.000+01:00

I listen to Frank Skinner's podcasts on Absolute Radio in which he often speaks of the "Idiotic Eureka Moment" which is when you realise something, usually years later, that should have been obvious from the start. I recently bought a WHITE iphone 4S. DUH!! What took me so long to realise??

Raspberry PI for Christmas?

2011-12-26T16:10:00.001+01:00

I've mentioned this before on my blog but you still may not be aware of it. Created in response to a need for university applicants with higher information technology skills than were being seen at induction times, this credit card sized computer is designed to allow young people to both understand and program a simple Computer System at school or at home. This tiny machine has input output, a

AI class. Done and dusted

2011-12-22T13:15:00.001+01:00

Overall the AI class has been a great experience for me. I have learned so many concepts that I had never even imagined and my take on problem solving has been forever altered. The logic of ones and zeros that I've always worked with in my professional career has been transformed into a logic which suggests that the logical course is clearly the one with the maximum probable likelihood of success

AI-class extra credit programming

2011-12-21T01:07:00.001+01:00

Well, what a letdown those answers were. I solved the rot-n one by sucking up an English word dictionary and seeing if the four longest words were in there. Ok, not particularly AI I suppose.I could have got the strip question by doing it manually but I wanted to at least try to solve it using programming. In the end the effort seemed too great so I let it pass me by and waited to see what the

Kicking myself AI Class final

2011-12-20T12:54:00.001+01:00

Lousy score of 55%, not because I got a lot wrong but because I didn't check all the right answers available. This is to say for example that in the propositional logic question all my answers were correct, I just didn't check all the available right ones. Same with the resource one. The fact that my electricity was out and I had to rewrite the house to run on three phase generator power didn't

Generator power.

2011-12-16T21:19:00.000+01:00

Because I live on an old farm, all the electricity supply for the house is three phase. A while back I bought an SDMO 20 KVA generator "for emergencies" and its been sat in my garage unused for a year. When I bought it I had plans to wire it in but things happened and in the end it never got done. Last night 100 mph winds destroyed the infrastructure here and so I've been running aroung trying to

Ai-Class aarrgghh

2011-12-16T05:25:00.001+01:00

Hurricane winds all night. No power and no DSL. Damn damn DAMN!!!!!- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

AI class final exam

2011-12-15T14:51:00.001+01:00

Well, I guess I'm not the world's best student and its been a long time since I sat down and tried to behave like one. I have just completed the AI class lectures, except the optional natural language processing question which I am about to tinker with, and my average for correct answers in the lectures is 57%. I seem to have fared better in the homework with an average over my best six

Windows Metro linear navigation model

2011-12-12T06:16:00.001+01:00

Being a software developer I'm used to hierarchical structures. Understanding where a file is in a hierarchical structure of directories or moving or copying whole directory trees from one place to another is something I do every day. However, I have come to realise that a large percentage of people do not have this hierarchical concept in their heads at all when they use their computers. My

Winzip loses my vote...

2011-12-10T12:30:00.001+01:00

Many years ago, and probably because I was involved with shareware at that time, I registered as a user of WinZip and make donations to support the software. Later, or WinZip became a little more commercial and because I liked to see their success or a continued as a user and bought upgrades to the software. Unfortunately, since being bought out by the Corel Corp. WinZip's "fantastic upgrade

Convert IOS apps to WP7

2011-12-09T11:09:00.001+01:00

Microsoft is very much aware of Apple's Jupiter like gravity in the smartphone market. Trying to compete with such a platform is an extremely difficult proposition and so it stands to reason that everything that makes it easier to produce their applications on Windows Phone 7 will go a long way to narrowing the gap. Microsoft has recently announced at all which will enable existing IOS

AI class Homework 8

2011-12-08T22:49:00.001+01:00

For the first time in this class, I have resorted to writing software to assist me in the completion of a homework task. Interestingly, this was something I would have done normally, but unfortunately a machine failure early in the class made me do things in a much more hands-on manner. This is not to say that I have completely given up writing software. Indeed, much of what I have learned

Calm down dear.

2011-12-08T22:24:00.001+01:00

A short time ago, Mary Jo Foley kicked off another tempest in a teacup by disclosing that Silverlight was dead and soon to be replaced by HTML 5. This shock-horror revelation followed an interview with Microsoft's Bob Muglia an apparently revealed a massive shift in Microsoft strategy that would render Silverlight and WPF useless. Recently, questions have been raised regarding Windows 8 and in

How will Windows 8 fare in a business environment?

2011-12-08T15:08:00.001+01:00

Having worked for very many years in corporate environments I know that the adoption of a new operating system is fraught with problems. Corporate paranoia and risk aversion dictates that the rule of "if it ain't broke don't fix it" applies, sometimes for many generations of operating system. Sadly, Windows 8 will be no different and despite Microsoft's desire to get the operating system in

Facebook!

2011-12-08T14:33:00.001+01:00

Hi everyone, please feel free to click on my Facebook badge at the bottom of this page. I answer all friend requests positively and I am dedicating time every day for discussions in that forum. Hope to see you there!

AI class homework 7

2011-12-07T15:25:00.001+01:00

93% go me!