I realise I’ve ranted about this before, but I make no excuses for it, and I’ll do it again if the opportunity arises. Just look at this:
Yes, the sticker says “25″ with a line through it, and “Are you old enough?”. And yes, it’s a child’s cutlery set, with a knife you’d be hard pushed to slice off a piece of ripe brie with, let alone stab a rival gang member in a dark alley. Let’s have a look at the back:
I found myself in need of a C# (.NET/Mono) control for displaying and interacting with maps. I’d already implemented the same functionality in my application using an embedded browser, but that’s a horrible hack, so I decided to implement something nicer. I ended up with this:
I can hear the whining sirens of the don’t-reinvent-the-wheel police approaching already, so a couple of points about that. Yes, there are a couple of projects around already that I could have used almost off the shelf. They’re too complicated for my liking. What I’ve implemented does the basics of what I needed straight away in two small classes, contained in one file. I find this much more pleasant that having to wrangle with someone else’s 25-class monster implementation. Sometimes you can spend more time figuring out how to integrate an external module than you would just writing it yourself, and having spent all that time you still don’t understand the underlying implementation. This becomes more important when you start to extend things further down the line, which I will need to do. I’ve even done all this before, about 7 years ago, using tile data sneakily grabbed from various online proprietary mapping services of the day – I could have used that code, but I even rejected my own wheel.
Furthermore, if all you ever do is piece together other people’s ‘wheels’, you miss out on a lot of understanding, and more importantly fun. I don’t advocate reinventing wheels when someone else is paying for your time or you just need to get something done, but aside from that it’s frequently a good idea. So hopefully the don’t-reinvent-the-wheel police have now gone away to annoy someone else, and I can get back on topic…
Something that was bugging me about Android was the touch screen keyboard. I found it impossible to type anything with acceptable speed or accuracy. Unless you have child-sized fingertips, you’re relying on the dictionary guessing to figure out what word you mean, which is crap at the best of times, and useless if you’re not typing dictionary words. A side issue – I’ve noticed that if you *do* have child-sized fingers, it’s hard to get the touch screen to register at all, when you want it to. I don’t have child-sized fingers, of course, but my children do. When they want to press things, they have to hold their finger on the screen for a while, and sometimes it registers, sometimes it doesn’t. On the other hand, if they approach from behind and stab at the screen while you’re in the middle of doing something, it invariably registers straight away.
Anyway, before I got side-tracked by children’s fingers, I was going to say: But then I discovered the SlideType Keyboard!
Stuart Langridge passed on a great idea that hadn’t occurred to me – running an FTP server on an Android phone. Although my i7500 is pretty much permanently connected via USB when I’m in the house, on account of needing to be sure the battery will be charged when I leave the house, I don’t particularly want to have to mount the USB drive and manually transfer things. Apart from requiring ME to do the work, which defeats the whole object of machines, the computer I connect it to isn’t necessarily the one I want to transfer files to/from. Also, a card can only be mounted to one device at once, so by mounting it to the remote computer, you snatch it away from the Android device, which isn’t always ideal.
Stuart tracked down an Android application called On Air, which he seems mostly happy with. I gave it a quick whirl, and didn’t like it at all. Clearly we’re all different. What didn’t I like?
Even at the best of times, there’s nothing more embarrassing than a politician trying to “communicate with the young”. But Ed Balls managed to take this one step further by engaging a bunch of manufactured gangsters to spearhead a ‘beat cyber-bullying’ campaign, as depicted in the artist’s impression opposite. The fake hoodlum standing alongside bully-boy Balls is Dappy, of N-Dubz, who shortly afterwards stole the mobile number of a Radio 1 listener who sent in a less than complimentary message about him, and used it to harass her, culminating in sending her a death threat. You couldn’t make this stuff up.
Behind the farce though, lurk more serious problems. How did we reach this sorry state where, in order to try and convince school children to stop bullying each other, it seems like a good idea to enlist the help of dubious role models who make a living pretending to be (or in this case actually being) illiterate thugs?
I’ve decided I’m not getting enough exercise. This wasn’t a problem last summer, when was easy to finish work, eat, get the children off to bed and then take the dog for a long walk and still have daylight to spare. It got slightly harder in autumn, with one particularly memorable walk ending up with me stuck in the dark in the middle of some pitch black woods on account of having to go off-piste to avoid some cows that took exception to the dog.
You know you’re getting old when you start complaining to the BBC about things. I’d like to think I’m not getting that old yet, but even so, this dreadful article made me do this:
It’s been in the works a long time, but Facebook have finally switched on their XMPP functionality. Suddenly something like 400m users inside the Facebook walled garden are contactable from the outside world. I don’t know if this makes it the largest single deployment of XMPP – Google may be in a position to argue there, although I’ve sometimes been inclined to call their implementation almost-but-not-quite-XMPP.
It’s understandable, I suppose, for someone who’s never given home education much thought to bring up the old chestnut of ‘socialisation’. Although it’s a ridiculous suggestion in reality, you could forgive someone for having the idea that home educated children spend all day at home in a classroom-style environment, the only difference being nobody else is there. Nothing could be further from the reality, of course. Home educated children have far more opportunity for socialisation (and in a far more appropriate context), as well as the other activities she claims they are missing out on.
But what if that someone is a member of the House of Lords, commenting in public on an issue she is shortly to be charged with scrutinising legislation for? In that case it’s no longer forgiveable, it’s a shameful display of downright ignorance.
The comments on that post do a fine job of rebutting Baroness Deech’s ill-informed assumptions, so I won’t waste my time doing that. One thing did amuse me though. She made these comments in the context of talking about a visit to a “Girls’ School”. The idea that an appropriate way to gain the social skills needed for the real world would be spending all day in the company of only children of the exact same age, while being told to sit down and shut up, is questionable enough in itself. When you also add the ‘only children of the same gender’ restriction it becomes totally preposterous.
I’m thankful Baroness Deech will not be descending on my children to lecture them on how great the Lords are, particularly the “expertise” part. Perhaps though, she was not referring to herself when she talked of expertise, because there are Lords who make the effort to understand before they speak. Just not this one.
This is the third list of books I’ve been reading. (One and two). I’m not sure what made me start doing this. Even writing a couple of sometimes sarcastic comments about each book can be hard work. It’s worth doing though, I reckon. To be accurate, the first two of these should have really been included in the last batch, but I forgot about them so they’re here instead. Anyway, without any further ado, here is the list:
