GITP runs from the Friday till the Sunday. The family and I decided to go out to the camp site a couple of days early since the kids and wife were on holiday from school and I was on holiday from work for a couple  of weeks. We arrived on the Wednesday afternoon to pitch up in the same field that we has been in for the last GITP. The field was empty apart from 3 other small tents. This was to change from the Thursday onwards and by Saturday afternoon you could have been mistaken for thinking that there was a festival being held at the site. Pitched next to us on the Friday and Saturday nights was a few people from the Chesterfield Astronomical Society. It would be an understatement to say that the telescopes they had were quite large. This was a great group of people who were friendly and informative and allowed us Geeks to take a look through the telescopes at Jupiter and other stars and were happy to answer our questions.

On the Thursday, the family and I made a trip to Monsal Head and walked along the viaduct, which is something that I have been wanting to do since I was a small child.

On Friday whilst waiting for the Geeks to arrive, a few of us that arrived at the camp site early went for a walk and to try and find a geo-cache.

Haddon Grove sits above the Lathkill Dale which is a great place for walking and very scenic. It’s also a fantastic place to hide the caches. Ian Ibbotson showed the way using C:Geo on his Android phone. After about an hour we made it to the site and managed to find the cache quite quickly. It just so happened that whilst the group was looking for the cache I sat down on a nearby stone along with my youngest daughter. The stone we were sat on appeared to have space underneath it and as I looked down, in between my legs, I say the prize that we were looking for. At this time the immortal words came forth from my mouth “Hey Guys, Come and take a look between my legs”. This was the first time that many of us has been geo-caching and it was so much fun that we were eager to go find another, which we did on Saturday.

The remaining group of Geeks started to arrive late Friday afternoon and that evening, a great Tandoor BBQ was cooked by Jagusti and the GITP team which was quite extraordinary. The Tandoor chicken was excellent and I was reliably informed that so was the panir cheese.

Saturday started off a little slow due to the frivolities of the night before and after lunch we set out on another geo-caching expedition.  This took us in the opposite direction down the Lathkill Dale towards the small village of Over Haddon. This was a great walk and the kids loved it, especially playing with the walkie talkies. The second cache of the weekend was found close to a disused mine, just off the beaten track. After finding the cache, we continued along the trail and to the Lathkill Hotel in Over Haddon for a well deserved drink. By the time we all got back to the camp site it was a little late for the communal dinner so everyone made their own dinners and then it was time to huddle round the camp fires once more and drink some beer and toast some marshmallows.

The weather over the weekend was superb with some of the campers evening getting sunburnt. Sunday was a laid back affair with the communal breakfast becoming brunch and campers starting to pack away.

A couple of things we have noted that we need for our future camping expeditions is a solar charger for charging the mobile phones and some walkie talkies so that we can keep in touch with the kids. They did tend to run off in to the small woodland areas around the camp site and to the kids play area.

Geeks in the Peaks is an awesome weekend and the family and I can’t wait until the next weekender and what it may hold. For now though, the camping kit has been packed away until next season.

Another items that I have been working on this week whilst I’ve been having some time off work is to get an old Qume QVT119+ dumb terminal working against Ubuntu. This was actually quite straight forward to get going with the only issue being that the terminal itself developed a fault. After closed inspection, and managing to get the display logic board out of the housing, I found that the board was a little burnt out. Luckily I had another terminal around which would not power up, however the board in this terminal was actually OK so a quick swap was made and the terminal is up and running. I have a couple of lose ends to tie up, i.e. getting the getty to run at start up and also working out the best emulation to use or write my own QVT199+ emulation (if a can find a manual on line). The plan is to document this project and post it up on this website.

Another project which has kept me busy over the last few weeks is tweets4sweets. This is a project for SHACKNET which uses an Arduino and Ethernet shield to search twitter for a given phrase and when it sees the phrase it will release a sweet. The code is now working but needs refactoring and we have ideas for the hopper and the release mechanism. The next Shacknet meeting on the 20th September is going to be a good one.

I now have to go and lay a little wooden floor in our attic where my work area is and then I can get on to working on some of these projects in more comfort than a bare floor.

Richard

Yesterday I attended Barcamp Barnsley. This was a one day event held at the Digital Media Centre in Barnsley, close to the town centre.

The event ran from 9.30am to around 6pm. The event attracted around 60 delegates from around the Yorkshire area as well as from further afield including the North East. I’m sure that the exceptional weather for the day was mainly to blame for the less than expected numbers with the pull of family and BBQ keeping people at home. They don’t know what they missed!

The Digital Media Centre is modern and stylish and was an excellent choice of venue for the day and was suited to the number of delegates that attended and could have easily coped with many more. Parking is available next to the building and was free for the weekend which was a great bonus. Refreshments were available throughout the day with pastries and muffins available for breakfast and afternoon tea and pizza for lunch. I liked the fact that there was tea, coffee and bottles of water available all day to just go and pick up.

The day started off looking as though there were not going to be many sessions to choose from as it appeared that for quite a few of the attendees it was their first attendance at a Barcamp and were unsure of what to expect. The board started to fill up and the sessions started.

I attended at least 6 sessions ranging from JQuery to protecting intellectual property to what to expect in a job interview. Other enjoyable sessions included coding standards and how to write an API.

I always come away from a Barcamp with some new knowledge, friends and ever so much more enthusiasm. Barcamp Barnsley did not disappoint and the Powerpoint Karaoke for the last session was as funny as ever. @marcjohnson and @jagusti did a great presentation for the Ikea Kitchen Build (but no one will ever live up to the presentation for this given by @KianRyan at #bcman2)

I didn’t make a presentation this time but I have one planned for my next Barcamp.

Unfortunately I can’t make the Barcamp Leeds next week but I will be at #bcblackpool and I look forward to helping out with the next Sheffield event. I also understand that plans are afoot for a Barcamp Bradford later in the year.

For anyone who has never attended a Barcamp I cannot recommend doing so more highly. They are experiences never to be missed and I hope to attend many more.

I have previously took a look at VB.Net which looks far better than the VB6 that I use in my day job. C# looks even better. I’m not sure if the IDE are different but there seems to be lots of great stuff in the C# IDE with the code snippets library, the plug in managers and some of the common controls that just save so much time.

In VB6 I do make a lot of use with control arrays. This is where it’s going to be interesting to see how I do things without the control arrays. The main reason for using them was to be able to attribute common code to then events and to be able to create new controls on a form on the fly. I have seen the nice way that you can assign code to events on multiple controls and that looks really neat as you can use the same code for different object types. I haven’t yet seen how to create the controls on the fly and assign the common code to them. If you have thoughts on this, please do post for me.

I used a few tutorials from the Microsoft website to take me through the IDE and these were really useful,easy to follow and intuitive. What I need now is information on how to code in C#, it’s a bit different in syntax to VB6 and to play more with classes and to find the best way to code OO.

One of the things that I need to catch up with is variable naming conventions. It appears, having spoken with others, that the naming conventions that I use from VB6 are no longer used in todays languages. The other thing is to write more OO code and to use classes rather than subroutines and functions. Another thing to do is to see how to write the unit tests for the classes to test the code automatically. Time to start doing some more reading. The Internet is great for finding out information but I have to admit that I do still prefer to read a good physical book rather than a web page.

After playing around for about 5 or 6 hours I came to the conclusion that I think I prefer C# to VB.Net.

If you have any good links to sites for C# please do post some links for me. I am very keen to take it further with this language.

I have just completed reading Practices of an Agile Developer and found this, along with The Pragmatic Programmer, really useful. It does go over a lot of things which shouldjust be natural to any programmer but reinforces the practices. I am now actively try, as we all should, to make my coding and working practices much better.

Easter Monday we took the kids and some friends to Beltchley Park. The kids had a great time doing the easter egg hunt and making easter baskets. It’s amazing that every time we go to Bletchley that you learn a little more of what went on there and things that went on during the war.

The National Museum of Computing which is based at Bletchley is also a great place to visit and is always expanding. It always takes me back to when I first started working back in the late 80’s, especially on this visit when I saw an old IBM mini which we used to run PICK Blue on. PICK Blue was the IBM implementation of PICK.

I thought with this being the start of the year an all that I would make some New Years resolutions. I don’t normally do this as I’m terrible at keeping to them. I thought though that Ishould try this year and at least make them achievable (Winning the lottery never seems to happen).

1. Stop smoking.
   I’ve been trying to stop smoking for years and actually managed it a few years ago for about 6 months. This time it will happen though. I’m currently on my 5th day. I see can a treat of a curry for getting through the 1st week.
2. Eat more healthily and do some exercise.
   Not as many kebabs and Indian takeaways this year. I’ll also try and cut down on the drinking as well. I’m sure a few of you will miss the “rixhamisation” when we go out (you know who you are ) but I think it has to be limited this year.
3. Read up more on the technical stuff and actually come up with an app that may be of some use.
   What I really want to do is get more in to OO programming and learn someVB.Net and some Ruby. This is already in hand and I hope to start looking more at a Ruby app in the next week or so with @marcjohnson and @ashleymoran.
4. Make some positive changes to work practices and become more efficient in projects and management.
   Think I need to do some more reading on Agile management process, OO programming and some more Project Management.

I think that these resolutions are achievable during this year. Most of these have already been started on already.

So what are your resolutions for this year? Maybe we can help each other out?

A hope every one has a great 2010.

Cheers,
Richard

Whilst at school I had built, with the instructions from a phiysics teacher, an interface to be able to control motors, take digital and analog input and I wrote some software to control it. All exciting stuff. These days I use Arduino, but that’s where it all got started.

The BeebM was eventually replaced by an Amstrad 1512 when I got to college and wanted to start programming in Cobol and Pascal, but the Beeb has always been my fave.

So, as I suspect many of my generation did after watching Micromen on TV the other week, I started to trawl eBay in search of my youth.

I managed to pick up a Master 128 for £30 (+12PP) which I didn’t think was at all bad. It arrived soon after and has now been sat on the dining room table for the last week, all wired up to the portable tv and tape deck.

After initially thinking it was broken as it came up with the message “This is not a language” we soon realised that the internal battery power had died. A quick bit of googling and we managed to get the old Master up and running. Remembering the good old command AUTO 10 and away we go with the obligitary

PRINT “Please enter your name” INP
INPUT NAME$
PRINT “Hello ” ; NAME$

We were off.

Next, to load some of those old games from tape that I had for the Electron. Tape desk plugged in, cassette rewound. CH. “” , hear the little microswitch go and wait for the tape deck to start. Nothing. Bugger. Still not got to the bottom of this, even after trying many different cassette cables. Will be a job for the weekend.

Next plan, to get a 3.5″ floppy disk drive connected and get that working.

It’s all good fun and keeps me and the kids amused, even if the wife does want her dining table back. She sounds similar to how my mum used to sound when she wanted to put the tea out. Happy Memories.

Now, where did I put that copy of Elite…..

This is a fantastic time for F1 and long may it continue. Brawn and Jenson have made a new fan this season (and I presume 1000’s more).

CONGRATULATIONS to Brawn GP and Jenson Button.

Our first project was to build a Laser Cutter using equipment and any bits that could be found around Access Space. Access Space had managed to get hold of a large plotter, a Roland DPX-3300. This would provide the basis for the Laser Cutter. The plan was to get the plotter working and then look at how we could make an attachment that would hold a laser from an old CD/DVD writer to then be able to design a pattern on a computer and then have this cut out on the plotter.

The first job was to get the plotter to actually work. Fortunately the plotter uses the standard HPGL language and Martin from Access Space had done some initial investigation and found how to take a .ps file and convert this in to HPGL which we could then send out to the parallel printer port. The PC that we connected the plotter to is running Linux Mint. Working with the tools Martin had provided we had the plotter printing within about 20 minutes, although it wasn’t printing in the correct positions. Some jiggling of the options on the HPGL conversion was going to be required.

A quick search of the internet showed that there were printer drivers available for Windows XP. I have to admit that I thought that this would be the easy option and so we set about trying to download a driver. In hindsight this was a mistake. We eventually managed to get a driver but it wasn’t even close to working. Back to using Mint.

By mid afternoon we had the printer positioning and scaling working brilliantly.

Due to there being lots of adults and children in Access Space it was not prudent to be shooting lasers around the building, so, we hooked up an LED to the pen mechanism to test out a theory on how to switch the laser on and off as the pen goes up and down. This worked a treat. We even then managed to work out how to slow down the plotter to allow for cutting.

This was as far as we got on this first project day so the plan is to meet up again in a few weeks time to complete this project. The two areas where this need work is to make the sending of the HPGL to the plotter more seemless from the PC applications by trying to add in a new printer driver. The second thing is to get the laser actually wired up as a unit that we can attach and remove from the plotter without making the plotter unuasble for anything else.

This has proved to be a very enjoyable project and will not only benefit the Shacknet members by being able to cut templates for projects but also for anyone else that uses Access Space and wants to make things. Combine this with the FabLab that will be coming to Access Space and there is the start of something really great for everyone.

I recently presented at Geekup Sheffield a presentation on PICK. PICK is a database and application programming environment which was first developed back in the 1970’s. There are still a few flavours of PICK still in use today, including U2 (AKA Unidata) which I still use in my professional capacity. I am a great fan of PICK and PICK style databases. My presentation, PICK - The forgotten database, seemed to go down well with lots of interesting questions being posed. My next presentation for Geekup will be on application and software tesing in collaboration with Catherine (@tiny_viking) which we hope to present at Geekup soon.

On 16th September I attended TEDx Sheffield. This was held at the Electric Works. Electric Works is unique in that it houses a 3 storey helter skelter. It was my first time at Electric Works and so I have to admit that I took the opportunity to have a ride down the Helter Skelter which was lots of fun and I did have a smile on my face for at least 10 minutes after reaching the bottom.

The talks at TEDx were really interesting and inspirational and most enjoyable. I would recommend these events to anyone and I can’t wait for the next one. The highlight of my day was getting to talk to Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, the CEO of Tinker_IT. I had the opportunity to talk to Alexandra about our Shacknet group in Sheffield which she said was a great idea and agreed that she would help us by providing links on their website and possibly coming to a meeting to give a presentation. This is a great opportunity for anyone interested in Arduino to be able to get access to the people who invented and make Arduino.

Continuing on the theme of Arduino, SHACKNET 2 was held on 17th September at Access Space. This was a great success with around 20 people attending. Details on the night can be found at the Shacknet site. The more I get involved in the Shacknet group the more excited about the prject I get. ASll I need now is more time to play around with Arduino. The next meeting of Shacknet will again be at Access Space on 22nd October at 7pm. Anyone is welcome to come along to see what Arduino is all about or to contribute. The students are now heading back to Sheffield for the new academic year and we hope that there will be even more people joining in with the group.