This is night #1 of “oh shit, my Uni work has to be in NEXT TUESDAY? Not a week on Tuesday?”

You see, for the past eight months I’ve been teaching IT to kids. This involves quite a lot of paper as I have to meticulously plan everything - I have yet to acquire the ninja skills required to simply turn up and go “right then, today we are …”.

It’s the worksheets that do me in. 30 kids in the room, I’ve made a two page worksheet for them. That’s 60 bits of paper to hand out and then take back in.

Here is the current state of my front room after sorting through this shite. The piles mean things, they’re important. A lot of this stuff is evidence that I can teach kids properly. It all has to be sorted, collated and put together into one coherent folder that can be assessed. Then I have to invent a reference system so I can say “ah yes, I meet standard 3.2.1 because lesson plan for class 7S3 - 3/2/2007, Period 1 says so”.

Obviously I’ve not just started to do that now. No, this is the finishing off - checking that if I taught something on the 8/3/2007 at 10:45 there really is some paperwork to back that up. No, not the 8/3/2006 at 10:45, nor the 9/3/2007.

Yes, I am finding lots of typos that I never noticed before. Head, this is Mr Wall, get acquainted

Not to worry, I’ll run out of A4 paper soon and my toner’s going.

Today I came across a rather frustrating problem with Processing. I had the idea to start writing a little platform game to test some ideas out that I have. After Googling around for a bit I couldn’t find any sprite libraries, so decided I’d probably have to write my own.

Wanting to get something working with minimal fuss I knocked up a simple class that tracked the location of a circle on the screen. There was a “move” function and a “draw” function. A bit of test code was created and I told the circle to follow my mouse pointer. This is where the frustration began. When I moved the mouse there was a noticeable lag and jerky movement as the circle moved around. Thinking it was probably my code I removed it all and had a simple piece of code that drew a circle where the mouse was - that’s all it did. One line.

And the jerkyness persisted. Now, I had arbitrarily decided that a screen of 800×480 would be good and it seems this is the problem. If I make the screen 200×200 things work well, but that’s a completely useless screen size for anything. Also, it seems the Processing IDE randomly decides it doesn’t want to run my code, but wants to show a 200×200 grey application instead.

No idea what’s going on, I find it hard to believe Java is so bad that it can’t draw a circle on the screen at my current mouse position. Something else has to be getting in the way. I might boot Windows tomorrow and have a play in the Windows version. I want to make this work, it’ll be much better releasing little test pieces of code that run in a browser, rather than hoping people can be bothered to compile my source up. It spits out ready made applets and webpages that just need uploading to a webserver.

It’s going to work, it has no choice. Maybe the circle drawing routine isn’t very quick, and maybe I should try with a real image.

Ms Paint: Painting Mona Lisa - More free videos are here The best bit is reading through the comments. Now, if like me you do actually remember the time before Photoshop, when the only blurring was caused by your eyes losing focus, this isn’t actually such a big deal. However comments like this show just how we’ve “forgotten” that it doesn’t take an expensive art package to make nice pictures.

Here’s a prime example

how in gods name is that even possible. its so realistic. the face looks completely real, the shadding is perfect! teach me!

It’s called “artistic ability” you get it by being good

I came across this post while on a random Stumble session. On there you will find a little program that can crawl an RSS feed and give a reading ease value. Point it at your blog’s feed and see what it says. My blog has the following results

• Syllables per word: 1.49
• Words per sentence: 19.50
• Flesch-Kincaid Reading Ease: 60.90
• Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 9.61
• Gunning-Fog Index: 20

which probably means half of you can’t understand what I write, since supposedly you need 20 years of school education to understand this. I think it just shows I’m not the most organised of writers when I put things in my diary. I do have a habit of just typing away with no real planning or ideas.

It’s been a while since I posted one of these :)  Take your pick from the following;

The BadVista campaign is an advocate for the freedom of computer users, opposing adoption of Microsoft Windows Vista and promoting free (as in freedom) software alternatives.

http://badvista.fsf.org/

or

DefectiveByDesign.org is a broad-based anti-DRM campaign that is targeting Big Media, unhelpful manufacturers and DRM distributors. The campaign aims to make all manufacturers wary about bringing their DRM-enabled products to market.

http://www.defectivebydesign.org/

and of course, don’t forget

 Sixteen hexadecimal digits that unlock the wonder of most currently released HD-DVD titles from the surly clutches of the AACS revenue content protection system.

link

My final placement has finished. No more will I have to endure getting up at 6am and staggering about the house for fifteen minutes just to wake up. I’m off until my proper job starts in September so expect to be completely nocturnal by then.

Kids are strange. You fall into three categories - people the like, dislike or couldn’t care less about. Being in the first category is a handy way of keeping them under control, and it’s weird the way they’ll decide if they like you or not. Sometimes they decide you’re likeable simply because you don’t shout at them all the time.

Now I have a week to put all my files in order, sort through the work I should have done six months ago and generally make sure I am ready to have everything assessed. I see a week of typing and organising ahead of me; dividers and sticky tabs have been bought for the occasion.

My new school are holding an induction day at the end of next month. In fact a lot will be happening next month as I need to find somewhere to live again and then move. Currently I’m on the scrounge for things to put into an empty house - handy things like tables, chairs and settees.

I modified an old hifi to have line inputs so I could connect it to my XBox. I’ve written about it and included photos on my Wiki. Follow the link to read more. It was good fun doing this mod since I didn’t really know what I was doing

I gave up trying to make my own, I just don’t have the tools or skills to make it work safely. Sure, if you want a stove that will set you on fire then feel free to poke around in my recycling bin for the remains. I, on the other hand have decided to spend a whole £20 on the real thing - well, it’s not the real thing, it’s made from a Pepsi can

It arrived

Here it is boiling some water…

Here it is burning off excess meths…

(shutter speed adjusted to give extra sense of drama )

And here it is all packed away…

Well worth the £20 it cost me.

I came across this website a while ago when looking for a new stove to take with me when I go camping. Seeing how my idea of camping involves walking for a few hours into the middle of nowhere weight and size is a big issue. There’s a company that sells these stoves, made from old coke cans for about ten quid. They’re called Antigravity alcohol stoves but seeing how my neighbour is a hardened alcoholic and has a bin full of potential stoves I decided to have a go at making one.

So, after checking he was out I had a root through his bin and found a few tins. Several minutes of chopping and bending resulted in this

As you can see it’s a popular Scottish drink and looks a little black. That’s what happened after I lit it for the first time. They run on methylated spirits (denatured alcohol) which is something I don’t have in my house for reasons that escape me. I do however have a lot of lamp oil. Lamp oil burns therefore it must be good to use.

wrong!

lamp oil doesn’t set on fire that easily, it’s like trying to light diesel or cooking oil. You have to sort of boil it up first to get the vapours escaping and then it burns very well. So I whipped out a small gas stove I had, put some lamp oil in a pan, whacked it on the heat and gave it a good boil. At the same time I carefully placed the stove I’d just made into the - now smoking - pan of oil and applied some fire.

You know that cool sound when things suddenly set on fire? 

It’s supposed to look like this when it burns…

Mine resembled this…

Will go and buy some meths tomorrow and try again. It was working, but the flames were a bit too “vigorous”.

Yeah, I know it was almost a week ago but I was busy. Here’s a rather good video of what it’s like; just ignore the goon at the end who stands in front of the camera

Hmm, it seems I can’t work out how to embed YouTube videos into Wordpress. The link below should work though.
Wii Bowling