my apologies for not being diligently working as I probably should have been today. If you were not aware, it’s been snowing the past few days and being the rather large kid that I am, I decided that we were unable to get to the office (despite it being eight steps from my bedroom).

To compensate for this, I did something much more productive. It’s a prototype implementation of a Briggs inspired solution to the classic winter design problem:

Yep, I engineered a freakin’ snowman. He’s 5ft 8in tall, a few feet across the shoulders and should hopefully last at least a few days.

Normal service will resume tomorrow.

Orange Tentacle have just released their latest Android application: Masque Mobile. Masque Mobile is a fencing referee’s friend designed to take the pain out of juggling scores, times and cards.

The UI has been built, and rebuilt around the ideal of a clean interface designed to minimise potential mistakes. The referee is presented with a clean UI, with only the score counters, cards and time on screen. A large button with haptic feedback means the timer can be started and stopped with the eyes away from the device.

If a penalty occurs during a bout, the referee can action a card by selecting the appropriate card outline. Optionally a full screen card can be presented to the offending party. The interface will keep track of the number of cards awarded and can also award hits to opponents.

Other features are cleverly hidden away. Priority resets, and breaks are all actioned from the menu, and preferences to define period length, and the amount and kinds of feedback the application provide can all be set from the preferences dialog.

This is the first “paid for” app released by Orange Tentacle (at a very modest 99p), and while we’re not expecting it to be proving Porsches for Christmas, we hope the fencing community will appreciate the amount of time that has gone into developing this little application.

IntelliJ IDEA

Google have very kindly put together the ADT for Eclipse, which consists of plugins and layout managers to make development a bit smoother. Which would be great for me, if using Eclipse didn’t make me want to pull my nails out with forceps (I’m a Visual Studio person by day). I dislike Eclipse so much, that I spent most of the last project building in TextMate and looking up API references by hand. The very nice people who make my most favourite Visual Studio plugin in the whole WORLD – Resharper, also make a very nice Java IDE called IntelliJ IDEA. Version 8 came with some basic plugins you could download for Android development, but the very nice people at Jetbrains have put some serious time into the Android tools for Version 9 of IntelliJ. Inbuilt Logcat support, and a run/deploy model which beats the socks off the Eclipse one. I believe there’s debugging support as well – I’ve not been able to test that yet though. All in all, a very nice environment. Oh, and most of the refactoring & code navigation tools that make Resharper so awesome in the first place. Check out version 9 BETA.

DroidDraw Beta

DroidDraw is a cross-browser UI designer and editor for Android applications. I’ve not had a proper play around with it yet, I’ve just been using it for a few days, but so far it is officially awesome. Much more reliable than the in built Eclipse editor, and nowhere near as frustrating. I’ll be honest, now I’ve got the very, very good XML support which IntelliJ provides, I’m not needing it so much, but it makes a great prototyping tool.

Linky Linky Linky

Some articles which have been useful over the past few days:
How to use AlertDialog.Builder in Android applications Great quick reference to AlertDialog.Builder.
What’s Your Preference: Part One Writing preferences should be easy. _Don’t do my trick and write a load of custom layouts, only to realise the API does 90% of the work for you
What’s Your Preference: Part Two more of the above
Android 1.5 android.R.drawable Icon Resources The API contains a load of built in graphics you can just reference.

Photo by Cat Ashton

Can I sleep yet?

Barcamp Manchester 2 happened this weekend (twitter: #bcman2). As you can guess by the title, this was the second barcamp run in Manchester, and at 200 people, was one of the biggest community event held in the area for a while. We had a great range of people turning up, from Londoners bringing N900s, through to locals playing with giant robots. What happens when you take that amount of people, a near limitless supply of tea, coffee, soft drinks and sweet things and put them in an awesome space? Sessions happen, discussions are had and people come up with ideas^tm.

Venue

Barcamp this year was run in the Contact theatre (twitter: @contactmcr), which is not just a phenomenal space (several stages/cinemas, rooms and excellent communal bar spaces), but comes with THE BEST STAFF I HAVE EVER KNOWN AT A BARCAMP. Seriously, considering they were there for two days solid, they came into sessions, ran session, did some beatboxing and honestly added to the atmosphere. They really wanted to get engaged, and even came up on stage to do some powerpoint karaoke. You guys rock – we’re definitely working with you again!

Talks

I admit it, I didn’t get to many talks this time around. We got a little wrapped up in making stuff happen, then sleeping, then taking a much needed walk. I did make a talk on Monotouch, the port of the Mono project the the iPhone. Looked cool, especially as a .NET developer by trade.

For those that are visiting my blog from my android demo talk, you’ll find the resources on the talk and the code on this blog post. If you have any questions, catch me on the usual channels: twitter and e-mail.

Food

Pizza. Cheese And Ham Coissants. Sushi. Ice Cream. Nuff said.

Fredrick’s Ice Cream. At Barcamp, we serve only the best.
Photo by Cat Ashton

Evening

Paul Sylvester – Magic’s Best Kept Secret rocked the floor yet again. This time he was performing close up magic, working with small groups at a time. The perfect combination of magic, pizza and some light drinks was spot on, and the magic kept going all evening. People splintered out for some Beatles Rock Band (note: next time – bring the lot. If I ever hear another Beatles song it’ll be too soon), and then we moved for the time honoured tradition of Powerpoint Karaoke. I take it no-one got videos of my impression of a Sweedish IKEA designer? I’m not sure I can repeat that gig.

Thanks go to all the organisers for making it happen and the army of minions which spent the weekend running around making sure that stuff happened. We now need a month to recover. WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT’S GEEKUP MANCHESTER TOMORROW?

Fawlty Towers from Wikipedia

I travel quite a bit. Mostly around the UK, I end up visiting clients all over the place. A travel and stay cheaply, I require very little. I ask for a clean room, half decent shower, and pleasant staff. That’s about it. I have stayed in some dodgy guest houses, scary hotels and borderline B&Bs. But on no occasion have I been a place quite like this. I was so impressed by their attempts to thwart my enjoyment of my stay I decided it deserved a blog post.

This is a long post with pictures. More below the cut.

On the way down to London for a client visit, I ended up needing to make a very short notice change of plans to my accommodation stay. A quick search on my favourite booking site LateRooms.com threw up the “Euro Hotel Clapham” as being close to my client site, very cheap and it looked rather good (take a look at the photos). Room was booked, under “Euro Hotel Clapham”. My confirmation e-mail said so.

Day 1

So I turned up to Euro Hotel Clapham, and was told rather snottily that my room was not at the hotel, but at the Euro Lodge Clapham down the road. So I grabbed my not inconsiderable baggage and dragged myself down the road again. 20 minutes later in the lodge and I was seen to be checked in. I was given a keycard, and the receptionist walked me around to the room I was given.

Walking from reception to my room required me to leave the building, cross a yard, scramble around the workmens’ van (did I point out this was a work in progress), go down a small alley way and enter a second building. Here’s the amount of space we had to get everything around. The van came and went over the next few days, but always returned to the same spot. At one point, there was also a bicycle in the gap left by the van. The staff were clearly aware of the obstruction this caused, since one of the reception staff hoisted her skirt to climb over the bicycle.

Since the room was being cleaned, my bags were dumped within the room and the receptionist left. The cleaner finished and I entered my room. I immediately noticed the two suitacases, pile of clothes and the clear evidence that the room was still occupied. I left my bags in the room (there was only so far I was dragging everything) and went back to reception. Reception apologised for the mix up and issued me with a new card for a new room. I went to the new room and the key card failed to work. Back we went, and yet another card was issued. This card did work. The staff left me with the keycard for the occupied room, and left me to my own devices to move my kit between the two rooms. To clarify they left me knowingly with access to another patron’s room. Out of decency, I returned the card once I had switched rooms.

The rooms are not quite as advertised. Remember the rather pleasant, glitzy look of the rooms from the advertisement?

Here’s the reality:

The double bed is two singles pushed together, the desk looks half built, the television has a large crack in it, there’s mould in the bathroom and those little spots you can see on the curtains? Let me enlarge those for you:

That’s chewing gum. And for contrast:

That’s bubble gum. Chewing gum on the curtains, bubble gum on the walls. Lovely.

At times like this, all you can do is go to sleep.

Day 2

Woke up, went for breakfast. Noticed that the fire door from my building is propped open with a brick. Remove the brick. This brick kept re-appearing to hold the door open:

In the dining area (which stands between my room and the way out), noticed that the toasters were right next to the fire exit. So the one thing likely to catch fire is next to the exit in case of … fire. Excellent health and safety there:

After breakfast, I attempt to exit the hotel and trip over a roll of carpet. The carpet is laid over the french door runner on the ground with no trip warnings. There’s also chunks of badly fitting overlapping carpet everywhere. I spent half my time tripping like a Laurel and Hardy sketch.

When I got back from my day at the office, I went straight to my room to find my key card failed to open the door. A trundle to reception later, and a reset key card and … it still didn’t work. On attempt three, there was a small crowd of people assembling in the reception area. Six people with the same problem, key cards which no longer worked. The staff were clueless, appeared to have no senior management they could call for advice, and completely failed to offer refreshments or space to wait while the situation was resolved. In attempting to resolve the situation, the reception staff let us know that the cleaning staff take the master cards home with them. Considering there is no external security on the building, this means that the cleaning staff have access on and off duty to all the rooms in the hotel at all times. Thirty minutes later, and several desperate phone calls, they managed to get a phone back from the engineer and our cards started working again. Unimpressed, I went to catch some sleep.

Day 3

Morning was uneventful. Felt strangely optimistic. This was the evening of Nick Griffin appearing on question time, an event I was looking forward to. I came back from the office, and noticed a smog in the hotel. Smelling smoke, but not seeing any staff running around in a panic, I assumed it was safe to get my card swiped at reception. Card set I wander into the dining room to see five men sat around a circular table smoking cigars. I pop back into reception to ask if this was in fact a non-smoking hotel, to be told by the receptionist that it was but “it was okay, because they were the hotel owners”. At this point, I realised it would be rather futile lodging a complaint against the hotel management. I went into my room to watch Question Time.

Towards the end of question time, there was the sound of a large smash outside my block. I went outside to find a pile of broken glass, and a rather bemused partially dressed lady hanging out of the upstairs window. She said she was okay, that she had tried to open the window and it had fallen out and that her husband had contacted the staff. Confident that the situation was under control, I went to bed to catch some much needed kip.

Day 4

Last day, and I was glad to be out of the hotel. On the way out, the pile of glass that was there from the previous night incident was still there as I wandered out (I only caught some of the glass on camera):

I left, went to the office, and was honestly glad to not have to go back to the hotel.

I’ve not actually detailed everything here. There were also issues with the wifi (you can’t pick it up in the rooms), a good trick with an ironing board with no cover (I had to improvise – they actually had no cover for the ironing board), and noise from hammers and drilling at 7pm at night. I had hammering in Dolby 5.1 at one point.

I will be pointing various people at this blog post. Any reaction I get will be mentioned in an update, probably later in the week. If you are travelling in London, I would avoid this place like the plague.

Photo by Cat Ashton

We like Geek Girl Dinners. Pleasant company, good food, good conversations. Cat Ashton and I attended the fourth geek girl dinner in Manchester, this time being hosted at, Sweet Mandarin (who also host regular tweetups). This time, we had the company of Dom “The Hodge” Hodgson talking on http://www.geekery.in/ and community events, and Liv Wild from Thoughtworks, discussing productivity and happiness.

Good food. Good company. Awesome.

Also an awesome announcement that BAE Systems would be putting a large amount of cash behind the entire GGD movement. There’s also some mumblings of organising Girl Geek Teas, as a more frequent meet up with the same ideas of Geek Girl Dinners.

Here’s a few videos from the event. Apologies for the orientation – you would have thought that Youtube would give you an option to rotate them once they’re uploaded. Audio quality is a bit pants as well, taken on the phone. As is the video quality. In general, they’re a bit pants – but you can at least get a feel for how the evening went.

Wikimedia Photo

On Saturday I presented a short talk on building a basic android application in 20 minutes. This was the full process, from generating the shell project, to writing the code, generating the layouts, testing on the emulator, signing the application and uploading the binary. I wasn’t able to do this as “live” as I would have liked – I’ll perfect the routine in time for Barcamp Manchester, but the group did a good job of being a dummy audience.

For those interested the application is called “Barcamp Blackpool” (available on the Marketplace). It downloads the latest 20 tweets with the bcblackpool hash tag and displays them as a list. Clicking on an individual item will then launch a browser session showing the tweet on the twitter website. Basic but functional. The source code for the application is available on Google Code.

If there are other things people would like to see in a 20 minute Android demo – please feel free to comment on this post and I’ll see what I can do for Barcamp Manchester.