It seems that while I have been swanning around in london on my holidays, google has announced and released the Eclair (2.0) SDK for android. But in doing so I feel that it is quite a headache. Now heres the problem

The hero has Sense built on the cupcake release of android (1.5), now Donut is out (1.6) but htc is not releasing a donut release and as such is skipping to eclair (2.0). Now I wanted to try my hand at developing my own android app but I am left with a dilema. I can write a cupcake version of the app now but then have to rewrite it again very soon when eclair comes out which is unknown how long htc will take to port senseUI to eclair with htc stating that it could be quite a while cos Eclair is a major release of the OS. Or I could write an Eclair version of the app but have no way of testing the app to see whether it works or not cos my phone does not have eclair running. Nor the fact that if it does work I won’t be able to run my own application which is the whole point in writing my own.

And so while android is all very well and a beautiful system to use, google does some strange things to screw up development and I am beginning to see the benefits of only having one handset a la Apple.

Last night, Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP appeared on question time. Now before I proceed I must stress that I in any way DO NOT support the BNP. They are a racist fascist bunch of lunatics.
But I do think the BBC were right to allow mr Griffin to appear on question time and here is why.
Question time is an impartial programme and it cannot go choosing who it shows. If this country has democratically elected a fascist then so be it but in order to protect the impartial of the nature of the programme then the BNP must have the right to appear on the show, the same as if an extreme left wing party were electected.
Now that is my stance. The programme has been aired and what is done is done. Now stop arguing.

I was 18 a week ago and decided that I wanted a phone for my birthday. I started off by trying to decide between an iPhone or a palm pre and then after following a few people on Twitter found the HTC hero and I have to say the phone is beautiful. It arrived last Tuesday and I have had a week to play with it and here are my impressions of it.
Even though t-mobile market it as the G2 touch it is the HTC hero. Running android it makes it probably the strongest competitor to the iPhone. HTC have also tweaked android slightly so it also runs the sense UI which means that it has multi-touch on a gorgeous 3.2 inch capacitive touch screen
The market gives access to many apps and because there is no gate keeper like Apple testing every single application it means the is a lot more scope of what apps are allowed to do. For example I have a brilliant sms app called handscent which makes sending mass sms a lot easier.
Background apps also mean that other things can be running and left to control the phone. Power manager can be left running to monitor battery levels and when it is depleted to a certain level, it then changes the settings of the phone to conserve battery.
I do have a few niggles with it though. First of all is it asking which network you would like to connect to. Now I have a t-mobile sin in the phone so I am not going to want to connect to the O2 network, if I try it just says “can’t register on network” so stop asking me whenever the signal drops out. Then sometimes when the list comes up t-mobile isn’t there and so it doesn’t get a signal. Then if let’s say the list comes up when you are inside and can’t get a signal you can’t manually force it to connect. And finally, although its good you can run background apps, it is probably over eager to leave them running in the background. When the camera is not on the screen then there is no point running it in the background and so without taskiller the phone would slow up and be unusable. Other than them three there are a few things that I would change. A stronger vibrate would be nice so you can actually feel it along with a way to make the clicked in the keyboard louder and the same with notification sounds but phone and sms rings are loud enough
Other than that it is a brilliant phone and would recommend it to anyone. Well worth the gadget of the year award by stuff magazine.

A new game emerged onto the internet this week. www.monopolycitystreets.com/game.html is where it is at and it combines monopoly with google maps. Just about any map in google maps is purchaseable and once purchase the owner can then build properties on it increasing it’s rent. Now this is where chance cards come in. Once you complete an action (buy a street/build a house) you get a chance card and these can either be fines, rewards, hazards or bonus cards. Fines and rewards are pretty self explanatory, you get money or get it taken away from you. Hazard cards come in two flavours, either buldozers or building hazards. If you get a buldozer card you can knock down any building on the map (ie. the world) and then that street doesn’t earn as much rent. Building hazards, once built on a street then stop that street from getting rent. Bonus cards allow you to build properties on your streets that stop other players building hazard cards on which ever street you play it. It is a brilliant game and quite addictive and competative especially if your friends are on it as well. But it has had quite a few teething problems.

And so this is directed to Hasbro/Google, here is how I would fix it. The game is up and running and many people have good streets. there is a split those who got the streets they wanted don’t want to reset it and those that didn’t do want it reset. So don’t reset it for a month. Keep it as an open beta, get more hardware in place to cope with the demand and test the hardware. Iron out all the bugs especially the login. Force people through a proper sign up page needing an email address that make it easier to recover a password, not the flash thing onscreen. (Recapcha is good though, keep that.) Then in a months time once all the bugs are out, close the beta, reset the servers. TELL EVERYONE WHEN IT WILL OPEN AGAIN, make sure it is on a saturday so people aren’t trapped in work. And also schedule a time that finds the most people online from austrailia to west coast america. Probably around 3-4 GMT.

But overall, a good game and keep up the good work.

after many people asking me “what did you do to your arm chris?” i’ll attempt to answer that question here, albeit slowly typing one handed, (i already miss touch typing).

tuesday evening i was playing out on the street with the kids and i was pushing nathan down the street in something similar to one of these.

and now it gets a bit more complicated so i may as well use a diagram.

i was pushing nathan in that cart like thing above. having given nathan one final push and let go i was heading towards the pavement in the direction of the arrow. only i didn’t know jack was on his bike and coming up behind me. we both collided and i remember his front wheel hitting my leg but then i blacked out and woke up 15ft further down the road with no idea how i got there are which part of my body hit the ground first.

Thats all for now. i’ll add updates when i ask kids on the street what happened.

I got my AS Level results yesterday and I did really well. I got A in Maths, A in Geography and B in Physics. I also managed to pull my General studies up from a D to a C and have also worked out that I need 13/100 marks in C4 to get an A at A Level maths. Not going to be complacement though. Now with 3 weeks left of the summer hols I am planning on finishing my PS, (already done half of it) and start to revise FP1 and phyics for the tests when we get back to college

Started off early Monday morning and had a good drive up the M6 and managed to get all the way to Ambleside without any hickups but then on the road down to hawkshead we met a coach coming the other way and suffice to say, two into one do not go but with a bit of umming, ahr’ing and a bit of team spirit we backed up the traffics behind the coach and reversed it into a side road. So with dad’s nerves totally shattered we pulled in to hawkshead at about half one on Monday afternoon.
We then set up and found the Yardys, old neighbours who moved down to Kent a few years ago. The aftenoon was then spent in the stream behind the site, time mainly spent building a pretty big dam across it and in the end it held a hell of a lot of water, let a lot through it mind but even so what do you expect from a dam made of stones. With the dam complete I set about taking pictures of it with my camera and I do have to say they are quite good. In the end we had to destroy the dam so that we did t flood any campsites upstream but it would have been funny if we did.
We then bbq’ed in the evening and had a wonderful tea and then after, with a few logs on the BBQ and lit into a good fire, toasted marsh mallows for the remainder of the evening. To round off the day I got a few good shots of the moon rising over grizedale forest and got a lovely seven and half minute exposure of the stars.
Woke up Tuesday morning to glorious sunshine and after breakfast went for a walk up latterbarrow, which by the time we got to the top was quite windy but nice and cooling. Then after the walk back down had lunch and then went up to rydal water. Once there my mad sister then swam out to the rocky island in the middle along with lewis and Alexander. I was quite happy taking pictures of mad people swimming or of the ducks nearby. We then drove back and had tea and then spent most of the evening playing ring of fire and talking in the tent.
Wednesday we departed hawkshead in a drive that dad was not looking forward to but in the end we got to the site at conniston without any major hickups such as a coach in the way.
Unhitched and setup we all walked down to coniston along the lake footpath and had a bit of food to push us on to the BBQ when we got back to the caravan. I do have to say that the steak pie that I had was very nice and the chips weren’t bad either. The butchers in coniston does lovely sausages and so we stopped in there on the way back to the caravan we also picked up some bacon chops in garlic butter as well.
Back at the van we showered and set about bbq’ing the food which was all very nice except the bacon was very salty which was a bit disappointing as they looked very nice.
We headed up to Keswick on Thursday morning to go to George fisher to get some boots for my D of E in the autumn. I have to say that they are very good. The boots they sell are more in the premium side but the service they offer is next to nothing and they sell them with a garantee that if they aren’t right then they will refund some of the money. I would definitely recommend them.
Back in Coniston, we walked down to the village again and hired a rowing boat for me, mum and dad while my sister paddled around on a kayak, I blistered my hands rowing though.
Overall it was a good holiday and I will post some of the pictures up to flickr and facebook tomorrow if I get round to it.

With the summer I was thinking of buying a new game and couldn’t decide by buying a cheap game, an expensive/new game or saving my money and waiting for all the good games that are coming out in the autumn. And so I came up with my wishlist

1. Halo 3: ODST
2. Left 4 Dead 2
3. Modern Warfare 2
4. Left 4 Dead: Game of the Year edition
5. Dead Space
6. Dead Rising 2
7. Ashes Cricket 2009
8. Burnout Paradise: Ultimate Box
9. Fable 2
10. Bioshock 2
11. Halo Reach
12. Forza 3
13. BLUR
14. DiRT 2

And with that done, I am still no closer to buying a game. Of note, halo: ODST looks absolutely awesome so does L4D2 and modern warfare 2. Then there is Deadspace which got really good reviews and is a bargain at £13 and Fable 2 is going for £17. Oh decisions.

Any advice would be welcome, please leave a coment.

Just a quite note to say that I have started work on the new site yesterday evening and you can take a look at the progression of it as it goes along. Here it is http://develop.chrisbramm.co.uk

Feels ages since I posted here and one of the reasons is I have been away this week since saturday midday at a course at Birmingham Uni for people wishing to study civil engineering.

I packed last friday night (Bloody Hell, almost a week ago) and then left saturday morning. In the end I ended up going a night earlier as Dad had tickets for The Eagles gig at the MEN on sunday night and couldn’t take me. Anyway going off topic. We left saturday and got down in a couple of hours and first visited my grandparents and had tea there. Around 7:30 parents left and then my uncle came and picked me up around 9 o’clock. I slept on saturday night and then my uncle dropped me off at halls at around 3 on sunday afternoon.

I registered and got my key and went up to my room and started to unpack then went back downstairs outside as people started to congregate and introduce each other. It was then a 20 minute walk to go and get tea at Shackleton hall which was quite nice but I was at the back of the queue so must have been waiting for close on an hour to get food. The food wasn’t bad though and the chicken was nice and tender however it meant that all the bones kept falling off and I kept eating them. With dinner finished we headed back to the civil engineering.
That evening we had a design and build competion. We had to build a bridge that spanned 1.2m and could hold at least 5N 350mm above the height of the table, made out of only paper. The only problem was that the bridge had to fail at 50N and so we set about designing a truss bridge. Our main idea was a truss bridge made of triangles and to raise it up high enough we planned a second layer of triangles. That was the plan and tbh it didn’t really work. With making it out of paper it meant that the holes for the bolts weren’t at exactly the same length each time which left some members a few milimeters too short and it pulled in all the members. When designing it we also forgot to think how we were going to attach both trusses together and in the end we just sort of put a few members on the bottom and added other ones to weak parts of the structure that need it. In the end though the bridge held 11N and we weren’t last. We then went back to halls and quite a few watched Jackass in S5 common room. Then bed and the end of a good day.

Monday morning we started work with a lab session. The first one I was in was looking at velocity of water and hydraulic radius trying to find manning’s constant, n, in the formula Q = (A/n)(R^2/3)(?Sf). You can look here if you are interested. The afternoon was then used to start putting together concepts for our main bridge. The brief was for a pair of bridges that would help move visitors between stratford international station and the main stadium. They had to be 50m wide which would reduce to 6m after the games and span 45 and 30m over 2 rivers with a bit of land in between. We started throwing a few concepts around and came up with a bridge that would have a central 6m bit which would be used by cyclists and then there would be an extra 22m either side that would be used by pedestrians.

Monday night we went bowling which was really funny. I won’t recall a lot of it to save embarassment for people but I will say that I was shockingly poor the first game and was quite good the second game, managed 2 strikes in a row and got 4 strikes total, I was quite happy.

Tuesday started off with more lab work looking at structures and how beams are made in I shape. It is to do with the axis of bending.

The x axis/plane runs down the centre of the beam through your eyes and in the other direction and this is known as the axis of bending. Then the I shape is used to provide strength. The shape arised out of using a rectangular beam with a shorter x axis and longer y axis however it is found that it is only the extremities on the y axis that provide the most strength so materials are removed round the parts where it is not effective and just adding weigh round the centre near the axis of bending.

The final lab work was looking at the height of the water above the weir. By using the height of the weir and the velocity of the water the height of the water above the weir can be calculated. This was needed as the bridge was not allowed to flood in a 1 in 100 year flood of 200m^3/sec.

With the lab work done we set about looking at the concepts and deciding what was feasible to design and then eventually to build. Lots of designs were put forward and in the end we settled on a design with 2 steel sprung arches supporting a central 6m walkway that during the games would be used as a cycle way. There would also be 22m spans eitherside supported by suspension/cable stay sort of thing, these would then be used as walkways during the games and could easily dismantled after the games like the brief specified.

On Wednesday morning we went on a site visit and the group I was in went to ronald mcdonald’s childrens house. The building was being built for families to stay in who’s children were in the childrens hospital over the road. The visit was really eye opening and you can look at some pictures here.

As the week progressed we built up our designs on sketchup and in the end, culminated in doing a presentation to the client on the Thursday. This is when it sort of started falling apart. Earlier in the week we were told that the lecture theature had google sketchup and so were planning on doing out presentation then showing the client round our design using sketchup however when we got into the theature we found that we didn’t have google sketchup and another thing I’d that we had sort of done both designs of the bridge, the one of the sprung arches and the one of the suspension detachable sides in random and didn’t have one overall dewing thatincluded both of them. As a result our presentation wasn’t that slick and we left the client confused as to what our bridge would look like.

Even so it was a very good week and I made lots of friends. Lessons were learnt and I would do quite a few things differently if I was to do it again but it was still good all the same and confirms that I want to do civil engineering at university.