Dave Snowdon

I'm running a BFO session at Devoxx UK on 26th March: "Is NAO your robotic overlord?"

On 9th February I took part in the February Hack The Tower event organised by John Stevenson (@jr0cket). John runs this event as a sort of one-day hackathon for the London Java, Scala, Clojure & Salesforce developer communities and one of its compelling features is the diverse mix of developers who attend.

I haven't posted anything about NAO for a while, which is a shame since it's a great platform and I've been having a lot of fun with it. More details (such as there are) on my NAO project page.

Over the last year or so a group of UK based NAO developers has started to meet semi-regularly and back in March we decided to run our own hackathon based on the NAO. We hoped to get registered NAO developers and other coders together for a weekend of hacking code on the NAO.

Not long after Mum died I noticed that she'd written on the base of a Robin (the bird) figurine "My Ruby wedding present to Jim 8/8/2004" At the time I thought it was typically Mum writing such notes on things. When we started going through her keepsakes in her "muniment chest" (that Dad made for her) we noticed many things had little labels pinned to them, for example her wedding dress a pair of trousers that Mum and Dad had bought for me on holiday in Scotland when I was about the same age as my son is now.

Change is a strange thing. We need some of it or we get bored but mostly what we really want is homoeostasis - to find a situation we like and keep everything the same indefinitely - this is unlikely to happen and if it did we'd probably get bored eventually.

I just upgraded the head of my NAO robot to a NAO next gen head. The old head needs to go back to Aldebaran, but before that I could not resist having a little fun. Ghene Snowdon took my initial shots and edited them in photoshop to create the images below.

I bought this postcard about ten years ago in Karlsruhe, Germany and it just resurfaced while i was sorting out my stuff after moving house. The back suggests that it's titled "Dompteur" by Michael Sowa but I don't know any more about it than that. However, I think in many ways it sums up perfectly the experience of writing computer software.

After some discussion on Aldebaran Robotics Developer program's forum a few of the UK developers decided to meetup in London. We were lucky enough to be joined by Jerome Monceaux, the architect of the NAO platform and Akim, the developer program community manager who came over from Paris to spend the day with us.

After introducing ourselves, the first order of business was a little surgery on Tim's NAO to replace some stripped screws on the battery compartment.

Have finally got my Linux box back on-line today after a couple of months of decorating and then moving house. We now have at least one CAT5 cable to every room in the house except the kitchen. This afternoon I spent some time wiring up a patch bay in a utility cupboard and checking everything out with a cable tester.

Being the unashamed geek that I am I think it's quite cool to have wired ethernet to every room and now my Linux box (which has no wireless interface) is taking advantage of it.

I ocasionally read Chinasmack, a website that aims to give some insight into the internet stories that are currently hot in china. One of the recent stories featured a Thai TV advert urging people not to forget those around them when using mobile devices. It's a bit schmaltzy but the point is still valid.