Songsmith

The people behind SongSmith reckon that "Everybody has a song inside". I just hope that in my case it isn't "Shaddap You Face".

Anyhoo, the program itself is rather clever (as it might be, coming from Microsoft Research). It will orchestrate a tune that you sing, adding accompaniment in one of 30 styles. It does this by analysing the notes that it hears and then using some clever algorithms to pick chords that would sound the best alongside.

It is a free download, and looks like fun. Perhaps it might be useful for some cheap and copyright free game soundtracks....

Watch This

Amazing.

Little Boots

You might have heard of Little Boots. She might be the next musical sensation. I quite like the sound of the free track you can download from iTunes at the moment.

MacBook Wheel Revealed

Could this be the future of computing?

Departmental Christmas Bash

We have decided to have a Christmas Bash in the department in honour of the festive season. I've just spend half an hour fiddling with Photoshop to make the poster. Find out more here.

Deep Zooming with Ed

Ed Dunhill from Microsoft came to see us today as part of the Inspiration Tour. He gave an excellent talk to a whole bunch of students. One of the things he showed us was Silverlight and Deep Zoom. This is wonderful. A bit like Photosynth, but you can create your own images into which web users can zoom and zoom and zoom. And zoom. Don't take my word for it, have a look at the Hard Rock Memorabilia site.

If you want to make your own Deep Zoom pictures you can download the Deep Zoom Composer for free here.

Portable Apps

Peter put me on to this one. It is very useful if you want to carry around your own working environment and use it on any PC that will accept a USB key.

Particularly useful in places like universities, where the machines tend to be somewhat locked down.....

http://portableapps.com/

Turn your Name into a Face

What Rob Miles looks like...

Does exactly what it says on the tin.

http://turnyournameintoaface.com/

Flying Starts for Student Entrepreneurs

If you have a idea you want to turn into a software product and a yen to run your own business on the back of it you may be interested in the new Flying Start program being launched by the NCGE.

The National Council for Graduate Entrepreneurship (NCGE) is a government funded not-for-profit organisation that works with Higher Education institutions in England to promote entrepreneurship education and to provide business start-up support for students and graduates.  It has teamed up with  Microsoft and Agitavi Research to create a business start-up program for final year students, post-graduates and graduates (of up to 5 years on) who plan to launch a software business based in the UK.

The program begins with a 3 day residential course held at Wokefield Manor in Reading, on 16, 17 and 18 December 2008. Fees, accommodation and subsistence for all 3 days are included. If you are starting (or have just started) a software business and you want some professional support (and some free food) then it is well worth a look.

http://www.flyingstartonline.com/fsprogrammes/upcoming/

Last FM Rocks

I watched The Gadget Show on Five tonight. Are you surprised? They had quite a fun feature where they tried to wean one of the presenters off his Apple habit by doing things like giving him an electric shock whenever his iphone was slower than the competition.

One of the things that came out of this was a mention for last.fm as a replacement for iTunes, the Apple music store. This went down a storm with the Apple lover, and so I took a look myself.

Turns out it is wonderful. If you fancy a completely free, streamed service that will send you your favourite tunes to a PC or mobile device (the iPhone client is lovely) then you would be bonkers not to take a look.

You calibrate it by giving a few of your favourite artists and then it either plays tracks from them or suggests others you might like. All for free. If you actually want to buy any of the tracks that you are hearing you can press a button and download them there and then. The new iTunes has a feature called Genius that works like this, but it either plays your own music or suggests things that you can buy.  Last fm on the other hand gives you a free soundtrack for your life anywhere you can get a network connection, including 3G and even Edge (although I guess the quality won't be the best on low bandwidth connections).

Actually, while I'm mentioning amazing things to do with iPhones, I should really give a shout out to Shazam (you can get it for other platforms too).  It is a free application that tells you what music is playing on the radio. Let the program listen to a snatch of the song and it will go online and then more often than not come back with full details. It is truly amazing, and I've no idea how it works.

Mini-Microsoft and Achieving Senior Level 63

Talking of good blogs to read, I quite like Mini-Microsoft. This is an anonymous manager at Microsoft giving a take on the way that the company is going. It is also sprinkled with detail about life inside Microsoft, and how to get on in the corporate environment.

Mini (if I can use that name) has just posted a good post on how to get to Senior Level 63 (apparently some exalted management level in Microsoft). I've no particular desire to scale those lofty heights, but the post is interesting because I reckon if you follow the advice in it you will do well in whatever field you are in.

Microsoft, like everwhere else I suppose, is mainly interested in promoting useful, effective people and this post gives you an insight into how to be more useful and effective.

Hard Code on the Web

I've mentioned I.M. Wrights "Hard Code" book before on this blog. It is actually written by a bloke called Eric Brechner, who adopts the I.M. Wright persona to write hard hitting, controversial, articles about software development best practice. When I mentioned the book before I said that I thought was worth a look. Having finished reading it I've changed my mind.

You must read this book. It is excellent. The even better news is that I.M. Wright also has a blog that is an equally good read. You can find it here.

Pomegranate Phone

I know you've probably all seen this before. But I like it. And I want one.

skyfire Windows Mobile Browser

If you have a Windows Mobile device you might want to take a look at skyfire. It seems to be a really fast mobile browser option and at the moment it is free.

Update on 2008-09-25 08:28 by Rob

Unfortunately at the moment it only seems to be available in the 'states. But it does look good.

Hull Computer Science Twitter Feed

We now have an experimental Twitter feed for the department at Hull. This will be used for sending out messages as a supplement to the RSS news feed that we run internally. You can find it here:

http://twitter.com/HullCompSci

Since Twitter has an API I was thinking of writing a program that reads an RSS feed and tweets any item under 150 characters in length to twitter. This would make it a completely automatic extension to our message system. Does anyone know if this has been done already? Does anyone fancy doing it?

Oh, and you can follow me on Twitter at:

http://twitter.com/RobMiles

I'm not a very good twitterer (or is it twit?) to be honest, I have enough problems thinking of something to say in daily blog posts, but if you want to follow me you are more than welcome.

Voice from the Dark Side

Andy Sithers (who we call "The Dark Lord of the Sith" - no he doesn't think it is very funny either) has started a blog. Andy is a Microsoft Academic chap who is very clued up on the ways of Microsoft and is also a top bloke. Well worth a read.

One of his early posts brings great news. The Ultimate Steal is back. This puts a copy of Microsoft Office into your hot little hands for less than the cost of a video game. You can get all of it for 39 quid. Hence the name.

HypnoCube HypnoCute

I sooooo want one of these. Just a 4x4x4 would work for me.

EverNote is Neat

If you do anything that involves holding little bits of data and then using them from wherever you happen to be you will probably find EverNote useful.

It is a "cloud" application that lets you lob pictures, notes, web links, bits of files and whatever onto a central storage location that you can then access from your PC, Mac, browser, Windows Mobile device or iPhone.

It has some nifty search facilities, even being able to pull handwriting out of images you have captured as notes and then use them as search keys.

It seems to work really well, and you can use it for free if you don't want to upload much content. Even the paid service is not bank breaking, at $5 a month.

Whether you are studying on a degree course, running a business or just going shopping I reckon that it is well worth a look.

Fantastic Fun with Fantastic Contraptions

Simon just sent me this link:

http://fantasticcontraption.com/

It is a puzzle game very like the Physics Illustrator in the Tablet PC Power Toys but with directed challenges. Great lunchtime fun.

Everything Changes

I dunno. You go away for a week or so and all kinds of new stuff happens while you are out. I love this business..

The XNA Creators Club has moved on to the next level, in that there is now a way you can start to get money for games that you have created. This is really exciting, in that it means that it is now properly possible to write games in your bedroom (or even downstairs) and then get them out in front of a mass audience. 

If you want to create 3D models for your games you can head over here and get a free copy of Caligari trueSpace 7.6, which is a proper 3D authoring package. It also has some really neat tie-ins with Virtual Earth, so you can create things and have them rove around anywhere in the world.

If you are new to programming and want something to help you learn the principles (and produce some neat flowcharts of your code) you can find the Visual Studio Middle School Power Toy here. I've not played with it yet (just got back from 7 hours driving) but it looks interesting.