Party Masters

After Thursday's party for the first year, tonight it was the turn of the Masters students to sample our beer tokens. We followed the same pattern as last time, although this time I varied the presentation a bit by having the tablet PC battery go flat just as we were going through the quiz answers. Note to self, don't leave home without the power supply.

These are the quiz winners, note the slightly larger prize this time.

After the quiz, and a lot of dicussion about the answer to the last question (it is on the screen above - can you figure out what the question actually was?) we went on to more Guitar Hero and other silly stuff.

We had a guy turn up who was awesome on this. He played some of the tracks on "expert" mode. What a performance.

Then we tried to find out how far you could get from an XBOX 360 and still play Geometry Wars. (the answer is a very impressive 75 feet - then you lose sight of the screen and crash). Those remote controllers let you get pretty remote..

Hi for Collectormania

And so it was another Sunday of rising at 4:30 am and the zooming off down the motorway to mingle with the stars and buy silly bits of overpriced plastic at the Collectormania in Milton Keynes. We've been going to these for a while, initially to meet up with hobbits and the like, but now more likely to have a drift around the many stands selling all sorts of stuff. Of course I took a camera (or two)

..of course it is cool - I'm there

Maggie Grace signs her name

Amber Benson tries to get us to sign it for her

They have Krispy Kreme donuts at Milton Keynes now. "A heart attack with a hole in it". And free samples. Yay!

It was very tempting, but it wouldn't fit in our toilet and 60 quid is a bit expensive. I've no idea what the thing on the right is.

Then it was back into the car to trundle back to Hull.

To Durham. And Back.

Took number one son to Durham today for him to resume his studies. Then brought him back to Hull. All rather complicated. Tomorrow we are heading off for Collectormania (one of my dafter pursuits) and as he would like to go too, we are performing this rather strange shuffling of student and stuff.

Means a fair bit of driving though. I reckon that my average speed over the entire weekend will be around 20 miles per hour....

Shiny Doncaster

Went to Doncaster today for a presentation. The university has a relationship with Doncaster College, where we accredit two of their degree courses. The students are based and taught at Doncaster but we award the degree.

Anyhoo, I went down to say hello to the Business Computing crew and give a presentation about final year projects. They are a nice bunch and the talk seemed to go OK, although I may have spoiled the atmosphere a little by telling the undertaker joke right at the end.

The brand new Doncaster campus is very shiny - and this is just the back of the college

Fresher's Party

As part of the fresher's week we always have a party to allow the staff and students to get together. This year we are doing things slightly differently from last time, in that we are taking over a bar, dishing out beer tokens, having a quiz and then playing silly video games.

 
These are the beer tokens being prepared (took ages - won't do it this way again)

The crush at the bar once the tokens went into action

The quiz winners clutching their prize (sorry it is a bit paltry - I spent all the prize money on beer tokens)

I think it is fair to say that a rattling good time was had by all. We had Donky Konga on the GameCube (my bongos got a real hammering), Dead or Alive on the XBOX 360 and dueling Guitar Hero on the PS2. Plus a bunch of folks with their DS machines fighting it out .

Dr. Peter Robinson (right) showing how to lay down some classic riffs in the Guitar Hero duel (not that anyone seems that impressed....)

Way To Park

Our session has started, so the campus is full of people again. I really like this. Although the peace and quiet of summer is rather nice, I don't really think that things are right unless we have students around the place.  The semester starts with a "Fresher's Week" with all kinds of fairs and events. There is a marquee set up outside the union where various organisations are touting their wares. I was walking back to the office when I noticed a brand new, shiny, Porsche Boxster parked right across the footpath in the way of everybody.

In the windscreen was a handwritten note "Driver on the Barclays Bank stand" (or it might have been Lloyds-TSB - I can't tell banks apart any more).

I'm not sure if this is impressive or not. Random thoughts sprang to mind:

• I work for a bank and drive a Porsche so I can park where I like
• I must be a good banker because I have a posh car
• Bank with us and you can have a car like mine
• Bank with us and you can help pay for my car

Very confusing.

Happy Snaps

I've just pulled some pictures off my little camera and so I thought I'd post them on my otherwise boring (graphically wise) blog.

Last week my car showed me this. Scary eh?

Things were much simpler when cars were like this one I saw on campus on Thursday

Bulding a new Hull

University this morning.

The Madness of XAML

Spent a whole evening achieving virtually nothing. I'm writing a little program for the plasma display in our new, spiffy, meeting area in the middle of the department (if you think that this means I'm a lot better at starting projects than finishing them- Icon Invaders, Moosaic etc etc then you are probably right - but this one needs to be done pronto and I'll get round to the others later).

Little know fact: Pronto was Tonto's younger, and much more punctual, brother.

Anyhoo, I'm using WinFX which is very nice. Got the latest versions of .NET 3.0 and all the trimmings and I can make swooshy windows now. I even managed to figure out how to read the RSS feed that is going to provide the data source for the display, and unpick the data from it that I want.

Then I try to put messages in the WinFX containers that hold my text. Now I'm using my usual learning technique here, which is to use Intellisense and MSDN and not read any books. Bad move. Simply couldn't figure out how to get text onto the control. Unlike old style windows components, which have a Text property, WinFX is much more complicated. It has FlowDocument and Paragraph and Block and all kinds of paraphernalia. But no Text property. After a lot of messing about I found that there is an InLines property which does pretty much what I want and lets me add strings of text to the display. Hurrah.

But the really good news (which probably makes the 90 minutes of cursing and swearing worthwhile) is that it will do all the formatting for me using Xaml cues in the string to lay out the text.

Which means that whilst it has taken me ages to do the easy bit, the hard bit should be really easy. If you see what I mean.

I'll post the program in source form once I've got it working.

Jane Eyre vs Aeon Flux

Tonight in the Miles household, for your viewing pleasure:

• Downstairs number one wife was watching improving cultural content based on literary classic : Jane Eyre
• Upstairs I was watching brain rotting science fiction tosh : Aeon Flux

I've seen Jane Eyre a few times. Once you have worked out that her surname is actually pronounced "Air" and reached the four magic words "Reader, I married him" (hope this doesn't give to much away folks) you have taken pretty much everything away from the story that you need.

Although, having said that, and sat through Aeon Flux (which also has its pronunciation problems) I have noticed some similarities between the two:

Male Lead : both of them have a male protagonist who may/may not be a baddie (you guess). Both males have equally dodgy hairstyles and stupid names. Rochester sounds like something from a sixties heist movie ("Tonight we steal the Rochester Diamonds...") and don't get me started about having an evil overload with the first name Trevor. Both of them looked like they were thinking of getting sideburns too.

Plot : Actually there isn't that much in common here. However, they do both have big explosions now and then. And both of the male leads have crazy people trying to kill them.

Female Lead : OK, so Jane Eyre doesn't have skin tight leather clothing and access to futuristic weaponry. But she does wear those dresses that reach all the way to the floor and let her move about like a Dalek with no obvious means of propulsion. I just hope that she can climb stairs. Of course Aeon Flux doesn't actually climb stairs at all, she would use a double somersault flip with a half twist up the banister rail in case the stairs vanished when she was half way up them.

Happy Ending : (plot spoiler alert - though if you read the bold bit it is probably too late) Both have a happy ending. Despite being shot a great deal (but missed an improbably huge number of times) Aeon ends up in a happy clinch with her man. In Jane Eyre something equally unlikely happens, when her new husband mysteriously regains his sight after having married her.

So there you are. Stay tuned for more cultural insights. Once I've finished watching the Simpsons.

Cheap, Great XBOX 360 Game

If you are in the UK, and are in the market for a good XBOX 360 game for less than 13 quid, toddle down to HMV and pick up a copy of Amped3 which is in their sale at the moment.

It is a snowboarding game. And a very good one. Some games feel kind of churned out. But with Amped3 I got the feeling that the development team really enjoyed themselves. A lot. They have taken the "silly" control and turned it all the way up to 11. Oh, there is lots of good snow. And very pretty mountains. And lots of things to do. And a nicely judged difficulty curve. But the thing that really does it for me most of all is the quality of the cut scenes and the challenges. These are just bonkers. I've only seen two, but the first one, "Wienerland", is worth the price of the game alone, and I'm definitely going to work my way through the rest of them, just to see what they are like.

If I had paid fully price for this game I would not have been dissapointed. I only didn't get it because I'm not mad about snowboarding games particularly. However, I am well happy if they are as mad as this one.

And at the price, a steal.

Evil Jag Drivers

Boy did it rain this afternoon. Heavy stuff. The little dimple in the road near our house filled up with water to make a mini-ford. There was a Fiesta parked in it. A Ford in a ford. How poetic. Not that that poetry was really on my mind as I trudged up the road to the chip shop to fetch Friday tea.

As I was walking along the pavement, trying to avoid the puddles that actually went over my shoes, I noticed a big Jaguar car approaching. The driver wasn't slowing down for the dimple in the road, in fact he was speeding up. Just as he reached me the awful truth dawned. He was heading for a pool of water in the gutter that I was just passing. He went past at speed and with the evident intention of soaking me to the skin.

Which he nearly succeeded in doing. Fortunately, thanks to some fancy footwork on my part, he only managed to drench my trousers. The only good thing that came out of this was that he then drove at speed into our little ford, sending a jet into the air reminiscent of the water splash at Disney world. Unfortunately his car kept going, but I hope it was a nasty shock for him.

But is it a bug?

I noticed a little "foible" of Windows when I was writing my Moosaic program. Windows provides a lovely way that you can load an image into a program. You just go:

Bitmap b = new Bitmap ( filename );

This goes off to the filename and gets you a shiny bitmap which contains your picture. However, it also leaves open the connection to the file, so that if you try to delete the file you get an error saying the file is in use. I don't think that it is. I've just read an image from it, that is all.

This is rather frustrating if you want to reuse a temporary image file. In the end I had to use a stream to read the file, which I could then properly let go of..

StreamReader streamReader = new StreamReader( filename );
Bitmap b = new Bitmap( streamReader.BaseStream );
streamReader.Close();

This is messy, but works in that the file is released. I'm wondering if I've found a bug or a feature...

Moosaic Takes Shape

One of "Robert's Rules" is:

Any software development takes longer than you think, even if you allow for this.

Of course, having a day job as well has kind of hampered development...

So I've not finished the Moosaic program just yet. But it is looking quite tidy:

Coming to a setup program near you....

I've got the image download and the grid selection just about sorted, Now I just need to get the tile output done and we will be in business.

At it again

Came in tonight with an urge to write some code. Just as soon as I'd finished watching "Harvey". Wonderful old film staring James Stewart. Anyhoo, I'm going to write another Flickr program, this time to create lots of little images from a single Flickr picture. The idea is that you can make mosaics to have printed out on little cards.  I've called it my "Moosaic" program (not my idea I'm afraid).

I've got so far and run out of steam for tonight(must be my age). Should have it going tomorrow.....

Cheap Games

I thought it might be worth putting down some hints on cheap places to get XBOX 360 games. If you don't want the hassle of mail order you might find these useful.

I've found that specialist places like Game tend to sell at full price. The cheapest place to buy XBOX 360 games on the high street is actually a music store; Music Zone (which has shops in most cities in the UK) quite often has titles at 10 pounds less than the "usual" price, i.e. 39 quid rather than 49. If you don't have a Music Zone shop in your town, the next good place to look is WH Smiths. They quite often have games at around five pounds cheaper than other sellers. If you use Smiths, make sure you have a points card, as these can save you even more cash.

I was thinking about the price of games. 49 quid does seem rather steep, but I remember paying 48 for the very first version of Destruction Derby for the Playstation 1 (quite a good game in it's time)around ten years ago, and money seemed to go a lot further then....

Free Printing with Moo

Number one son put me onto this. If you have a Flickr Pro account you can get 10 free "minicards" from Moo. The cards are teeny tiny, but they look like fun. I've ordered my 10 free ones (and I'm darned tempted to have 100 done as well).

Time Travel

I'm slowly going back through the days last week and posting what we did and some pictures. I've no real idea why I do this, but for the sake of completeness I just like to have an entry for each day. Anyhoo, feel free to browse backwards into my holiday past.

Speed Meeting

We had a staff meeting today. Over in fifty minutes. Amazing. Kudos to the chairman, and the idea of sending out all the reports electronically in advance. I'd taken the Tablet PC in so that I could even have the notes on the screen (and doodle on them, just like in the old days with paper). I thought I was being high tech and kewl.

So much for being ahead of the game. I counted four other tablets and laptops in use during the meeting. At least I'd turned the sound down on mine, heh.

Monday Quiz

This might not happen on any other Monday. But then again....

Old advert : "Only a fool breaks the two second rule"

But what is it?

Return of the Rob

Well, I'm back from my holidays. Went loads of places, took lots of pictures, a good time was had. And now I'm back. And raring to go.