Christmas Cake Joke

"Is that cake paid for? Or is it stollen?"

Evening Coder

A nice way to end the day (drawing with the .NET Micro Framework)

Early Riser

A nice way to start the day

Christmas Do

Getting into the spirit of the day....

Today we had our staff christmas lunch. For a change we had the meal at a nearby golf club. Very posh. The car park was full of expensive cars and a good time was had by all.

Then in the evening we repaired to the Hive Virtual Environment suite and found out what you get if you plug a Wii into a huge video projector and play tennis and bowling. The answer? Big fun.

Wii Sunday

Had some of the family around for a meal today. Because I am a showoff I got the Wii out and we had a go at four player tennis. Great fun. Although we did hit the light fittings a few times.

I think that the Wii is probably going to change the way that people arrange their front rooms..

York Under Water

We went to York today, the weather was nice, but bits of the city were under water.

York city wall

The top of Micklegate (I think)

We used to park the car near here

The river is a lot wider at the moment....

Easy Lies

There should be a special place in hell reserved for people who tell you lies on customer support just to get rid of you. I've just got a new portable media player, the Archos 504 (long story, but it is very nice). One of the reasons I bought it was because I want to load it up with music from my Napster account. It has the "Plays for sure logo" on it and everything so there should be no problem.

Of course it doesn't work. As soon it is connected it to the Napster program the device resets itself. I've emailed Archos customer support ("response in two business days"). At least they haven't told me any lies. In fact, after nearly a week, they've told me nothing.

So today I ring Napster support. Expensive, infuriating and ultimately pointless. I tell them my Napster doesn't work. They suggest a few things and press some buttons to no avail. The supervisor is fetched. He tells me that Napster doesn't work with Archos. I tell him I have another device made by Archos which works fine. He tells me it might not work now. It still does. After a while it occurs to me that I'm probably being told this information because it has the best chance of getting me off the line. In the end it does, because I ring off in disgust.

Then, after some internet digging I try Media Player 11 rather than the Napster program. It works fine.

Minibus Lag

I think I have minibus lag. It is like jetlag, but much noiser and rather slower. The journey each way was fair enough, traffic jams not withstanding, but I keep trying to do things and finding that I can't think all the way through to the end.

I''ll start writing something and then ju

XNA Launch Event

We got up nice and early and headed for the university. Unfortunately, thanks to traffic, we were a bit later arriving on campus than I wanted, but still in time to do a bunch of interviews for the press.

The morning talks were all about how the XNA technology works and how it fits into to the games industry. The answers, by the way, are very well and very well. It is really easy to use and, whilst not yet applicable to "top of the range" games is going to find increasing favour in the games industry as they come to terms with just how much easier it makes things.

Then it was lunch, another interview, and then time for my bit. The talk seemed to go OK, the audience were polite enough to laugh at most (but not all of) my jokes. You can find the presentation, complete with clip art, here.

Then Peter Molyneux gave his session. Which was excellent. The most important thing that came out of his talk was the emphasis that he places on communication skills. You should be good at your part of the game production process. You should be brave enough to take your ideas and champion them passionately. But you also need people skills. If you can't persuade, argue, admit when you are wrong and keep as many people happy as possible during the rollercoaster ride that is game development then you are going to have a hard time. That was very good to hear. At Hull we push those aspects of professional development very hard indeed, and it was good to hear one of the best game creators in the business echo them for me.

We even made the BBC News.

And then we got in the magic bus for the trip home.

One of these students has won an XBOX 360 at the XNA launch event. Can you use your powers of observation to discover which one?

Mini-buses and temporal anomalies

Today is the day we all pile into the mini-bus that I've arranged and then rumble down the motorway to the Microsoft XNA Launch event at Warwick. I'm going to give a talk, the students are going to learn things and get free stuff.

Last night I discovered that my powers of organisation had temporarily failed me, and that I booked the bus for the wrong day, but fortunately the nice man at the hire company took that in his stride and so that 17:00 we hurtled out of the university into the darkness.

The nice lady in my Gizmondo directed us straight to our luxurious Travelodge for the night. The journey was mostly painless, although the traffic was quite busy on the motorway. I have a new respect for Ford Transit vans now, this one had a seriously powerful engine and was quite happy to reach 80, even with 14 souls on board. Didn't try a handbrake turn though, not sure that everyone would have appreciated that.

Pitch me a Snake

I've spent a very happy day in the labs marking student work. Normally I hate marking. Exam scripts send me into a cold sweat. But this was much more fun. Rather than dead trees I was looking at live code. Each of our students in the first year was given 15 minutes to pitch their Snake game. And there have been some super ones. We are going to open up the "wherewouldyouthink hall of fame" and put some of these programs up there for download. Great stuff.

Next semester we are going to take the snake game and move it onto an XBOX. And I reckon we will be the first people in the world to do this in an undergraduate course at first year level.

Busy Sabbath

I know you aren't really supposed to work on Sunday, but I'm afraid I must add this to my, already long, list of sins (which I am most definitely not going to blog about).

I'm writing the material for the XNA Launch talk I'm doing on Wednesday next week. For some insane reason I've decided that, because I'm speaking after lunch, I need to make sure that nobody falls asleep during the talk.

The answer, I've decided, is clipart. If I put a piece of witty and amusing clip art on every slide people will be so agog that they will forget to drift off to sleep. Problem is, I now have to find around thirty pieces of witty and amusing clipart. So there goes Sunday...

I've seen a PlayStation 3!

I have! There's one in a shop in the Prospect Centre in the middle of Hull. Very big and very shiny. It is not for sale (just as well) but it is definitely a PS/3. They were even letting people have a go on it. I watched someone playing a driving game, probably Ridge Racer. The car was shiny, the road and the landscape were detailed and things moved along very smoothy.

The kid at the controls had obviously played driving games before. He drove round the twisty highway with a miniumum of fuss and the occasional powerslide. It was hard to tell whether he was impressed or not.

And there's the rub. Wind back the clock 24 hours to the kids having a go on the Wii. They were waving, clapping and cheering. At the moment it seems to me that the PS/3 gives you a very high quality "same again" whereas the Wii gives you something totally different.

Even allowing for the fact that perhaps folks behave differently in shops, I reckon that this underlines the validity of the Nintendo approach. Perhaps over time the PS/3 will catch up and truly new forms of game will emerge as developers get the hang of its enormous power. But until then, I'm going to be in front of my Wii, waving the controller around like a mad thing.... 

I took the camera up town too:

Shiny building

This was in the art gallery. It is made entirely of seeds and flowers and should last around a week. Very clever.

The Day of the Wii

What a day. I'm exhausted. I was up really early after the bus trip yesterday, and zoomed up town to try and get hold of a Nintendo Wii console, which launched today in the UK. This was mildly important since today is our special Wii Open Day and a whole bunch of people are coming to see them. We have one running in our open area.

But we want more.

I had everything carefully planned down to the last minute. Into Game, grab the console and then back to the university in time to set it up. And then I saw the queue in the shop.  At 9:20 I was in the middle of paying for the console. And the first group were due to arrive at 10:00....

Fortunately it all went wonderfully well. Even better than that. Dr. Paul Chapman (who was in the paper and on the local TV yesterday demonstrating the worlds first paraglider trainer that he's just built at Hull) was able to show how is system works, and some of guests even got to have a go at flying. And we showed off the Hive setup. And we did some programming using XNA to take a look underneath the bonnet of a video game. And there was a lot of Wii time.

Then, after lunch, we did it all again. And followed it up with a student run quiz computer games quiz and further Wii play. For just about the whole day you could here howls of laughter and enjoyment as the little console worked it's magic.I took a whole bunch of happy snaps...

Getting Started

Letting fly with the controllers

Damian shows how to box in pink.....

In the USA people have been crashing into their tellys. I can see why.

Boxing was very popular for some reason

Remember to guard...

...and then punch

Jon congratulates the Wii winner on the day. And stands in the way of the projector . He  won't do that again...

Quiz Prizes

The end of a balanced meal

"Everybody say Wiiiiiiii!"

Second prize quiz winners

And the winners, who showed a deeply scary level of knowledge about computer games.....

Ed Gibson is "The Man"

Today we went up to Bradford for a rather special talk. The folks at Black Marble arrange seminars for IT professionals (you'll never guess who's giving the next one) and today they had managed to get Ed Gibson over to talk about Computer Security. Ed is quite a chap, an ex FBI guy who is now Microsoft UK's chief security advisor.  So a bunch of students and myself boarded a magic bus to Bradford.

We were lucky enough to meet up with Ed. before the talk. Thanks to my super advanced planning I managed to get everyone to the venue around 90 minutes early, and so we had plenty of time to sit around a roaring fire in the hotel bar and chat. Ed turned up and the first thing he did was buy everyone a drink. My kind of guy.

Then, after some superb sandwiches courtesy of Black Marble it was time to get down to the serious business of the evening. And it is serious. Ed has been there, done that, and told us some truly scary stories. For me the most interesting thing that emerged from his talk is that the computer fraudsters don't want your bank details. They want your bandwidth. If they can get enough machines on the net under their control they can pretty much take down any server, anywhere. Unless you pay them big money.

At some point we will have laws that extend far enough to catch the perpetrators and enough systems out there hard enough to resist the attacks that can turn your home PC into an agent of the bad guys. However,  until then the rule has got to be keep your system up to date. Don't think of computer crime as a "soft" crime with no real victims. The people who do it are in there for the cash, very organized and totally ruthless.

Ed made some good points on a broad canvas. The speaker that followed him zoomed right down into the low level detail. He showed how breathtakingly easy it is to attack a system. One of my programming rules is "build yourself a nice place to work". What I means is make sure that it is very easy to create, build and test the systems that you are writing. It never really occurred to me that hackers would do the same.

We were shown a tool which used SQL injection (basically a way of putting database commands into the text you feed into a web page) to stripmine entire company databases. I knew about the technique, but I never thought there would be such advanced tools for this kind of thing. The next thing that we were shown fair took my breath away. It involved changing the way that the .NET Framework itself works.

Imagine that a developer has got some permissions set on a program. And they want to stop users from pressing certain buttons on certain screens. The Forms library that ships with Windows will do this for you. With a simple property change you can disable a button. If the button is disabled it turns grey and the user can't press it. Job done.

Unless someone changes the guts of .NET so that this property change no longer works. By just changing one particular byte in the right library file a nasty person who has access to your machine can make every single button work all the time. So simple, sooo scary.

Admittedly you'd have to do something rather stupid to let someone else run their program on your machine in the first place, but the result of this is that even securely written code can now be totally banjaxed by being hosted on a corrupted system. Amazing stuff. Simple yet brilliant. And a very worthy follow on to the talk from Ed.

This was a superb evening. Kudos to Black Marble, Ed and his associate (who's name I've forgotten I'm afraid). All the students had a great time, with some pretty deep conversations on the bus on the way back. This was the first Black Marble event I've been to. It will not be the last...

And with that, I'm just going to update my virus scanner...

Blanked

We had the first of our new season of open days today. If you came along, thanks for coming, it was nice to see you.

I did the opening talk and it seemed to go OK, then I sat down to run the little question and answer session afterwards. I was introducing our staff and I got to Helen Wright, one of our lecturers. As I was starting to announce her name to the group another part of my brain was thinking how terrible it would be if I forgot her surname. So I did. So she was introduced as "Helen, our Quality Officer". Forgetting the name of the person in charge of quality. Way to go Rob.

It is probably the kind of thing which is supposed to happen when you get old, but it has been happening to me for absolutely ages (which might mean I'm very old, but I'm putting it down as an endearing character trait of mine).

Anyhoo, I think it went OK apart from that slipup, and the name did come back to me, and I did apologise.

For me the best part was when all the parents of the candidates took over the Nintendo Wii system we have on loan and showed the young'uns how to play Tennis. Great fun.

.NET Micro Framework Book

I'm writing a book. I'm very excited about this. The schedule is deeply scary, in that we hope to have the bulk of it completed by the end of January next year, but then again if you don't set a deadline you don't know when you are late. Anyhoo, myself and Donald Thompson of Microsoft are writing a programmers guide to the new .NET Micro Framework.

This is a new embedded platform which Microsoft have been working on for ages (it is what powers the Microsoft SPOT watches). For me it is a terribly interesting because it means you can write code in a high level, managed, environment using C# and then run it on a device the size of a postage stamp which costs pennies to make.

I am anticipating that it will do amazing things to the world of embedded development, as it makes it much easier to write code and put it into any kind of tiny system.

I've had a .NET Micro Framework microsite on my pages for some time. We've just set up a site for the book and we will be posting sample chapters and the contents for comments soon.

Wii Week

"Batter Up" with Peter and Darren

Well, we have started our Wii Week. The machine arrived from Nintendo on Saturday, and we have set it up on in our open area for the week. The climax is on Friday, when we have some schools coming over for a look and we are going to have three or four systems running in the department.

I had a very quick go with Tennis, Baseball and Bowling. All I can say is "The system works". It works wonderfully well. It works "want one" well. The feeling of control that you get with the small gamepads is very good and surprisingly subtle.

The Wii is going to massively change gaming by adding a new level of fun (and probably fitness) as well. The games we played are all free with the console. And they are smashing.

There is no way that I can see the Wii being anything other than a hit with this kind of stuff available at the start. Wonderful.

If you are in the department, we are running the Wii from 12:00 to 1:45 pm each lunchtime. Feel free to drop round and have a go.

How true....

Don't laugh too loudly at this. I'm still wiping the tears from my eyes.

York was full

Did everyone in the world decide to go to York today? Just because we did doesn't mean that everyone else has to. Anyhoo, we had a nice time (although we had to try three places to find somewhere for lunch - and I'm not tell anyone where we did go because it was nice and quiet and I we might want to go there again). Took the camera, and the light was quite good for pictures.

A nice bridge

A few leaves left to fall....

A few that have fallen

..and another Bliss replacement (Clifford's Tower)