Graduation Daze

Did a couple of graduation ceremonies today. I'm the chap who stands up at the start and gives a 10 minute spiel on how to behave, when to stand up, sit down, wear your hat etc etc. Great fun. Had two very well behaved audiences who did everything right. Thanks folks. We also had a couple of really good honorary graduates; Jane Tomlinson and Michael Apted.

Free food and drink for our graduands

I think I'm going to have to retire my opening joke that I use at the graduation ceremonies. It never gets a laugh and I think it might be turning audiences against me. I'm not going to reproduce it here, ask a Hull graduate if you want to find out what it is.....

After the show is over

Game On with Bing

Yesterday we went off to London courtesy of Electronic Arts, who had arranged an all expenses paid (perhaps my favourite three words) trip to the Game On exhibition at the Science Museum with free beer (perhaps my favourite two words) and a talk from Bing Gordon, EA's Chief Creative Officer.

Just before we boarded the magic bus

We set off at 10:30 prompt, bound for London. The M1 was kind to us, so we got to the big city in good time. I'd taken the big camera, so it was time to go off and take some snaps.

The Natural History Museum looking good

We piled into the tube and took a ride up to Oxford Street.

Oxford Circus

Fruit and Veg

Then, at 6:30 the doors opened and it was, quite literally, Game on.

EA had set up some gamer pods around the museum. That big shiny thing at the back is the wing of a Spitfire plane.

Bigging Up Bing

First up was the talk from Bing Gordon. Very interesting. Some good comments about life, followed by some more specific discussion of video games.

Health note: these are pulled from my recollections, if anyone who was there remembers differently then I apologise in advance.

From the life point of view:

• Find out what you really enjoy doing and then try to get to do that as your day job.
• Don't be afraid to fail.
• Set yourself big goals (but make them testable so that you can decide when/whether you reach them)
• Maximise your learning opportunities
• Set very high standards and give everyone who fails to meet them a really hard time. There is nothing more demoralising than a boss who accepts poor quality work.

This is all good stuff. For me what was also interesting was that one of Bing's heroes is a chap called David Ogilvy. He was an advertising executive who ran some of the most successful campaigns of all time and went on to set up one of the largest Ad agencies in the world. I remember reading one of his books a long time ago (I've always found the advertising field fascinating) and I would advise you to take a look as well. Then the talk turned to games. More from Bing:

• Games are becoming hobbies (people play them in the same way that they would build model railways, or go fishing)
• Games are including things like searching, trading and community..
• .. and search engines and other tools are starting to behave like games
• By around 2012 we can look forward to movie level realism in games

There was a very good question and answer session at the end, and then the doors to the Game On exhibition were thrown open and it was time to get in there and start playing.

..but first a drink

Game On indeed

Not the kind of high score I'd take a picture of, but there you are

Jon Purdy gets back to basics

One of my all time favourites, Ridge Racer

Not sure quite what this is, but it looks fun.

I used to own quite a few of these....

Then, at 10:00 we all clambered onto the magic bus and headed back to Hull (I had a kind of bet with David Byrne from EA that all our students would turn up on time - and they did. Kudos guys).

Many thanks to the highway engineers who added around an hour to our journey back just because they wanted to play with their big Meccano near one of the bridges. I finally managed to hit the sack around 4:30 am, just as the birds were starting to sing. But it was a good trip.

Thanks to EA for setting it up and making us so welcome.

Name In Print

My name is actually now on the web page for the book that I'm involved with. And I've also signed and sent off the contracts. All I have to do now is the writing part......

Snow on the Road

..and so there is

Email Etiquette

I sent some emails out last week and got no reply. Nothing.

There is a difficult etiquette issue here. Do I assume that the message has not got through? Do I assume that the person who received it does not think the message worthy of reply or would rather not talk to me?

This is tricky. If I send a further message saying "Did you get my email?" I force them into responding when they'd probably rather not. If I do nothing, and the mail didn't get through, then they might think me rude for not getting in touch, or I miss out on a conversation which may benefit both of us.

In the end I solved the problem by checking my junk email folder. Which of course is where the responses had ended up. I'm no further forward on the etiquette issue, but I'm going to check through my junk email more frequently....

New Soul

One of my favourite books since forever is "Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder. It recounts the story of an attempt by a bunch of engineers to build a new microcomputer for an ungrateful company.

Whilst the technology described is now very elderly (the book was originally published in 1981) the story of what drives engineers to create is still bang up to date. So, get the book and read it. Even (or perhaps especially) if you know nothing about computers.

Then spool forward 26 years in time and read Dreaming in Code. I've not got it yet myself yet, but a review which compares it to "Soul" is good enough to get me onto the Amazon site and flashing my credit card.

Building the Future

We had an admissions Open Day today. As is our won't on such occasions, we put on a hearty buffet and sat around with candidates and their parents eating sandwiches and chewing the fat.

One of the parents made the point that he thought Computer Scientists were an enviable bunch because we are "building the future". I nodded and smiled, and managed to avoid mentioning the half a day I spent a while back trying to get Aero Glass running on Vista, so my windows would have semi-transparent borders.

"It is an awesome responsibility" I managed to reply eventually. And then changed the subject.

Eight Hours Driving

Well, we were on the road at 6:00 am, over the Humber Bridge at 6:20 and in our first traffic jam at 6:35. Fortunately we managed to get around this road closure (I felt sorry for the big trucks that had no chance of turning round) and make it with a few minutes to spare.

It was nice to see some people that we haven't seen in a while, the circumstances were not the happiest, but the weather was kind to us, there were lots of flowers, and the service was a celebration of a good life lived to the full, which is how it should be.

And then it was time to get back into the car for another four hour drive back to the homestead.

Best Laid Plans

We had to be somewhere else today. Not a particularly happy somewhere else, in that we are attending a funeral, but a somewhere else nonetheless.

Unfortunately the weather had other ideas. We set off as planned for our overnight stop and we turned the radio to the traffic news, as you do. At the Humber Bridge we stopped to have another listen. The RDS system that automatically flips between travel news on different stations was having a field day. We didn't manage to hear the end of four different reports. And all of them were telling us that today was a bad day to travel. Basically, all the roads between where we were and where we wanted to be were full/broken.

So we went home and had some fish and chips. It will mean an early start tomorrow to get where we want to be, but I don't think tonight was meant for traveling.

The Earth in Your Pocket

Where I work. All it took was the search term you see.

If you have a Windows Mobile device, and are lucky enough to be on an "all you can eat" GPRS tariff, you really should get a copy of Virtual Earth Mobile. It is a free download from here. It lets you search for places anywhere in the world and then display them in map or aerial photo view. What is really impressive for me is that the search facility works really well. I banged in my home address and it took me straight to a view of our house. With my car in the drive.

Performance over GPRS is a tad slow, but the pictures are worth waiting for. It will also do route planning and connect to a GPS device (although I've not tried that). And all for free. How can you go wrong?

Inside a Wii Controller

I was sitting waiting for an ebay auction to nearly finish so that I can pile in with a last minute bid when I wondered to myself if there was anything about the inside of the Wii remote controller out there on the interweb. Turns out there is.

Very interesting, and lovely pictures.

EA Good Sports

If you are a student at our university you might be interested in a little event that we have been invited to. Hull University has been recognized by Electronic Arts as one of their key partners, which is rather nice (well, they did hire a whole bunch of our students last year).

Anyhoo, they have very kindly invited our students to a "do" at the Science Museum in London. It is based at the Game On exhibition, which traces the history of video gaming by means of a whole bunch of old consoles and arcade machines.

Which you can play on.....

I was going to make a trip down there myself later this year, but the chance to attend for free, and with a talk from Bing Gordon, EA's Chief Creative Officer, is just too good to miss.

Hull students can apply here.  Note that unfortunately, because they have an exam on the day of the trip, first year students will not be able to attend, but any others can. Places are limited people, so get your names down as quickly as possible.

Make Anything

My co-writer on the .NET Micro Framework book put me on to this. This is a machine which can make anything. So called fabbers can be regarded as three dimensional printers. We have one at the university which is used in the engineering department and it is amazing. It even makes spare parts for itself.....

Anyhoo, you can now think about making one of your own. Take a look here.

Code that sucks

I'm writing some background stuff for the .NET Micro Framework book. We've been working on the final project, which we want be a mobile robot of some kind. I suggested a Micro Framework controlled vacuum cleaner, and so today I started work on the emulation environment for it.

The idea is that we can simulate "pixel dust" on the floor and the "virtual sucker" will sweep this up and collect it. Our vacuum will have a dust meter which will allow it to tell how much dust is being collected and the name of the game will be collect as much dust as possible whilst avoiding crashing into the "virtual furniture". Then we are going to try to put exactly the same code into a real roving robot and see what happens, Great fun.

It also means that I can write properly factored, well commented code with methods called "doSuck". Wonderful.

Warioware Smooth Moves for the Wii

I didn't mean to buy it. I'm supposed to be on iron rations and saving up my pennies for a Playstation 3 (which is going to take a lot of saving). But number one son told me to buy it "The best Wii game you can get at the moment" was how he described it.

So I weakened.

And do you know (and most annoyingly) I think he is right. I mean, it is bonkers. But I like bonkers. It is cute. But I can handle cute (within limits). I've loved the Warioware games ever since they first appeared on the Gameboy years ago. This one takes the idea (mad mini-games that take seconds to play which are thrown at you in rapid succession) and adds the new Wii controller, which is used in a variety of configurations including "The Samurai", "The Chauffeur" and one where you stick it on the end of your nose. Oh yes.

If you have a Wii you owe it to yourself (and the rest of your family) to get this disk of insanity. Last night I watched the pantomime, a show which managed to keep three generations amused at the same time. This game is one of the few that I've seen (and most of the others are on the Wii as well) which I reckon will do the same thing. Fantastic.

Oh Yes We Did

We went to see the pantomime tonight. Just the two of us, which meant we felt a bit out of place amongst all the complete families that packed Hull New Theatre, but number one wife has always liked the Chuckle Brothers and I like watching professionals drive an audience so off we went.

One of the reasons we ventured out was that we heard this was a good one, and so it turned out. The Chuckle Brothers are the kind of comedy institution that it is popular to throw rocks at in this interactive, multi-channel, reality TV driven world. However, the simple fact is that you can put them in front of an audience and they will give darned good value for money. And so they did. Very funny.

I found it interesting to look across the theatre and see three generations of a family all laughing like drains at the antics on the stage. I enjoy a good pantomime. There aren't many traditions like it in the world and I love the idea that successive generations will turn up as grandkids, parents and grandparents and all enjoy something which, with a modicum of tweaking, has stayed fundamentally the same for many years.

The rest of the cast were well up to their roles. The story was Cinderella, and the ugly sisters were suitably nasty, the prince dashing and the fairy good mother flew about the stage with the right amount of bangs and puffs of smoke. They all had real barnstorming voices too, and belted out their versions of recent pop songs with great gusto. I'm very impressed that they managed to keep up the pace and the volume even after a month of solid performing. Good stuff.

Retro TV

With number one wife out for the evening number one son and I had free access to the big telly, and so a night of retro TV was in order.

First up was Thunderbirds, a puppet series which had me enthralled in the 1960's. I must admit it looked pretty darned good on the large screen, and the remastered sound was fantastic. Even after all these years it still packs a punch. In the episode that we watched all the trouble was caused by a "World Navy" exercise which went wrong when a missile strayed off course. Until now the idea of a world navy seemed quite sensible, but tonight I was wondering just who they would be fighting against. Anyhoo, it all ended well, although there were some rather large explosions. The really weird thing was that as we were watching a story of a gas rig in peril there was a real life drama of the same ilk playing itself out in the North Sea less than a hundred miles away.

Next we fired up "The Prisoner", a strange spy series of the sixties which was filmed in the wonderful Portmerion (which I really must visit one of these days). This stands up pretty well, it seems no more or less silly than things like "24" or Prison Break, with a cast of all the greatest TV actors of the time. Familiar faces kept popping up all over the place. Great fun.

Good Evening Mr Bond

Went to see the new James Bond movie tonight. A bit late, but we've only just got around to it. Well worth the trip though. Perhaps the best Bond movie that I've ever seen (and I've seen most of them - apart from a couple of the well dodgy Roger Moore ones). The action starts at frantic and then never lets up. The plot is good too, rather than a tale involving far fetched world domination with expendable chaps in coloured boiler suits on enormous sets we have just some very nasty people with cash flow problems.

The film manages to get the feel of how Bond should be and seems truer to the books than anything else, even matching the plot of the original Casino Royale story pretty closely. One thing to note though, Bond doesn't do much for local property values. Early in the film he causes a substantial amount of collateral damage on a building site and towards the end there is some serious mayhem aboard (and I do mean aboard) a block of flats in Venice.

If you want to see why the new Bond has been so highly praised you should go and see the film. If you want to see a high quality action film, with good production values and a twisty, gnarly, plot, you should go and see the film.

Vista is a Scroll Wheel

I've had Vista running for a couple of weeks now. I'll not deny that I've had problems, but I reckon that most of these are down to the fact I'm using pre-release drivers for my particular hardware. Hopefully by the time Vista is turned loose on the world these will have been fixed.

Anyhoo, I like it. It is a bit like the scroll wheel on the mouse. I remember the first time that I got a mouse with a scroll wheel. At first I couldn't see much point, but as I used more applications which supported it I got to use it more and more. Some time back I used some very old programs which did not support it and I found them very hard to get to grips with.

Vista is like that. Its usefulness kind of creeps up on you. I like the 3D effects. I like the way that I'm finding it easier to move between folders, see what files I've selected and navigate around running programs. When I use an XP machine it feels clunky and less elegant and I'm now glad to get back to Vista.

I've stressed it really hard, with loads of simultaneous applications doing lots of different things and it just seems to come back for more. Drivers not withstanding, this is one solid operating system.

And, like the scroll wheel, I reckon it is going to be the way that we use computers for some time to come.

Delinquent Children

Number one son keeps getting busted by the police. One of his little prangs has just cost me 34,000 dollars and things have now got a lot worse. He's gone and bought a motorbike. Fortunately this is not real, this is Test Drive Unlimited for the XBOX 360, which is slowly taking over our lives. We've won a few races, run a few errands, bought a new house and spent a while exploring the neighbourhood.

I'm impressed with this game. The graphics are very believable, and the roads go on for ever. You start to explore places just to find out what is round the next corner. Perhaps we'll soon identify a few haunts to hang out at and get to know some of the locals.

If you like driving games and exploration you should track down a copy. Maybe we'll meet up in Hawaii.