Travel in Hope and Pain

I've managed to wangle a trip to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco California. Not quite sure how I did it, but very pleased to be going. Anyhoo, we made trip today. We started in Humberside airport at 5:00 am and thence (posh prose) we moved  on to Amsterdam.

Starting from Schipol

"The Dammed" assemble

The plane was full. And I mean full.  And since it was the "nerd express" to the conference everybody had used their internet skills to bag all the best seats by booking online. This meant that there was not a tall seat for Rob. The cabin staff were very sorry. I was even sorrier.

Legoom, KLM style

There should be a rule requiring airlines to hold the legroom seats for tall blokes like me who really need it. Perhaps I should start an e-petition... Mind you, winging about slightly uncomfortable seats on a free trip to California sounds a bit rich to me, so perhaps I'll keep quiet.

The girl in the window seat took a picture for me

Anyhoo, we got there OK and on time, and had a smooth taxi ride to the hotel.

First view of SF

We are going to freshen up (whatever that means) and then go for a wander round town. For the first time ever, I'm staying in a city with a proper middle (as opposed to a bunch of malls) and so it should be fun.

Just what you want to see before a 12 hour flight....

Just what you want to see before a 12 hour flight....
Originally uploaded by RobMiles.

Pastey Faced

Someone actually asked me for a copy of Pastemaster. It is a text boilerplating tool that I wrote rather than mark exams.  I've written an installer,  improved it a bit and added it to my Lively Learning pages.

Pastemaster 2 Launched

Pasty Powerhouse...

I've developed a tool for assessment which has proved useful. It provides a means by which you can quickly and easily create pro-forma comments and mark values and then insert them into any document. The comments are entered into a number of categories and given marks (if you want to). Then, when you select them they are copied into the bottom area and the total calculated.  Pressing Clear gets rid of the comments and sets the total to 0. The comment text is automatically loaded into the paste buffer so that you can just paste it into any Windows application. The comments are remembered automatically, and there are 6 pages available.  You can download an installer for the program here.

Burn In

I've just abut got my magic message system to working on the big plasma.  It displays the time on the screen in a nicely muted shade of grey. I'd heard that plasma screens have problems with burn in, and I thought I had been careful to avoid that. So when we turned the display off to plug in our new PS/3 I was mortified to see the time etched on the screen......

Fortunately, when our shiny new PlayStation 3 was fired up, nobody could see the damage, which cheered me up a bit. We were playing Ridge Racer, which looked OK but no better than versions on other platforms (even the PSP version compared well...)

Underwhelmed

Now, we were using the composite output to drive the display. And Ridge Racer is not one of the better launch titles. But I have to say that the experience did very little for me and the rest of the bunch around the machine.

When we had the Wii running we would usually find a bunch of laughing people waiting to have a go. With the PS/3 nobody seemed that impressed, even when they found out what was running the show. I'm told that it can do great things, and I'm looking forward to seeing it run on a decent connection with a better game.

Actually the best part of it was when I turned the PS/3 off. And found that my burned in time display had been replaced by the Ridge Racer speedo...... 

Service with a Smile

Went to Doncaster today for an external exam board meeting. Meant I missed some meetings at Hull, which was nice. The way I see it, they should schedule every meeting I have to go to at exactly the same time, so that I can pick the one I want to attend, and then have a good excuse to avoid all the rest.

Anyhoo, I shot off down the motorway, looked at some student work, had some very constructive discussions (which is par for the course at Doncaster) and then it was time to eat. We usually have a working lunch of sandwiches just before the exam board. But not today. Today we ate in the training restaurant. Which was wonderful. We were surrounded by attentive, polite, friendly (if a little nervous) faces who did the whole "posh nosh" thing around us.

As they were still being trained they had not picked up any of the habits of waiters that I have had to deal with in the past. In other words they didn't hide, bring the wrong thing, look down their nose at me when I ask for the house white (or even worse, a glass of water) and treat me like an idiot.  The food was great, the service was great, and I didn't have to pay. That to me is perfection...

The Humming Bag of Danger

My bag has started humming to itself. Scared me half to death when I first heard it at 3:00am. Scared me even more when I found out what it was.

Under Vista, if I ask my machine to Sleep it doesn't quite behave the same as it used to. Sometimes it wakes up. In my bag. Being wrapped in plastic doesn't do much for airflow, so the thing just sits there humming and getting hot. I'm sure it would shut down before it set fire to the house, but it is rather worrying.

Number one son has had the same thing happen with his Mac Portable, so this thing might be becoming common.  The way I see it, if you are putting your machine in your bag, you really should hibernate the device. This copies the entire memory to disk and then shuts down completely. The effect is similar to sleep, except that it takes a bit longer to wake up because the file has to be loaded off the disk when the power comes back on. With sleep the memory content is retained and so the machine can come back instantly. But it seems like computers are becoming lighter sleepers.....

Maxing out Vista

I managed something today which I didn't think was possible. I managed to get my machine to use up nearly all its memory. I was testing a SideShow gadget application which starts running automatically when the SideShow device is connected. But because I haven't completed the code yet, the program didn't finish properly. So Vista started it again. And again. So I ended up with several hundred copies of the program in memory before I realised what was happening.

86% and counting...

By the time I worked out what was happening I had 86% of my memory filled up. The nice thing is that Vista never really slowed down or seemed to suffer. I just saved my files, shut the machine down and rebooted. Which is quite impressive when you think about it.

Kitchen Orchids

The Orchids in the kitchen are doing well

Durham Roses

I just liked the colours.

Almost Lucky

This is the complicated tale of boy meets tablet, boy tries to run Vista on tablet, boy finds that more memory would help run it faster, boy buys memory that won't fit and then, after he has made the memory fit boy finds that it won't work. And he is the thick end of 60 quid light on the deal. Now read on...

I sent the memory back to Ebuyer who admitted it was faulty. At the same time I managed to acquire the memory from somewhere else. So I called Ebuyer and say that, since the memory was faulty and I'm sorted, I'd really just like a refund. They say yes. Happy ending.

Then the memory arrived this morning in the post anyway.....

Open Wide....

Went to the dentist today. I had to fill in a new form. Apparently my dental practice has spent up all the money that the Health Service gave them last year, and is now running on empty until April. This means that yours truly has now had his teeth privatised. I had to sign up to say that I would pay for my treatment.

There were three prices on the piece of paper, fifteen quid, forty three quid and one hundred and ninety quid. "Don't worry about those" said the nurse airily. "We'll decide which one to use later". 

There is only one thing that scares me more than someone poking around in my mouth with bent metal and drills, and that is having to pay around half the price of a PS/3 for the privilege.

Anyhoo, apparently my teeth are OK at the moment so it was the lowest price for me today. My teeth are a pretty horrible colour but apparently quite hard wearing. And I'm going to brush them very carefully from now on...

Go See Hot Fuzz

Hang on a minute. Let's see if I can find the right font. Ah. There it is.

Go See Hot Fuzz

Go now. Go quickly. You'll thank me. It is brilliant. Best film I've seen this year. Better than Bond (and that is saying something). Funny. Clever. Well made. True to itself.

The film is about a hot shot London copper banished to the sticks for being too efficient. But once he gets out there he finds something very nasty in the woodshed, and the church, and the florists. Gory, scary and funny in turn, it reminds you just how good Simon Pegg is. I'm going to buy the DVD as soon as it comes out. And in the meantime I'm going to re-watch all my Spaced episodes again.

Cheesy Wotsit Challenge

I've been giving the first XNA lectures to students this week. This is actually a world first; the first time ever that XNA has been used to teach C# to first year students in Hull by a tall bloke who needs a haircut.

Anyhoo, it has gone pretty well. I had a few minutes spare at the end of the lecture so I showed the students "Hot Salad Death With Cheese". I've given them the source of the code and offered a bag of Walkers crisps as a prize for the person who produces the best game based on it. If you fancy a go you can pull the files down from here.

Normal Service

For the last couple of weeks the car has been displaying "Service Required" and showing me a little green picture of a spanner. I figured it was trying to tell me something. I checked in the handbook and apparently it needs servicing. So today I took it to my favourite garage and turned them loose on it. I've got it back and the car seems just the same, although the message has gone and I am a couple of hundred pounds poorer.

Questions abound. What would happen if I'd ignored the message?Would the spanner turn red?  If I kept ignoring it, would the text change to "Service Me Now or Die" and the airbag go off? Would the engine management system eventually start making the car run badly and force my hand? Would the GPS, if I had one, tell me that all roads lead to the garage? Did the service just involve turning the message off?

It begins..

I've started a Playstation 3 sinking fund (wonder why it is called a sinking fund?). Anyhoo, item one is here. Next up is my tasteless clock (a timepiece since you asked - nothing to do with my face).

Playtime Postponed

I can't get my hardware to work. Lights flash but nothing happens. I've got some lovely toys to play with and I can't get anything to go. It's like "Christmas morning and no batteries" all over again.

Except with RS232 cables.

Am I Spam?

I've sent some email of late which I don't think has been read at the destination. In fact, I think that my deathless prose has just ended up in the spam folder of the recipient. I wasn't offering any little blue pills, I was just getting in touch. But perhaps because the correspondence was from a new address and the content included a web link the filter may have decided that this was fishy..

What I really need is some form of "From Rob and therefore highly important" tag that will get the attention of people the world over.

Then again, if it fell into the wrong hands.......

Pirates Ahoy

Went to see number one daughter play tonight. Actually,didn't see her play at all, since she was in the orchestra pit at the York University Gilbert and Sullivan Society production of Pirates of Penzance.

The PR machine

Now, as you all probably know, I'm not really one for culture. I remarked, as we were listening to what I now know to be the overture, "Aren't there supposed to be singers in this..."

Anyhoo, the production was excellent. It is surprising how many of the songs have found their way into my head over the years. It was great to see the performers enjoying themselves as much as the audience. Actually there is not much of a story to the show, it is more a collection of sketches and songs and a bit of shameless pandering to Queen Victoria at the end. But that didn't get in the way of the fun. I took the tiny camera and grabbed a few snaps.

Pirates!

Ladies!

The model of a modern Major General....

The Police

The happy ending....

Got Hardware

I've got me some .NET Micro Framework hardware. Donald, my co-author, has sent me an i-MSX system to play with. It is very nice, but scarily fragile. Given my experience with hardware earlier in the week (current thinking is that I converted a functioning but wrong memory device into a non-functioning but still wrong device by cunning use of a nailfile- at least it should give the chaps at Ebuyer something to laugh at before they stamp "Rejected" on my letter) I fired the device up with some trepidation.

At present it doesn't work. This is no surprise. It connects via RS232 and so I'll need to use one of my copious collections of cables and lights to get the signals aligned correctly on the plugs. But it does light up. And it looks very promising.