For the love of Mars bars

Today we had our first practical session. As part of the work I thought it might be a larf to ask the class to email me with the answer to a simple debugging question. This is the first ever lab for these folks, and so I thought not many would get in touch. I offered  a prize of a Mars bar for the first correct answer.

Lots of people like Mars bars it seems. Loads of responses. I've just spent around an hour going through and sending "Right but too late" messages.

I'm wondering about getting our labs sponsored by Mars...

First Year Welcome Party

Qn: "What is the combined age of the "Chuckle Brothers"?

Ans: - you'd know if you'd been at our First Year party...

We had a quiz, and Guitar Hero, and a PS3, and Wii Tennis, and 8 player Halo 3, and free drinks and food, and, and, and.....

And it was good.

Many thanks to Warren for bankrolling the operation and Adam, Simon, Dan, Zoe, Sam, Helen, Joan and Amanda for helping make things go with a swing (and apologies if I've missed anyone out). I took a camera (some of our students have got some amazing cameras - we must sort out a Flickr group for pictures) and took some happy snaps.

Full Swing

What half the room does when you shout "smile"

What the other half does..

These folks came first in the Quiz

These came second

And these won the, er, "special" prize

Big riffs. Sam found this amazing disco sound system that we ran Guitar Hero through. And dig those groovy lights on the pillars...

On the left we have Wii Tenis and PS3 Motorstorm, in the middle we have Guitar Hero and on the right, for your pleasure, we have 8 player Halo 3.

It was a great night. Hopefully more (and perhaps less grainy) pictures will surface. I'll put them on Flickr if they do..

Halo 3 Hits Hull

We've been expecting you....

After last night's queuing to get hold of a Legendary Halo 3 pack for number one son (sorted, and what huge box) I set up a 360 on our big plasma screen for a select gathering to have a play. It looks good. Very good. I've not played myself yet, and I had loads of work planned for this evening but......

Guess Where?

Guess Where?
Originally uploaded by RobMiles.

Never Buy Clothes Un-supervised

As part of my drive towards greater sartorial elegance I was pleased to discover that "The Only Shop Where Rob Can Buy Clothes That Fit"(tm) was having a "three for two" deal on shirts at their new web site.

I was very proud of the way that I actually went Internet clothes shopping with a spring in my digital step, as it were, and ordered up three (including a rather racy one with red stripes).

I told number one wife about my cleverness at teatime.

"I hope they are not all cotton" she said. "If they are, they'll be swines to iron, and I'll make you do it".

Hmm. Oh well. They arrive in a couple of days. Here's hoping for a bit of polyester goodness..

Halo House

In keeping with the much anticipated launch of Halo 3 real soon, tonight I saw a house with "Master Chief" windows.

This is an original, completely unretouched picture. And I've got the RAW file from the camera to prove it. Spooky eh?

Update on 2007-09-25 08:54 by Rob

Oh, and I've just discovered that Microsoft have decided not to release a version of the game where the Master Chief joins the navy. It was going to be called "Halo Sailor".

What Price Loyalty?

I was in Waterstones yesterday buying a couple of books. When I paid for them the person at the till asked me if I had a Waterstones "Loyalty Card". I said no and paid up. As I left the shop I began to worry about this.

Was it disloyal not to get a loyalty card? When you get one, do you have to swear an oath? If you get one of the cards and then buy a book from Amazon, do they mind? Can you get stripped of your card for such transgressions? Do they have loyalty police?

I think I had a near escape there...

Copyright, what copyright?

I got this last week at Hornsea Market. Actually works very well, and definitely not a shameless ripoff of another toy with a boys name. Oh no.

I Love Autumn

I really like this time of year. I like it when the nights get that bit longer and there is a bit of a chill in the air. I've been wondering about why I like September so much, and I reckon that I've figured it out.

The students come back on Monday, including a whole new bunch of First Years. It means I'll be knee deep in lectures, labs and tutorials. Great stuff.

If you are reading this and coming to Hull for the first time as an undergraduate it will be nice to see you, and make sure that you come along to the welcome do on Thursday evening . We are going to have big screen Wii Tennis and Guitar Hero, along with a PS3 and other bits and bobs, free food, beer tokens and a silly quiz with impossible questions. And a prize (which I really must sort out).

Update on 2007-09-22 16:24 by Rob

If you have any real stinkers of questions you'd like to inflict on hapless first years and masters students, feel free to send them through and I'll give you a namecheck if I actually use your question..... 

Untamed Workforce

Microsoft has put up quite a funny spoof web site to showcase mobile working:

http://www.untamedworkforce.org/

It is quite neat, but the links drop you onto the Windows Mobile web site, which kind of gives the game away.

However, I was very pleased to find that the best of these sites (in my opinion) is still live. If you've not seen "Escape from Yesterworld" before, it is quite a treat. I especially like the videos:

http://www.escapeyesterworld.com/

XNA Bits and Bobs, and the power of XACT

I've added a new section to the XNA Book part. This is where I put all the little things that I've found out about XNA development. I've discovered a couple of things about using XACT which you might find useful. They are here.

On the subject of XACT (the program that you use to create audio content for XNA games) I've gone from mild loathing to strong affection. Sort of a love affair, but with wavebanks. It lets you do really nice things with your samples, so that you can create complex sound stages with only a few wave files. It will change playback settings each time it plays the same waveform, to make a single sample sound like hundreds of different ones. It will randomly select a sample from a range, so that you get a nice variation in sounds. It will even let you bind variables in your program to settings used for playback, so that the sound can get louder on the left when the spaceship moves to the left.

So far I've only really scratched the surface of the tool (which is all I'll have time to do in the book) but if you want a nice way to add sound to games you should take a look. It is free, supplied as part of the XNA 2.0 developers kit.

Widsets: another good link

Taking of good links, which we were, Simon put me on to this:

https://www.widsets.com/

They are little gadgets that you can load into your phone. A bit like the lovely PopFly, but for your mobile device. You can create and download gadgets into your phone, and the user interface is very neat.

They are written in Java, but I can live with that and they seem to work OK on my Smartphhone.

Very, very, very, very, very, very, very funny

Zoe put me on to these. This is my favourite one.

Happy Unwrapping

Well, I got my parcel, and it contained just what I wanted, another gadget.  I'll let you know what I think of it when I've got around to playing with it properly.

Oh, and I've had this idea for a film. It is about a young man who is injured in a freak bowling accident which leaves him with one leg shorter than the other. Fortunately, the pretty young assistant at the bowling alley finds his leaning gait rather attractive, and in the interval between the accident and him getting pioneering surgery to level off his walk they fall in love and get married. I'm going to call the film "While you were sloping".

Thank you. And good night.

WebGuide Goes Global

Some time ago I mentioned WebGuide. This is a wonderful tool for Windows Media Centre that lets you share your media all round the house, and indeed the world.

It seems that somebody in Redmond reads my blog (Hi, Bill!) because Microsoft have recently hired Doug Berret, the man who wrote the program, and will be making it part of future versions of Media Centre. This is great news, except for the fact that I bought mine (for the princely sum of ten pounds).

Then again, I did earn some money writing about it for Windows Vista magazine, so I guess we are about square on this.

My media PC is well past half way to paying for itself at the moment. Earlier this year we realised that the only bit of Sky+ that we actually used was the "record all EastEnders episodes" facility for number one wife. So we dumped it and got a Media Center PC which does the same thing and also lets me make DVDs of Shaun the Sheep, at a saving of 36 pounds a month.

I Live at the Wrong House

When I was 11 my parents bought me a new bike. This was a big thing to me. We went into Halfords in Lincoln to order it. It was a BSA Bermuda in red and blue and it had white wall tyres and a Sturmey-Archer three speed. It cost all of eighteen pounds.  (I sold it some years later, also for 18 pounds and bought a Solarvox stereo amplifier,but that is another story). Anyhoo, I got so excited that I made myself ill waiting for it to turn up. When the great day came I got up from my self inflicted sickbed and rode it around outside in my pyjamas.

I've always been like this with stuff arriving. Today I was all excited about a delivery that the UPS website had confidently announced would occur today. I worked from home specially to receive this magical package. Well, the delivery occurred today all right. But not at my house. Imagine my surprise and delight when the tracking website informed me that an attempt had been made to deliver the parcel to my home, where I was sitting waiting, and that apparently I wasn't in. I checked the mirror to make sure it was me, looked outside at the house number to make sure I was in the right place, and then rang UPS.

They have this clever voice response thing where you read our your tracking number and it tells you what you already know, without giving an obvious way to talk to a person. So I just said "chicken chicken chicken" instead of any numbers and after a while it put me through to a human who has hopefully sorted it out.

Although I'll believe it when I see it.

Hornsea Sunday

Today was a nice day. And we had a birthday to celebrate. So it was off to Hornsea Mere for a baked potato. And cheese.

It was very windy. But there were a few brave folk out in yachts

Then we went onto the front for donuts (forget your Crispy Cremes, these are the real deal - and six for a pound). And of course amusements....

Winning big at penny falls (you can actually see the pennies falling)

One of my ambitions, which looks like it might end up being thwarted by big city developers, is to visit Coney Island in New York. Hornsea is a bit like this I think with some amazing attractions. Including the "New Super Palmist".

The machine went up and down my hand and then printed out a very accurate assessment of my character....

I think that pretty much sums me up.

If you live in Hull you really should go to Hornsea.

I can't think of a title for this one

For some time we've been having phone problems. It seems that calls weren't being recorded, messages weren't getting through etc etc. So today I bought some new technology to try and fix the problem. Rang the home number to test it.....

"What is the mass of Jupiter?"

Strange. Rang off and tried again.....

"What is the population of China?"

Checked the box. Turns out we had bought a question machine by mistake.

Virtual Reach Vigo RSS Reader

If you've got a Smartphone with a free internet connection you might like to take a look at what Virtual Reach can do for you. They provide a neat RSS feed reader for mobile devices and also some quite cute services that you can use to get local information as well. And all for free.

http://virtualreach.com/index.htm

Accidental Art

I've been playing with XNA for the new book (book news coming soon, along with another chapter). As part of this I investigated the use of layers and transparency and what happens if you draw lots of coloured things on top of each other. I ended up with this rather attractive arty looking display which I've made into a clock.

Having decided that the output looked nice, I then reckoned that from a software point of view the code could be a lot better organised. So I went in and tidied things up, re-factored classes, improved the scaling and made the movement of the layers more realistic. And of course the "proper" version looked rubbish.

I'll be making the clock available on verysillygames.com later on. And you can actually see the clock in action here. It is a bit jerky, but it gives you an idea of how it works.

Video: XNA Groovy Clock