Enchanting Enchanted

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I quite like some kids films. They have fewer bad things happen in them and, give or take a bit of singing, they are usually great fun. A well written one can be a treat, with slapstick for the kids (which I love) and some quite zingy dialogue (which I love). Enchanted hits the spot on both counts. It gives a nce take on fairytale vs. real life with some funny moments and some genuinely touching ones too. You get a standout performance from the princess and the ending is a properly happy one. Well worth a look.

...or you could buy an iPhone

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I love my iPhone. It is a highly covetable device which is a genuine pleasure to use. It is just a pity that it is not quite as useful as I'd like. I end up having to put the sim into my Smartphone when I want to do something useful like manage my email or work with Word documents.

But I've been doing some sums and playing with other toys and I've fallen over something very interesting. An iPhone costs around 270 quid, and you have to sign up for a scary 18 month contract that will cost you at least 35 quid a month. Scary money. For roughly the same outlay you can get a SkypePhone, an eeePC and a cheap USB Bluetooth adapter. You get all the internet you can eat for around 10 pounds a month and you can walk away when you like. And the eeePC is not the same as an iPhone from the style point of view, but it is a whole shed load of useful.  It works a treat over Bluetooth with the Skypephone to give a proper 3G browsing experience. You don't have quite the posing power, but you can do everything that the iPhone can do, plus an awful lot more.  Worth a thought I reckon.

The Golden Compass

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I think I'm getting bored with movies packed with magic and mystery. I've seen too many bits where one character looks at another and asks in awe "You mean that this might be the chosen one?" And later someone says "..but no one must ever know..". And then we get a "..and took away my rightful throne...".

Well, The Golden Compass is all that and more, you even get a "..Luke, I am your father" moment towards the end. And you end up thinking "Meh. So what?".

Everyone plays their part quite proficiently. There are good goodies and bad baddies and baddies who might be goodies and I'm sure if they ever get to make the other two in the series we'll find goodies who are turned to the bad side by something or other. The special effects are pretty good, apart from a few "video game" moments in the fight scenes. Nicole Kidman, who must have been sponsored by a detergent company judging by the amount of white she wears, plays her part very well and even the child with awesome powers carries off her role with a certain amount of verve, even if her accent slides around a bit from scene to scene.

It is based on a book that I've not read, but it stands up well enough on its own if you like that sort of thing. And the problem for me is that there has been a lot of that sort of thing over the last few years.

Party and Fan Man

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Went to a party today. We had our "office do" at Fudge in Hull. Very nice it was too. Great food, great company, great times.

And no photographs. (I forgot).

Then it was back to Paul's, where he strapped a propeller on his back and tried not to fly around his garden. No. Really. Paul is a recent convert to paragliding, having just helped to create the world's first paraglider simulator. He wanted to show us his new rig and was offering drinks and sweeties, so we were all round there like a shot. So it was that, drinks in hand, we watched as he fired up his machine and tried to use it to blow cast iron garden furniture around. Now this I did get a picture of.

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Fan man

When Paul bought his house, it came with a collection of plates. Including this one.

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I'm not sure if it is dishwasher safe, but it does have a unique style.

After the party we wandered back to the office for some gaming. I had to zoom off early and do some other bits and bobs, but I did manage to win at Wii tennis (although Warren beat me at Guitar Hero).

EeePC Tiny Computer

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I really must stop doing this. Whenever I come into some money (in this case some modest royalties for a CD-ROM I wrote some time back with number one son) I spend it on a computer.

This time though I've got a little peach. It is an Asus EeePC.  I'd heard these were hard to get hold of. That's like a red rag to a bull where I'm concerned. If you want one, and they are really neat, I'd recommend trying your nearest Toys'R'Us, where I managed to pick one up, after considerable agonising, yesterday. They cost around 220 pounds. For your money you get a tiny laptop with a little 7 inch display. Of course you can get "proper" laptops for only a few pounds more, but the EeePC is interesting for a number of reasons.

For a start it really is small. If you want a proper laptop as small as the Asus you would be hard pushed to get one for less than seven or eight hundred pounds, and it has a battery life of over three hours, which is again very promising for the price and size. It also has no moving parts to break, unless you count a little fan and the keys, and uses an internal 4GB solid state drive for storage. There is an SD slot for additional memory, three USB slots for external devices, WIFI, a webcam, a wired network connection and even an external monitor socket. It feels very robust and is powered by an Intel Celeron processor tied to 512Mb of memory.

It can run Windows XP, but it is supplied running a variant of Linux which contains all the bundled applications that you would need to make the machine useful, including Open Office 2.0, Firefox for web browsing, a collection of Picture, Music and Media utilities, some teaching applications and a few games. The user experience is very like Windows, with just a few rough edges here and there.  It booted up, connected to our WIFI and worked a treat. The only scary bit was getting it to print, which involved compiling a printer driver and installing it (good job that Number One Son was around to do that bit).

If you want a tiny PC to take with you on trips, and would like something that won't break the bank and you won't fret about too much, then I strongly recommend it. If you are thinking of getting your kids a notebook PC, but are worried about their fragility and price(the notebook that is, not the kids), I'd recommend it very strongly. It is also a hackers delight. It is essentially a PC platform, but small and cheap and very easy to develop for. I'm going to put Mono on mine so I can keep writing C# goodness. Number one son wants to put one on a robot. There are stories of an Eeepc that has been made to run Vista (quite well so they say) and an XP version will be available in 2008 which will be very interesting.

What I want to do next is couple it up to the SkypePhone so that I've got a portable, high performance, network terminal. If I put XP on it I could do this tomorrow. The machine is supplied with a set of XP driver disks and I really am tempted to do this.

Deathmatch Bot Fun

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I took some time off from the glossary to have a go in our Deathmatch challenge today. We've run these before and they are always great fun. We write C# programs that control bots in Unreal Tournament and pit them against each other. I'd not had much time to write any code so I quickly knocked up a "happy camper" who grabbed a gun and then took pot shots at anyone who wandered past. If you want to run your own challenge you can find out more here. The going was tough.

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A tense moment

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Darren's Ripper Santa does the business (note my best score)

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Zoe takes first prize from Darren

"If you need me, I'll be in the Glossary"

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I'm presently writing the last, last, bits of the XNA book at the moment.

Pre-order it here in the UK and here in the US. You know you want to. You know I want you to. So go on. The best book on programming ever written. And the only one with cheese based gameplay.

The plan is to have a glossary at the end which describes all the programming terms. Good idea, except that I have to write it. Each time I used a term that I wanted to expand on I put a note in the glossary file that I needed to go back and fill that bit in. And the time has come to do the filling in. That means over 40 pages of writing.

I'm around half way through ("N is for Namespace") at the moment. It is due for the end of tomorrow.....

Deadly Toasters

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Never had much luck with toasters. The old one repeatedly tried to kill me, and the new one doesn't work at all. Ages ago we bought a shiny toaster, mainly because the picture on the box had a funny misprint. It worked fine, but it wouldn't give us the toast back. Kind of a pop-down design. It was practically begging me to insert a pointy, preferably metal, instrument into its innards to try and prise the hot bread out of its steely grip. Instead I used to turn it upside down and shake it, which spread crumbs around the kitchen and nearly set fire to the base, what with heat rising the way it does.

So on Saturday we bought a new set of toaster and kettle. The toaster has three buttons  and lights, a big dial and comes with a "User Manual". But if doesn't work. Of course by the time we got round to testing it we'd thrown away all the boxes and packaging, so I'm going to have to go down to Tesco armed only with a receipt and an aggrieved manner. No fair. I like toast.

What Can't You Fix with Cable Ties?

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Some aspects of life seem to have an irresistible attraction to me. Take car window winders for example. I seem to be acquiring considerable familiarity with the darned things, mainly because the cars that I own have windows that go down. But not up.

Thus it was with the Scenic, and now car of number one wife has the same problem. My first solution,a length of duct tape over the gap was not entirely successful, and definitely not elegant, so today it was out with the big spanners and into the fray.

Last time I tried to take the door of the car to pieces it won. I was so concerned about damaging the thing that I gave up and got out the sticky tape. But this time it was different. I had no such qualms. Truly I was a man beyond fear. Although I didn't want to break any fingernails.

There is something a bit embarrassing about forcing something off with a hammer and chisel and then finding that there is a perfectly simple, and really neat, trick to removal. But there you are. I won.

Anyhoo, once I had the thing to bits the problem was obvious. The car maker had sent a plastic boy to do a man's job. The most important component, the link between slide and window, was a bit of bent, and now broken, plastic slide. Ho hum. Time for a really subtle and cunning invisible mend. As I went to get a bit of wood to prop the window up I mentioned the problem to Dave next door.

"I'll just be a minute" he said.

He came back with some jumbo cable ties, linked slide and window and presto. Fixed. What a guy.

Bag Yourself a SkypePhone

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I wish I had more friends. Or more people who wanted to talk to me. The two free Skypephones that were very kindly sent to me for testing have languished on my office desk for the last week, whilst my iPhone keeps reminding me that I've not actually made a call for several days. I'm obviously not the kind of person who will go for the Skype part of the Skypephone, but the way that it provides cheap mobile network access for my notebook is attractive.

Today I saw someone up town offering the phones for 85 quid a pair, which is a very enticing price. And you can get them in white too.

If you want one for free you can take part in a little competition here. The idea is you pitch just how much you really want one, how it will change your life etc etc. The best pitches get a phones. My suggestion is not to go too far overboard on this though. A big production number with dancers and a sky-written message at the end would probably cost more to produce than the 49 quid or so you have to lay out for a phone of your own. But a cheap, heartfelt, plea might hit the spot.

By mentioning this I suppose that this means I'm actually taking part in some kind of viral marketing but what the hey, I like the product.