The latest very silly game is on the stocks. (or should that be in the stocks). I've even got the title screen finished, as you can see above. The letters rotate and jiggle in a most engaging manner, and purists will note that the shadows for the text are in exactly the right place for all of them.
Clever eh?
Now all I need to do is write the game itself....
I wrote this ages ago, and I still like it:
"The dish was concerned about the way that her father kept introducing her to spoons."
Well, actually, not here. They are at VerySillyGames. These are actually the PDF files for chapters 1 and 2 that went to the printers. I've also included all the sample code so that you can make yourself a moodlight. I've posted them in celebration of the fact that the book is now being printed, ready for a release towards the end of Feb.
For some reason (actually a search to find the seven signs of ageing - don't ask) I found my way back to my old Crazy World site today. I had a read of some of my old posts, circa 2005.
I was much funnier then.
Perhaps the extra cares of the world in the intervening three years have worn me down. Perhaps I have run out of whimsey. Either way, I have now resolved to up the light hearted content (and probably the number of puns) and really, really write another Trip Hazard episode.
And maybe a sequel to The Little Brown Ikea Pencil of Doom.
You have been warned.
I've been worrying about this. Perhaps I'm just more grown up than I used to be. After all, by my reckoning I've got three of the seven signs of ageing.
The new semester started today. Did my first lecture at 12:15. Didn't manage to escape until ten minutes after the finish, because there was so much discussion about what I'd said. I love lectures like that. At lunchtime I went out for a walk and took the little camera with me. Whenever I travel far afield I take lots of pictures, and I really must remember that there are some nice bits just around my workplace too.
I love the colours on this tree
Go Hannah Pickard
Green campus
The Venn Building
I thought I'd take some photos of the flowers I got on Friday. Seemed to come out OK.
Since my early experiments with speech recognition I had been looking out for a decent head set. I was really pleased when I discovered some Logitech headphones at a knockdown price in our local Staples store. I took them home and plugged them in and started talking. And they didn't work very well.
The sound was indistinct and the recognition was very poor. I spent a while fiddling with the settings and re-training but it was nowhere near as good as it used to be. At this point I decided that I might have bought a duff device so I did a little investigating.
Rather surprisingly, results seemed to be equally bad with the headset microphone switched off or even unplugged. After some investigation I discovered the speech recognition software was still using the microphone inside the computer. It seems that it doesn't always automatically select the headset microphone.
However, now I've managed to make the switch must handle the speech recognition works an awful lot better.
A tip, you can disable and enable sound devices by going to Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound and clicking Manage audio devices. This opens up the Sound dialogue. When you disable a device it rather annoyingly vanishes from the list of devices. You can get a device back again, so you can re-enable it, by right clicking in the device window and selecting show disabled devices from the context menu that appears.
Today we said goodbye to Jane Evison. The name might not be familiar, but if you've ever been to one of the degree ceremonies at Hull you will have seen her handiwork in action. Over the years she has worked behind the scenes to make everything seem as effortless as possible. She is a great person to work with, although she doesn't suffer fools particularly gladly, which makes her getting on well with me especially surprising.
We had a leaving do for her this afternoon, she said some thank-you's and rather surprised both myself and James, the other graduands marshal, by giving us both a bunch of flowers each. Thanks a bunch (literally) - although I now have to explain to number one wife why I'm being given flowers....
Good luck in the future Jane, have fun.
Today I did my final routine for this set of ceremonies. These were some students from our department, who I'd actually taught, which was nice. As a celebration I took the big camera and the fancy lens and tried to get a photograph of everyone at once. The light could have been better, but the results do seem to be recognisable. Although I can't find myself in the pictures anywhere....
Front of house graduands
Stage graduands
Marshal's eye view of the Vice Chancellors speech
After the ceremony
The weather was a bit dull and blustery, but a good time was had by all.
There are a few more pictures on my Flickr Account. Click on any of the above images to go there.
I was Graduands Marshal at three degree ceremonies today. Wore the hat, did the intro and got everyone down and into the right place. Great fun, if hard work. All the audiences were terrific and everyone played their part just right, even the nervous graduands who were all splendid. Well done to you all. I'm doing my final intro tomorrow for our Computer Science students, which will be quite an occasion. I might even try out a new joke...
We only had one Honorary Graduate, but he was great. Sir Michael Alan Willcocks, KCB accepted his degree with an excellent and self deprecating speech. Most speakers at degree ceremonies try to pass on some wisdom to the audience, and Sir Michael was no exception. He said something which I think is actually excellent advice. He said that if you have a problem, rather than worrying about it you should try to do something about it. If you can't do anything about it, it is not a problem - it is a fact.
Went out to the movies tonight, I am Legend. We left the house with the intention of seeing the St. Trinians movie, but we thought that something a little less lightweight might hit the spot better.
I am Legend is not lightweight. It is actually a zombie flick. I'm not saying that it is based on the video game "Resident Evil", all I'm saying is that the producer, the director, the writer and Will Smith must have played the game quite a lot. And got killed a lot.
The premise (the last man left alive is not alone) is quite an interesting one, but it has been done before. The whole film is basically a long downward spiral, with an uplifting bit at the end to stop the audience from all diving under busses after they leave the cinema.
And finally, a note to world leaders, when someone called Dr. Crippen invents a virus that purports to kill cancer, I think we should be very careful about letting her use it on real people.....
This morning found me performing an unexpected Exam invigilation in the Sports Centre. I was down as reserve invigilator and when someone didn't turn up I had greatness thrust upon me. I wasn't that keen to be honest, until I saw the content of the paper I was invigilating, which had the wonderful title of "Evil". Thinking I might be good at evil, since I practice a lot at home apparently, I had a look at the questions. They were very thought provoking and I quite fancied having a go at them. The last one was "Is evil art?". Profound stuff.
Then tonight it was down to the pub for the first Preston Foster Appreciation Society meeting in a long while. A great time was had which, to be honest, was not very profound. For some reason I found the following very funny.
"I was feeling a little under the weather last week, so I went to the doctor to find out what it might be. He told me it was raining."
Perhaps you had to be there.
Apparently today is officially the "Worst Day of the Year". A combination of Christmas credit card bills, lousy weather and failed New Resolutions conspire to make today the worst day ever.
But not for me.
I've just found out that Hull University has got four teams into next round of the UK Microsoft Imagine Cup Software Development competition. Congratulations to Stuart, Kamilla, Callum, Ashley, David, Kenny, Sam, Nicholas, Anthony, Jon and Jonathan who make up the successful teams. Well done everyone! What is especially impressive is that at least two of the teams are made up of first year students who only joined the department in September last year.
The next stage for each team is a trip to Manchester to further develop their competition entries and perfect their pitching skills, leading to a Dragon's Den style final in London later this year.
I can't wait.
Whilst playing with Photoshop I've dug out one of my old pictures to use as desktop wallpaper. It is a tiny bit out of focus, but the colours are very nice.
Microsoft have stopped making my favourite image manipulation tool. The 2006 version of Digital Image Suite was the last, which is rather sad as I always quite liked the program. Unfortunately, the code is showing its age a bit now, and it doesn't handle raw camera images very well, and so I've had to look around for a new image processing program. Paint .NET is great for a freebie, but doesn't do much with raw images and I also wanted some image cataloguing tools.
So last week I downloaded a 30 day evaluation copy of Photoshop Elements from Adobe, and this week I bought a book which tells me how to use the program (essential in this case because even a seasoned computer user like me finds some of the ways the program works to be quite opaque). Next week (or perhaps the week after) I might even buy the software itself.
I've always had a kind of "dis-affection" for Adobe software. It never seems to quite work properly for me. Their PDF reader is a huge, unwieldy beast for something which is essentially a file viewer, and it really upsets me when such a lowly program insists on rebooting my machine when it has updated itself. It used to annoy me even more when it hid the update confirmation window behind everything else, and brought my machine to a standstill waiting for a response. Having said that, the latest reader does have some rather nice tools that you can use to annotate PDFs which are rather cute, although I guess they contribute to the "bloatiness" of the program and make it much slower to load when all I want to do is look at a document.
Anyhoo, I digress. The Elements installation went smoothly, and I quickly had a picture open for edit. And I got that sinking feeling again. All I wanted to do was darken one part of the image, to hide some of the background. An adjustment layer might have hit the spot, if I could have figured out how to mask it over the bits that I need. A darkening brush might have been nice too if I could figure out how to use it. There's usually a scene in most action movies where the hero gets into the pilot's seat in a helicopter, spaceship, ocean liner or some such and is confronted by a huge, complicated array of controls. You then get a close up of their baffled face as they scan the buttons, dials and levers in front of them. I get that face whenever I use Elements. Stuff I never want to do ("Conte Crayon" anyone?) is right in front of me and stuff I always want to do ("make this bit darker") is nowhere to be seen. In the end I gave up and resolved to buy a book.
I then had a go with the photo catalogue software. Now, granted, bringing 50 gigs of images into the index in one go might be pushing it a bit, but I was hoping for something a bit more useful then a terse "import failed" message after thirty minutes of hard disk rattling. I imported the pictures in a directory at a time and this time it worked OK. Then Elements started nagging me to do a backup of my catalogue so eventually I said yes, hooked up an external drive and pointed the program at it. At which point it put 24 thousand images into the root directory of the disk. Most backup programs that I've used create a directory to put their files in. Not Elements. Actually, kudos to Vista here, in that I managed to select all the files and put them into a more sensible place without the file explorer window tipping over.
However, the program is growing on me bit by bit. I've been reading the book I bought to find out what it can do, and it really is a powerful beast. And perhaps I've been a bit harsh in expecting it to just work. We shall see.
Apparently, in the jungle all the image editing is done by "Photoshop Elephants".
"Waiter, why have you served me a dictionary with my meal?"
"Well sir, you did ask for the full English breakfast".
I'm listening...
I'm presently marking loads of software submissions from our second year course. This involves looking at some designs, making some comments, coming up with a mark and them moving on to the next one.
A hundred times.
I thought that rather than type everything I'd try speaking it instead. So, for the first time, I hooked a microphone up to the computer and fired up Vista's speech recognition.
I didn't have particularly high hopes. The last time I saw it being used was when a hapless presenter tried to show off a beta version of windows at a talk they were giving. The results were highly amusing, and probably the product of beta code and a dodgy microphone setup. However, they did serve to put me off trying to use the system (although it is very funning when the presenter says "delete sentence" and the system dutifully puts "delete sentence" into the text).
The training session is interesting. You go through learning how to control the program whilst at the same time the system is learning how you speak. This means that you can say profoundly wrong things as you train it, and it still seems to work (although this will come back and haunt you later when it uses the trained data to try and make sense of your real speech).
It took a while to complete all the training tasks, but there are a large number of options and you really could use the speech interface to control pretty much all of the machine. The text correction stuff is very clever, and makes it easy to correct particular errors.
Then it was time to use the system in anger. And it worked pretty well. I could just dictate comments and they are decoded and fed them into the window where the cursor happens to be. I didn't find any particular need to speak more slowly, the system actually seems to work better if you throw a whole load of text at it rather than single words - probably because it uses a lot of extra context information from the text to decode the sounds. I knew I was on to something when I started using the voice input to write and send an email. The only problem is that you have to compose the whole sentence in your head before saying it, and this is not usually how I write.
Having said all this, I'm definitely going to get a proper microphone and start using the speech input as part of the way I work. If you've never tried it I'd recommend it, I'm not sure which versions of Vista it is supplied with (I'm using Ultimate - which seems to have everything) but if it is there it is definitely worth a go.
I've finally got around to launching verysillygames properly. The new site has downloads, an FAQ and all sorts. I'd love to know what you all think, and if you have any ideas for content let me know.
ITV have brought back News at Ten, which used to be an institution in our house when I was younger. It was usually the cue for my sister and I to have an argument about whose turn it was to make the supper.
I miss those days.
Anyway, pop quiz question with no prize.
"What links News at Ten with Dr. Who?"
Sigh. Nobody knows anything these days (or perhaps they are too shy to post, or admit they know).
The link is that the theme music for both programmes was written by the same person, Ron Grainer,
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
Begin to Code with JavaScript is now available for purchase and download. You can find it here
