Sign of the Times

These "lucky" people were at my XNA talk today.

..and here is the rest of the room

Another smashing audience, thank you for laughing in all the right places..

I'll put all the content up here tomorrow.

Then it was off to do  book signing. The man who runs the bookshop had, perhaps somewhat optimistically, got 100 copies of my book in to sell.

I ended up selling 10, which was nice. Then I went around and took a look at what the students here are doing with XNA.

The answer is lots, and very well. I saw some Imagine Cup entries and some very impressive work. Well done folks. And now I'm zooming of to catch a plane home for fish and chips.....

A Night for the Geeks

Geek night was a blast.

 

I've always wanted to see my name in lights. This is the project of the team presenting before me, who showed what happens when you marry dance floor displays with Wii remotes. They could draw on it, play games and, as you can see above, write silly messages.

The audience. Sorry it is a bit blurred, but the house light were off at this point..

The talk was fantastic, even the 8 player button bash game went well, although the players on controller one did suffer a bit when someone reset the counter....

I'm doing it all again tomorrow. And a book signing.....

Micro Framework at DevDays 2008

So today it is time for another chapter in my jetsetting life...

The view from the plane was nice.

They had this special machine for installing tall presenters..

The talk was on the .NET Micro Framework, which is something I really enjoy taking about. The audience were great, and put up with my jokes, which is nice. I got to know them so well that I told them about "My Awful Experience in Schipol Airport a Toilet" this morning.....

I always take the pictures at the start, while the audience is still smiling. And in the room....

Packing for DevDays

Tomorrow is DevDays in Amsterdam. I'm just packing and charging gadgets for the trip. I'm giving three talks, including one at Geek Night.  I made a spectacularly embarrassing video for the event where I pretended to confuse the name with Greek Night. Fortunately I can't seem to find it on the site.....

Powerdown Power

First I must declare a vested interest here. David has promised to buy me a vest if I mention his software.

Actually no. In the old days only my mother bought my vests. Now number one wife does it.

But I work with David, which is how come I can recommend things he makes. Like Powerdown. You can get it here. It turns your computer off when you aren't using it. And makes it come back on quickly when you need it again.  It is particularly interesting for large companies, who might have hundreds, perhaps thousands, of machines which they would like to make greener.

Powerdown also provides a way of controlling the power characteristics of large networks of computers from a single point, properly integrating with corporate systems to make things easy to manage.

Well worth a try.

Amazing Picture

I was messing around with some software to see if I can use webcam as a video viewer of the screen of a Zune. It doesn't work. (I can't focus close enough). But you do get amazing pictures when you leave the webcam lying on the desk.

Cheesy Music

I'm doing a session at Dev Days next week in their Geek Night slot. It is on XNA, and so I thought I'd have a play with "Hot Salad Death with Cheese" and get it running on the Zune.

Took 30 minutes.

Took another 20 to make the game play a random music track and display a spectrum analyzer as the music plays. Great stuff. I'm really looking forward to the talk now..

Hot salad death with music and cheese.

Buy My Book (please)

I was overjoyed to find last week that Waterstones bookshop in Hull had a copy of my book in stock.

I was less overjoyed to discover this week that the copy is still there. Now I'm fretting as to why nobody has bought it. Of course, they might have sold hundreds and kept refilling the shelf.

But I doubt it.

I got a royalty cheque yesterday and so there must be some copies selling somewhere, but I'd love for the one in my home town (so to speak) to sell as well.

Nearly Perfect

I've got the Mac just about how I want it. Everything works, I've got four versions of Visual Studio on it and most of the data that I need. Except for one thing.

The icon for iTunes is broken. It just displays the standard folder one, rather than the proper picture.  I've rebuilt the icon cache and spent much too long (i.e. more than five minutes) trying to fix it.

Oh well, according to some religions anything perfect is an offence to God. So I guess that makes my machine as perfect is it could be.

Fun Beyond Imagining

Today is the day that the Imagine Cup entries are due in. Cue much panic, tweaking of software and poster preparation.

..and a five minute trip around the campus to get a picture of Team X in their natural habitat. You think writing software is hard? Try getting these three to all smile at the same time.

Anyhoo, the entry deadline is midnight tonight. I reckon they'll make it with minutes to spare. Minutes...

Iron Man

Went to see Iron Man tonight. Good film. It's a superhero movie with a beating electric heart. Having a proper actor in the lead works very well, Robert Downey Jr. is excellent in the role. And it is nice to see no implausible "super powers" and completely broken laws of physics and instead some very nice looking, but vaguely fallible, technology.

The story was good, the climax was proper, there's a "will they-won't me" romance storyline in the works. I'll be there to see the sequel and the one after that.

Blue Zune

All that work. Just for this!

I've got my Zune working on my newly fettled PC. To celebrate I've made the screen go all blue (actually this is the default project). Time to get some cheese in there methinks.

Clean Machine

If you ever seen the film Amélie you'll know how good it is. If you haven't, then I envy you, because you get to have the experience of seeing it the first time. One of the best films ever. Ever.

Anyhoo, it has a scene at the start where it describes how her father likes to pass the time by emptying out his toolbox, cleaning it and then putting everything back in the right place.  It captures perfectly the idea of someone who likes to have one small part of his life completely under his control, and which he can make how he wants it. I think I'm a bit the same with my PC.

Today, for a number of reasons, I wiped my MacBook clean and restored everything from scratch. I've done a lot of work too, I've read all the final year project reports that I'm marking and I've also made a start on tidying my office. You can get a lot done when your computer is broken...

I've been meaning to re-install Vista for a while, there is a broken install of an old XNA version which is stopping it working with the Zune and it doesn't pick up my camera properly. It also has some software on it which I'd be happier without, and I wanted to re-partition the hard drive to give more space to Vista and less to OS X. Nothing wrong with the Mac operating system, it is just that Vista does all the things I need to do, and I know how to make it do them. I like using the Mac, and GarageBand is a program I'd love to spend more quality time with, but I don't think I need to give it as much disk space as I did.

So, after taking complete backups on four different disk drives I wiped the Vista partition and tried to use the Mac BootCamp program to create a larger one.

And there the fun started. The first time BootCamp didn't work, and told me that it couldn't move the partitions because some files were fixed. The second time it tried it crashed the machine, leaving the disk file structure a bit awry. I fixed that, tried it for a third time and had the same problem. So, I wiped OS X and did a complete install of that, so that I could then put Vista on afterwards. 

Operating installation is nowhere near as fraught as it used to be, both OS X and Vista loaded themselves onto the machine with a minimum of fuss. There were occasional moments of high drama, updating the firmware in the Mac was a bit scary, as was the part where I found out Apple was updating one part of the system whilst Microsoft was twiddling with another at the same time, which could have gone badly, but all in all it was just a case of looking up from what I was reading and clicking OK every now and then.

By the end of the day I'm about back to where I stared operating system wise, now all I have to do is put the applications and my document files back into place.

Good Search Tool

The heck with Yahoo. I reckon Microsoft should buy Clusty.

Remote Controlled Rocket Launcher for a Fiver? Yes please.

Went to Asda today to do the shopping.

I could have bought a magazine for a fiver. Or one of these.... Guess which I got?

It is ace, you can steer it round the floor and rapid fire off 12 missiles. If only we had a cat...

Major Wit

Geoff: "Went to see Iron Man last Monday"
Rob: "Can he do shirts?"

Students at TechEd 2008

One of our students came to see me this morning. He is hoping to go to TechEd 2008 in Orlando and wanted me to write a supporting letter for his visa application.

You bet I will. I'm actually going to TechEd 2008 myself (I'm giving a session on the .NET Micro Framework) and I know what a great experience it is. Particularly if you are a student.

I've advised him to prepare carefully before he goes to make sure that he gets as much as possible out of the trip. He should be able to get his session schedule sorted out in advance of the conference, and he really should make use of the Hands On Labs to play with the latest toys. There are also discount Microsoft Certified Professional tests that can be taken on site, but for me the most wonderful feature of the event is the "Ask the Experts" bit.

It continues to amaze me that Microsoft puts its absolute top dogs out there for the public to harangue.  Perhaps it is because they are too cheap to hire "booth babes", but I like to think that it is because the really want their developers to meet up with the people that use their stuff.

When you go and talk to someone on the XNA, or Micro Framework or Sharepoint or whatever stand at "Ask the Experts" you are actually talking to the product managers and developers that make the product. They aren't just customer support people, they are the authors themselves. Most delegates at the conference just use this opportunity to see what swag is being given away at each booth. But a few have cottoned on to this part of the conference and take the opportunity to get deep answers to hard problems.

I've told our student to make sure that he goes around the experts and has a chat with them, from my experience they love talking about the stuff they make and why they think it is the best in the business. I really hope he makes it out there, I just wish more students could get to go.

XNA now available for Zune

Alfred reports that you can now get the first CTP version of XNA 3.0. This is the one that will make it possible to create and deploy games on Microsoft Zune devices. Wonderful stuff. If you want to write games for mobile devices you should take a look. All we want now, Mr. Microsoft, is a UK release of the Zune. Please.

Pain in the neck

I don't think it was the Wii fit. In fact I'm fairly sure that it wasn't. However, the bottom line is that at the moment my neck doesn't work properly. I'm moving a bit like a Cyberman, turning my whole body to face people rather than just rotating the head part. Looking slightly to the right is fine, looking more hurts like heck.  It seems to be easing a bit, but I've been playing GTA 4 rather than exercising.

Just in case.

Hornsea Bank Holiday

Good weather on an English Bank Holiday? Shurely shome misthtake. We went to Hornsea for the afternoon.

Baby geese

Hornsea mere looking good

Even the sea front looks good today. Although that water does look a bit brown...

I love stalls like these.

This is Hornsea Sunday (and Bank Holiday) market. Amazing place, with a water feature and a place you can buy old photos that might have you in it. I checked, but there were none of me.