Blossom

I took this on the walk from the car park to the office. I like working here.

Big Crane

I don’t know who David Millington is. But I would love a go with his crane.

Mad March Bash

Today was the day of the Mad March Bash. This follows on from the Christmas bash we had at, er, Christmas, and has pretty much the same format. With a treasure Hunt too.

We had to use a different lab for the FragFest, but this did mean that we could have more systems, with 32 players taking part in mammoth Counterstrike action.

Network Gaming Action – but the only things moving are mice and keyboards

We tried using the Buzz quiz, and that was a great success. At Counterstike I got shot every time, but with Buzz I actually managed to win one contest. Go me.

Getting the Buzz

The food was the usual Pizza, fizzy drinks and afters. Including  (of course) Easter eggs.

Meat Feast was still the most popular…

We actually had a winner of the Treasure Hunt. The team “The Nuzzling Badgers” managed to find every single cunningly hidden tag. Even the very high one.

Now, that’s a prize worth winning.

The Dance Mats were popular as ever.

..as was Rock Band.

Thanks to everyone who came along, I think a good time was had. Now we start preparing for the Grand Finale Midsummer Bash.

There are some more pictures on Flickr. I’ve tagged them with hull2009madmarchbash.

Tag Treasure Hunt

Spend all evening setting up a Tag Treasure Hunt for our Mad March Bash tomorrow. I’m using these new fangled tags from Microsoft that let you use pretty much any mobile phone which has a camera and a network connection to read a printed tag.

The phone hooks up with the tag server which delivers a message, a business card or a web link. We’ve come up with 26 clues to 26 websites and 26 tag stickers. The idea is that you match the clue to the tag.

As an example, one clue was

"640K should be enough for anyone" But he claims he never said it

And the answer….

 

Tomorrow I’m going to print out the tags on the Pogo printer and then stick them around the department for the students to find. Should be fun.

X48 Cheesy Success

Last weekend four of our students went over to Derby to take part in the X48 Marathon gamecamp.  The idea was to create a game from scratch using C# and XNA 3.0 based on a particular theme. So it was that Harry Overs, Rob Eagle, Rob Hubbucks and Craig Dickman from our second year headed over to Derby to rub shoulders with lots of fellow game developers, many of whom were students from Masters levels courses.

Our lowly second years actually did quite well for themselves. The theme was “evolution” and by the simple technique of not sleeping for a day and a half they managed to come up with “Evo Fighter” a beat-em-up that merges arcade punching action with an exposition of the ideas of Darwin.

Part of the very funny start screen….

Evo Fighting Action

This managed to walk off with the “Cheesiest Game Award”. When the cheese arrives from Derby, I’ll put up a picture of the team with their prize. I’m very proud of them, and like to think I have taught them well. You can find out more about them here.

Apparently Channel 4 were there filming, so there might be some TV coverage too.

I’m hoping that the competition will become an annual event. I’m tempted to dress up as a student (some say I already do) so that I can take part if it runs again. Many thanks to everyone at Derby, Microsoft and Pixel-Lab for setting it up.

Off the Air

After a great weekend, everything broke. On Monday a router failed at my service provider, which knocked out the IP address that all my blog pages live at.

This probably worried me a lot more than it should. After all, it is not as if I run a business from these pages. But the thought that the link to the outside world was broken was kind of upsetting. I’ve been blogging for a long time, and it is the first time that I’ve been “off the air” like this.

Anyhoo, the new address is now in place, and you should be able to read this.

Splendid Sunday

This is turning out to be an excellent weekend. Went out for a superb meal at Fudge yesterday and spent this morning making things work that work (actually, number one son wrote most of the code – I see myself as more of an ideas man).

We now have multiple sensors talking to our .NET Micro Framework device and the next thing is to build the emulation environment and interface the actual sensor electronics.

This seemed as good a time as any to take a break and watch a dodgy James Bond movie, and so we did. There was no particular agreement on who was the best Bond, I think your choice says as much about your generation as it does your taste, but there seemed to be no doubt who was the worst, with Roger Moore coming out on top.

I think the film was “For Your Eyes Only”, but they made a whole bunch of anonymous Bond films in the eighties, and it could have been any one of them. It did have some hilarious “Hi-Tech” bits, where Bond could be seen manhandling what looked like RL-02 disk packs on a Digital Equipment machine (which as I remember provided a whole 20Mbytes of storage). Bond then spent some time sitting in red lighting doing something fatuous with a really old display, before going out and failing to get killed by idiot assassins.

Ideal Sunday afternoon fare.

First, Update the Firmware

Did some work on our Micro Framework project today which will be our entry into the Dare To Dream Different competition. We are creating an “Anything Bad” alarm system with nifty remote sensors. The sensors are based on the XBee ones that we got supplied with the competition hardware, and they work a treat.

Eventually.

First thing we did was build some test remote sensors:

This turned out to be easy enough, although I did solder 20 pins rather than four, which took a bit longer than it needed to…

Anyhoo, the next thing to do was configure the XBee devices. This was harder, in that nothing seemed to work. We were giving the correct commands and everything, but the device was complaining every time. A bit of searching got us the answer. We found a blog post with the revealing message “To get the devices to work you must upgrade the firmware”. I’m not sure why a company would ship a product which doesn’t work out of the box, but then again, welcome to the world of hardware development.

After the upgrade things went swimmingly. We reached a point where I could press a button on the device above and have a program on another machine notice this. Wonderful.

Feeling Better

Managed to make it to work today and give my lecture. I now have a mini-tower of packets of tissues on my desk. I hate it when I have a full nose and nowhere to put it. No fun.

Not Well

Really not well today. Actually had to go home and have a lie down, which is most unusual for me. I’m hoping for better things tomorrow.

Open Day Sniffles

We had another Open Day today. I’m nursing a bit of a cold at the moment (it is doing very well, thanks) and so I tried to stay as far downwind from our visitors as possible. I think a good time was had by all, it was certainly great weather to walk around the campus, and thanks to everyone who came to see us.

The holder of ticket number 20 gets his prize from Warren.

Mad March Bash

After the roaring success of the Xmas Bash I am organising a follow up, the Mad March Bash, for Wed. 25th of March, starting at 4:00 pm in Room 312 of the Robert Blackburn Building and finishing at 8:00 pm.

There will be Half Life 2 Deathmatch, Zombie Panic, Wii Sports, Dance Mats, Rock Band and an all-new feature, the Tag Treasure Hunt.

Pizza, pop and sweeties will be provided.

Entrance to the event is by ticket only. Tickets will be on sale in the Departmental Office, priced at 2 pounds each, from 2:00 pm on 19th March. As last time, numbers are limited, so make sure that you get yours early.

/Events

Steely Dan are Touring the UK

Number one daughter put me on to the fact that Steely Dan (best band in world, ever) are doing some shows in the UK later this year.

That’s the good news. Bad news is that tickets are 50 quid and there aren’t any for sale at the moment. Never mind, perhaps they’ll add some more dates.

Imagine Cup 2009 Judging

I’m really pleased. Microsoft have picked me as one of the Captains of the Software Design Competition in the Imagine Cup. I love this competition, and what it does for the students that take part. This means that I get to go to Egypt later this year, and see what all the students from around the world have been up to. Wonderful.

Find out more here.

Saturday Open Day

We had our biggest open day of the year today. Perhaps the biggest we have ever had. Thanks to everyone who came along, it was great to see you all. As usual I took a snap of the assembled multitude:

Funny how people always sit at the back in lecture theatres…

I gave my talk as usual, and I must apologise for the jokes. But, of course, I will be using them again…

We gave away a PSP to one lucky winner, ticket number 65 as I remember.

Warren, using his specially big hand to give the prize away. Note cunning product placement of C# Yellow Book (you can get yours at http://www.csharpcourse.com/)

I went outside with the big camera and ran straight into a rather nice photo-op.

I just love skies like these.

Anyway, thanks very much for coming and I hope you all have a good journey home.

Red Nose Day

Well, I did my lecture. Thanks to everyone who came along, it was fun. I’ll post the video tonight, once I’ve got it off my little camera. If you have any pictures or video of the fun and games, please get in touch and I’ll set up a group somewhere to share the magic…

We did rather well on the day:

..what it is all about. I’ll take it down to the bank later today. If you want to add to the pile, just drop by my office or sponsor me at:

http://www.myrednoseday.com/LectureInRhymeWithRob

I hit my target, and so I’ve moved it up a bit.

Update

on 2009-03-13 20:51 by Rob

We've counted all the money, and it turns out that the bucket had two hundred and fifty eight pounds 11 pence in it. All through the afternoon people were dropping by who couldn't make it to the lecture and they were dropping more cash in. Thanks to all the staff and students who were so generous. We are going to take the cash down to the bank tomorrow and this should bring the total earnings to well over 500 quid, which is ace!

I've put the lecture slides up here.

Average Clocks Conundrum

All the clocks in my house are slightly wrong, but if I take the average of them all I get the right time. Except sometimes. Why?

Polaroid Pogo Printer and Microsoft Tag

I fondly remember Polaroid cameras. I even had one for a while. You forgave them their dodgy colours and blurry nature because they were so instant. They are pretty much gone now, but the desire for instant printed gratification hasn’t, so Polaroid are still making portable devices that let you print tiny pictures. Of course, the colours are still a bit dodgy, and there is a bit of blur, but they actually look pretty darned good.

The thing I’m talking about is the Polaroid Pogo. This is a device around the size of a portable hard drive, which will print out onto 2x3 inch prints, that can be made into stickers. You send the prints either from your camera using the usb PictBridge interface or via Bluetooth from any device that can transfer files that way (which includes most mobile phones but unfortunately not the iPhone for some reason).

I nearly bought one a while back, but reckoned they were a bit expensive at around 90 pounds. For some reason the price seems to have halved recently, which is either good (we’ve sold so many that we can drop the price) or bad (we’ve not sold any, and so we need to get rid of them). Either way, it worked for me and so I got one from Amazon.

It works a treat. It is particularly good at printing Microsoft Tags. These are the things that you can scan with your mobile phone to direct you to a web site, or business card or something. I can fit a couple of them onto a single 2x3 output and then stick them around the place.

Pogo and printout. You can even follow the tag from the image above, which is pretty amazing.

I can see this being a huge hit down the pub, where you might want to take lots of pictures and then let folks take a copy home. The paper is a tad pricy, working out at around 30 pence per print, but I guess that is the price that you pay for immediacy.

We are going to have a Tag Treasure Hunt in the department at the Mad March Bash (coming soon…) and now I have the perfect device for printing the tags.

Immersion Therapy

What did you do this lunchtime? I bought and fitted an immersion heater switch. Turned the power off and everything (it seemed best to do it that way).

Hot showers tonight for everyone..

Lecture in Rhyme for Red Nose Day

I will be giving a Red Nose Day Lecture in Rhyme at 11:15 on Friday 13th of March in the Foss Building Lecture Theatre 1. An older boy told me to do it.

The lecture is part of the 08120 Programming 2 course and will be on the subject of class design in C#.

Students who turn up in fancy dress will get out half price.

If you want to sponsor me (and you do, really you do) then you can visit:

http://www.myrednoseday.com/LectureInRhymeWithRob