Professor Layton will Steal Your Life

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I picked up a second hand game for the Nintendo DS on last week. “Professor Layton and the Curious Village”. It is a collection of 130 puzzles wrapped around a plot where you have to find “The Golden Apple”, left in a legacy by a mysterious baron. The adventure is set in a Japanese version of France, in a village called St. Mystere and with a cast of eccentrics that also seem to be getting murdered and disappeared one by one.  And everyone you meet has a puzzle they want you to solve.

Some of them are easy, some more tricky. I’ve done 40 or so puzzles so far and I’ve only found one that I’ve not been able to crack, and that is just because I’m too lazy to work it out the hard way. The game is great fun. I really like the way that the puzzles have no time limit, so I can ponder them at my leisure.  It has taken far more of my time than I should spend playing games, and is a nice illustration of the way that games are developing to bring in a wider range of players. I can strongly recommend it.

Whitby at Easter

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The weather forecast wasn’t wonderful. But that hasn’t stopped us from going to Whitby before, and it wouldn’t this time. And the Big Camera went too.

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Beach Huts

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The Harbour

We did get rained on. But we did manage to get into “The Magpie” for lunch. This is quite famous for serving really good fish and chips. And it was really good.

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Round Thing with No Purpose I can Understand

Memory Upgrades and New Hard Disks

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What do you do if you have sworn off working with computers for a while?

Go up town, buy some memory and a hard disk and spend the day upgrading stuff.

My little MacBook, which has all my music and media on it, has just about filled up its little 120G hard disk. It could do with something a little larger. And my Advent Netbook, although wonderful with Windows 7, does chug a bit when I run more than a couple of programs alongside each other. And so, since this is not technically programming as such, it was off to the shops and out with the debit card.

The Advent 4211 upgrade was simple enough, once I’d got all the screws out and unclipped the back. The memory went straight in and then, after a kind of “reverse tussle” to get the back clipped on again we were in business. Windows 7 noticed the upgrade straight away, and seems a lot happier. The good news about a move like this is that you don’t double the memory from 1G to 2G, you have a much bigger effect than that, since the operating system takes up a good chunk of the original memory. I reckon that I now have around three or four times the original space for running programs.

The Apple upgrade took a bit longer, what with having to copy all the files off the original disk onto the new one, but it was actually a very smooth process. I put the old disk in a USB caddy and then restored the old contents onto my newly installed operating system, which worked a treat.

All in all, a successful day, but not perhaps as far away from computers as I originally planned.

XNA Network and Hair Restoring

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If you can’t solve a problem, just go to bed. I should have done that yesterday (although it would have meant I was in bed at 11:30 in the morning I suppose).

Anyhoo, I got up, had breakfast, and then made XNA networking work perfectly.

It turns out that there is something in the WiFi configuration at my house that stops network gameplay from working. I had connected all the devices by wires, but had left the WiFi turned on, which seemed to confuse matters. Replace wireless connections with wires everywhere and everything works.

I now have a working lobby system, proper host and client gameplay, sample programs and a completed Chapter 16. And, since that is the last chapter in the book, I guess that means that I can return to real life and start doing other things that have been piling up a bit. But I think I’ll have some time off the computer for a bit.

XNA Networking and Hair Tearing

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Today is the day I’m supposed to write all about how to create networked XNA programs. This is a wonderful feature of the platform, and makes it really easy to make multiplayer games for PC, Xbox or even Zune. Or at least it would be, if I could get the networking to work.

I’ve got the material written but my programs just don’t notice each other. They just sit there, aloof and out of touch. I was a bit cross about this for a while, but then I tried some sample programs from other sources and they don’t work either. I think it must be something about the installation I have here, but at the moment I’m not sure what.

The good news is that the Zune devices which I’ve got, which also support network gameplay via XNA, work just fine.

Yet Another Robot

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Briefly snuck away from writing today and bought another robot dog. I felt a bit guilty about not being sat at a keyboard all the time, but not about buying the dog, which was half price and is really good. The best part is the Remote Control, which is absolutely huge. Wrex is not really a proper piece of Artificial Intelligence, in that you mostly have to steer him around by hand. He does have an “off the leash” mode which is quite fun, along with a keypad on the back you can use to re-program him. He has a wide repertoire of remarks and special actions which are pretty amusing.

Going to Live There

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I find that when I’m trying to write stuff I have to “Go and Live There” for a while. “There” being what the book is actually about. This doesn’t make me particularly good company, but it seems to be the only way to do it. Today I was mostly in Chapter 15, which is coming along nicely at the moment.

I really like working with XNA, and I’ve been playing with just what you can do with the Zune device, which is actually rather a lot.

Nintendo DSi

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As a reward for finishing off Chapter 14 I went up town and had a look at the new Nintendo DSi. This is an update of the Nintendo DS which has been around for a while. This has a couple of cameras, bigger screens and can play music off an SD card (although not MP3 songs). GameStation were doing a trade in deal on the old DS Lite which brought the price down to something sensible and, since I happened to have my old DS Lite and power supply with me (what are the chances of that eh?) I got a less shiny new black device.

Very nice. The new larger screens look excellent, and the camera games and audio games are great fun. I’m told that the battery life on the new devices isn’t as good, but I’ve not noticed this yet. The only real problem is that, as there are no DSi games out there yet, the machine doesn’t really represent much of an advance on the old DS, but it does have a faster processor and will also support the download of games into memory (it has 256M) and also SD card.

I downloaded a couple of games from the online DS store via the home WiFi, along with the free browser which works quite well (although it ran out of memory showing my Gmail pages) and so long term prospects are promising.

And Zoo Keeper has never looked so good.

Funny Way to Run a Railway

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Got into a conversation with a web design company today. They had asked permission to use one of my pictures on Flickr (which was nice of them) and mentioned the site they were building.

I had a quick look and the site was really swish. Well designed and with nice content. But I noticed that one of the pages did not render quite correctly with IE8, my current browser of choice. I’ve been quite happy with IE8, although it has to be said that sites don’t always look right with it. Perhaps this is due to it being more standard than they are, but I’m not sure. Anyhoo, I tried the page with Safari and it seemed to look OK so I pinged the company my findings.

They came back to me and said “Oh, that’s interesting. We don’t usually test our sites with IE8 or Safari.” I found this very surprising. I’m not sure if a shop would do very well if it has window display that was only visible to blondes, or put everything on a high shelf where only tall people could see it (although I’d be OK on both counts of course).

If I was running a web design company I’d make it my business to ensure that the site worked correctly with everything. Of course one day, in a distant utopian future, we might have some web standards that would mean browser compatibility was no longer an issue, but for now it is – and I would have thought that would be standard practice to worry about this kind of thing.

Live Code at the Humber Bridge

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The clocks changed on Sunday morning. In the UK we started British Summer Time, which meant that a sinister government plot resulted in 60 minutes of my life being stolen overnight. We had to put the clocks forward of course. One year I tried to assert my independence from this time base tyranny, but it didn’t work that well, and I was late for everything (or early, I forget).

Anyhoo, many years ago I wrote some software for the Humber Bridge that is part of their toll management system (Ian and Nicky did the rest) and my bit is in charge of making sure that the clocks get put forward and back. Because the software had to go quite quickly I implemented a little look-up table with the dates hard wired into the code. And then I forgot all about it.

Of course this weekend my little table ran out, and today I got a call from Neil at the bridge because their system was living in the past. So it was out with the Windows 95 system that I used to create the software, a quick extension of the table and down to the bridge to install it.

We use a system by Siemens to talk to PLC machines in the Toll Booths. It has a wonderful ability to let you update the code while everything is running. This is because the software is designed for process control, where you sometimes can’t turn everything off just to put new versions out there. So I was able to add the new code (which I’d already tested on my laptop) and then watch as the clock pinged forward to the correct hour.

The table now works to 2012. I’ve set an appointment in my diary to remind me to get in touch with them well before then, so that it doesn’t happen again.

One Hundred Followers on Twitter. But Why?

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I now have 100 followers on my Twitter account. I’ve no idea why. I still don’t fully “get” Twitter. I only follow 4 people, and two of them hardly tweet anything. The other two are quite chatty, and I have bother keeping up with everything they put out there.

Some people follow thousands of other Twitterers, which begs the question “How do they keep up?”. The answer must be they don’t. I think they use some filtering stuff so that certain words in Tweets cause those to bubble to the surface. This means that lots of tweets go un-noticed and ignored. That bothers me for two reasons. One is that when I’m having a conversation with someone I think it is bad manners not to listen to what they say. I wouldn’t feel right following someone and then ignoring them. The second reason is that I’d hate for any of my deathless prose to be ignored by anyone else.

Perhaps I’m reading too much into the whole thing, but at the moment I kind of regard Twitter as the digital equivalent of standing on top of a bus and shouting things out. And we know what we think of people who do that kind of thing.

Anyhoo, I’m going to keep putting the odd (and I do mean odd) tweet out there. Just as I’ve found that writing a regular blog has vastly improved my writing style (you might disagree) perhaps regular tweeting will improve my “Shouting on a bus” technique.

Treasure Hunt Kit

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If you want to have a Tag Treasure Hunt like the one we had at our Mad March Bash you can now download the tag designs and the question and answer sheets from here.

I printed out the tags on my Polaroid Pogo printer and then stuck them around the department, gave the question sheet out and then watched as people whizzed around trying to find the tags and solve the clues. They seemed to have fun.

If you do this though, a note of warning – the glue on the sticky prints seems to get much harder over time. Don’t stick them on any painted surfaces and try to take them off as soon as you can. Otherwise they can be a bit tricky to remove.

Spring is in the Air. And in my Sofa.

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A week or so back I sat down rather more heavily than usual and there was a loud twang from underneath me. One of the springs in our Ikea Ektorp sofa had broken. I checked the interweb and apparently this furniture has a lifetime guarantee. Unfortunately this does not cover springs, cushions or covers or anything else likely to break or wear out.  Such is life.

Fortunately the interweb also took me to http://upholsterysupplyman.co.uk/ where I could buy a replacement spring (you need a 23 inch serpentine/zigzag spring for the Ektorp) for only two quid. I got four in case I decide to sit down heavily again, along with a bunch of clips to hold them in place.

The springs arrived yesterday, and so today I had the fun and games of fitting one. Turned out to be quite easy, although what I really want is a staple gun to pin the fabric back onto the frame properly. I’ve used such things in Doom, and they seem to work quite well.

One handyman success a day is usually enough for me, but then, last thing at night I got the “chance to shine” again, when the power shower suddenly became a lot less powerful. And much, much colder. Having just spent the price of a really nice camera (and I mean *really* nice) on replacing big chunks of the water heating system I was less than happy at this point. So it was off with my socks and hello to an evening of standing in the bath swearing while I tried to dismantle chunks of plumbing.

After a while skimming my knuckles and reflecting that it might be time to call in a plumber again I had a kind of breakthrough when the piece I was pulling at came off in my hand. Turns out that something was blocking the hot water inlet filter. Feeling a bit like a chap in CSI I bagged it for further investigation, put the shower back together and it all worked perfectly. I think something must have got left in the replacement heating tank and found its way into the part of the system that would cause me the most bother. There wasn’t enough of the sample to get a DNA trace, but foul play is not suspected at this point. Just dumb bad luck.

After that it was time for a shower and bed, at the end of a slightly shorter but on the whole successful day.

Fantastic Blog Site

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Abhinaba Basu is a Microsoft Developer working out of Hyderabad in India. He works on the Compact Framework Team, take excellent photographs and even finds time to paint great pictures.

He has written some great blog posts about how the internals of the Compact Framework and you really should read them. If you have ever wondered how Garbage Collection works he has one of the best explanations I’ve seen. You can find his work blog here.