Another Reality Fault

I love Windows Media Center. I’ve used it for a couple of years, ever since I got rid of my Sky box.

A couple of weeks back the Freeview system was “upgraded”. I got loads of difficult to remove messages on the TV telling me that I would have to re-scan and find all the channels again. What the message didn’t say was that after the “upgrade” pretty much nothing would work any more. All my TV channels are broken apart from Five.

Now I quite like CSI and Flash Forward, but there are actually other things I fancy watching as well. But I can’t. Kind of ironic really. An upgrade to improve the reception of Five has broken everything else.

Of course all my other digital tellies work fine, it is only the Media PC that is broken. Initially put it down to the TV tuner cards I’m using as they are a bit old.  So I tried playing around a bit. I managed to get the Sony PlayTV that I normally use with to the PS3 to talk to the computer and that duly found all the channels. But it would only show me channel Five. Wah.

This is very, very strange. If it wasn’t for the fact that it was happening I would say it was impossible. There is some muttering on the interwebs about changes to multiplexes and signal strengths, but nobody has reported the same problem I’ve got.

I call this kind of thing a “Reality Fault”, in that everything is working fine, it is just that reality around it is broken. Oh well.  If I can find a cheap enough TV card I’ll put that in and rebuild everything I suppose.

Don’t you just love progress?

Nice Weather

This morning the weather here was horrid. Wet and grey and just right for going out and not getting what you want from the shops.

So I did.

In the afternoon things picked up a bit.

Nice tree and sky.

Not Intrepid

We got a letter today. Someone had tried to deliver a package and failed because “our house is not on a road”. Well, I looked outside and the road was still there. True enough, a road near where we live is blocked at the moment while some new flood drains are installed, but we can still get in or out. And the letter managed to get here….

I rang the delivery company and told them that it is actually possible to get to where we live. I guess that as soon as they saw that the way the SatNav was pointing was blocked they must have given up.

What?

I’m collecting stupid error messages. This is one of my favourites:

Every time I see it (which is often because our eBridge system has some links to insecure pages in amongst its https) my brain does a double flip as to what it might mean. Show someone that message and ask them which of the buttons is the dangerous one and I’ll bet they’ll look at you as if you were from Mars. Why can’t they just say:

The “Ultimate Steal” is Back

If you are a UK student I have some very good news for you. The Ultimate Steal is back. This is a deal from Microsoft that puts its software into your hands at less than video game prices.  You can get Office Ultimate for 39 pounds and Windows 7 Home Premium for 30.

Well worth checking out.

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/education/studentoffer/default.aspx

Up Movie Review

Go and see Up. Just go.

Rob at TechEd 2009

I’ve just found out that I’m giving a session at Microsoft TechEd 2009 in Berlin next next month. It is Breakout Session DEV08-IS: Writing Games and Exploring the Microsoft Zune HD in XNA 3.1 and it is in Interactive Theatre 2 – Orange on 11/11/2009 at 17:30-18:45. I’m really pleased about this. I’ve done TechEd sessions before and they are always great fun.

If you are in Berlin and attending TechEd 2009 I’d love to see you there. I’ve even come up with a new joke to use during the session, this alone should make it worth attending…

If you are are in Hull I’ll be “test flying” the session(and the joke) in the department before I go. The presentation will be in Lecture Theatre D in the Robert Blackburn Building at 2:15 pm on Wednesday 28th October.

Uncharted 2: Amongst Thieves video game review

Uncharted 2 is a follow up to Uncharted: Drakes Fortune, a PS3 platformer in the Tomb Raider mould. It follows the fortunes of Nathan Drake in his ongoing quest to find ancient treasures and stuff like that.

It is very good. Perhaps one of the best looking games that I have seen for a long time. The attention to detail in in the graphics is astonishing. You find yourself wishing you could stop and take a proper look at the scenery as it whizzes past – which would be much easier if you weren’t on top of a moving train with heavies coming towards you and a helicopter gunship hovering above spraying you with lead. Actually, I didn’t play the game as I was watching number one son do all the hard work. I saw myself in more of a supervisory role, saying helpful things like “Try shooting at him” or “Did you really mean to do that?” at appropriate times.

The story is reasonably absorbing, involving the usual mix of temples, treasures and chaps with dodgy accents trying to kill you. And a love triangle. In this episode you are much more likely to have a computer powered character around with you who gives you a good lead on where to go and makes the whole thing more like a proper adventure. There is also a multi-player option (some of the levels look like they have been really designed with this in mind). I’ll be having a go at that once I’ve finished the game itself.

If you are new to Nathan Drake I’d advise that you pick up a copy of the first Uncharted second hand (you should be able to get it for around a tenner as it has been out for a while) and then, having really enjoyed that, you can move onto Uncharted 2 and have even more fun.

Wispa Gold

Not sure I should mention this for two reasons:

1. They are apparently only on the market for a limited time, and I want to make sure that there are plenty left for me.
2. I don’t want to get anyone else addicted…

Anyhoo, the Wispa Gold chocolate bar is back for a while. This is a really nice bar with caramel inside the chocolate and I seem to be eating one a day. At least.

Dreamspark Goodies

Andy pointed me at a feature of Expression Web that does a similar job to the Balsamiq user interface designer:

http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/Sketchflow_Overview.aspx

I had a quick play and you can make diagrams and design the navigation between the forms in your use interface. However, I found it a bit more complex to use than Balsamiq (although it has to be said that it does an awful lot more, and actually lets you construct the interfaces as well as play with them).

For students the interesting thing is that it is available for free from DreamSpark:

https://www.dreamspark.com

If you are a student on an academic course (and have an Athens username to prove it) then you can get hold of all kinds of goodies here, including operating systems and Visual Studio.  You can even get XNA Creators Club memberships so you can deploy your XNA programs to an Xbox 360. Well worth a look.

Hull Fair

Went to Hull Fair tonight. Some of the rides are deeply scary. The kind of things I’d pay good money not to have to go on.

I went up on the Big Wheel to get this shot.

I took the little camera and we had a good look around. Won a prize on the Hook a Duck and then headed off to Fudge for tea. Great stuff.

Team Fortress Game Afternoon

Hull University, like most others, reserves Wednesday afternoon for games. So does our department now. Hull Com. Soc. is using one of our labs for Team Fortress 2 sessions every other week. I went along with the camera.

The event was something of a success…

I would have liked to have had a go, but they had people queuing outside the door, waiting for their turn. Apparently there were also students taking part from off campus too, since we were using the Departmental Games Servers. The next one is in a couple of weeks, I’m going to try and get there early for some multi-player action.

Incidentally, if you are in Hull this weekend there is a FragFest organised for Saturday 17th at the Lawns. You can find out more at the Hull ComSoc web site.

Masters Welcome Party

We had another party tonight to welcome our Masters level students. Same format, different quiz questions and some different winners.

First prize

Second prize (they actually got a higher score, but since the team was all staff and contained Warren, Head of Department, it wasn’t allowed to win.

Third prize

We had a wooden spoon (or plastic microphone) prize for the team who made it into last place.

Then it was on to Rock Band, Wii Sports and dance mats for the rest of the evening.

True Hitch Hiker?

Strange things. In a week when a new volume in the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy series is released (although sadly not by Douglas Adams) a company releases this.

Makes you think.

Fantastic Mockup Software

Adam put me on to this software. He plans to use it for his design documents for his Final Year Project. It is really nice if you want to make mockups of your user interfaces and storyboard your programs before building them.

http://www.balsamiq.com

The supplied templates look really good, in fact I’m tempted to get a copy myself…

University Open Day

We had our first University Open Day of the season today. We had a huge number of people turn up, which was great.

I like a nice audience.

Thanks for coming along folks, I hope the day was useful to you. The links I mentioned are:

www.csharpcourse.com – you can get the C# Yellow Book from here

www.verysillygames.com – there are some XNA C# samples here

www.wherewouldyouthink.com – our admissions site

Hull Pictures

I made a quick trip up town today to pick up some bits and bobs. The weather was nice, and of course I had a camera with me.

You really wouldn’t think this was the middle of Hull.

Zune HD

I’ve just managed to get my hands on a Zune HD. It is a personal music player from Microsoft. The Zune brand has been around for a while. The first players appeared a few years ago and have been developing ever since. They are rather like ipods; but they have one or two nice extra features, including built in WIFI and radio but they have always something of also-rans when compared with the all-conquering Apple product.

However the HD version might change that. It has a superb OLED display and an all new multi-touch user interface. As the name implies, you can put high definition video onto the machine and get video output into an HDMI display.  The whole package is lovely and the hardware is beautifully made and very stylish.

It also runs XNA, so you can take C# games that you have written for the framework and they just run on the device. Your games can even take advantage of the multi-touch interface and the accelerometer inside the Zune. I managed to convert a game to use them in just a few minutes. I’m going to write some posts nest week about porting games over onto the platform, but there won’t be much to say as it is all so easy to use.

The only problem with the Zune is that you can’t get it in the UK yet.

Undergraduate Welcome Party

Today was the day of our welcome party for those new to the department. There was free drinks, free food, silly games and my evil quiz.

This is the team that won. You should have seen this picture before I removed the red-eye…

These folks came in second. The prizes this year were a bit smaller than previously, so we could pay for extra beer…

This is the third placed team, obviously deeply moved by the generosity of the department.

Windows Live Mesh Rocks

I’ve been using Windows Live Mesh now for a while and I must admit I love it. I now no longer have to bother about keeping files on my various machines up to date. I just have a couple of Live Mesh synchronised folders and I lob all the important stuff into there.

Live Mesh gives you on-line storage that is synchronised to the hard disk of one or more computers. Each computer runs the Live Mesh software which makes sure that whenever you change a file on one of the machines the copies on the other devices are automatically updated next time they connect to the network. It even provides a log of your activity, so you can track back what you have been up to.

Now, when I take my portable along to a lecture I don’t have to worry about putting the latest presentations onto it because I know they are already there. If I forgot the machine completely I could even use a web browser to pull the files off the Live Mesh online storage.

You get 5Gbytes of storage for free, and that is more than enough for a year’s worth of lecture notes and other teaching stuff. In fact, the service is so good that I’d pay to have more than that. If there was an annual subscription like I could put all my important stuff out there and I’d be happy to pay for that.

For students I can’t think why you wouldn’t use it. It would mean that you never lost your notes or programs, even if someone made off with your precious laptop.

Find out more at:

https://www.mesh.com/welcome/default.aspx