Lion King in London

Went to London today to see the Lion King show. This meant getting up at 5:45, but as you all know I’m prepared to suffer for art, and so this wasn’t a problem.

We had lunch at the Masala Zone restaurant in Covent Garden. Masala Zone is a small chain of Indian Restaurants in London, each of which is decorated in a characteristic way, the one we went to has loads of puppets hanging from the ceiling, depicting the guests arriving at a particularly posh wedding.

The food was great. Really tasty, and very nicely priced.

If you want a place to eat in London that won’t break the bank, but will deliver a really good dining experience, then I strongly recommend it.

Then it was on to the theatre.

I’m not that big on musicals. I reckon that if the story is going to be interrupted by a song it had better be a darned good one.  However, the songs, sets, costumes and style of the whole performance worked for me.

I think I rather annoyed number one daughter when I said (somewhat tongue in cheek) “It’s good, but it’s no Avatar”. Actually it is far better than the movie. Avatar is highly polished, with incredible attention having been focused on getting everything to look as real as possible. Lion King takes the approach that since it is impossible to get the whole of the jungle into a theatre we will concentrate on giving you the impression of what it is is like there.  And it works a treat.

Avatar is like watching a really good computer game being played by an expert technician. Lion King is like having a beautiful story told by a bunch of people right in front of you.  If you want to see how far you can get with imagination and just plain cleverness, then go and see the show. Great stuff.

Keeping Fit with Wii Fit Plus

I took this picture, and the one on yesterday’s blog, while I was out in India at the Imagine Cup World Finals in 2006. We visited Akbar’s Tomb to do some work there, and I tried to look busy by taking lots of photographs.

I’ve been playing with the Wii Fit Plus software. This uses the Wii Balance Board to keep you fit. I was quite pleased to find that, since I last used the Wii Fit a while back, I’ve only put on a couple of pounds. However, I did tell it I was wearing heavy clothing……

The game is pretty much the same as before really, although there are some neat new exercises (I like the Kung Fu one) and enhancements to the older ones. All of the exercises are now unlocked at the start, which seems sensible to me, and by the end of half an hour I’d managed to work up a bit of a sweat. I’m trying, again, to get some kind of an exercise regime going, and with a bit of luck this might fit the bill. If you will pardon the pun.

Tom Speaks

If you want to get ahead, get a blog. Last week I reported that Iain had started blogging, and today I’m pleased to be able to tell you that Tom Hulton-Harrop is now also blogging.  Tom is one of our final year students, very into programming and XNA.

Imagine Cup Live Meeting Fun

Well, I did my Imagine Cup Live Meeting today. Just me sitting on my own in my little room with a headset on, talking to students all round the world who must have got up early/stayed up late to find out how to succeed in the Imagine Cup Software Development challenge.

It all seemed to go OK, although it is a bit un-nerving when you are just speaking out into the void with no feedback other than a set of coloured indicators showing how happy the audience is. I knew that green was good, and red was bad, but when a couple of lights turned blue I had completely forgotten what that meant. I thought it was either “Speak more slowly or speak more loudly” and so I solved the problem by SPEAKING SLOWLY AND LOUDLY for a while until the lights went green again.  Actually, I’ve just thought some more. Blue could mean “speak more quietly” or  “speak more quickly”. Oh well.

If you were in the audience, thanks for turning up, I hope we managed to answer all your questions. I think my finest moment was when somebody asked “How many countries are in the Imagine Cup?” and I finally managed to come up with “All of them”. Actually, as Matt informed me a second after that, the real answer is 70.

If you have any other questions that sprang out of the presentation you can post them in the forums, which you can find here:

http://imaginecup.com/forums/18.aspx

When the presentation had finished I left my microphone switched on for a few minutes, which meant that the assembled multitude were treated to the sound of my heavy breathing for a while. Sorry about that.

Marking and the Micro Framework

Spent a big chunk of today (like yesterday and the day before) marking exam scripts. However, I did find time to upgrade my system to the .NET Micro Framework version 4.0. This platform is getting really interesting just now, with some fantastic hardware coming out and a whole set of great new features for embedded developers. I’ve been a fan of the framework ever since I saw one of my C# programs running on a device the size of my fingernail.

Much more fun than marking.

Using Digital Photo Frames as Lamps

I was wondering the other day why nobody had thought of using digital photo frames as lights for macro photography. So I thought I’d find out for myself. I’ve got a couple of little frames (the ones that you can now pick up less than 20 quid in some places). So I made some images of single colours using Photoshop Elements and spent some time balancing the frames precariously over the two model cars I wanted to  photograph.

You can see how I arranged things here. I used one frame as the “sky” and the other to light the background.  You can just see the front of the cars peeking out from underneath the black frame at the front. I just used white paper as the background.

Once I had the frames lined up I put the camera on the tripod and fired it up. I was using a macro lens to focus onto my tiny cars and it was hard to keep everything sharp. I ended up using a really small aperture (F16 or so) to get as much depth of field as possible. At that aperture, with the camera set to 200 ASA, I was exposing for a couple of seconds or so.

I’m quite pleased with the results. The great thing about working like this is that changing the colour of the light is very easy, you just advance the frame to the next coloured image. On the picture frame I had, I could do this using the remote control for the frame, so I didn’t have to touch anything.

So,  as a light source the frames do work. The light you get is not that bright, but it is very even, which is nice. This is probably as effective as using a small light tent,  and it works best if you can get the frames really close to the items being photographed. I’m certainly going to try some more later.

Imagine Cup Software Design at the Captain’s Table

You might not know this, but I’m the Captain of the Microsoft Imagine Cup Software Development competition this year.

No. I don’t get a special hat. Or a uniform. I did ask though…

What I do is make sure that from a judging point of view everything lines up, competitors know what to do, how to enter, and how to make the best entries.  As part of this I’m taking part in a Live Meeting later this week where I’m going to go through the Software Development Challenge, how the competition works and what the judges are looking for. If you are preparing an entry for the competition (or thinking about taking part) it would be well worth you turning up. You can find out more here:

http://imaginecup.com/Competition/mycompetitionportal.aspx?competitionId=37

LaserQuest!! Pew Pew Pew

Dan from Seed Software organised a bit of shooting fun tonight. And so a bunch of us turned up at LaserQuest in Hull. Some of us were dressed in black, which I thought was a good idea, until I discovered just how much it makes your dandruff stand out when they turn up the UV light. And from the look of everyone’s teeth it looked like we now all lived on the far side of the uncanny valley. Of course, I took the camera, although I didn’t use the flash and had to set the sensitivity to a very silly value.

I think you should know that I got shot several times while taking this picture.

One of the few remaining pictures of “The Outfit”

Into the fray

Peter uses a laser to lay down the law

Ha. Go Red Team. And I wasn’t the worst one there either…

More Chumby Fun

I hate it when programs lie to you. Just spent a chunk of time finding out how to reliably put images into Flash programs that run on my Chumby. Clue: It is not as simple as it probably should be.

You can find out what I have been doing in my Chumby blog.

Adding Images to Flash Programs using FlashDevelop

Images make programs more fun. And in the Flash world, it is all about images. There are essentially two places that your images can come from. You can get them from the internets or you can load them from your Flash project. I've been trying to do both, and finally I've figured out how to do this reliably using the FlashDevelop tool.

Mostly.

Today I'm going to look at loading images from your library, the one that should be the easiest to do. These notes apply to FlashDevelop 3.0.6 which you can find here. I’ve found this stuff out while playing with my Chumby, but you can use the techniques for any flash program.

Say I have an image called “one.png” that I want to add to my project. It just contains the number one:

First thing I do, is add it to the library directory in my project:

It is now in there, along with the font that I’m using to display messages. Note that it is displayed in black though. This is bad, in that it means that it is not part of my project. Attempts to load it won’t work. To make it part of the project I need to right click on it and select “Add to Library” from the context menu that pops up:

Now the item in the project turns blue, which is good  because it means it has an outside chance of working. Next thing i want to do is load the image into a media clip.  I can do this in the Main method of the application class if I like:

static function main(mc:MovieClip)
{   
    var oneImage:MovieClip;
    oneImage = mc.attachMovie("library.one.png", 
                 "oneImage",
                 mc.getNextHighestDepth());
}

The first parameter is the name of the file in the resource. Warning: the property information for a library item (the thing you can see above) has a useful appearing “Insert into document” tab, which will insert the path to your resource into your program. For my one image above it suggests the helpful path “libary/one.png”. This doesn’t work. You need to separate the directories in the path using dots, as I have in my sample code above. I’ve no idea why this doesn’t work, perhaps someone out there can tell me.

The second parameter is the name of the resource you are creating.

The third parameter is the draw depth. You can ask the parent movie clip to give you the next highest draw depth. If you set your new image to this depth it will appear on the screen. If you put this code into the main method of your program it will fetch and draw the item.

Good eh?

If you get any part of it wrong,  get the path wrong, forget to add the item to the library or anything, then it won’t work and you will not get an error. I hate this. The only thing you can do is add trace statements to see what your program is doing. these are printed out

trace(oneImage._url);

This will display the url of the file that has been loaded.

Mad World Shopping

Three bags full

Did the shopping today. All on my own. I did have a list, but even so I’m very impressed with myself. Anyhoo, the supermarket was selling off Mad World for the Nintendo Wii for a very nominal sum and so I invested in a copy.

Note: I never buy a computer game. I invest in a copy. This makes it sound much less like a waste of money. Although, perhaps investing is a waste of money these days too .

Anyhoo, once I had got home and figured out which cupboard to put things in (Hint: Use the very cold cupboard with a light inside, I think it is called a fridge, for items like yoghurt and sausages) I had a go at the game.

It is very bloodthirsty, violent and foul mouthed. You play a participant in a warped TV gameshow who has a chainsaw for an arm.  The gameplay revolves around extreme violence where you use the chainsaw, road signs and just about anything else around to bloodily despatch people who are presumably very bad. At least I hope they are/were…..

When you go into chainsaw mode the Wii remote actually makes chainsaw noises. The game  is like being inside a slasher movie and has absolutely no moral centre. I quite like it.

Iain Speaks: new Technical Blog

Iain Kelwick, the Manager of SeedSoftware has started a blog. This is a proper technical blog which will have genuinely useful things in it. The kind of thing I aspired to before I started going on about CSI and Silent Witness. You can find his first posts here:

http://iainkelwick.blogspot.com/

I See Dead People

On Tuesday night I can watch CSI Las Vegas. And see  autopsies.

On Wednesday night I can watch NCIS. And see  autopsies.

On Thursday and Friday night I can watch Silent Witness. And see  autopsies.

Then on Saturday we get CSI New York. And see  autopsies.

I’m sure this can’t be healthy.

Free XNA Screencasts

I’ve been recording XNA screencasts for the last six months or so for Thirteen1 magazine. The aim is to give you a gentle introduction to programming, using XNA games as the basis of the teaching.

I’ve just reached the end of the first section. If you want to view the screencasts, and download the practical sessions that go with them, you can find them on VerySillyGames:

http://verysillygames.com/Screencasts

Christmas Chumby

My “big” Christmas present to myself was a Chumby. This is a fun little internet appliance that you can write programs for.  I’ve started doing just that, and you can find out more at my newly minted Chumby pages.

Update on 2010-01-13 09:23 by Rob

My Chumby program is now live. In the unlikely event that you actually have a Chumby you can find it here:

http://www.chumby.com/guide/widget/Experiment%201:%20Slidy%20Clock

Getting Started with Chumby

If you want to start writing applications (or widgets) for the Chumby device it helps if you know how to write Flash programs. At the start of this exercise I didn't, and so I had to spend some time in the learning curve.

If you are rich (and a graphics designer) you can simply shell out for a copy of the Adobe developer environment, that lets you create applications using timelines, and all kinds of things that can make things move around the screen. If you aren't rich (but are still a graphics designer) I can reccommend the products from SwishZone that seem to make animations that work, and don't cost that much.

However, I'm not rich. And I'm not a graphics designer, so I wanted to write programs that looked like programs. So instead I'm using FlashDevelop which lets me write programs that look sufficiently like C or C# that I feel mostly at home.

If you want to download the FlashDevelop project and source for my first ever release (Experiment 1: Slidy Clock) you can find it in the downloads part of my Chumby pages. I'll be releasing more experiments as I find out more about how to program this splendid little device.

Yet More Hull Imagine Cup Success

Last snow picture for a while. actually taken on Friday on the way to fetch the Fish and Chips (note capitals) for tea.

The Imagine Cup is a programming competition run by Microsoft. We at Hull are quite good at taking part. Last Friday the six teams that have made it to the UK finals were announced, and two of them come from our university. Well done folks. We'll have team details and what they are up to later this month, when the students come back and we start up the new semester.

In the meantime, if you want to take part in the competition, do your bit for charity and cost Microsoft some money (and who doesn’t) you can still sign up for the other competitions at the UK Imagine Cup web site. Microsoft have pledged a pound to charity for everyone who gets involved.

Power Mad

In Tesco yesterday I nearly bought one of these power monitor type things.  You strap a little sensor to your mains supply and a receiver box in the house gives you a second by second readout of how much your electricity is costing you. I was tempted, but in the end I didn’t invest. Not because I don’t think it is a good idea, but that I think in wrong hands (i.e. mine) such a thing would prove highly dangerous.

I know that as soon as I started getting live data from the device I’d turn into a power crazed madman, searching for hidden mains adapters and wincing whenever the kettle was turned on. I’d become obsessed with getting the thing to read zero pence at all times (which I know is impossible) and lie awake at night trying to work out where that thing which is costing me ten pence a day actually lurks.  I’d probably end up stressing about how much power the monitor itself consumes, and set up a treadmill somewhere which is attached to a generator.

I strongly agree with energy conservation, (that’s how come my loft is always so cold) and I’ve got loads of energy saving lamps all over the place.  Although (and I wonder if I’m the first person to notice this) when you turn on one of these fancy expensive bulbs they actually seem to make the room darker. I think this is because when they first come on the starter circuit gives a brief flash of bright light. This is then replaced by the dim glow produced by the tube itself which, if you are lucky and the bulb is less than a few months old, will eventually become bright enough to read by.

Anyhoo, in the light of all these things I’ve decided to give the energy monitor a miss for now. Perhaps in summer…

Bayonetta Review

Hull in the snow

Bayonetta is bonkers. But great fun. I got a copy today and have spent a couple of hours playing it and I’m hooked. You play the role of the last surviving witch doing battles against avenging angels in a quest to  uncover your past . Or something. It is a third person fighting game with amazing special combat moves that defy explanation.

Bayonetta herself comes across as a kind of “Steam Punk Lara Croft on Acid” with a nice line in laconic dialog. You get your special moves by learning particular button combinations (or you go for the Easy mode where it figures out what button to press for you) and they let you do incredible things to your enemies, including lob them into torture chambers that you can conjure up out of thin air.

The action and the story zip along at quite a rate, and to be honest I’ve not got that much of an idea what is going on. However, I’ll keep playing to find out how it ends.

Help me lower my bounce rate

I spent some time this lunch-hour playing with Google Analytics. I use it to track access to this site. I take a great interest in visitors here. In fact, even as you read this I’m actually looking at you. That’s me,  behind the third window along in the building above…..

Actually no, but every year or so I check on how the site is doing. I do have some readers (which is nice – thanks for coming) but I also have a “bounce rate” greater than 60%. Anything more than 20% is bad so they say. Of course, once I found this out I had to do something about it. The first thing I had to do was find out what “bounce rate” actually means.  It means the visitors that have been tracked as just arriving at the site, looking at one page and then disappearing.

From a business point of view this is probably not a good thing. It means that around two thirds of my visitors take one look at the place and then go no further. So, in order to make the Google machine happier, I ask you, dear reader, to stick around a bit more. Take a look at Trip Hazard. (New episode coming soon eventually). Discover the terrifying tale of  the Little Brown Ikea Pencil of Doom. Download some free software or a book. Even try to find some funny stuff from the archives.