Split/Second Looks Excellent

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I used my new, high speed, internet connection to download a demo of Split/Second today. The 815M came down the line in around 12 minutes or so, which was nice.

The game looks excellent. It is a mix of Burnout, Need for Speed and Super Mario Kart, with destructible scenery which is all set up for maximum mayhem. Accumulate power by drifting and tailgating other cars and then use this to unleash the environment on your opponents. If you thought the red shell in Mario Kart was nasty, then you haven’t seen anything yet. We are talking exploding buildings, out of control aircraft and all kinds of other bad stuff. After a few tries I realised that first place is probably not  place you want to be until the very last part of the race, what with everyone behind you lining up to blow you away.

The handling model for the car (at least on the demo) is quite forgiving, but I don’t think people will really be playing it as any kind of simulation. If you think of it as a big budget car chase action movie where you get to drive, then you are pretty much there.

Split/Second was written by Black Rock Studios, who are division of Disney Interactive and are based in Brighton in the UK. They presently employ quite a few of our graduates and our students visited them earlier in the year for a look at their HQ. The game comes out in the UK in a week or two. I shall definitely be getting a copy. 

Christian Aid Humber Bridge Cross

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Humber Bridge Christian Aid Walk Bus

Today we walked across the Humber Bridge for money. The money wasn’t for us, it was for the Christian Aid appeal that has organised these sponsored crossings for several years. We’ve done the walk many times. The first time, with very young kids and a pushchair we managed to cross the bridge four times. Since then the weather has been nowhere near as good, but today it was bright and just a bit blustery so we managed to get over the bridge and back again.  Of course I took the big camera and the wide lens.

Humber Bridge Christian Aid Walk Telescope

That windmill used to be used to grind chalk.

Humber Bridge Christian Aid Walk

Obligatory tower shot.

Office 2010 Now on MSDN

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If you are lucky enough to have an MSDN subscription you can now head over there and download Office 2010 Professional Plus. This gives you Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher,  Access, InfoPath and a bunch of SharePoint goodies as well. There are two versions, for 32 bit and 64 bit installations.

If you want to use the 64 bit one you will have to uninstall all the previous 32 bit versions of Office 2007, including any compatibility tools and viewers, but the installer talks you through this and tells you what to do. It looks like the 64 bit version is well worth the effort, it loads in a trice and seems a bit more snappy than the 32 bit one.

Once the programs get running they look very snazzy too. Outlook found all my previous details and just works a treat. There are some nice improvements that I’m finding as I use the programs. The mini “Start” button has been replaced by a File tab on the menus (which makes sense) and the way you modify styles in Word hasn’t changed (which is just as well, as I only found out how to do that in Word 2007 last week).

For me the big news is the SharePoint integration and the group working options which look very interesting.

Iron Man 2 Movie Review

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Went to see Iron Man 2 last week. Take one spoonful of Fantastic Four light heartedness and add two spoonfuls of Spiderman angst. Throw in a bar of soap and a bunch of high grade special effects and you are done.

The movie wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t that great either. The first one seemed to have more of a plot than this one, which had a whole saggy lump in the middle where our hero has an “end-life crisis”. I can’t fault the acting, Robert Downey JR is very watchable in the title role, but I would really have liked a little bit more than one robot fighting another robot (or bunch of robots). If you like superhero films you won’t be disappointed, but I don’t think you’ll be that overwhelmed either.

Running Windows 7 64 Bit on a Macbook Pro I didn’t know was old..

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York Railway Museum Engine Controls

I’ve had so much success with 64 bit Windows 7 on my new Dell Laptop I thought I’d put it on my MacBook Pro. I got this around 2 and a half years ago and it has been quite reliable, only needing a new power supply, battery and system board so far. Thank heavens for AppleCare.

But I digress. I bought a new hard disk and got number one son to fit it. Then we installed OS X and fired up BootCamp which is the Apple program to partition the drive and put Windows on it. At the appointed time I put my Windows 7 64 bit distribution disk in the machine to begin the install. And I got a very strange error message, as if the disk was stuck at a menu I hadn’t seen before.

Turns out that the Windows 7 64 bit DVD uses a format that doesn’t work on old (i.e. made more than 18 months ago) Macs. After a bit of searching I found my way to a web site that explained how to make a new DVD that worked OK.  The command I used (with my not-working DVD in drive d:) is this one:

oscdimg.exe -n -m -bd:\boot\etfsboot.com d:\ c:\windows7x64.iso

The oscdimg program is provided by Microsoft for making disk images. Once it had finished I then had an image on drive C:  which I could burn to make a working disk. I still have it. I’m going to put it somewhere safe.

Anyhoo, that got Windows 64 bit working on my machine and then I hit a second snag. The machine is so old that Apple don’t provide a version of BootCamp for it. This means that I couldn’t do the automated install of all the Apple and other drivers to make it work properly. The good news is that I’ve got all the important bits working without it and I’m sure I can live without the light up keyboard. From a performance point of view everything is fine, and I can now use all of the 4Gbytes of memory the machine has inside.  If you have an older Mac I’d definitely recommend the move to 64 bit.

More Steam, and new Heroes

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Ada Lovelace, a woman ahead of her time, from the wonderful  http://2dgoggles.com/

If you have not yet discovered The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage then you are in for a treat. Fantastic drawing and actual historical quotes thrown together with outrageous plots to make something quite unique. Kudos to number one son for the link.

Steam Engine 02

..now I really want a steam powered computer..

Steaming Idiot

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Steam Engine 01

Bought a steam engine today. It was a reduced price bargain. And it has a generator. And lights. So buying it actually made perfect sense. Took it home, got it out of the box and then dropped it on the floor.

Idiot.

Fortunately not much harm was done, except that the “very important pin” that the piston pushes seems to have born the brunt of the landing and is now slightly bent. I’ve straightened it to the best of my ability and it seems to work OK. The whole thing makes a pleasing chugging noise as it runs, and the lights even come on. Great stuff. I’m now wondering if I could power a .NET Micro Framework device from it.

VS 2010 Windows Phone Refresh

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Mars Bar

A student gave me a Mars Bar at the end of my last lecture of the session. It is kind of a running joke thing, in that I keep promising the class Mars Bars and never delivering. Anyhoo, thanks very much. It was delicious.

The  next version of the Windows Phone 7 CTP is now available for download.  This version plays nicely with the release version of Visual Studio 2010. Some folks have been reporting fun and games updating but, for some reason, my update went fine.  The only issue I’ve hit is when opening an old Windows Phone project I was told I needed to add some lines to one of the configuration files. Unfortunately the lines can’t be copied out of the message for some reason, so if you need them you can cut them from here..

<Capabilities>
    <Capability Name="ID_CAP_NETWORKING" />
    <Capability Name="ID_CAP_LOCATION" />
    <Capability Name="ID_CAP_SENSORS" />
    <Capability Name="ID_CAP_MICROPHONE" />
    <Capability Name="ID_CAP_MEDIALIB" />
    <Capability Name="ID_CAP_GAMERSERVICES" />
    <Capability Name="ID_CAP_PHONEDIALER" />
    <Capability Name="ID_CAP_PUSH_NOTIFICATION" />
    <Capability Name="ID_CAP_WEBBROWSERCOMPONENT" />
</Capabilities>

Hull Digital TechMesh Meetup

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Hull University Campus Library

Today’s Hull Digital MeetUp was interesting. We had a presentation from TechMesh, who provide networking (of the human kind) between like-minded IT and Telecoms business in the area, a talk from Nick Riley from Hull University Logistics Institute about the use of RFID and a few words from MediaSat3. And very nice free food and drink.

Hull Digital are organising a very interesting event next month. Hull Digital Question Time brings together a bunch of experts, including the Vice Chancellor of the university, and invites the audience to ask questions. Should be fun.

Videogames Hardware Handbook

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Videogames Hardware Handbook (Videogames Hardware Handbook)

I picked up a copy of this last week. The Videogames Hardware handbook  is a collection of articles from Retro Gamer magazine which describe consoles and games from the seventies to the nineties. There is pretty good coverage of the platforms, especially handhelds, and there are game top tens for all of them as well. There are some missing (I’d love to have had more about the Amiga CD-32 for example) but overall it is a great read.

If you want to relive your memories of old machines then this is a great way to do it.

Hull Holy Trinity Church

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“The church looks lovely inside today” said the chap watching me take photographs in Hulls’ Old Town.

Hull Old Town

I asked if it was OK to have a look around, and maybe take some photographs. “Sure” he said “You get a great view from the pulpit”

Hull Holy Trinity Church Pulpit

He wasn’t wrong. The font you can see at the end of the Nave weighs two tons. William Wilberforce was baptised in it. Mind you, there were some other pretty amazing views to be had as well.

Hull Holy Trinity Church Window

Hull Holy Trinity Church Stained Glass

..and finally, outside

Hull Holy Trinity Church Reflection

If you live in Hull, and have not been around Holy Trinity then you are missing out. I got there early this morning and pretty much had the place to myself, which was wonderful for me, but rather sad really, in that more people should be seeking out “the largest parish church in England” and having a look round. Breathtaking.

TechDays 2010 Portugal Session Resources

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TechDays Portugal 2010 My Office

ACA009 Creating Windows Phone Games

Here is the content from my session. Thanks for being a great audience.

The code works on the current version of the CTP for the Windows Phone system. You can download this from here. If you want to use demo 3B to serve out accelerometer information to your phone app make sure that the program is running with Administrator privileges, and that you have modified the URL in the Phone Starlight program to address this host (localhost should just work).

If you want to get started with Windows Phone you can find a list of useful lines (and some FAQ entries) here.

ACA004 Giving Robots Life with the .NET Micro Framework

I left Oscar the robot powered up overnight by mistake. I was very impressed to find that he still had plenty of battery power left this morning. Fortunately nobody had been sending movement commands to him via the secret URL otherwise he could have gone anywhere!

If you want to get hold of a robot and Fez controllers you can go to:

http://www.tinyclr.com/

If you want to get hold of the Web Server board you can go here:

http://devicesolutions.net/Products/Tahoe.aspx

If you want the most powerful Micro Framework board I’ve ever seen you can go here:

http://www.ghielectronics.com/product/125

The Micro framework at Microsoft can be found here. There are links to platform manufacturers and a very useful forum. You can even propose enhancements to the platform.

http://www.microsoft.com/netmf/default.mspx

TechDays 2010 Session Fun and Games

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TechDays Portugal 2010 My Desk

My desktop setup. A robot, a PC doing desktop sharing, another PC running a video call and a final Micro Framework device running a web server. And it all worked. Eventually.

Thanks to everyone in the audience, and Luis for setting everything up. I wasn’t in Lisbon, but thanks to cunning camera work and a nice fast network I got as close as I could. I could even see the audience on my screen (which probably freaked a few people out at the start).

We had the audience hitting web sites that caused my programs back in Hull to hit breakpoints (which must be the largest debugging session ever). And then I let the everyone out there send commands to Oscar the robot who, right on cue, tried to jump off the desk.

The audience were fantastic. As usual from Portugal. Thanks for taking the event in such good sprit folks.

TechDays Portugal 2010 Back Wall

To try and make everyone feel at home, and add some “TechDays 2010 Portugal” flavour I did up the office wall behind my chair…

TechDays Portugal 2010 Luis Setup

Luis during the, slightly fraught, setup.

TechDays Portugal 2010 Great Audience

Some of the audience at the start of the talk.

Thanks folks. That was the best conference I’ve never been to….

I mentioned in the talk that I’m going to assemble some resources for Windows Phone and .NET Micro framework. I am, but I’ll put them up tomorrow. Off to bed now….

Ash Stranded

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Hull Marina Ocean Herald Again

I had everything ready. My bags were packed and I’d heard on the TV last night that they were reopening all of the airports. Thing is, KLM hadn’t heard this.

And so I’m not going to Portugal. So, I’m going to have to bring a little bit of Portugal to my office tomorrow and beam my sessions at TechDays from Hull. Whatever else, it will be interesting.