Why You Should Enter the Imagine Cup

If you are thinking of getting involved with the Imagine Cup Software Design competition I’m hosting a couple of Live Meetings where I describe why you should.  The meetings both contain the same content, one is in this evening and I’m trying not to think about the time of the second one…

You can find details of how to sign up on the Imagine Cup Software Design page or you can follow these simple steps that I’ve stolen from it.

1. Install Microsoft Office Live Meeting. We recommend you do this in advance to avoid technical difficulties.
2. Join the meeting on February 7, 2011 at 19:00 GMT. Find out what time it is in your country/region.
3. Join the meeting on February 8, 2011 at 6:00 GMT. Find out what time it is in your country/region.

There will be fun, jokes and some rare Imagine Cup pictures from way back. Oh, and if you sign up and enter it might just change your life forever.

Update on 2011-02-07 20:00 by Rob

One presentation down, one to go. Thanks for being a good audience and staying to the very end. Some great questions too.

Update on 2011-02-08 08:49 by Rob

...and we're done. Did the second meeting at 6:00 am this morning. Thanks for being another great audience. With a bit of luck we might meet up for the next meeting. Stay tuned for dates and times.

Getting Students Started in the Windows Phone Marketplace

Getting started as a student in Windows Phone marketplace is actually quite easy, but there are one or two issues that you need to be aware of, and best practices to follow to make sure that you get going as quickly as possible. If you know how to do stuff the two issues that you need to be aware of are very simple:

• The validation of your account only starts once you have submitted an application for approval.
• You can only unlock a Windows Phone device once you have submitted an application for approval.

The bottom line here is that the first thing you must do when you have registered is submit an application for approval. Think of this as a “placeholder” that will move you through the process. You can remove it from sale later.

If you are an experienced Windows Phone developer this should be no problem. If you are not submitted before the process is simple enough, and to make it even easier I’ve made a tiny screencast that goes through it for you. In this I make a brand new application from scratch and then show how it would be submitted for approval. If you just copy what I do you can be sorted in around half an hour or so.

You can download and view the video here:

Windows Phone Marketplace Walkthrough

Note: The application that I submit during the screencast hasn’t appeared in the Marketplace yet. I’ll let you know when it does…

The King’s Speech

The King’s Speech is a great film. Colin. Firth. Must. Get. An. Oscar. Apparently Queen Elizabeth has seen the film and is of the opinion that it is OK. It must have been strange for the queen to see herself portrayed as a child in the film. Especially when she saw that her sister was actually that irritating little girl from “Outnumbered”.

The film tells of a man who was not born to be king but had greatness well and truly thrust upon him, in spite of being stuck with a terrible stammer. His wife finds him an unconventional speech therapist and the resulting collision of cultures is a great thing to watch. This is just a nice, uplifting film with a great cast and visuals that captures the spirit of the times beautifully. I’m not totally convinced that everyone was exactly as they are portrayed in the film, but that is by the by. Go and see it.

Get Your Windows Phones at Hull University

Quite a few students at Hull now have Windows Phones, which is nice. They are also writing games for them and Imagine Cup entries. Which is even nicer. If you are a student at Hull and you want a phone to play with I can lend you one for a little while. This offer is only open to people who turn up at my office and show me some neat stuff on the emulator, and I can’t let you keep the phones (shame) because we need them for teaching later in the semester. However, they should be useful to people who are stuck for a way of testing their program on a real device.

Later this month I’m going to run some “Bring Out Your Living” Windows Phone sessions on Wednesday afternoon where anyone can turn up with a XAP file and we can try them on a device and see what happens.

Oh, and if you want to make your Windows Phone work on the exchange server on campus the settings are:

Server: exfs.adir.hull.ac.uk

Domain: adir

Server Requires Encrypted (SSL) connection: ticked

Find your way to the advanced settings when the standard ones take you there. Use your university username and password and it should all work fine.

XNA 4.0 Book Now Available

The latest version of my XNA book, XNA Game Studio 4.0: Learn Programming Now! has just been released.  It must be good, it has an exclamation mark in the title!

The book contains content updated for Visual Studio 2010 and XNA 4.0. It also contains three chapters about Windows Phone game development, so you can take your XNA skills and show them off on the phone.

Bubblegum for Windows Phone pictures and Good Advice

Bubblegum is a new program for Windows Phone 7 (and coming to other platforms they say) that lets you take pictures and share them with your chums on Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. The application also has some very “hipsteresque” (if that is a proper word) filters that you can apply to the pictures before you send them. These make you look even more artistic and interesting.  As a true artist, I have of course posted a few of my own. My name on Bubblegum is, unsurprisingly, RobMiles it you want to take a look.

The program is free, and fun. It was written by a couple of folks from Microsoft who are also a couple, if you see what I mean. Aarthi Ramamurthy and Sriram Krishnan have done a super job in making a nice little program which does the job with flair and humour. Sriram Krishnan even has a blog. Everyone should read his “Stuff I’ve learned at Microsoft post”. Great stuff.

http://www.sriramkrishnan.com/blog/

Over Compressed Audio

These images don’t tell you you bad it is going to sound…..

This evening I thought I’d spend a few minutes taking some of my old records and making them into MP3 tracks. I’m not sure about the legal issues here, but since I’m not going to actually sell the recordings I think I should be OK. Years ago I recorded some albums by just recording the entire record and converting it into MP3.  What I wanted to do now was just pull out individual tracks. I used Audacity, the best audio editing program you can get. It is free and works a treat.  If you want to play with audio, get a copy here:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/

A tip, the latest beta (1.3.12) is the one that you should use for Windows 7 and works fine. It also seems to have the MP3 encode/decode built in.

Anyhoo, I opened up each large MP3 file and then laboriously saved the sections that held each track. And was rewarded with some recordings that sounded, well, horrible. Horrible, horrible. Then I realised what I’d just done. I’d taken a compressed signal, decompressed it and then recompressed it again. They tell you not to do this, and blimey they are right.

Next step is to dig out “Ye Olde Recorde Deqque” and re-record uncompressed (wav files I guess) of the records and then save sections of these to compressed form. Oh well.

One of the records I was converting was Andrew Gold, “What’s wrong with this picture” which has one of the best record sleeves ever:

See if you can find a high resolution copy of the image and find all 32 mistakes in it…..

Reference and Value Types

I reckon that the day I give a lecture and don’t learn anything is the day that I will give up teaching. I always take something away from a lecture, although sometimes it is only a decision not to use that particular joke again…

Today I was telling the first year about reference and value types in C# and I learnt something as well. For those of you who are not familiar with programming in C# (and why should you be?)  this is all about how data is held in a program.

Once you get beyond programs that do simple sums you find yourself with a need to lump data together. This happens as soon as you have to do some work in the Real World™. For example, you might be creating an account management system for a customer and so you will need to have a way of holding information about a particular customer account. This will include the name of the customer, their address and their account balance, amongst other things.

Fortunately C# lets you design objects that can contain these items, for example a string for the name, a number for the balance, a string for the address and so on.  In fact, C# provides two ways that you can lump data together. One of these is called a struct (short for structure) and the other is called a class (short for class). These two can be hard to tell apart, in that the way that they are created is exactly the same. But they have one very important difference. Structures are managed by value, but classes are managed by reference.

Today is the point in the course where I have to explain the difference between the two.  I’ve got a routine for doing this which I’ve used in the past, and it usually gets there. If an item is managed by value (for example a struct) you can think of it as a box with a name painted on it.  If we move data between two variables managed by value:

destination= source;

- the result is that whatever value is in the source box is copied into the destination box. If my source is a structure value which contains lots of elements all of these are copied into the destination. This is how simple variables such as integers and floating point values are managed.

However, if an item is managed by reference the effect of the assignment above is different. You can think of a reference as a named tag which is tied to an object in memory. If I assign one reference to another:

destination = source;

- the result of this is that both reference tags are now tied to the same object in memory.  No data is actually copied anywhere.

At this point in the explanation I usually have a room full of people wondering why we bother with references. They just seems to be an added piece of confusion. Now that we have references we have the potential for problems when the equals behaviour doesn’t do what we expect.  Why do we have these two ways of working with data? Why can’t we just use values for everything?

My answer to this is that using references allows us to provide different views of data. If I have a list of customers that I want to order by both customer name and account number then this is not possible with a single array of values. But if I use references it is much easier. I can have a list of references which is ordered by name and another list ordered by account number.

So far I’m going by the slides. But then it occurred to me to go a bit further, and think about the use of reference and value types from a design point of view. If I’m designing a data structure for a  sprite in a game (for example a single alien in a Space Invaders game) the sprite will have to contain the image to be used to draw the sprite and the position of the sprite on the screen. I posed the question which of these two elements should be managed by value and which by reference.

After some discussion we came to the conclusion that it is best if the image to be used to draw the sprite is managed by reference. That means that a number of sprites can hold references to the same sprite design. You see this a lot in computer games, where a game has multiple identical elements (soldiers, cars, spaceships etc) it is often the case that they are all sharing a single graphic. However the position of the sprite on the screen is a value that should be unique to each sprite, we are never going to want to share this, and so the position should be a value type.

We then went through a bunch of other situations where an object contains things, and pondered for each thing whether it should be managed by value or by reference. Generally speaking we came to the conclusion that anything you want to share should be managed by reference, but stuff that is unique to you should be a value.

Of course references bring a lot of other benefits too, which we will explore in the next few weeks, but the thing I learnt was that the more you can show a context in which a particular language characteristic is applicable the more chance you have of getting the message across.

As a little puzzle, one thing we talked about was the storage of the address of a customer in our account database. Should that be managed by value or reference, and why?

Save Dalby Forest

Dalby forest is one of my favourite places in the country. We go there a couple of times a year with a packed lunch and just wander round the place. Years ago, when the kids were smaller, we used to go and have barbeques. It’s just a nice place with loads of trees and some lovely walks.

And if the government have their way I won’t be able to go there much longer. They have this cunning plan to sell off, or lease, or give away, or whatever, the forests in the UK. This will save them some money and avoid them having to levy so much tax on very rich people. Or something.  It will also almost certainly mean that places like Dalby Forest will be out of bounds to folks like you and me.

I’m not a particularly political person. My theory is that whoever you vote for the government always gets in. I’m also very aware that there are much more important things out there than whether or not Rob has a nice place to go and have his picnics.  But I’m also aware that there are a lot of us packed onto this tiny little island,  and that the few really nice green spaces that we have left should be protected, not sold off for profit.

There is a petition you can sign up to if you want your voice to be heard on this matter. I’ve already done so. You can find it at the Woodland Trust web site:

http://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk

Lazy Sundays Don’t Exist

I was planning a kind of lazy Sunday. Soundproof my PC, wash the cars, find out who murdered Clarissa Lisle and so on. That’s kind of how it turned out. Except that nothing was quite as easy as it was supposed to be. First off was soundproofing. Having obtained a soundproof kit from http://www.akasa.com.tw/ I set about fitting it to the PC. This involved taking off all the panels and sticking what looked like a cross between foam and felt on each of them. The instructions mentioned that it was a bad idea to block up any ventilation holes and I agree with this, so I had to cut out gaps for the air to get in and out, which was kind of fun and left me with lots of odd foam shapes that I can put to one side in case they might be useful one day and then throw away in a couple of years’ time.

I managed to get all the cutting and sticking done and then carefully reassembled the PC and slotted it into place under the desk, forgetting the golden rule that is “Always test it before you put the lid on”. Of course, once I’d connected all the network, usb, video, power and audio cables I found that the machine no longer started when I pressed the go button.

A tip, if you are not sure whether or not power is reaching your PC, listen carefully as you plug in the mains cable. You should hear a tiny “crack” as the plug goes in. This is a smoothing capacitor in the power supply charging up. If you get this then there is a good chance that the fault is in the output of the PSU, not the input. I was hearing the sound, and so I knew that something was wrong inside the box. Of course. So I removed all the cables, pulled the machine back, took the side off and found that I’d managed to dislodge some cables from the motherboard. Since these were the ones connected to the power switch it was fairly obvious where the fault was. Pushed them back in, tested the machine with the lid off (even at my advanced years it is still possible to learn stuff) and then, having heard the happy sound of fans whirring into life, put everything back into place. It is a bit quieter with the padding. Most of the noise seems to be air moving around, which is difficult to silence completely. The machine itself seems nicely quick, and I’m looking forward to doing some serious work on it. I’ve even managed to get my old, broken, mouse back working again by the simple expedient of putting in some batteries that work, rather than a replacement set that seem to have been pre-flattened before I got them.

Next up was wash the car. Some people drive down to a car wash but I’m not one of them I’m afraid. I’m more of a “bucket and sponge” kind of guy. The main reason for this is because I like the idea of going carefully over the car looking for damage. Particularly at this time of year, when the authorities drop loads of salt and sharpened stones on the road which are then shot at your car by the tyres of the one in front. I was sad to see a bit of stone damage to the front of the Cube, which meant a trip down to Halfords for the right coloured paint and a little bit of touch up action, which sounds vaguely rude but actually just involved me and a very small pot of paint. I don’t think that the problem is completely solved, but at this time of year the best you can hope for is a holding action until the weather improves.

On the way back into the house I noticed that one of the tyres of the other car looked a bit flat. Or was it standing in a puddle? No, the tyre was on the flat side of flat. Something to do with the galvanised steel nail stuck in it. Ho hum. I’ve pumped the tyre up and if it still has some air in tomorrow this should get the car as far as the nearest repair place. So, I’ve done lots of stuff but still not found the murderer. I’m reading a story by PD James, “The Skull Beneath The Skin”. It took a while to get going, I was half way through before anyone got their clogs popped, but things are now hotting up nicely with a grisly death in a locked room and a whole drawing room full of suspects with their own motives and alibis. I do like murder mysteries, and PD James plays very fair with her plots. There is lots and lots of well written detail about the characters and the locations inside which are scattered enough clues to get you thinking. And this particular story even has a suspicious butler, which really marks it for greatness.

I’m reading the book on the Kindle, which is a lovely device for consuming things like this. Some books you want to own (those are the ones with big pages and coloured pictures) and some books you buy just to read once and throw away (those are the ones by John Grisham). The Kindle does the second type of books very well. I’d been put off the idea of an electronic book by the fact that you never actually own anything. It wasn’t until I realised that I didn’t want to actually own some of the books, but just read them that I actually cottoned on to the plot as it were.

The good news for us I guess is that eventually we will end up with a house full of books that are actually nice to own, rather than lots of paperbacks that we bought and now don’t quite know what to do with. Eventually they find their way down to the charity shop, which is fair enough but involves me having to do something, which is not great. And I often come back with more books than I took. We used to have a weekly pilgrimage to the library when we were younger, but I’ve not been there for a while. I used to get books about subjects that I found interesting, like advertising, and then read a whole bunch. I don’t have as much time for that kind of thing just right now, but I’d like to think I could go back and the books will still be there. Even with the magic of the Kindle and the interweb there is still something nice about walking down a row of books and picking out one to read. I hope we still have that in the future. Anyhoo, back now to a world of shady characters and murky plotting. And I might read some of the book as well...

Tangled Movie Review

Note: I’m having a long weekend. I’m making my blog posts at least 1,000 words long for the next couple of days. Just to see if I can. You don’t have to read them all. Normal, truncated, service will be back next week.

Tangled is the latest animated film from Disney. It follows in the footsteps of some pretty heavy hitters like Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. Unfortunately Disney has also made some pretty dodgy animated films as well. Anyone remember Lilo and Stitch? In a good way? Opinions in the reviews were pretty sharply divided, with critics either praising it to the heavens or calling it lacklustre and run of the mill. As we sat down with our popcorn I was consoled by the fact that most of the nastier reviews had been in the posh papers.

We were seeing the film in 2D instead of the much touted 3D. This was not because we couldn’t afford the 3D seats (although the difference in price had paid for the drink and meal combo that we carried gingerly into the theatre), but because we happen to prefer to see our movies the way that they are supposed to be made. Flat. There is a very good discussion of why 3D doesn’t work out there on the web somewhere, I recommend that you seek it out (search for “Why 3D doesn't work and never will” by Roger Ebert). Essentially he makes the point that when you watch a 3D movie your eyes have to focus at a fixed distance on the screen. But when you see 3D your brain thinks that the 3D bits are different distances away. The 3D seeing part of your brain then has to override the 2D part of your eyes to make the scene look right. In the 600 million years that the brain has been developing to give us useful 3D vision it has never had to do this before and the resulting mental tussle gives me (and lots of people) a headache after a while. Actually, there is another good reason why we only saw the 2D version. Due to a quirk of fate number one wife and I only have two good eyes between us (fortunately we were given one each) and so we don’t really miss the third dimension much. And anyhoo, although there were a few bits obviously added for 3D (point stuff at the audience and swing it around, lots of tiny particles etc etc) seeing it in 2D didn’t really make much difference. We were pleased to see that the theatre was packed with people who didn’t mind missing 3D either.

But back to the film itself. I’m not giving too much away if I tell you that the film is a reworking of “Rapunzel”, the fairy tale about the girl in the tower with the unfeasibly long locks. And they’ve done a pretty good job. If you know the story you’ll appreciate the stuff they’ve put in to make it interesting. If you don’t you’ll just appreciate the story. The villainess of the piece is very well portrayed, one of the better and more plausible fairy tale nasty’s and the hero and heroine are nicely matched. The music is not intrusive. It’s not a musical film (or of course I would not have gone) but the songs that they do are very well realised and enjoyable in a hum along but then forget after the film kind of way. The best one is the set piece in a lair of ner-do-wells which manages to echo some of the best of the song about Gaston in Beauty and the Beast (I don’t dislike all musicals, just ones that aren’t Beauty and the Beast).

The film is all computer rendered, but looks very lush. The fabric on the clothes is particularly impressive, especially the dress worn by the villainess (I’m wondering if we now call female baddies villains, in the same way that actor and comedian have now gone unisex. Perhaps this is something I’d best not dwell on). But the cloth does look very real, as if there actually was a character wearing clothes, rather than a surface with a texture on it. The characters look good, move well and fit their voices. Disney spent a lot of money on this film and it shows.

I liked the film a lot. It has been unfavourably compared with Shrek, another reworking but of a less popular children’s tale. I think this is unfair. Shrek had the advantage that nobody (or at least me) knew how it would turn out and did have some really standout actors voicing the characters. One big advantage of Tangled is that it is unlikely that we will see any massively inferior sequels, something that was unfortunately not true of Shrek. The critics also compared Tangled unfavourably to films by Pixar, saying that it lacks the wit and invention of some of their efforts. I kind of agree, but the producers are a bit constrained by the fact they are reworking a fairy tale. There is little chance of a cute robot or house dangling from balloons being able to make an appearance, and at least they avoided making any crass references to contemporary culture that can date a film faster than side splitting jokes about Betamax. The characters they have added to fill out the story are good, with a particular call out to Maximus the horse, who would get a film of his own if there was any justice in the world.

So, to sum up I really enjoyed the film. So did the rest of the theatre. If it can keep an audience made up of around 40% kids under 10 quiet (and me) then it must have something going for it. It is a genuinely nice story with well defined baddies and a good solid triumph of good over evil. The computer graphics are some of the best that you will see at the moment and it has the Disney trademark of lots going on in the background that marks some of their best work. The songs aren’t the best in my opinion, but they are OK and you will not leave the theatre feeling shortchanged. In fact you should work out feeling that you have just seen a really good film. I did.

CS Degree Pictures

I think I’m getting the hang of this. Thanks everyone for keeping still..

And these are the folks on the back of the stage. Well done folks.

Getting the First Degree..

Just done my first ceremony of the day. Everything went well and the audience were great (although to be honest I’ve never had a bad audience at a degree ceremony).

I’m really pleased with the photograph. It is made from three stitched together and actually came out very well. If you click on the photo you can get to my Flickr site and see the much larger version, where pretty much everyone is recognisable.

These are the students on the back of the stage, this panorama didn’t work quite so well because I didn’t hold the camera as still as I might have.

Another ceremony at 2:00. Great fun.

Windows Phone Power Packs

One of the nice things about a Windows phone is that you can take the battery out and put a replacement in. This is useful if the battery breaks, or runs down. And you can get spares really cheaply. These people are presently selling a pair of batteries and a charger for the unbelievable price of £7.90. I’ve no idea how long they will last, but they seem OK at the moment. For less than the price of a music CD they seem a good deal to me.

Talking Windows Phone 7

Took this picture in 2007 by mistake. And I love it.

Had a great time today. I’ve been talking to folks about teaching with Windows Phone 7. Saw some amazing XNA games produced by student teams and met up with some Microsoft people. Slightly marred by the four hour train journey back, but everything was on time, which was nice.

If you want to find out about teaching with Windows Phone or learn something about it (subtle plug) take a look at my Blue Book material which you can find on this link.

Heading to Reading

I like train travel. Which is good, because I’m going to be doing a lot of it over the next couple of days.  Got a Windows Phone meeting tomorrow at Microsoft Reading and so today I’m waiting for the first of a bunch of trains to take me down there.

What Computer should I get for University?

We got an email last week asking what kind of computer works best at university. Here are my thoughts on the matter:

Netbook

Netbooks based on the Atom processor are very cheap and great for web surfing, email and writing essays but they are a bit underpowered for the more demanding stuff like image editing and HD video. While you can use large tools like Visual Studio on an Atom powered Netbook it will not be a particularly enjoyable experience, particularly if you only have 1G of RAM in the machine.  However, they are great for taking notes, very portable and their batteries should see out a day on campus if you are careful. And they are so cheap you won’t suffer an enormous loss if you drop or lose yours.

Laptop

If you are buying a laptop I would go for at least a Core 2 of some kind. Machines based on the i3 processor are becoming affordable and are worth a look. If you are buying a laptop make sure that it has (or you can upgrade it to) at least 4G of RAM. If you want to write games with the machine it really needs a separate graphics adapter, those with built in graphics might work, but their performance will not be good. Take a look here for details of requirements to write XNA games:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb203925.aspx

Such a machine need not cost too much, I got an Dell Studio 15 with ATI graphics for around the 600 pound mark last year, and I’m sure things have moved on since then. Of course the snag with buying a “proper” portable computer is that it is properly heavy and scarily expensive to cart round with you.   This might mean that it gets left back at your house most of the time, which kind of negates the purpose of a laptop.

You should also look very carefully at the battery life. Bear in mind that although there are some charging stations on campus these are the exception rather than the rule and so a machine that can last all day is a good plan. I used to have a rule of thumb that I would take the manufacturers’ claimed life and halve it, so a machine that was supposed to be good for 3 hours would actually give only 90 minutes. However, I think things are improving a bit. My latest little machine claims 9 hours of use, and pretty much gets there.

Desktop

I’m in the process of returning to my desktop roots at the moment. I moved onto a laptop a while back because I loved the idea of having all my data with me at all times. It meant that I could pretty much work anywhere.  However, I can now have my data anywhere by using Live Mesh and Dropbox, and I fancy having a go with two monitors, so moving back to desktop makes sense. If you are buying a desktop now you should take a look at the new Intel “SandyBridge” I5 processor, which is not that expensive and provides a big leap in performance terms. Such a machine with at least 4G of ram and a 1T hard disk  and a reasonable graphics card should come in at around that magic 600 pounds (if you shop carefully)  and will provide a big leap in performance over a laptop of similar price. 

Some students have a great big hulking desktop at home and carry a tiny cheap netbook around during the day to take notes. This can work very well, particular if you use one of the cloud services (see backup below) to keep everything synchronised.

Apple

Apple seem to have figured out what makes something a pleasure to own and use, and then bottled it and sold it. All their machines run Windows really well, although the native OS X operating system has a lot to commend it and gives you access to wonderful programs like Garageband which come free with each Mac. And of course if you have a Mac you can write programs for the iPhone. 

I would place a slight question mark over the reliability and longevity of their hardware though. My MacBook Pro has been through two batteries, a power supply and a main board since I got it, and my little MacBook is on its second battery. I've bought machines from lots of other suppliers, Dell, Sony, Toshiba and Acer, and never had this failure rate with them.

If you are in academia make sure that you buy using the Apple academic discount scheme, you will save a little money but you will also get three years of Applecare warranty, which is well worth having. 

Software

Don’t forget software when you are pricing your systems. All our students get Microsoft Academic Alliance usernames shortly after they arrive with us and you can get Microsoft Operating systems and development tools for free from this:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/academic/default

The only thing that you will miss from this is Microsoft Office, which you can get quite cheaply from here:

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

If you want to try Linux I’d recommend taking a look at Ubuntu, which provides one of the best turnkey Unix experiences.

Backup

It seems that you have to lose a big chunk of work before you appreciate the importance of making backups of your data. One of my project students had their hard disk crash the night after they had just finished writing a very important report. Of course they hadn’t backed up the files…. 

These days, rather than remembering take a backup I use Dropbox and LiveMesh to make sure that files on my computers are all synchronised. During a working day I’ll probably move between two or three different platforms and these technologies make sure that the data on all of them always lines up. They are also provide browser based interfaces, so that you can get at all your important files anywhere you can find a web connection. 

http://explore.live.com/windows-live-mesh

http://dropbox.com/

The main problem with these services is the limited amount of space they offer. Live Mesh will give you 5G of online storage for free, with Dropbox you have to make do with 2G for free, although you can have more if you pay. However, this is not an issue for me. I don’t put any of my music or video on them, I simply use them to store “work in progress”, which for all the taught content and presentations that I gave last year only amounts to around 2 or so gig.

Insurance

If you do buy lots of fancy hardware do make sure that it is insured. Sometimes home insurance needs to be modified to cover expensive single items and if you move away from home you may need to get a policy of your own to cover your gadgets.

Final Words

Don’t spend too much on a computer. You don’t need a huge powerful machine to do our courses at Hull, actually most of the work (apart from 3D game writing) could be performed on a fairly basic system costing less than 300 pounds. We do have machines on campus which you can use, including some really powerful ones in the games lab which are available to students who need a lot of horsepower. Remember that anyone who tells you that you need the most expensive and powerful system they have is probably a computer salesman….

Double Sided Printing Satisfaction

Is there anything more satisfying than spending a Sunday afternoon managing to make your HP printer actually print on both sides of the paper?

I suppose the answer is getting a printer that works as it is supposed to do out of the box with the drivers as supplied.  And don’t get me started about how it is impossible to get Photoshop Elements 9 (latest version) to print out on paper exactly what is shown on the screen….

Playing with Money

Almost enough here for four cups of coffee…

When I’m in the middle of conference calls I’ve taken to piling up all my change on the edge of my desk. So if you hear the sound of falling money when I’m talking you’ll know what has just happened.

Platform Expo–27th March at KC Stadium

Lindsay West...a man with a plan.

We had a planning meeting today at the KC Stadium. We were sorting out the arrangements for Platform Expo in March. You can find out all about it, and even sign up, here:

http://platformexpos.com/index.html

Every time we talk about the event it gets bigger, and better, and more awesomer (if that is a word). Today we found out more about the laser show, live bands, interactive art and virtual costumes that are going to be there. Along with Microsoft Kinect, Nintendo 3DS, showcases and sessions on making your gaming ideas into reality. And of course we will be having the final presentations of our 24 hour game development at the expo as well.  It is going to be such fun.

The hallowed turf of the KC Stadium, home of Hull City and Hull FC.