Imagine That Judging

Did the exam board (portable worked very well as a tablet, I was able to flick up and down my notes very easily) and then shot back to Hull in time for an Imagine Cup Judging Live Meeting.

We are busy briefing all the judges for the Imagine Cup World Finals next month. We have 67 (yes, sixty-seven) teams to judge. Every year Microsoft say they are not going to have as many as last time. And then they end up with even more teams taking part. Which must say something for the popularity of the competition around the world.

The finals are in New York, and it looks like it is going to be an amazing event. Find out more, meet the teams taking part and see how the judging works at www.imaginecup.com

External Examining with a Tablet PC

In Newcastle today to do some external examining.  It seems strange to have just finished marking our student work and then go off and look at a whole bunch of exam scripts and reports, but actually it is very interesting to see how other institutions deal with all the same things that we see in Hull. It is nice to go somewhere and just talk shop for a while too. And there was a really good sky over the city which I could see from my hotel window. 

The exam board is tomorrow morning. Last year I used my iPad to assemble my thoughts for the meeting. This brought home to me that the iPad is great for consuming content but can be a bit of a pain when you try to create with it. This time I’ve brought along a tiny Windows 7 notebook with a twisty screen, it is a Packard Bell (actually Acer) Easynote Butterfly Touch. I got it a while back. It doesn’t have massive performance, although things picked up a bit when I upped the memory to 4G and it will quite happily run Visual Studio 2010 and the Windows Phone emulator which is quite fun with the multi-touch screen. However, the best thing about this shiny device (which I don’t think you can get any more I’m afraid) is that the battery life really is good for 9 or so hours. In fact, if you turn the brightness down you can get close to the lifespan of an iPad. I’m really looking forward to trying to get Windows 8 running on it…

Anyhoo, it has behaved itself very well up to now. I’ve been using it to type in the reports. Tomorrow I’m going to flip it into tablet mode and use it to read the notes in the meeting.

Stalked by an Oven

I’m being stalked by an oven. It’s actually very scary. We are in the process of planning an upgrade to our kitchen. It should be completed this century with a bit of luck. As part of this I’m searching for prices of various kitchen appliances, including the device you see above. However, now pretty much every web page I go to has an advert for this oven appearing on it. Something in the interwebs has cottoned on to the fact that I’m in the market for some cooking equipment and is tailoring what I see to suit. Most interesting.

Web pages are highly aware of the searches I’ve been doing. Last week there was a very good article in the paper about this kind of thing, which made the point that what you see on the web and when you search depends on what you have already looked for/at. This is not something that you might expect. It means that, far from allowing the web to expand your creativity and send you down new avenues, what really happens is that after a while the search tends to contract and focus down onto what the engines think you are interested in.

Discovering this hot in the heels of the presentation from Sir Tim Berners-Lee last Friday on his dream of an open and level playing field for all internet users makes me wonder if somewhere a battle has already been fought and lost.

I’m not sure if anonymous browsing would make a difference, or if search aggregators like duckduckgo.com would help. As someone said last week “If the service is free, you are the product”. That is how it is with search these days.

Missing Mole Wrench

This is what my Mole Wrench looks like when I can find it.

One of the reasons I had such fun trying to repair the toilet last week was that I had lost my precious Mole Wrench and wasn’t able to use it to hold things still. My Uncle George used to say that the fastest way to find a missing golf ball was to get out a replacement. On that basis I’ve just bought another one. Surprisingly inexpensive. If you not got one of these they are jolly useful. You can even use them as a mini-workbench where they can hold things so that you can work on them.

Update on 2011-06-14 19:12 by Rob

The Wikipedia site for Mole Wrench has this amazing link to Popular Science from 1935. A fantastic read.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee at the Yorkshire International Business Convention

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. I was lucky enough to take a few students up from Hull today and hear him.

During his talk today at the Yorkshire International Business Convention he mentioned that 20% of the world now has web access, and that access to the web is being made a human right in some countries. It was great to hear him speak of the origins of the world wide web as a side project and how it has developed to become the massively complex beast that we have today. Having designed the way that systems on the web interact he has made it his mission to ensure that it continues to develop according to the original vision of free access for all, to all.

He was preceded by Roy Walker who, as a highly accomplished comedian, gave a master class in comic timing and reminded me of a simpler time when jokes were just funny, and not complicated.

Once outside we made for the beach and an ice cream:

These are the crew that came along from Hull in the minibus.

TouchStudio for Windows Phone

If you want to create programs on your Windows Phone 7 device you can of course use the delightful Iron7 implementation of Ruby. This works startlingly well, but using it you are painfully reminded of the fact that mobile phones are best suited for consuming programs, not creating them.

TouchStudio is a project from Microsoft Research that aims to change that a bit. It has been designed from the ground up to work with a touch interface, rather than in spite of it. The commands and the syntax of the language have been created to make it easy and engaging to write applications for the phone, on the phone. There is a nice paper that sets out how it works here here and the project web site here. If you search Windows Phone Marketplace for TouchStudio you can download the latest version for free.

The programming model is easy to pick up, although the language syntax is different from ones you might have seen before. I don’t see this as a bad thing actually, I reckon that programmers should be used to the idea of using different types of language. What makes it stand out for me is the ease with which you can create stuff, and the level of integration they have with the phone. You can work with pictures, maps, music and even set up phone calls from within the language. The web integration is very good, in around 10 minutes I had a program that would fetch my Xbox avatar, convert it to black and white, display it and then save it as a picture on my phone:

I need to do a bit of scaling and tidying up, but the program itself is simple enough:

action AvatarDisplay() : Nothing { 
  pic := web->download_picture('http://avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/rob the bloke/avatar-body.png'); 
  pic->desaturate; 
  pic->post_to_wall; 
  wall->screenshot->save_to_library; 
}

There are also a bunch of built in programs that play games or even do some simple image processing. This is what one of “\themify Picture” did to one of my photos:

If you want to while away some time with your phone and actually achieve something fun and maybe even useful, you should grab a copy and have a play.

Giving Great Presentations

If you are serious about presenting (and I reckon everybody should be) then you will find this presentation from TechEd 2011 very interesting/useful. It was given by Mark Russinovich and Mark Minasi who are very experienced Microsoft speakers.

They make all the sensible points about presentations that seem like common sense; know your stuff, practice your demos, engage the audience etc, but they also set out some other very good thoughts that will take your presentations to the next level.  Well work a look.

LG Optimus Quest 2

Following on from the hugely successful Optimus Quest competition, we now have the inevitable sequel. I’ve got two brand new LG Optimus 7 devices up for grabs. This is a really good Windows Phone with 16G of internal memory, a lovely screen and a nice metal body.

This time the competition is different. All you have to do is send me your download stats from Windows Phone Marketplace and at the end of July and the end of August I’ll give a brand new LG Optimus 7 Windows Phone to the Hull Student with the most downloads. I’ll be checking the numbers with Microsoft, so no photoshopped graphs or tampered screenshots please .

Note that this is open to Hull Students only, and not those who have just graduated (sorry Harry). If you have applied to join us in September, you are eligible to enter too, as long as we have your details on file in our admissions system. 

Just email me your entries at optimusQuest2@robmiles.com before the end of July and I’ll send you a phone if you are the best. Then we do the whole thing again in August.

Some tips to optimise your Marketplace stats:

1. Always give a trial mode. If you are selling your game, make it a free download with a trial mode so that users can get an idea of what it is like for free.
2. Release updates. Don’t finish all the levels and then put the game out there. This means you will be late to market. Instead you can release level 1 in trial mode and then add features and functions as you go along. Harry Overs is doing this very successfully with Destruction Golf, which is picking up quite a following on the Marketplace. Bottled Games and Rusty Spoons also deserve a mention here too, as they have applications out there which are chugging along nicely.
3. Take trouble over your icon and description. Don’t do these the night before you submit. These are your “shop window” and the better they look and the more enticing the text the more chance you have of catching the eye of a customer.
4. Move your game around the Marketplace. If you are not sure which category your game fits into, move it into different ones (within reason) then you can find the one where it attracts the most attention.

Don’t worry if you only get a few downloads, send me your entry anyway. If everyone else forgets to enter you might sneak in and win the prize. Oh, and sign up for rewards at http://www.my-rewards.com. That way you will win something whatever happens. And enter the Windows Phone competition at the Microsoft UK Student Blog.

Update on 2011-06-10 14:24 by Rob

A little clarification here; the figures must be for a single Windows Phone app or game that you have placed in the Marketplace. What I want to see is the total number of downloads from Marketplace. It makes no difference whether it is free or paid, or paid with a free trial. You can't win twice, once you have one phone that's it.

Never Apologise in Advance

Over the years I’ve watched loads of presentations all over the place from students, professionals and even once, by mistake, from me on Channel 9. And one thing that has struck me is that there is one thing you must never, ever, do in front of an audience. And that is apologise in advance. If you say at the start of your talk “I’m sorry, but because I’ve not had time to prepare/got drunk last night/just ended an unhappy love affair (delete where applicable) this is is not going to be as good as it might be” then your audience is instantly expecting you to fail, and they will set their expectations appropriately.

Now this goes against a certain aspect of “Britishness” which is that we from the UK should at all times to be slightly self-effacing and modest. If a Brit tells you that something they have done is “quite good” then be prepared for something truly amazing. But you would never anyone from the ‘states saying that something is quite good. In America things start at “awesome” and then go up from there.

I’m not saying that you should attempt to deceive your audience, or that you shouldn’t apologise if something stops you from doing a good job during the presentation. What I’m saying is that you should not set the wrong expectations at the start. I’ve seen some superb talks from people who have come off the stage and told me how badly they thought it went. I’ve also done what I thought were barnstorming presentations to get a decidedly ho-hum reaction from the audience.

If you are not sure about something, say so during the presentation not at the start. If you put a downer on things right at the beginning you are not actually doing yourself any kind of favour.

Man Made Shed

This is not my shed, this is the showroom model. Mine looks similar, but with somewhat more tatty tools.

I’m spending a few days not on the computer. I’m either marking exam scripts or doing manly DIY type activities. Yesterday I failed to mend one thing (although I did also replace some broken pipe somewhere else, ending the day with a win on points).

Today I built a little baby shed which we are going to use to store all the gardening implements that I never use. I then bolted it to the floor and the wall. It has been a bit breezy lately and so I really don’t want it to fly away. If you have need for a tiny shed that is easy to make you could do worse. You can get it from B&Q here. It even has 13 reviews, 11 positive. I suppose it will shortly have its own Facebook page.

I Hate Plumbing

This is a picture of a cactus. You wouldn’t want a picture of anything else…

I don’t mind wiring things up. I know where I am with electricity. It tends to stay in the cable and not squirt out of joints at each end. Unlike water. The water pipe going into the toilet cistern has been leaking slightly and so I thought I’d improve on Fix #1 (a bowl underneath to catch the drips) with Fix #2, tightening the compression joint. (you just know this is going to end badly, don’t you).

Anyhoo, I attached my one good adjustable spanner (all the rest seem to have vanished) and gave the joint a twirl. This had the effect of twizzling the whole fitting round and shearing off part of the ball cock inside the cistern. This was extra annoying because I’d tried to use my other adjustable spanner (the bad one) to hold that part still and the spanner had just broken. So now whenever the toilet fills up after a flush I also get a four foot high jet of water into the air. Not good. So it was off down to the DIY store to get a replacement fitting. Which of course wouldn’t fit. In the end, by dint of a lot swearing and removal of skin from various knuckles I’m pretty much back where I started, with a bowl collecting the drips. I can’t replace the faulty part with a new one because all the new ones are the wrong size.

I think it might be new toilet time.

In the Reserves

I was a “Reserve Invigilator” today. This means that you get to sit by the phone in your office waiting to get called in to an exam. Fortunately everybody turned up, and so I was able to get on with some more lovely marking.

My “Revision Tweets” do seem to have had some effect, in that I’m getting answers to some of the questions that seem to have been based on what I said, which is nice. I’ve noticed that students make much less use of things like forums these days, perhaps Twitter is the way to go with this.

50 Things a Design Student Should Know

There is a lot of stuff here that applies to software development, and still more that applies to life in general:

http://www.jamiewieck.com/visual-essays/the-50-things-every-graphic-design-student-should-know/

See Sir Tim Berners-Lee for Free by the Sea

The university has obtained a limited number of places to go and see Sir Tim Berners Lee speak at the Yorkshire International Business Convention on Friday 10th of June at Bridlington Spa. His talk is on Friday lunchtime, so we will be leaving the university around 9:45 and getting back on campus at around 2:00, depending on whether we also go for a paddle or not…

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is widely acknowledged as the person who invented the World Wide Web and is chairman of the World Wild Wide Consortium.

If you are a student at Hull who is interested in coming along please get in touch as soon as possible.

Summer Bash

These are the “slightly processed” prize winners.

We had our last bash of the year today. It was great fun, even though we had some technical troubles. The camera on the PlayStation Move was definitely faulty, causing me to lose at Table Tennis. Fortunately the Pizza arrived on time, and everybody had fun. Some were there with tears in their eyes, with this being their last bash as students in the department.

I took some pictures, there are a few more on Flicker tagged Hull2011SummerBash.

Trying to get the hang of this panorama thing…

Panoramic York

Adventures with Panoramic Cameras in York

We went to York today. It only rained twice. Once for four hours and once for five.

Rob on Channel 9

If you want to watch any of the sessions that I recorded during my recent “World Tour” you can find them all nicely indexed on Channel 9:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Speakers/rob+miles

This even includes my Windows Phone Lecture in Rhyme, which is at least as much fun as it sounds. If you watch them all you can count how many times the same jokes come round…..

iPad 2 for Mad-ness

I really like my iPad 2. I bought it because I am always a sucker for the sales assistant saying “It’s the last one we have in stock”. And because I’d seen one. It is a very well realised device.The funky magnetic cover, whilst amazingly expensive (even by the standards of Amazon Kindle cases) does a very good job of providing a stand and protection, and the way you can turn the device off just by covering it is very neat.

I’m not keen on the way that you have to use iTunes to set it up and get things onto it, but I’m just about prepared to put up with this, even to the point of keeping a Mac lying around just to look after the iPads in our household. I reckon the secret of iTunes success is to run it on a Mac. My experiences with iTunes on the PC have never been good, and woe betide you if you ever try to remove iTunes from a PC. Actually, I do know how to do this, the first step is to reformat the PC and re-install Windows.

But I digress. If you do have an iPad there are a couple of programs that I’ve found very useful. The first is PDF Reader Pro which does a very good of rendering PDF files, which you can transfer to the iPad using the dread iTunes. Some time ago I bought Absolutely Mad, which is DVD filled with 50 years worth of Mad Magazine, all as scanned PDFs. The iPad is wonderful for reading this, so now I can carry around a few years worth of Mad for reading. I’ve just noticed that you can get National Lampoon on the same kind of thing, which is nice.

The second useful program is AVPlayerHD, which lets me carry around a few episodes of Veronica Mars wherever I go without having to fill up memory with large video files. This has very good presentation and lots of options you can use to make even highly compressed stuff look as presentable as possible.

Update on 2011-05-31 08:22 by Rob

Just discovered that you can get Star Trek, the complete comic book collection, in PDF on DVD rom from Amazon.com for 17 dollars. Very tempting...

Just when you are waxing philosophical…

Thanks to Joey deVilla for the link

Where did they find a cat that big?

Windows Phone Mango

The latest development tools for Windows Phone are now available for download. They are very good. There are lots of extra features, and a really nice new emulator which does location and accelerometer emulation.

I reckon that Microsoft stuff tends to get really interesting around the third version. MSDOS 3.0 was the first one that really worked well, Windows 3 was the one where things got really interesting, the third’ish version of Windows NT (NT 4.0) was rather good and so on. By the time the development team get to version 3 they have got all the core behaviours out of the way and can move on to the interesting stuff that they really wanted to do when they started.

Mango is the third version of the Windows Phone software.  This is really impressive, in that the phone itself has not been out for a year yet, and the first set of development tools only appeared just over a year ago.

While you can’t get your hands on hardware yet, thanks to the emulator support you can start to write programs that take advantage of the new features, which include background processing, combined Sliverlight and XNA applications, on-board database, sockets support and lots of other goodies.

You can get the SDK here. One thing you might need to do first is install Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 – which you can find here. (this actually took longer to install than the SDK for me).

There are also loads of new examples which you can find here

I must admit I find Mango really exciting. If you want to see some videos of the new consumer features (neat things you’ll be able to do with the phone soon) then take a look here.