Imagine Cup Video Round Judges Comments now Available

I’ve just finished spending a few hours in the Imagine Cup Judging tool. I’ve been going through the judges comments on the Video Presentations that we’ve been reviewing. The idea is that we can get some feedback to the teams in advance of the finals in New York next week. This will allow them to add some detail to their presentations and make sure they can give their best.

With over 60 teams it has been quite a challenge to summarize all the comments and get them distributed but I hope the teams find the information useful. I was very impressed with the videos that I saw, and it was good to see comments from other judges saying how much they enjoyed seeing theirs as well.

Remember that these comments are there to make good things even better. If we have mentioned that you could add some coverage to particular aspects of your presentation this means that we liked what we saw, and we want to see more.

I’m really looking forward to New York next week. It is going to be super great. Come and say hello if you see me. I’m the tall bloke wearing the Lego watch….

Cottingham Day

Cottingham Church was open too

Today is Cottingham Day. I normally miss this because I’m out of the country at the Imagine Cup World Finals, but this year they are a week later and so I’ve had a chance to take a look. On Cottingham Day they close the main street and set up stalls and stuff for folk to take a look around. They also have some classic cars parked up, so it was out with the big camera and off for a look.

Cottingham churchyard

I used to have a Mini, but not as nice as this one…

Cool Rover

Proper motoring

The whole thing was great and had a super atmosphere. If you are around next year, well worth a trip.

Another year of MVP-ness

Just got the email from Microsoft telling me that I’ve been reappointed as a Windows Phone MVP for another year. Very pleased. It seems that rumours of the death of the Windows Phone MVP programme are somewhat exaggerated. Or something.

I’ve been an MVP since 2003. I’m never quite sure what I’ve done to deserve it, but I hope that as long as I keep doing stuff, they’ll look kindly on me each year.

Windows Phone 7 Mango Magic

Mango Upgrade - Star Trek fans please note

I upgraded my “proper” phone to Mango yesterday. I wasn’t going to, the plan was just to upgrade a developer phone and use that to play with the new SDK features. However, once I’d played with the system for a while I just had to do it so I can use Mango as much as possible.

One of the things that I used to love about my iPhone was the way that I really enjoyed using it. I’d fire it up knowing that whatever I was going to do, from create an appointment to surf the internets, would be fun. The people who make the iPhone really seem to understand how software must not get in the way, it should just make doing things better. With Mango, Windows Phone has reached that point. I love the way that it organises all the interactions with friends into single strand. I can see all the phone calls, emails, texts and messages in one conversation, which is just so nice. Being able to make family groups who I can message and deal with as a single entity is great too.

One thing I used to do with the iPhone was spend an evening browsing the App Store and parting with a couple of pounds (less than the price of a pint of beer) on little programs that would be fun to play with. The Windows Phone Marketplace is by no means as large as the App Store, but it is plenty big enough for me to start doing this again. And now we have Angry Birds and Plants vs Zombies (two must buys) as well.

There are still a couple of things missing to make my Windows Phone experience perfect. I’d love to have Street View for the navigation (although on the plus side I now have turn by turn navigation with spoken directions) and not having BBC iPlayer is sometimes a bit of a pain, but I now have a phone that I open up knowing it is going to be fun to use, which is really great.

If you are a Marketplace Developer I’d strongly advise you to get Mango on your device. Sure, it will make you able to play with the new code libraries, but it will also give you a really nice phone experience. I’ve said before I reckon that version 3.0 is when Microsoft start to really nail their products and Mango is definitely proof of this theory.

Poolside Programming with the C# Yellow Book

Russell, who has signed up to be in our First Year starting in September, shows how he is getting ahead of the game by taking the C# Yellow Book for some poolside programming in Fuerteventura. Good stuff.

It seems that the Yellow Book is looking a little pasty this year. I was going for an artistic shade reminiscent of dappled sunlight through tall tress in spring. Unfortunately I got muddy white. But don’t worry, the next Yellow Book is going to be the yellowist yellow you have ever seen. I’m presently working on updates for the content. Remember that you can get your own, completely free, PDF version of the book from www.csharpcourse.com I’ll put the new version up when I send it to the printers for copies for next year.

Mango Unleashed

In case you were wondering what a Mango actually looks like. I think you should know that I had to buy this picture from iStockPhoto….

Big things afoot in Windows Phone 7 land.

Firstly, the latest version (7.1 beta 2) of the toolchain is now available. You can get it from here. This lets you create Windows Phone apps for the Mango build. It replaces version 7.1 beta 1, which you must remove before you install this one. A tip, I download the iso image (there is a link on the download site) and burn it to a disk. Then I can update machines at home without losing all my network bandwidth.

Secondly, and this is the big one, all registered Marketplace developers will get access to a Microsoft Connect program which will enable them to put Mango system images onto their developer devices. And not just the special developer phones. This means that I should be able to get some Mango goodness onto my Samsung Omnia 7. Wonderful. The email invitations are going out at the moment. Not got mine yet, but I’m watching my inbox.

Thirdly, if you are a student you can take advantage of a new DreamSpark inspired competition.  Here are the instructions, hand stolen from the WindowsTeam Blog (I always think that says Window Steam Blog – but that’s just me).

1. Make sure you’re registered for DreamSpark
2. Download and install Expression Studio Ultimate and the new Mango Windows Phone Developer Tools (available free as a member of DreamSpark)
3. Get the free Sketchflow Template for Windows Phone and create a Sketchflow mock-up of your app
4. Post the Sketchflow mock-up somewhere online and tweet out the link using the hash tag #WPAppItUp
5. We will review all prototypes and will contact the developers who submit the best ones and send them a special Mango developer device.

Great stuff.  Windows Phone is going from strength to really strong.

Optimus Quest 2 Reminder

Don’t forget my Optimus Quest competition. The Hull student with the most Windows Phone Marketplace downloads up to the end of July 2011 will win a shiny new Optimus 7 device. Then we do it all again in August.

Full details here.

Things that go Beep in the Night

Think I might have overdone the perspective correction on this picture….

The burglar alarm went off at 5:00 am this morning. And I don’t mean went off in a “I’ve seen a burglar” kind of way. I mean went off in a “bottle of milk” kind of way. It started emitting clicks and beeps that indicated that all was not well inside. Since I knew that opening the box would probably set it off properly we just endured the unhappy beeps for a few hours.

When I took a look I discovered that the system seemed to have forgotten all its settings and was having difficultly remembering new ones. I think one of the memory chips has gone a bit soft. Since I hate being without intruder detection it was therefore time to fit another.

Turns out that I happened to have a replacement device lying around. I bought it a while back when I needed to find out about burglar alarms for a .NET Micro Framework project I was involved with. It has been sitting, unfitted, in the bedroom because the old alarm was working fine. Until now.

So it was out with the new kit and off I went. The new device actually has an alarm in the keyboard unit. I didn’t know this until I set the thing off by mistake. The resulting 100db of noise made me levitate from my chair around 2 feet and I spent 30 seconds or so trying to find out in the manual how to turn the darned thing off and cover my ears at the same time.

Anyhoo, I’ve configured and tested everything and it seems to work fine. I’ve had to say goodbye to the old one, which is a bit sad, it had served us well for a very long time.

Synchronicity

Ian came over today. He is the kind of chap who will turn up and help you carry a sofa upstairs. Which is just as well, as far as I’m concerned.

Anyhoo, we got to talking and he told me that earlier that day the mirror in his lounge had fallen off the wall, all by itself. This happened at pretty much the same time that a noticeboard fell off the wall in our house. Scary.

Light Field Photography with Lytro

I’ve always been interested in photography. When I was young I used to read books full of theory about ASA film speeds, f-stops and depth of field calculations. One book said that there was no chance that a camera would ever be able to focus itself. I really wish I’d kept that one.

Anyhoo, I’ve just found out about Lytro. This is a new way of taking pictures they are calling “Light Field Photography”. Rather than using a lens to capture a single, hopefully well focused, image on a sensor, what Lytro are doing is capturing the entire “Light Field” from a scene. The blurb (and this highly detailed thesis) say that the camera captures not just the light, but the direction it is coming from. This means that by using cunning computation they can then built up an image which is focused after it has been taken. The photographer can make decisions about which parts of the picture they want to have sharp after the shot has been taken. They have some astonishing demos on their web site where you can click on different parts of the picture to focus at that point.

I’ve had a read of the thesis and I think what they are doing is putting a bunch of tiny “micro-lenses” in front of the sensor so that different parts of the sensor are focused at different distances. This means that you lose resolution (since the same spot in the image is being focused at different points) but by selecting the output from particular sensors you can build an image focused at any point, or indeed build up an picture that is sharp at all points. This requires a fairly ferocious amount of processing power, but does give you a lot of flexibility after the picture is taken.

I’m not completely convinced by their pitch. Modern cameras with small sensors have a large depth of field (most of the image tends to be in focus anyway) and they also have very efficient auto-focusing software. However,  I’ve clicked the box that says “Let me know when the cameras are for sale” and we will just have to see how it all turns out.

Not Welcome at Ikea

Not sure how it happened, but Ikea managed to both lose my password and then ban me for entering the wrong one. Not impressed. I guess I’ll just have to buy my compressed sawdust from somewhere else.

Using the Proper Kinect USB Drivers

This picture has nothing to do with Kinect, but I took it after the End Of Year Ball and I quite like it…

I’ve been playing with the Microsoft Kinect SDK and I really like it. The speed with which it snaps on to people and tracks them is really impressive. However, I did have one bit of fun and games when I installed it. Like loads of other people I’ve been using other drivers with the hardware and although some of these have uninstall behaviours they don’t always get rid of the device drivers themselves. This can lead to problems when you try to install the “proper” drivers and the old ones load up and get in the way. So, to get rid of the Kinect drivers you can do this before you install the Microsoft Kinect SDK. First perform the uninstall on all the previous drivers. Now you need to get rid of anything left lying around:

Open up a new command prompt running in Admin mode. The best way to do this is to click the Start button, type CMD into the search box and then hold down CTRL+SHIFT and press Enter. If you get this right you will be rewarded with a User Account Control dialogue box warning you that you are about to do something vaguely dangerous. Click OK.

Now, in the command box give the command:

SET DEVMGR_SHOW_NONPRESENT_DEVICES=1

This sets an environment variable to tell Windows you want to see all the hardware devices, not just the ones that are active . If you type this command wrong you won’t see an error of any kind, but the process won’t work either. You can select and copy the above text into the paste buffer, then right click in the command window and paste it into the command prompt if you like. Now give the command:

devmgmt.msc

This starts the Device Manager. Now open the View menu and select “Show hidden devices”. This is actually quite fun, as now you will see every device that has ever been connected to your computer. If your machine is like mine there will be around 50 or so different Disk drives, one for every memory key that has been plugged in over the years. Look through the device tree for things with the word Kinect in the name, or the name of the package you are removed.  Look in the “Human Interface Devices”, “Sound, Video and Game Controllers” and “Universal Serial Bus controllers” parts. Anything you find that you want to get rid of you must right click and select Uninstall. If the dialog that appears has a checkbox marked “remove driver software files” then you should select this so that the driver files are no longer around to cause trouble.

Note that this could be vaguely dangerous, in that if you delete an important driver for your system you might find that it will stop working until you replace the driver file, but if you only remove things that are to do with Kinect you should be fine. One tip is to plug the Kinect sensor in before you remove the software and just note what appears in the Device Manager when you do this. These are the things that need to be removed.

Once you have removed all the drivers simply exit Device Manager and close the command prompt. The setting is forgotten, so if you want to remove other drivers later you have to do the whole thing again. This technique can also be useful for removing old USB drivers that are causing trouble.

Robot Fun at the University Transition Event

Making Robot Cowards with C#

Sometimes it helps to read the specification. I’d been asked to prepare a talk for a schools visit today. Six sessions in front of students from schools who were visiting the university to learn about the kind of things we do. I thought Oscar the robot and the Kinect SDK might hit the spot, so I made my slides, built some demos and turned up to give a talk to a bunch of interested Sixth Formers. Who were between 8 and 9 years old. Ooops.Turned out that this was a visit from youngsters looking at moving to the new Northern Academy which opens in 2012. If I’d taken the trouble to read up on the event I would have known all this. Oh well.

During the introductory talk I made some frantic changes to the slide deck and then off we went. Children at this age are about the toughest audience you can get. You either have them, or you haven’t. The good thing was that I had some nice props. I had a robot that you could control by touching your hand on you head. And this proved very popular. At the end of every talk we had a queue waiting for their turn to step in front of the Kinect Sensor and make Oscar the robot do a wheelie.

Who wants to have a go next?

It was really hard work, but enormous fun. All the kids were fantastic and a real credit to their schools. I got some great questions from the audience and everyone left happy, including me.

Two satisfied customers

Watching Oscar

Thanks to Moy Lanade for sorting everything out and Mike Park, University Photographer, for the pictures.

Flipboard

I’m not sure if Steve Balmer reads my blog (actually I’m pretty sure he doesn’t) but in the unlikely event that you are reading this Steve, would you please give Flipboard an enormous sum of money and ask them to make their program available on Windows Phone. And the Microsoft Tablet when that appears.

Flipboard takes a very simple idea (read social network feeds and use them to build a personalised magazine) and implements it in truly beautiful way. Your Twitter feed becomes a gateway onto a whole collection of interesting content. Simple tweets containing links are presented as pieces of editorial over multiple pages that you can flip through. If you have an iPad you must get this program. It is completely free and totally wonderful. And I want it on my Windows Phone.

Robot Fun at St. Bede’s

These folks were a great audience.

Went over to St. Bede’s school to do a talk today. I did one last year and it was great fun. This time I was showing off a .NET Micro Framework. We did some simple robot control and then I managed to get the Kinect sensor working with the robot. I’ve not had a lot of time to play with the SDK, but I did manage to get the robot to move forward when I put my right hand on my head. The Kinect SDK is really easy to use.

Four Storeys of Sugar

An M&M (previously know as a Treet if you are very old) is a small, candy covered chocolate sweet. Like a Smartie only smaller. In London they have a huge building completely devoted to this confection.  We went around it yesterday. Scary.

I think I just saw the one at the back move….

This is the M&M Mix Lab. I think they have a machine that can put all the purple ones in one box. The girl on the right is saying to herself “For this I went to drama school…..”

If you are in London and want to see how far you can take the marketing of a single kind of confectionary, then you should go and take a look.

Meeting the Woman in Black

Actually you really, and I mean REALLY, don’t want to meet the Woman in Black. We first saw the play around 20 years ago and today we took the kids to see it. Just as scary as last time. If you want to find out how a play with only two actors can scare you to death then get yourself down to London and see it live. Well worth the trip.

Kinect SDK Now Out

The Microsoft Kinect SDK is now available for download. I’ve had a quick squint and it looks really easy to use. And the body tracking is much, much, much faster than the Open NUI drivers I’ve been using up to now.  Go get it from here.

Engineers Don’t Tend to Fib

You’re Fired

I like The Apprentice. As entertainment it works well. As a lesson for any kind of life it is however a disaster. This was brought home to me last night when “LordAllan” fired someone because he had never known an engineer who could succeed in business.

Ugh. I think what “LordAllan” means is that engineers have more difficultly telling porkies than folks in other branches of business, particularly marketing. Telling whoppers about a financial product is a lot easier than lying about whether or not a bridge is strong enough. And in the marketing game you can blame “market forces” when the shares tank and everybody loses their money. Where as in engineering it is a bit tricky to blame gravity when everything collapses and a train plummets to the bottom of the ravine. Engineers are expected to do their sums and get it right, whereas other folks can get away with telling the version of the truth that will get the deal.  Ho hum.

Update on 2011-06-21 18:17 by Rob

Having thought a bit more about this post I've decided that it is not the case that you have to be good at telling lies to succeed in business. Just that "LordAlan" thinks that you do.

And I'm sure that none of these comments are in any way influenced by the fact that I once bought an Amstrad amplifier and all the knobs dropped off...

Putting Plenty of Music in your Car

My car (see above) has a very good in music system. Very loud. Like lots of modern cars it has a USB socket into which you can plug a memory stick. I’ve been experimenting with the devices to see which work. I bought this amazingly tiny 16G one but it didn’t work. For some reason the car rejected it. However, if I take a 16G SD card and put it in a tiny reader this works a treat. So, if you want to drive around with several day’s worth of music in your car, you might want to try this. The other benefit is that SD cards tend to be somewhat cheaper than USB keys of the equivalent size.