Optimus Quest 2 Winner

Joseph with his prize

Joseph Appleyard came into the office today to pick up his prize for the greatest number of Windows Phone Marketplace downloads up to July.

If you want to add to his number, and get hold of his DND companion application, you can find it here:

http://windowsphone.com/s?appid=effe0566-c375-e011-81d2-78e7d1fa76f8

I’ve got another phone to give away at the end of August. If you didn’t win this time, and are still a Hull student, you can enter then. Don’t forget.

HypnoCube

Ages ago I found out about the Hypnocube. And recently I’ve actually managed to buy a version. If you are wondering what they are, they are made from a cube of 4x4x4 multi-coloured leds soldered to steel wires as you can see above. There are a number of projects for making them and now you can even buy them from Firebox in the UK, although they are a bit more expensive than the price I paid. They go through a very impressive animation session that runs for around 90 minutes or so.

What I want now is an 8x8x8 one…..

Super 8 Movie Review

Super 8 is a movie about a group of plucky kids that sort of save the day. And manage not to be too annoying along the way. Good special effects, a very good recreation of the time it is set (late seventies) and some good “jump out of your seat” moments at the beginning. 

If you do go (and you should) stay at the end during the credits to see the “film within a film”, which is absolutely great.

Bristol M Shed

Outside M Shed they have this rather nice boat

M Shed is a really good industrial museum in Bristol. You should go. It’s free and the whole setup tells the tale of commerce and trade in Bristol through the ages. The cafe is nice too, and they have a rooftop terrace with some really nice views that will find their way onto these pages once I’ve tidied them up a bit.

Inside they have some very interesting exhibits with roots in the area, including this Raleigh moped.

Captain America Movie Review

We actually saw Captain America some time back, in the best possible place to view such a film. America. I love American cinema audiences. In the UK the audience usually sits fairly quietly, unless something really amazing happens on the screen or they feel the need to “Shhhhh” someone nearby who is making too much noise with their sweet wrappers. In the USA the audience likes to join in. This includes sharp intakes of breath, cheers and even clapping at the end – although it is unlikely that the director or any of the stars can hear the applause. Great stuff.

Anyhoo, this film has been tailor made for the American audience. The clue is in the name. All the baddies are pretty much bad all the way through, and very easy to spot. Parts are played with gusto, although the cartoon origins of the characters do tend to show through a bit. The special effects are up to the job and the whole thing hangs together as well as a superhero movie needs to. If you are prepared to suspend your disbelief from the highest American flagpole then you will have a great time, as we did.

Sent Packing

Packing again for a trip away. Put the clothes in a tiny bag. Put the mains leads, power supplies, cables, gadgets ect. in a slightly larger bag.

Optimus Quest 2 July Winner

I’d nearly forgotten about the Optimus Quest 2 that I set way back in June. I’ve got two LG Optimus 7 phones to give away, and they are going to the students who show me the most impressive download stats in Windows Phone Marketplace for their applications. Fortunately Joseph Appleyard hadn’t forgotten, and of the entries I received his was the one with most downloads. Well done Joseph, send me your postal address and I’ll get the phone sent out for you. As you are a registered developer you can then upgrade it to Windows Phone Mango and have all kinds of new fun.

If you want to enter again, I’ve got another phone going on the same basis at the end of August. The only person that can’t win it is Joseph…..

What’s Wrong with this Picture Answer

Why is this stoopid?

There is nothing wrong with letting you run the program from the last successful build. Perhaps you want to quickly show somebody what your program looks like, but you are in the middle of editing it. In this case you just click Yes and that person can see your program running, even though it won’t build at the moment.

The problem for me (as some of you have already spotted) is the nasty “Do not show this dialog again.” check box. If you check that it means that Visual Studio will always run your last successful build without giving you a message. The scenario where this bites you is as follows:

1. Run program, notice an error.
2. Edit source code, fix error but forget to type semi-colon, leading to a compilation error.
3. Run program again to see if error has been fixed. Program fails to compile, so Visual Studio runs the old old version without telling you. The error appears to be still there.
4. Go nuts trying to find the error that you have already fixed. Every change you make has no effect. Give up programming and become a beekeeper.

An experienced programmer will be looking out for compiler errors and will know that they are running old code. But not everyone will. You can get a similar effect by working on the wrong source file. In that case you got the fix right, but a file somewhere else is being used in the build. If I suspect a “reality fault” like this I do something that is guaranteed to break the build:

wobble;

This should not compile and run. If it does, something else is happening. If you want to put this back to how it should be (in my opinion) you can go to Visual Studio Tools>Options and find the following entry:

Change “Launch old version” to “Prompt to launch”.

If you want to get rid of the dialog box completely, and never have the program run when it won’t build, change it to “Do not launch”.

I’ve been racking my brains as to why you would want to hide the dialog box and always run the old version. To be honest, I can’t think of a reason why you’d want to do this, and I’d be a bit happier if the folks at Visual Studio hadn’t.

Car Wash Therapy Fail

Normally when I spend time washing the cars I come up with answers to questions and solutions to problems and stuff. Today all I thought of was:

Nobody ever plays that record from The Ronettes about the man that puts the cables away after a gig. It was called "The Packer of the Leads"

This made a good tweet (at least I thought so), but is absolutely no use for anything else.

Foveon Sensor Fun

Ian collects guitars. I seem to collect cameras. I’m playing with a second hand Sigma DP2s that I picked up as a kind of birthday present to myself. This is a neat looking compact that uses a Foveon sensor. This sensor works in a different way to the ones in most cameras which use a “Bayer” design. With this each sensor is covered by a coloured filter that lets the sensor read only that colour. So to get the colour of a particular pixel you need three sensors, for Red, Green and Blue. Actually most cameras use two Green sensors, since that is colour that has the greatest effect on brightness as far as the human eye is concerned.  So that makes four sensors in total.

But anyhoo, this means that to get the colour of a pixel the camera must read the brightness of a bunch of pixels and then combine them using some clever maths. Then the camera does something even cleverer and works out the colour it would be at each of the Red, Green and Blue positions, based on the readings from those around it. This is a bit sneaky, in that it means that your 16 megapixel camera isn’t actually reading 16 million coloured dots. It is actually working a lot fewer colour values and then spreading these back over 16 million points. This can lead to pictuers with artefacts (funny shapes that appear as a result of the averaging process) and noise (because the maths is really only a form of guessing).

The Foveon sensor doesn’t do any of this. It uses a cunning silicon sensor that reads all the colour values at each pixel position. The bad news with a Foveon sensor is that it doesn’t have quite many pixels as most “Bayer” designs, so the ultimate resolution is a bit lower than what you get from other cameras. However, all the dots are “real” dots, and I think this counts for quite a lot in terms of picture quality, as you can see above.

If you want a camera that is quite a challenge to use (the sensor and lenses on the Sigma camera are very good but the electronics and user interface are a bit of a pain when compared to more popular offerings) then you should take a look at the DP1 and DP2 devices. They are also a good way to learn how photography really works, in that to get the best from them you have to take things like exposure and focus very seriously.

You can pick them up second hand from ebay at reasonable prices, and they are great fun to use.

Setting Ringtones in Windows Phone 7.5

When I upgraded my Samsung to the latest version of Mango I lost my beloved custom ringtone. I’d used the Chevron tool to set the ringtone ages ago, and the “undocumented feature” that made it work must have been withdrawn/fixed. Anyhoo, nothing is going to keep me from my precious ringtone, so I set about fixing this.

One of the improvements in Windows Phone Mango is that it lets you set your own ringtones. There is even a sample application here that does this. However,it is a bit too complicated for me. I just have a wma file that I want to make into a ringtone on the phone. That’s what this program does. Just add your wma file in place of Ringtone.wma and build and deploy the program. Run it and press the Set Ringtone button and follow the instructions. If all is well you should get a toast pop up telling you the ringtone has been deployed.  You can then select the ringtone on the phone.

Of course your phone needs to be developer unlocked for this to work. Just one more reason to become a Windows Phone developer.

Visual Studio–What’s wrong with this picture?

Simon and I think this is stoopid. Do you know why?

Tie Power

I’m thinking of starting to wear a suit for work (a vain attempt to add more perceived value for students who will soon be paying an arm and both legs to study with us). While I was in NYC I bought some ties. Three for ten bucks. Which tie would look best do you think?

The Coming of Mango

This is how the campus looks today. Feel free to compare it with Harvard Yard any time you like….

The latest version of Windows Phone Mango is now trickling out to developers. If you’ve upgraded to the first developer version of the platform you should soon get a message telling you an upgrade is available. Indeed there is. This one is really close to what people will be getting when Windows Phone 7.5 (to give it its proper name) will be released. It now has the Twitter integration which works really well, along with a whole host of extra goodies that I’m having great fun playing with. If you are not into Windows Phone development then you really should be.

Imagine Cup Thoughts

Now that the dust has settled a bit I’ve had time to reflect on the Imagine Cup this year. Here are some random observations:

• It gets better every year : the teams, their ideas, their implementation and their presentation seems to improve with every world final. This year was the best ever. I get the impression that teams are really thinking about how to not just make their ideas work, but how to make them real so that the outside world can make use of them. This is great.
• Making stuff is much easier : quite a few teams had made hardware. The winners even used the .NET Micro Framework to power their in-car device. In the old days using hardware meant messy wooden boxes and dodgy looking devices. Not so now. With fabrication machines appearing at very low prices it is now possible for a team to make a case for their device which looks as good as any shop-bought item. There was some highly impressive, consumer ready, hardware being shown off.
• Teamwork is still vital : the teams that did best did it as a team. The ones that played off each other and made use of all the team members in presentation and development were the ones that did the best.
• The judges had a great time too – every judge that I spoke to really enjoyed seeing what had been made and talking to students. I said at one of the briefings there was only one group of people more determined than the students to come to the next Imagine Cup, and that is the judges. This is absolutely the case. And I’m including myself in that..

Meeting Alfred Thompson

Alfred and I, conveniently name tagged for your convenience. No idea who the bloke in the background is though…

One of the really nice things about going to the Imagine Cup was that I got to meet up with some friends I’d never met. One of them was Alfred Thompson. I’ve known Alfred since the days of “the Spoke”, an early network community where we used to via for visits to our respective pages. This was way back in 2003, when the idea of community sites and stuff was just taking off. I was very proud of the fact that I’d had more visitors to my page, right up to the point where Alfred overtook me and headed off into the distance.

Alfred works hard to promote Computer Science as a “good thing” and it was nice to finally meet up and swap some stories.

Back Home

Got home today after an overnight flight which managed to steal five hours of my birthday. Oh well. Nice to be back though. Hull is looking good in the sunshine.

Heading Home

These are some of the tickets, brochures and badges that we have used over the last couple of weeks. Some great memories here.

And now we have to fly back.

MIT Museum

This one’s for you, Dr Brayshaw….

We went to the MIT Museum today. One of the highlights of the trip. They take all the things they’ve done and put them on display. Great idea, and some really interesting stuff.

Robot close-up. I know what a few of these chips actually do..

They had this robots idea wall. I had to add an idea of my own. I’ll be back next year to see how they’ve got on.

Franklin Park Zoo

Boston has a really nice zoo, located a way out of town – the journey itself was a bit of an adventure, particularly as we missed the stop to get off the bus.

They have some butterflies.

..at least one peacock..

..and a gorilla.

At the moment things are very, very hot. We had to keep ducking back into the gift shop to cool down.