My apologies to those of you looking forward to getting your hands on Fez Ultimate .NET Microframework kits. Because of the need to collect deposits for the devices I think it is best if we do this at the start of the session, when all the Hull students are back on campus. This will also allow us to open up the offer to any first year students who fancy having a play with hardware. Keep watching the blog for details of how to get your hands on fun hardware.
Having spent a bit more time on Windows 8 I now know 10 more things:
Ten things I’ve discovered playing with Windows 8 over my lunch break.
Windows 8 looks really interesting. And I mean really. This evening I watched the live keynote streamed from the Build conference (you can find a video here). Worth a look, behind all the marketing hype is a system that is a proper step forward. It was lovely to see something that puts touch interfaces to the fore.
For me the great thing is that it provides a user interface which is very similar to Windows Phone. The “Metro” interface which launched on Windows Phone 7 is now being rolled out onto Windows 8. Furthermore, with Live Tiles and a XAML powered front end it looks like any skills that you might have picked up making Windows Phone programs will map very nicely into Windows 8. In fact the new Visual Studio 2011 seems to make it possible to move applications between the platforms very easily.
Lucky delegates at the Build conference will be getting Samsung tablets with a developer preview of Windows 8 pre-loaded. For those of us not out there in LA Microsoft will be making the software available tomorrow for anyone to download and play with.
..another satisfied customer..
Michael came to see me today and pick up his Windows Phone prize, having showed an impressive set of Marketplace download figures for a game that was written, tested and marketed without having access to an actual device. Good work.
Apparently the phone is now running the latest version of Mango, which was quick work.
There should be a special place in hell reserved for camera manufacturers who use strange cables to connect to the computer. These are the wires that instantly hide themselves amongst all the other, normal ones, that look like the might fit, but won’t.
Flew home on Ryanair. They really know how to work an airplane. It must have been on the ground for less than half an hour. In that time they got everybody off, along with their luggage, got us all on the plane and took off again.
I think they’ve moved the seats even closer together since I last flew with them. I’m not a fan of aircraft seats, but these were really quite painful to sit on. Oh well, at least it was a short enough flight.
We spent our last full day in Brno wandering round, having great coffee and buying a few souvenirs and presents. We have had a great time here, and would come again in a heartbeat.
We wandered up to the cathedral and discovered a bunch of fast cars. It seems like the Diamond Race was passing through town. So I took a bunch of photographs.
Cool Cars
I think the rusty effect is painted on.
Maybe next year I’ll enter with the Cube….
We went to see some caves today. And an abyss. David was kind enough to drive us out to the Moravsky Caves near Brno. They have some fantastic stalactites and stalagmites and even an underground river that you can go along in special electric boats. It was great fun.
This is a proper abyss. Of course there is a local legend which ends with a wicked woman hurtling down to the bottom. Isn’t it always the way…
There are some beautiful forests too, reminded me a lot of Dalby Forest.
We had a traditional Polish meal at the restaurant. These are delicious.
Thanks to David for looking after us so well.
A couple of weeks ago Andy Wigley and I spent two days taking about Windows Phone development, with a focus on the shiny new Mango features. We did it as a Live Meeting and it was great fun. Now the recordings of the sessions have been released here to a waiting world.
So, why not uncork a nice Chablis, retire to your chaise longue and watch us in glorious high definition on your 60 inch plasma screen…..
The Department of Graphics and Multimedia has a really nice courtyard. And you could play croquet on that lawn on the left…
Adam was kind enough to show us round his department (Computer Graphics and Multimedia) in Brno University of Technology this morning. It is s a great department, based in new and restored surroundings. It was interesting to hear about another department in a different country, and find out that many of the issues that they are addressing are also the ones we worry about at Hull too.
Another one bites the dust….
After that we went up town to Brno for lunch and then on to to Špilberk Castle. On the way we passed this amazing sign:
We’ve no idea what made them put the one in the middle on the lower row, and frankly, we don’t want to know…..
The castle was great, and if you go to the top you can get some great views of the city.
There are some great places to wander round here, and some superb pavement cafes.
Today we spent the morning wandering round Brno and then in the afternoon I went out to give a couple of Windows Phone talks.
As usual I took a picture of the folks who turned up, there is another on Flickr which shows the rest of the room. The talk was great, really good audience. You can find slide decks and demo programs for the two sessions here. The sessions you want are the Introduction to Silverlight (02) and Introduction to XNA (11). The decks are part of the Windows Phone Jumpstart series, you can find decks on lots of other interesting Windows Phone topics as well. In a little while there will be some videos as well.
After the talk we went out for a drink and then headed for a walk around Brno by night.
Enjoying a drink..
The bar had these really cool speakers
These folks were really (and I mean really) good.
Brno station by night.
Thanks for doing such a great job of guiding us around folks, it was a really splendid evening.
Today’s weather forecast for Brno for the last few days has been confidently stuck at “heavy rain”. So we put on all our waterproof stuff and headed out to explore the city.
No rain. Wonderful (and very hot) sunshine. We were torn between happiness that we had good weather and annoyance that we had far too many clothes on to be properly comfortable. Brno is great. Big squares, lovely looking buildings, a cathedral which is beautiful (although you’ll have to take my word about the insides as they don’t allow photos) and lots of those cafes you can sit at and watch the world go by. Which we did.
The even better news (I guess) is that ten minutes after we got back to our hotel it really, really, rained. Not sure what we are going to wear tomorrow though…
Taking artistic pictures while having tea…
True story. I was invited to speak at the Mobera mobile development conference in Brno in the Czech Republic. It was in the week that we normally have for holidays, but, seeing that it looked like it was in a nice place (never been to the Czech Republic before) I said yes and bought tickets for myself and Number One Wife. I was looking forward to speaking about Windows Phone development and then spending a few days looking around the city.
Then the conference was postponed. Oh well. Since we’d booked holidays and bought flights we thought we’d go anyway. Good move. The city (what we’ve seen of it) is very nice, the hotel (Hotel Europa) is super and great value, and we seem to be surrounded by great restaurants. I’m giving a talk to a user group on Tuesday night, so I even get to do some performing while I’m here.
Number one son today took it upon himself to fall out of a plane in aid of charity. I don’t have any pictures, but I’m assured that the chap he was strapped to will vouch for this. If you want to make a contribution to his good cause, then head over here and give him some cash.
For some reason I’ve been getting a lot more span recently. The university filter is usually pretty good, bur over the last few weeks I’ve seen an increase in people wanting me to help move money out of shady countries and I have had lots of attacks on bank accounts I’ve not got.
I’ve been pondering the best way to deal with this and I did start to wonder if the best thing to do would be to reply to every spam message that I get, but give invalid information each time. If everybody in the world did this then the spammers (who rely on getting responses from just the few folks daft enough to respond) would have a denial of service attack of their own to deal with...
Actually this is a very bad idea though, in that the best approach really is to not do anything, since it is best if they don’t know whether or not your account is active and if you make yourself visible it marks you as someone worth chasing.
We have another winner of an LG Optimius 7 phone. This time the result was actually pretty close. But in the end Michael Clayton came in with a well impressive set of figures for his Breakout game. Congratulations sir. Catch up with me in the department and I’ll give you your prize. Thanks to LG and the Windows Phone team for sponsoring the competition. Perhaps we’ll have more competitions soon…
If you haven’t heard the “Bud Lite Presents” series of radio advertisements then you are in for a treat. I’ve no idea when they were recorded, but they are excellent. I’ve always had a soft spot for Budweiser beer, ever since they started using my software to put datestamps on their bottles, and the adverts are just great.
My favourite is “Mr. Fancy Coffee Shop Coffee Pourer”, but you may have your own. Best used as part of a “random play” list on your favourite music player (mine’s a Zune). You can get the mp3s from here (although you have to wade past some annoying advertising).
Just noticed (to my abject horror) that my Sunday games was posted on Monday, and my Monday reminders were posted on Tuesday. I’ve fixed it with a bit of temporal adjustment.
Programmers have a thing about consistency, (it is one of the better ways to make things work and manageable) but perhaps I’m taking it a bit too far. One of my favourite quotations is from Ralph Waldo Emerson – “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
I remind myself of this whenever I make temporal adjustments and back-date blog posts just to keep my record of one post per day intact. I’ve only “missed” one day in around five or six years (as I remember). But then again, I’ve always had the philosophy that I blog for my own amusement, if anyone else likes it that’s just icing on the cake…
A couple of things to remember today:
Optimus Quest 2
If you want to send me some Windows Phone Marketplace stats before the end of the month (i.e. tomorrow) then you might have a chance to win an LG Optimus 7 Windows Phone. Send your screenshots of the Marketplace to optimusQuest2@robmiles.com
Job with Rob
The closing date for applications to the Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP) which I mentioned earlier is quite soon. If you fancy working on a really interesting project in a nice part of the world you should get your applications in before Thursday.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
Begin to Code with JavaScript is now available for purchase and download. You can find it here
