Christmas Eve with Zelda and Link

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I’ve always liked my Wii, in spite of not using it as much as I should do. Today we went up town for some last minute Christmas shopping. And I ended up buying a copy of the “swan song” game for this console, which is due for replacement next year with the Wii U.

Watching number one son play the game I was struck by just how good Nintendo are at constructing things like this. Everything works, everything is charming, and pretty much everything has a purpose. Just a great way to spend time.

Evil Squash on Windows Phone

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There are now Evil Squash games in Windows Phone Marketplace. Yay! For those that haven’t heard of the game of Evil Squash; it is a kind of cross between Snakes and Ladders and Ludo. We invented it just for our first year programming practical work. And now some enterprising students have got versions running in the Windows Phone marketplace. Well done people.

I’m compiling an “Evil Squash” hall of fame for the Evil Squash site. If you are on the first year of our course and want your version promoting, give me a yell.

Gadget Box

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Gadgets

Yesterday I got a box for all the Gadgeteer bits and bobs that I’ve been lent to pay with. In amongst the cables we have a soil moisture sensor, barometer, a bunch of switches and multi-coloured lights, compass, gyro, GPS sensor, SD card reader, network interface, Joystick, LCD panel, OLED panel, network connector, processor board, video camera, power relays and usb host connector. I’ve already built a little camera (that’s the demo application). Now I just have to think of something else to build.

Free Xbox 360 with Nokia Lumia 800

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I didn’t realise it at the time, but getting a new Windows Phone has other benefits as well. In the form of a free Xbox 360 with every brand new Nokia Lumia 800. I think the offer has expired now though. I’d have got the phone anyway, free console or not, but it is rather nice.

I’ve had an Xbox 360 since day of release. I have fond memories of around 30 of us sitting in the dark playing Condemned when I took my shiny new console in having picked it up on the very first day. I have less fond memories of the “Red Ring of Death” and sending the whole thing back for repair fairly shortly after that of course….

Anyhoo; today the postman brought me a brand new Xbox 360. It is the new design one and almost shiny. It doesn’t have a hard disk, but it works a treat using an internal 4G of memory and is much, much quieter than my previous machine. Number one sun put in a copy of Skyrim and fired it up. Very, very good. I find it hard to believe that this is now a “mature” console.

The new machine works so well that it has now taken over from my original device. If anyone out there wants a “one careful owner” console, give me a yell.

Me, I’m off to buy a hard disk to plug into it.

Fifty Years of Private Eye

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Private Eye

Last week we went up to London for a day trip. One thing we wanted to do was take a look at the “Private Eye: The First Fifty Years” exhibition in the Victoria and Albert museum. Private Eye is a satirical magazine which must be finding life quite interesting in a world which seems to have moved beyond satire in the last few years.

Free to visit and some very funny cartoons. Worth a trip, but you’ll have to hurry as it closes early next year.

.NET Gadgeteer Fun and Games

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Gadgeteer Spider

I love getting parcels in the post. Particularly if they contain things like a complete set of .NET Gadgeteer devices and interfaces. There are loads of interface devices, including touch screens, GPS sensors, barometers, thermometers, gyroscopes, moisture sensors and even a thing that which looks like it will measure my heartbeat.

The potential for fitting things together and doing great things with them is wonder, wonder, wonderful. I’m going to take them home for Christmas and see what we can build. I foresee a return of the Blog Controlled Christmas Lights.

Christmas Bash 2011

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What CS labs are actually for...

We had our Christmas Bash today. A bit near the end of the semester so it was a fairly select gathering, but fun none the less.  We did the usual Team Fortress 2 and Pizza

Simon is a winner

After 3 hours of solid effort Simon found all of the 78 words in the “Three Thing Game” Christmas Wordsearch. We had to give him a prize, but only after we’d checked the age rating of it.

Notice beautifully sharp image of Simon's shirt.

Double barrelled cracker action. I think the blur adds atmosphere….

There are some more pictures on Flickr.You can find them here.

Media Player and Marketplace Certification with Windows Phone

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London Building

One of our students was having problems with Marketplace Certification for his XNA game. The game was failing certification because his game background music was playing over the top of any media that the phone user was listening to. There is a simple way to fix this, which is not to play your game music if the user is listening to something. You can do this by testing to see if the media player is stopped before playing your music:

if (MediaPlayer.State == MediaState.Stopped)
{
    // play your own music here
}

The MediaPlayer class lives in the System.XNA.Media namespace. If you are writing a Silverlight game you’ll have to import the XNA libraries.

Skydrive from Windows Phone Apps

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Oxford Street

The latest version of the Windows Live Connect APIs let Windows Phone 7 apps interact with the Skydrive storage of phone users. This makes it possible for us to write programs that authenticate users and store pictures and documents in the Cloud. I reckon this is a really significant development as it opens up lots of really interesting possibilities for connected applications.

Find out how to get started here.You can find a sample Windows Phone application that uploads pictures here.

Christmas Shopping on Oxford Street

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Oxford Street Again

We took a day trip to London today. Great fun. We were even brave enough to go down Oxford Street. To say it was busy would be a bit of an understatement. But it was nice.

Political Note: I don’t usually comment on politics on this blog. My opinion is that no matter how you vote The Government always seems to get in. But I feel I must apologise to the rest of the world about the behaviour of our Prime Minister with respect to the European Talks last week. When a previous Prime Minister was negotiating very important treaty stuff he hid a diplomat under the table who passed him notes with sensible things to say written on them. Apparently our Mr Cameron did the same, only he took Jeremy Clarkson.

Marking Evil Squash

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evilsquash Logo
This is a much better logo than my version. Thanks Jamie

I’ve spent the last three and a bit days in the lab marking first year student work. And it has been great fun. There were four of us down there watching students go through 15 minute presentations of their Evil Squash implementations. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Evil Squash is a board game for up to 4 players. It is a kind of cross between Snakes & Ladders and Ludo. We invented it just for the practical session and we are going to invent another one next year.

Our first year students had to create a program that implemented the game, getting all the arrows on the board to work, along with the “Squash” behaviour that is triggered when one player lands on top of another. We provided a “special” dice sequence which allowed us to test all the game actions and we watched each program run through this. Then we took a look at the code, gave marks for style and any extras (some students added AI players who could take on their human counterparts), checked on user documentation and test reports and finally gave out a mark.

We always do a game development for the first year course, but this is the first time we’ve used a brand new game of our own devising. It has worked rather well. Everyone got into the spirit of the development and we have seen some very impressive implementations of the game, including a few Windows Phone versions in Silverlight and XNA. Expect to find Evil Squash in the Windows Phone marketplace soon.

Once nice side-effect of using an original game was that there was no code out there for people try and use. When people get into trouble with a development there is sometimes a tendency to leap onto a search engine and look for code that solves the problem. This is never a good thing to do. A lot of code out there is buggy and hard to understand and often takes you further away from where you want to be. During the marking we ask for bits of the code to be explained to us, and I found that for the ones I marked everybody knew how their code worked. Even those unlucky souls who hit bugs during the presentation were able to say “Aha! I know what is wrong and how to fix it” and point to the code block that was causing the problem. 

We saw some great work, and gave some great marks out. I’m really looking forward to what they turn out next semester.

Project Hawaii For Windows Phone

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Project Hawaii is a set of cloud services for Windows Phone users which make it really easy to do things like heavy computation, storage, location mapping, optical character recognition and speech recognition. They also provide a really useful relay service that allows phones to communicate directly even though their IP addresses might be local to their operator carrier’s network.

It is free for students and academics, you only need to give your Windows Live ID to get a key and get started. You can download the SDK and have a play from here.