Happy 40th Birthday Darren

Notice how Darren (HellBoy) has filed down his two horns to just a couple of yellow marks on his head, specially for his birthday…

It was Darren’s 40th birthday yesterday. He knew this. What he didn’t know was that we did too. So when he turned up for a “jetlagged drink” this evening he wasn’t quite expecting a whole bunch of folks to jump out and say surprise. So we did.

Great fun was had by all, lots of familiar faces, drink, and cake. Number one wife reminded me that the next “big birthday” for me will be my sixtieth. Can’t wait.

Open Day and Holy Trinity HDR

I took this in Hull Holy Trinity Church this morning while I was up town shopping. It is an HDR picture made from five original images. I’m quite pleased with how it turned out.

Then, this afternoon we had our last Saturday open day of the season. As usual I took a shot of the audience:

Another good turnout. And of course we had a lucky (!?) winner of my XNA book.

After the open day it was back home to vacuum round the house (what  lifestyle I have) and spend some more time playing with HDR pictures.

I quite like this one too. Next time I’m going back with a proper tripod. Balancing the camera against bits of the furniture doesn’t always make for the best compositions.

If you live in Hull and you haven’t had a look around Hull Holy Trinity church then you are missing out. It has an interior that would put quite a few Minsters to shame.

Three Thing Game Funny Money

Spent a few minutes this afternoon making some money for the Three Thing Game auction on Monday. Teams will each be given a wad of cash each to bid for “Things” they can use in their games. 1:15 pm in Lecture Theatre A, Robert Blackburn Building. Should be fun.

(James just asked me how it is going to work. Actually, at the moment I have really no idea….)

Hull Digital March Meetup

This evening I went off to the Hull Digital March Meetup. We had a talk from Steve Bell of Kingston Communications about the upcoming fibre optic developments in the city. It looks like we are going to get some seriously fast networking around the place, I’m looking forward to getting it where I live. Then we had a talk from Gareth Hanson and Dave Foy who run 'Woof', an on-line marketing consultancy based in Hull. They were talking about Google Analytics. I use it on this site to carefully track all my visitors and analyse the effect of changes to the content so that I can relentlessly tune the material to increase the number of visitors and make them stay longer.

Actually I don’t. Because my blog is not really a business as such. I have Google Analytics enabled, and every now and then I go and look at which way the curves are going, but I don’t really do much with the information. But the important thing is that I could. Gareth and Dave made the point that by proper configuration of the analytic content in your pages you can find out where readers “bounce” from the site and the effectiveness of each step of your transactions. The bottom line is that if you are serious about making the most of your web presence, and finding out which of your pages are working hardest for you, you should look into this technology.

The Muppets

I’ve enjoyed The Muppets since first seeing their TV shows way back when. And A Muppet Christmas Carol is one of the best films ever made. Tonight we went to see the latest Muppet Film. Well worth a visit, although you’ll be humming the songs long after you have left the cinema.

Make TouchDevelop apps and put them in Windows Phone Marketplace

One of the many neat things that I saw at SIGCSE last week was TouchDevelop. This lets you write Windows Phone programs on your Windows Phone. The programming language and the user interface have been carefully crafted to work on a small handheld platform. If you have done a bit of programming already you should have no problem creating simple scripts to do all manner of interesting things. There’s even a simple sprite engine with physics support for game creation. There’s a free book about it that you can download.

It’s early days yet, but the developers of the environment have just taken a massive step towards making the platform into a genuinely useful place to create things. They’ve made it possible to publish your TouchDevelop scripts in the Windows Phone Marketplace. Up until now you could spread your scripts around to other phone owners, but only via the TouchDevelop phone application. Now you can distribute your TouchDevelop applications and games to the entire Windows Phone owning world. This means you could get on a bus with nothing but your Windows Phone and a good idea. And then get off the bus three hours later with a completed application which is ready for sale. Amazing stuff.

Find out more here.

Three Thing Game Rides Again

These are the teams from last time with their random things. This time we are having a “Thing Auction” which should be fun.

We launched the latest “Three Thing Game” competition today. Teams were invited to sign up for our game development competition which starts with three things. You can find out all about it at www.threethinggame.com. We are very lucky this time because Stuart Lovegrove from Sony is coming to help the judging and tell us a bit about PS Vita development. In fact a couple of our teams are quite keen on entering with a game for that platform. The good news for them is that the development environment for the Vita is C#, which is the language we teach at Hull.

We’ve already had quite a few teams sign up, but if you are Hull student you should find an entry form in your inbox. Fill it in and bring it along as soon as you can (places are limited) if you want to take part.

Update on 2012-03-07 09:32 by Rob

I really must get my ears syringed, or something. Turns out that people said "PS Suite" and I heard PS Vita. We will be making games using PS Suite, not for the Vita platform.  

Lumia 800 Battery Life Tips

When I first got my Lumia 800 I did some tweaks to improve battery life. I’ve just passed them on to a fellow owner, and they helped for him too, and so I thought I’d blog them (mainly so I don’t forget myself)

I turned off “Synchronise game requests” on the Game settings and “Notify me when new networks are found” from the WiFi settings. I also set “Download new content” to 30 minutes on both my email inboxes. I configured the Kindle application to display text as white on a black background, this makes a big difference to the consumption on the OLED display.

With these settings, which don’t cause me any inconvenience at all I can get a day of use out of the phone with enough left to limp through a second day on battery saver mode if I forget to charge the phone overnight.

Home to Windows 8

Got home to Hull this morning at 11:00 am. As I had rather cleverly (if getting up at 4:00 am for three days counts as clever) kept my body clock on UK time while I was away, I wasn’t suffering too much from jetlag, although I was suffering a bit from lack of sleep.

Anyhoo, I was wide awake enough to download the Windows 8 Consumer Preview and install it on my Acer Iconia W500 tablet. I’d put the Developer Preview on the device earlier, and I thought it might work well. It does. I’ve got me a snappy Windows tablet that works a treat. If you’ve got one of these devices and want some Windows 8 goodness you can find a useful howto here. This was written for the Developer Preview of Windows 8 but it works fine with the latest version too.

Windows 8 itself is interesting. It really is a system of two halves. The Metro powered Start Menu gives you Live Tiles and a very finger friendly environment. The desktop gives you a, well, desktop that looks and behaves pretty much like being at home, although it is noticeably quicker than previous versions of Windows. Startup and shutdown times have shrunk dramatically  too.

The Acer running Windows 8 is a reasonable iPad substitute. It even has a Marketplace where you can download and install applications, including a free copy of “Cut the Rope” which is a really good game. And of course I can plug in a keyboard and a mouse and then fire up Visual Studio to do some proper development.

I’m looking forward to seeing Windows 8 running on “pure” slates/tablets which are based on ARM technology. With built in Live Mesh integration you should be able to move between different platforms really easily, using the iPad like devices to consume information and the Windows Desktop behaviours to produce it.

Actually, for me one of the best things about the Windows 8 Consumer Preview is the version of Pinball FX which is shipped with it. This is a very good implementation of the game and it runs really well, even on my little Acer.

Goodbye to SIGCSE 2012

Pat Yongpradit does his Kinect booth session at SIGCSE 2012.Very smooth work sir.

I said a farewell to the Microsoft crew at SIGCSE today. When I left they were still working hard manning their stands on the exhibition floor. I only went by to say cheerio but I ended up dishing out tickets for the booth prize draws and talking to folks until I had to rush out and grab my airport shuttle. Great fun these affairs. Nothing quite like talking shop with a bunch of like-minded people. Thanks to the Microsoft crew for inviting me over.

Just as I was leaving there was great excitement at the hotel. Michelle Obama was in the house. She was dropping by to meet with some military families in the area and then take part in a fundraising luncheon. The hotel was full of large blokes with big shoulders and earpieces plus a huge queue of audience members, all looking super smart and obviously looking forward to the event.

SIGCSE Fun

This was on the wall of the room that we used for the presentation today. Who knew tables and chairs could be so dangerous in large numbers?

Did my two sessions at SIGCSE today. And before them both I did a very shouty 15 minute booth session which was fun. And loud. Sorry if my booming voice was a bit noisy folks, I feel particularly bad about the chap standing in front of me who seemed to rise about six inches into the air when I went into “Town Crier” mode to promote the session...

These are some of the Kinect presentation audience at the start of the session, both audiences were great with some lovely questions. Thanks folks.

I promised that I’d make the slides and the demos available after the session. You can find them all here. Some other useful links that you might find, er, useful.

www.csharpcourse.com – my C# Yellow book and C# from Java Orange Book. Also some XNA content you might find useful.

Microsoft Faculty Connection – you can find the Kinect content by typing Kinect into the Search Curriculum Resources box and doing a search. You can also find my Windows Phone content here too.

Kinect for Windows – if you want to work with any of the Kinect content you will need to install the Kinect for Windows SDK.

Channel 9 Videos – these are videos of some of my stuff. There is a session on the Kinect (with working demos) and other stuff you might find interesting

Windows Phone in Rhyme – and why not..

After my talk I had a wander around the exhibition.

This is the Touch Develop team strutting their stuff at a booth talk. They’ve just released a free book about writing Windows Phone programs on Windows Phone. And they have some really exciting plans for the future. I plan to spend the flight back writing some code on my Lumia (in flight mode of course)

One way to stop folks wandering off with the pens…..

The Gadgeteer crew in action. They have some really nice stuff here including a scary powerful buggy.

Want one.

Out and About in Raleigh

Raleigh State Capitol Building

Lesson 1: Raleigh is properly pronounced “Raw-Lay” here. Lesson 2: It’s a very nice place. I had a quick wander around once I’d finished playing with my slide decks for tomorrow and sorting out emails and stuff. They have some lovely museums that I didn’t really have time to look round properly, but I did spend some time in the Museum Shop, which had some lovely stuff in it. And with it being Feb. 29th today they were offering 29% discount, which was very nice.

On the way back to the hotel I wandered past artspace. This was great. A large building has been given over to artists studios where you can view their work and even see them making it.

I had a quick wander round and even had a chat with some of the artists there. This chap, Kyle Highsmith, was even happy to have is picture taken. I loved his stuff, which you can see more of here. Unfortunately I don’t think any of his canvases would have fitted in my suitcase. There was a huge variety of work on show in Artspace with prices at all levels and anyone passing through Raleigh should seek it out.

If you need to find your way round the place….

If you are at SIGCSE and want to come along to my sessions tomorrow I’m doing two:

10:45 am–12:00 pm room 305A

Empowering Students: Teaching Software Development with Windows Phone

1:45–3:00 pm room 305A

Creative Uses for Kinect in Teaching—with Curriculum Materials

Flying to Raleigh

This is not Raleigh, this is Boston airport. It was pretty much dark when I arrived in Raleigh.

Flew out to Raleigh in North Carolina today to present some sessions about teaching with Windows Phone and Kinect. I’m speaking at SIGCSE 2012 and the thing that is worrying me most is that in my presenter bio I rather stupidly put “..and Rob knows a lot of jokes about cheese”. Snag is that at the moment I can only think of two…..

XNA Windows Phone Theme Library

Danny, one of our First Year students, is hard at work on his First Year programming coursework. This year the game is “Sweepy Cleaner”, an XNA game where you get to control a robot vacuum. I’ve even bought the domain name.

Danny made a version of Evil Squash last year for Windows Phone and he is now building a Sweepy Cleaner for the phone as well. And he has discovered that:

1. It is nice if a game has the same colour theme as the ones set for the phone by the user.
2. It is hard to get these colours from an XNA game

So he has written a little bit of code to get this information into a game, and released it as a dll that any XNA developer can use. Which is nice. You can find it here.

More HDR Fun

Yep. Think I’ll buy this program. This is Hull Holy Trinity Church by the way, think I’ll nip back there with a tripod next week and take some proper shots.

Saturday Open Day

Saturday open days are always busy, this is some of the audience from today. Thanks for being another great audience and laughing at my jokes (at least most of them).

Just to show I have no fear, I set up the Kinect sensor and showed some demos of that before the actual talk, and it worked a treat, which is nice. You can click through the picture to the full size image on Flickr and also a picture of today’s lucky prize winner.

High Dynamic Range Photography

I’ve been playing with High Dynamic Range photography. This is where you take a bunch of pictures of a scene at different exposures and then make a single shot which has a greater dynamic range. The picture above is just a snap I took last year. I didn’t have three different exposures, so I did some fiddling with the RAW file to fake the different exposure levels. I then used program called PhotoMatix to combine them and then tone map to get the grungy effect that you see above. If you look closely at the picture you’ll see that it has a Photomatix watermark which means I’ve not paid for the software yet. However, I’m very tempted to, as the results seem quite nice to me. Not particularly photorealistic in this shot, but definitely interesting.

If you are into photography you might find it fun to have a go. The only thing you really need is a tripod to keep your camera steady between the different exposures.

PS Vita Fun and Games

The picture doesn’t do justice to the 5 inch screen on the Vita, but it does show you just how large the device is.

I wasn’t going to buy a Vita until I saw one running a game. I’d been lulled by iPads and Smartphones into thinking that they were the ultimate in portable gaming.

They aren’t.

The Vita is a proper, high performance, gaming platform that you just happen to be able to fit into your jacket pocket. The games look like PS3 or Xbox 360 games. Playing Uncharted (as I have been doing) on the Vita is just like playing it on the PS3. What’s more, with twin joysticks in exactly the right places, the control is like using the PS3 gamepad as well. It should have at least three hours of battery life too, which is lot more than you will get from a Smartphone if you start playing 3D games with it.

I am very impressed with the gaming experience. I’m also impressed by the other programs on the device. The browser is perfectly serviceable and the on-screen keyboard is one of the best I’ve used. You can also use it for Skype, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr should you be the sociable type. If they put Amazon Kindle on it I’d be happy to leave the iPad at home and take the Vita with me on trips.

There are some niggles. The use of highly expensive, Sony proprietary, memory cards is a pain and the games are closer to console prices than I’d like. And the device itself is a bit pricey. although that might change over time.

If you are a “proper” gamer who wants to take a “proper” gaming experience with them on the bus then the Vita is a very attractive proposition.

Open Day

These are some of the open day attendees. I’ll settle for “Mostly Happy”.

We had another Open Day today. Good attendance for a mid-week session, which was nice. There was even a chap there who had got hold of my yellow book, written some games and made money out of them. Can’t be bad.

This is the winner of the prize draw, accepting her prize from Warren.

Micro Framework Robots at Tech Days

Straight after my complete “demo meltdown” last week I was greatly cheered by some robots that one of the chaps at Tech Days was showing off. He had taken a toy robot and make it properly useful by adding potentiometers to the joints so that the .NET Micro Framework controller could properly position the arm.

These are the GHI controller boards that he built up.

He even had a demo where the robot was controlled by someone in front of a Kinect sensor. And his worked…..