Singapore Imagine Cup Finals

These are the winners, congratulations to the four team members from NYP-School of IT who are about to get covered in celebration bunting…

I was lucky enough to be invited to help judge the 2012 Singapore Imagine Cup Final presentations today. Yesterday a series of sessions had taken the teams down from 16 to 4 and today we had to pick the winner from these. For the teams in the room it must have been especially nerve wracking because the finalists were announced just before they had to present and had a scant 10 minutes to prepare for their session. Not that it showed.

Every team delivered a very professional result which brought home to me just how much the standard has improved in the competition. All the presentations were what I would call “world standard”, in that they were the equal of ones I have seen at the World Final level.

However, there was a standout winner and so congratulations to Eustace Zheng Xiangwen, Nur Nadiah Binte Zailani, Koh Kai Wei and Mong Xunheng (hope I got your names right) who made up Team AlphaWaves. Their system, the Dementia Assistance and Recall Engine (DARE) provides support to sufferers of one of the nastiest things that can happen to a person. I wish them the best of luck in the world finals in Australia later this year.

If you want to find out more about the competition and get some tips about preparation for the next rounds I’ll be hosting a Live Meeting on Wednesday 18th of April at 16:30 GMT.  You can sign up here for the meeting.

After the finals I had a quick look around Singapore and then we headed off for a really posh meal. Thanks for inviting me folks, it has been great. My only regret is that I’m in town for such a short time.

I’ve not bought many souvenirs, but that’s because I’m definitely coming back some day…

Campfire Fun and Games

A great audience to die in front of…

Did my keynote session today at Campfire. It was great fun, once I’d got over my nerves and lack of sleep.Pretty much everything worked as it should, apart from my “bomb proof” Kinect driver wrappers blowing up. Oh well. I said I’d put some resources up here for you to take a look at:

Slides and (mostly working) code from the presentations today - here
C# Yellow Book, Windows Phone Blue book and other free stuff - here
.NET Micro Framework embedded development - here
Gadgeteer embedded development -  here
Three Thing Game student madness – here
Windows Phone development - here
Dreamspark, free software for students - here
Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio – here
Kinect For Windows SDK – here

I think that is everything, if you remember something I forgot, let me know and I’ll add it. Once the presentations were over I went for a wander round the city. After some fun and games on the transit I managed to get all the way down to the bay. I took loads of pictures which I’ll play with properly when I get home. In the meantime here are just a couple.

Lovely

A boat on a building? And why not.

More tomorrow, I’m off to bed now…

Flying to Singapore–Day 2

A rather expensive sticker...

This was a bit nerve wracking. I was transferring planes in Jokarta (another airport that looks very like all the airports I’ve been to on this journey) and the chap at the desk asked if I’d paid my “airport transfer fee”. ‘No’ I said nervously, ‘How much is it?’. Turns out that the sticker above costs 150,000 rupees. This was seriously scary. I had visions of having to sell the house just so I could get onto a flight to Singapore. ‘How much is that in US dollars?’ I asked eventually. Turns out that it is 20, which I can just about raise without selling anything major. After that things went swimmingly. and I got to my room in the Fairmont Hotel in time to go straight to bed. Session starts at 10:30 tomorrow morning. Can’t wait.

Flying to Singapore–Day 1

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Heading off to Singapore today. Should arrive tomorrow. Had a rather nice sunset at the gate as we were waiting to board.

Campfire Packing

Spent the evening preparing for my trip to Singapore tomorrow to speak at Campfire. Really looking forward to it, in spite of the 29 hour journey to get there.

Time spent to decide which clothes to take and pack them:3 minutes

Time spent to decide which gadgets to take and pack them:: 2 hours and counting….

Windows Phone 7.1.1 Update

This has nothing to do with Windows Phone. It is the charming bird that wakes us up every morning by singing loudly at around 5:00am and then goes back to sleep. Which is more than we do…

If you are a Windows Phone developer you should install the Windows Phone SDK 7.1.1 upgrade. This has been out a couple of weeks or so (and I really should have mentioned it earlier). It has some bug fixes, lets you target the new versions of the Windows Phone platform and, perhaps most importantly, it runs under Windows 8. I’m using it on my little portable machine for demos and stuff and it works a treat.

Take the Brain Loser

Having beaten number one son at his game yesterday, today I thought I’d take him on at one of my old games. Take the Brain. This is a game I got many, many, years ago. It is a bit like chess, but your  pieces (numbskulls and ninnies) can only move according to the arrows on the squares they occupy. Very tactical and strategic. Which is probably why I lost.

However, it brought home how useful it is to play games against your kids. If you win you feel good. If you lose you feel good that you have kids clever enough to beat you…

Mage Knight Winner

Over the last two evenings we’ve been playing Mage Knight, a game that number one son brought along. My goodness it’s complicated. Cards, markers, dice, crystals, hexagonal maps, little figures and towers. And a winner. Me. Not sure how I did it but I ended up with more fame than anyone else at the end, which is how they decide who wins. Great fun.

Good Friday at Sewerby Hall

Today, despite the poor weather and the even nastier forecast, we headed of to Sewerby Hall, another of my favourite places in all the world. It has the most amazing gardens, as you can see above. We had a great lunch and then took a walk along the cliff tops.

This picture is probably more in keeping with the weather, which by now had gone back to horrid grey mode after the promise of yesterday.

Merely Hornsea

Now, isn’t this a turn-up for the books? After yesterdays “grey-fest” today has dawned all bright and sunny. Of course, we’ve got to stay at home waiting for a package to be delivered, but once that arrived we headed out to Hornsea Mere, one of my favourite places in all the world. It has a place you can buy cups of tea, and a very old Pike stuck on the wall.

It also has a pitch and putt golf course where I once got a hole in one. Unfortunately it was the wrong hole though. The massive slice I played at hole number 1 somehow ended up in hole number 9. And there are ducks and geese and boats and stuff.

“You lookin’ at my bird?”

Cafe view

If you are lucky enough to be a student at Hull and you are at a loose end later this term, take a trip to the Mere. Just a great place.

A Floor in the Plan

Happy Holidays Rob…

Today could have gone one of two ways:

Good weather -> trip to the seaside
Bad weather –> replace the flooring in the porch

Ho hum, at least the stuff in question didn’t put up too much of a fight. And we do have quite a small porch.

Go see Pirates–Band of Misfits

I’m on holiday this week. So of course I went to see a movie. This one seems to have lots of names, in our listings it was called completely different things in different cinemas. Some of the titles mention scientists, some don’t. Still brilliant though.

Don’t waste time reading my notes on how good it is. Just go see it.

Software Updates at the Humber Bridge

All my own work

One thing which I’m very proud of is that I helped to write the software that manages the toll data from the Humber Bridge. Ian and I wrote the “Instation and Control Room Mimic” system which tracks the traffic over the bridge, makes sure that vehicles are registered correctly by the toll booth operators and totalises all the takings. We wrote the programs around 12 years ago which means that if my code was a child it would now be starting secondary school. Scary stuff. (and probably due for an update)

Some time ago the wonderful Verity Stob introduced me to Meir M "Manny" Lehman's Software Uncertainty Principle. Put simply, it states that at some point in the lifetime of a project certain assumptions that were baked into the solution when it was first built become wrong. Today that happened to me. One of the assumptions that I’d made in the design was that it would never be free to cross the bridge. The program was built to validate the price entry and reject any values which were less than or equal to zero. And then at the weekend the Humber Bridge Tolls were revised downwards (a very nice thing to happen) and it became free for a motorbike to cross the bridge. Thing is, my software didn’t allow for this. And so, for the last day or so the price of a motorbike crossing the bridge has been recorded as a single penny (although of course the money wasn’t collected)

Today I drove round to the Bridge Control Room and did a code update of the bridge software, effectively changing a >0 to a >=0 and now the prices can be set correctly.

April Fools Day–an apology

Last year I did an April Fools joke on the blog that worked rather well. This year I’ve come to the conclusion that recent events have made it completely impossible to come up with anything remotely stupid enough to be believable.

Rob at Campfire

I’ve just got back from Bulgaria and already I’m preparing for the next trip away. The week after next I’ll be heading for Singapore to give some sessions (and be part of the keynote) at Microsoft Campfire. I’ve had a look at the agenda and it looks really interesting. I’ll be doing some Windows Phone and some Kinect stuff (let’s see if we can lay ‘The Curse of the Kinect’ to rest once and for all) and there’s some Imagine Cup action too. Should be great fun.

If you are in the area you can sign up here.

Flying Back from Sofia

Flew back from Sofia today, everything was fine including the 7 hour stay at Schipol airport. The McDonalds there was serving “1955” burgers which are ace.

The Curse of Kinect

A very patient audience, thanks for putting up with me.

Just completed my Kinect session. Having done lots of tests I then got lots of problems during the demos. But everything worked in the end. For those who were there and wondering what the problem was, I think I’ve found the solution. Sometimes the sensor doesn’t wake up before my update thread tries to use it. Which doesn’t end well. I’ll be putting up a nice long blog post (and some useful code) to address this later.

After I’ve had a lie down..

Windows Phone at MS Days

The audience at the end. Some of them are still smiling....

Just done my Windows Phone session for MS Days here in Bulgaria. Great audience. I promised all the content, you can find the slide decks and sample code here.

Next stop Kinect at 12:45. What could possibly go wrong?

MS Days in Sofia

Got up bright(ish) and early this morning to head for Sofia. Nothing like a 6:10 am flight. But the journey was smooth enough and this time there was no rain when I arrived, which was nice.

This is the rather funky buildings you can see from my hotel room. Although now you’ve seen the photograph there is probably less need to do so.

In the evening we went out to the Timeless Cafe for tea. Nice place. There was a clock there but it had stopped – which seems fair enough. We had a great evening of good food, drink and Geek Speak.

The universal language of beer…

Then it was back to the hotel. Sessions tomorrow, looking forward to them. Hope the audience is too…

Heading for Sofia

I’m on my travels again. Tomorrow morning at the lovely time of 6:10 am I should be flying out to Sofia to take part in MS Days. I’m doing sessions on Windows Phone game development and Kinect fun and games. And I’ve tested all my demos. A lot.

Come and see them all work if you are at the conference.