Art and Imagine Cup Finals

Today I actually had time to take a look around St.Petersburg. We caught the Metro up down and took a look at the Hermitage Museum.

They it can take at least six hours to tour the museum properly, so we settled for just looking at the imposing building from the outside. One day I’m coming back for a proper tour.

On Monday one of the judges, Bill Buxton, had mentioned that there was a really good contemporary arts museum quite near to the hotel. He reckoned that Erarata was well worth a look. So, with a couple of hours to spare before I had to head off the the world finals I hopped on a bus and went over there. I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked, but there was some intriguing stuff on show. I’m not a great art critic, but I like seeing stuff that makes me think.

This is a singularly appropriate exhibit, given that we have the creator of Tetris, Alexey Pajitnov, judging at the competition.

I think this was my favourite exhibit. Not least because it made me think the hardest. I hope they don’t mind me posting a picture.

If (or more accurately when) I go back to St. Petersburg I’m going to set aside a goodly chunk of time to have a proper look round this lovely gallery. And I’ve just discovered they have a gallery in London too, which is going on my list. I managed to make it back to the hotel with just minutes to spare before the busses headed off to the theatre and the World Finals show.

I took a whole bunch of pictures at the world finals, but curiously the only one that I can find to put on the blog is the one of the UK team (that’s UNITED KINGDOM) winning top prize for the Innovation competition. You can find out all about the all the other results and more details of the WORLD BEATING TEAM FROM THE UNITED KINGDOM at the Imagine Cup site.

I’ll be posting more pictures telling some more Imagine Cup stories (and there are some amazing ones) when I’m somewhere with some power to charge up the Surface.

Update on 2013-07-14 14:13 by Rob

If you are still not sure about that picture, you might find the following helpful. I got it the comic book store in Seattle market.

Hands-On Judging

Today it was time for the judges to get “down and dirty” with the teams. Each team had a 15 minute conversation with each judge in turn, showing their application running and getting scores and feedback from the judge Of course, I’m not a judge, but I was determined to join in the fun. I made it my mission to take a look at every single entry in the competition by the end of the day, and I pretty much made it. Some teams I when they presented, others I met up with on the showcase floor.

I started off by “shadowing” a judge as they chatted with a team, but having nearly bitten my own tongue off several times (nobody is supposed to ask questions except the judge during the demo) I gave up on that and went off to chat to teams that were in-between judge sessions. This was great. Teams seemed only to happy to practice their pitch on me, and I love finding out more about their solutions. Once or twice I got shooed away by a “proper” judge wanting to talk with the team, but it was great to be able to meet everyone. One of my regrets in previous competitions is that I didn’t have time to see all the entries, just the ones that I was judging. However, with my “captain’s hat” I don’t judge this time, so I’m free to go and chat. So I did.

Once the hands-on rounds had finished it was up to the judges to enter their individual scores and then these were combined to get a final score for each team.

And then we found out who gets the prizes. The numbers were unequivocal, which was good (I had this private nightmare of everyone getting exactly the same score).

So, once we had done our work, it was time for some play. First up with a bus ride to boat that would take us to the Winter Palace.

This was a boat a bit like ours, zooming past.

Docking

Now, that’s what I call a palace.

We got a tour of the palace and a potted history of Peter the Great and his dynasty. If you think Shakespeare had some dramatic stories, some of the stuff that went on here proves that real life can also provide big time drama and intrigue. 

Gold statues and fountains.

This picture was taken at around 10:30 at night. Amazing

How it must have looked when Peter was in the house.

Not Judging Judging Day

We had a great day judging the presentations today. I’m not actually a judge this time, I’m the competition captain. This means that I’m involved in making the judging work, but I don’t get to write down any scores.

But I still get to watch lots of the presentations, just to make sure that the judging process is working the way that I think it should. Today I’ve seen a whole bunch of lovely projects. Tomorrow I’ll watch through some of the booth demonstrations and see how well the teams can show off what they’ve made. I’m thinking that they’ll do a pretty good job.

Of course I’m still wearing the Lego watch….

I made a very brief visit to the student showcase. Can you guess which country this team member is from.

Imagine Cup Briefing Day

Today is the day that the competition gets going. But first we have to tell everyone, competitors and judges, how everything works. For me this means sorting out presentation content and then getting to to the best bit, which is actually deliver the briefings. John and I had a great time telling folks how it all works, and then we went out to have our pictures taken with the teams. I did have time to take a few pictures, here they are.

This is the panorama from the front of the hotel. Impressive eh?

.. and this is a slightly tweaked version of part of the same view.

The front of the hotel has these flags all around it.

At the internet cafe they have loads of machines for folks to do their email and surf the web. This is what was on the screens when I walked past. Honest.

These are the student teams at the World Citizenship briefing. You can tell that this is a proper presentation to actual students because the seats at the front are all empty. They are a great bunch, poised to do some great things…

Update on 2013-07-08 16:58 by Rob

I said at the presentation I'd make the slide deck available. If you want to see it, you can download it here:

http://sdrv.ms/14Dy9Yp

Heading for St. Petersburg

If I ever go on Mastermind my specialist is going to be “Terminal Z at Frankfurt Airport”. Today I had around 8 hours to study the place and I feel I know pretty much all there is to know about it:

• It is very clean and tidy
• They have aeroplanes there
• …and a MacDonald's
• Eight hours is around seven hours too long to spend there

Anyhoo, the good news was that I managed to pass the time well enough, particularly after I found the seats with the power sockets to recharge the gadgets.

This is our plane, being prepped for the last part of the journey.

I met up with Simon and Ben, who had travelled over from the ‘states and were noticeably more wide-awake than I was, but I put that down to my 4:00 am start today. Anyhoo, we arrived in St. Petersburg at the appointed time and, after I was reunited with my “big case” in the luggage claim area (a particularly emotional time for me as I always fret about losing all my extra-tall clothes) we headed for the hotel.

The driver was in a hurry, and we found out why when we arrived at the bridge that links the island containing the hotel with the rest of St. Petersburg. Every night, at around 2:00 am, they open the bridge for a while to let ships go through. We arrived just in time to be among the first to cross the bridge when it re-opened, which was unfortunate in one sense, but did give us a chance to take a look around the place and take some snaps.

This is the bridge as it opened.

There was some pretty impressive artwork on the sides.

St. Petersburg by night.

I got to my room around 3:00 am and then spent a while unpacking my big case and putting everything away. The real stuff starts tomorrow. Can’t wait.

Cottingham Day in Good Weather

Today was that rarest of coincidences. We were in the country, the weather was great, and it was “Cottingham Day” in the village. They had all kinds of stuff going on, including some vintage cars that were parked all around the village. This is a close up of one of them. I so wanted a car like this when I was a bit younger. A “non-price” to anyone who tells me what kind of car it is, and for bonus kudos, the car it was based on.

I took a whole bunch of other pictures which I’m sure will appear on these pages over time. It was a great day

Moving House

Well, that could have gone a lot better.

My plan was to move my blog over from Squarespace 5 to Squarespace 6. I liked the new styles, I’d found a new layout I liked and all seemed OK. I’d checked that my content would move with the blog. I’ve even built the new site. You can see it here if you are interested. So I flipped the switch on my name server to point to the new blog.

And the fun started. Bits of the layout weren’t right. My content didn’t seem to be where it should be. And I started to miss the features in Squarespace 5.

So I’ve flipped the switch back again, and here we are. Back where we started. I’m going to have another go later, once I’ve done some proper testing. In the meantime, sorry about any interruptions to the service. I’m going to make very sure that everything is in the right place before I flick that switch again.

Tiny Camera

In preparation for the Imagine Cup World Finals in Russia I've got myself a tiny camera that I can carry round at all times. It seems to do a good job of the Union Building.

Despicable Me 2–Just Go and See It

It is not often these days that I find myself in a completely packed movie theatre. But we did today. I'm sure that some if it was to do with the "Orange Wednesday Two for One Deal" on tickets, but the rest had to be to do with the film.

I really enjoyed Despicable Me when it came out, and so I was well up for seeing the sequel. And Despicable Me 2  definitely delivers.  Good action sequences, nicely constructed story (not that it needed that much to be honest). And loads of minions.  Great fun. Go see.

Fun with Windows 8.1

I was expecting tough times when I started on the Windows 8.1 upgrade trail. Turns out to have been quite easy though (albeit a bit time consuming). The Surface RT upgraded itself from Windows Store, and I was pleased to discover that it had remembered all its previous settings and applications. The Surface Pro was a little bit trickier. For that I burned a DVD and did the upgrade from an external drive. But having said that,  the upgrade offered to keep all my programs and data, and was true to its word.

The only thing that us Brits need to know about the upgrade process is that it won't work if you don't have the US English language installed on the device. If you have a UK version of the devices you'll need to change that over before the upgrade will play ball.

The machines seem no slower, although I've yet to give them a proper workout. The Start Button is back, but what really interests me is changes to the display zooming over different displays.  With my Surface Pro I need to zoom the display because the pixels are too teeny tiny. But when the Surface Pro drives a monitor it zooms that display too, which is just what I don't want to happen. In Windows 8.1 they have apparently changed the way that displays are zoomed, so that the tablet display and the desktop display can be different, which is much better.

Another year as an MVP

I’ve been a Microsoft MVP for over ten years now. And now I’m going to be an MVP for another year. Which is lovely.

Raspberry Pi Hardware Notes

I’ve done some small tidying up of the notes that we used for our Raspberry Pi Hardware sessions a couple of weeks back. You can download them from here. If you do use them in any way, I’d love to know how you get on.

Open Day and Saying Cheese

To be honest the day didn’t get off to the best of starts. I was crammed into a photo booth in Cottingham Post Office taking a picture of myself for a Russian Visa. Turns out that photo booths, like lots of other things in my life, weren’t really designed for someone of my stature. So I was trying desperately to get all of my head into the right part of the picture, repeatedly re-taking the picture and failing to get all of my apparently enormous face into the frame.

After numerous retries the system gave up on me and printed the tenth or so attempt. Fortunately it looks OK, and so my passport, along with lots of accompanying documentation, is now on the way to London and visafication.

The reason I’m after a visa is that I’m helping with the judging of the Imagine Cup World Finals the week after next. They’ve got some amazing judges, including the chap who invented Tetris,  and they’ve got Matt Smith, of Dr. Who fame, hosting the awards presentation.

I’m really looking forward to going along and taking part. Visa permitting. With a bit of luck the visa should be sorted on Monday and I can start choosing which gadgets to take…

Once I’d posted my visa application I shot straight into the university for an Open Day.

I did two talks, this is the first audience.

This is outside the library, we had our American Football Team, along with the rowers to show the kinds of things we get up to. 

This is the second sitting for my Open Day talk. Another great audience.

During the talks I mentioned the “Yellow Book” that we use to teach C#. You can download a PDF of the book from here. There are also some other free documents there too. All in all a great day, hope that everyone who made the trip found it worth their while.

3D Printing in Windows 8.1

Now, I’m not particularly old. But I can remember when the very idea of having your own printer was the stuff of dreams. Printers were places you went to when you wanted to have something printed. And as for printing in colour, that was beyond dreaming.And then the first dot-matrix and daisy-wheel printers appeared, closely followed by laser printers and finally inkjets. And now everyone has a printer.

In the early days of printing, it was a bit of a nightmare. You had to have the right kind of printer, the right kind of software and the right kind of drivers to get anything sensible. And often the thing printed didn’t match the image on the screen, or was the wrong size or shape. Eventually things settled down. Standards were set and now you can buy a printer in the confidence that it will just plug in and work with your computer.

I reckon that 3D printing is following a similar trajectory. We are at the point where hardware is appearing and we need some standards so that it can be made available to the widest possible audience. My experience with the technology has left me thinking that a 3D printer is not yet an “appliance”, but that in the longer term the attractiveness of the technology means that pretty much everyone will want a device eventually.

That’s why I’m really pleased that Microsoft have announced support for 3D printing in Windows 8.1. This is really only a step on the road to widespread adoption, but it is a really good one.

The Case of the Broken Blog

I took this picture shortly after I arrived at the conference centre. Lovely sky.

Before I do a session I always test my demos. I’ve found that you really need to do this, as oddities in the network setup can sometimes catch you out. Anyhoo, I was happily (or rather non-happily) testing my file download demonstration and it got stuck. So I spent a painful while trying to get it to work, all to no avail. Then I found the problem.

My blog was broken. It was the source of the files that I was showing how to fetch, and it wasn’t there. Wah. So I re-wrote the demonstrations to use different servers (and local ones just in case everything broke again) and just as I’d finished this little exercise my blog came back again. Oh well.

The sessions themselves went nicely, and folks were polite enough to laugh at my jokes. You can find the Speech demos here and the Background Agents demos here.

 

These are some of the audience at my first session.

This is my demonstration setup. Note red rocket poised for lift off.

These are some of the audience for the second session. There are some more pictures on Flickr. Apologies if you arrived a bit later,, and aren’t on the pictures. Although then again you might not be that bothered…..

I love doing TechEd sessions, the audiences are always great, and today was no exception. Thanks folks.

Tomorrow I’m back on a play to head for home.

Update on 2013-07-01 08:58 by Rob

The irony of this happening just after I'd done a post about the imporantance of paying for services that you can rely on has not been lost on me.

All I can say is that they responded to my cries for help really quickly, and they've just sent me another survey to find out how they did.

Hello Madrid

After a day of travel I’m now installed in the hotel in Madrid, nervously checking my demos and making sure that I don’t forget any plastic rockets for the sessions tomorrow.

The journey here was fairly uneventful, except for the “experimental road works” on the M62 as I was driving to Manchester Airport. The road works seem to exist for the sole purpose of finding out what happens if you reduce a busy three lane motorway to one lane. (The answer, by the way, is that you make everyone 25 minutes late).

If you are at TechED EU I’d love to see you at my talks tomorrow. Come and see me in room N12 at 12:00 to 12:15 talking about Speech on Windows Phone and at 3:15 pm lots of fun and games based around background agents. And you might win a rocket. Can’t say fairer than that.

Achievement Unlocked: Resits Written

After a couple of days of solid work I’ve managed to write all my resit coursework and exams. So, if you are unlucky enough to have to come back for a resit later this summer, at least you’ll have something to do now.

Learning Computing with Cubelets

I’m always on the lookout for a neat gadget. And at the Gadget Show I found one. What you can see above are Cubelets from ModRobotics. The picture above shows a robot made of little, cooperating cubelets. Each is around an inch on each side, and each is fitted with a set of tiny magnets that allows cubelets to snap to each other and send data back and forth. And each cubelet does something. Above, from left to right you can see a battery cubelet, a distance cubelet and a light cubelet. Black cubelets are sense cubelets, transparent cubes perform some form of action. Coloured cubelets are “thinking” cubelets that do something with the data coming in.

A sense cubelet will send out out the value it “sees” to all the cubelets around it. The distance one sends a signal that gets stronger the closer it is to something. So above you can see the reaction to my camera.

This is a slightly more complicated device. The dark brown cubelet is a “think” one that outputs the larger of the two inputs that are going into it. The red cubelet is an “inverse” one that reverse the sense of the input. So, if something is close to my robot, or the knob is turned to the maximum, the light will grow dimmer.

This one is a bit simpler. The cubelets at each end are drive cubelets. They have little motorised rollers. This robot will run away if I bring my hand too close to the top.

“Programming” with cubelets isn’t really programming at all. They click together and organise themselves so neatly that you just pop them into arrangements to see what they do. They are toy certified for kids from 4 years old, and I reckon that is a place they will really shine. After a bit of fun and games you can get some very complicated behaviours, and start making robots that behave in a way that you want, for example things like line following.

This is my cubelet collection. I’ve no idea what it does, but it definitely does something…

And finally, as if this wasn’t enough, you can actually re-program the thinking cubes in C. The blue cube at the top left hand corner of my collection above is a Bluetooth cube that can talk to your PC.

This is the programming environment that you run inside a browser. It talks to Bluetooth cubelet and allows you to select cubelets in the network and reprogram them.

The whole thing is utterly charming. The programming in C aspect is a bit of a work in progress at the moment, although it does work and ModRobotics are very responsive if you have problems. The system is powered by tiny rechargeable lithium-ion cells in the battery cubelet that seem to last a long time and the cubelets themselves are beautifully made and look like they would stand up to a lot of hammer. The kits are not cheap, but they aren’t bonkers expensive either, and you can always get them “on instalments” by just purchasing a few at a time. Well worth a look if you have any interest in engaging children with computing.

Update on 2013-06-24 19:55 by Rob

The only place I've found in the UK where you can buy them is RoboSavvy:

http://robosavvy.com/store/product_info.php/products_id/3082

However, they are happy to ship worldwide, if you are happy to pay the gouging customs duty and VAT on the parcel....

Learn Things from Rob at TechEd EU

I’m doing some sessions at TechEd 2013. If you want to know how to make your Windows Phone use background agents to add value to your application, or respond to what you say, then I’m your man. I’m speaking at 10:00 am on Thursday about speech and 3:15 about background agents. And I’m going to be around at Ask the Experts too.

I had this brilliant plan for TechED US, where I’d give away 3D printed phone cases at my session. I even printed them and everything. Then I found out that the phone that I’d printed the cases for is not actually sold in the US. Which makes me an idiot.

So, instead, this time I’m giving away “I learned something from Rob” ceremonial plaques. These are completely unique, except in the sense that there are more than one of them in existence. I’ll also be giving away lovely 3D printed red rockets. So come along to my session, answer a question and you might be in the running to win.

Above you can see the 3D design for the plaque.

This is what the real thing looks like. With a bit of luck I might see you in Madrid, and give you one.

Problems in Pink

That could have gone better…

Peter is still working on his 3D printer. Today I had a go at printing another part for him. It did not end well. As you can see above, when the printer runs out of fibre to print, bad things happen.

I’ve mostly reached the point where failed prints are not as interesting as they used to be, but even so I’m tempted to hang on to this one. The problem came because I’m coming to the end of my lovely pink/magenta fibre and the last few metres are tightly wound around the inside of the spool. When they are fed into the printer the tight curves of the fibre cause more friction in the tube that pushes them into the print head. This gets harder to push, so the knurled bolt that is doing the pushing starts to slip against the fibre, eventually wearing it in two.

Then you get to strip down the feeder and extract the broken bit. Fortunately the print head wasn’t blocked, and so I was able to switch to red fibre (that little coil that looks like red hose is me forcing out the pink and sending in the red) and print all the bits with no problems.

I’m going to have to make something that straightens the pink fibre out so that I can use it.