Lego Movie. Everything. Is. Awesome.

Went to see the Lego movie today. Of course, as a kid I had some Lego, although I was more of a Meccano man to be honest. But I've always liked the stuff, even more so when they produce amazing kits like the VW Camper Van. 

So of course we went to see the film. It really is going beyond product placement .The product is the movie. And it was produced by one of the largest toy manufacturers in the world. And the shops are full of toys built around (and from) it. But it is still crazy great. 

There is enough going on at all levels to make it interesting. Plenty of smart one-liners and cultural references. Loads of stuff being blown up. Some properly sad moments and a proper ending that I reckon really works. 

Go see. And probably buy a kit or two as well....

Kinect for Windows V2

Oooh. Good news. Just got our notification email that connects us to the Kinect for Windows Developer preview.  I'm a big fan of the Kinect sensor. I even wrote a book about it. 

Start Here! Learn the Kinect API

By Rob Miles

(do you think that plug is subtle enough).

I saw the new sensor in action a while back and it is awesome. It can't actually read the time off your watch, but it can tell you which wrist you are wearing it on. And it can apparently also read your heartbeat. Which might make it a good zombie/vampire detector I suppose. 

Anyhoo, we should get ordering details soon so that we can get our hot little hands on the hardware.  Such excitement. 

A Map of the Floating City

His album art is usually pretty special too.

Thomas Dolby is one of my favorite artists. He's done sterling production work with Prefab Sprout and other bands, and every now and then he makes an album. And unfortunately, nothing much happens after that. Such is the life of a recording artist. 

Anyhoo, a couple of years ago he made another one, without telling me. I've only just found it.  A Map of the Floating City is splendid stuff. Some songs are poignant, some silly, and all different. He has some high powered collaborators too, including Imogen Heap, Mark Knopfler and Eddie Reader. You should definitely seek it out, if only to listen to The Toad Lickers. 

Tech@Hull Launch Event

Andre Hitchman is one of our second year students. With some big ideas. One of them is Tech@Hull. He launched it this evening at C4DI. Tech@Hull aims to bring students and business together to encourage entrepreneurship and innovation. Which are things that I'm quite keen on too.

The launch event was great, plenty of people, food, drink and discussion. Jon Moss of C4DI urged us all to get out of our comfort zone and go and talk to other folks, something I've always been spectacularly bad at, but I did my best.

If you are a student in Hull you'd be bonkers to miss out on this opportunity. Tech@Hull will be running lots of events where local developers and students can meet up, learn from each other and make plans together. You must, must, must be involved in this. 

Andre has set up a web site for the group. It's under construction at the moment but you can sign up for news of when it goes live here. 

C# Code Snippets on Demand

This is kind of neat. Rather than have to jump out of your IDE to find samples of how to use language and API features, you can just put the question into a comment and hit tab. 

It is a bit hit and miss at the moment (and doesn't know anything about XNA) but it would be a very interesting future development of my favourite place to work.... Have a play yourself here. 

Global Gamejam Hull Wrap Up

It's taken me a while to get round to doing the final wrap up on the amazing Global Gamejam Hull 2014. I've been hunting down videos and pictures and I've still not got quite a full set, but I've got details of the top six finalists, and pictures of all the prize winners. So here goes. 

This is the awesome "Spooky Elephant - Beard Bandit Collective" which picked up the award for "Most Ambitious Failure". Oh well. 

This is 121 Gigabits with their "Best Presentation" award.  Their game is superbly presented, and you can even download and play it. 

The Chips 4 Rent team came home with "Best Aesthetics"

The Disolveable Mammals  and their prizes for  "Most Ambitious Working Game". 

This is what remained of "Grown Up Games" by the end of the competition, and his "Last Man Standing" award.

This is the sound man from 'Put a const on it' with his richly deserved "Best Audio" award.

The "Stick Pixels" team were down for a while, but never out. So they were awarded "Best Comeback" for finishing with something awesome.

These folks made their own trees from code. This earned "Put a const on it"  the award for "Procedural Awesomeness"

And so we come to the winners. The judges had a tough time here. Lots of different takes on the theme, lots of seriously good stuff. In the end, in reverse order, they awarded the top three prizes as follows:

Third Place - Disolvable Mammals

These guys came third with a game that gave you a chance to experience life as a cat and see everything through feline eyes. With novel "scrabble powered" leap sensor movement control and sofas you could jump on, a great piece of gaming awesomeness. 

Second place - Put a Const on It

These folks put you in a godly position, planting and managing an algorithmically produced forest that grows and decays over time. With haunting music that changed with the gameplay and the ever present threat of winter, this made for some absorbing play. 

First Place - 121 Gigabits

These folks took the concept of identity and made it into a retro-styled 2 player game where the object was to find yourself, and your opponent and then blow them away. With retro themed graphics and gameplay and a multitude of different modes this polished production looked ready for the shops and gained the team, a stalwart crew of Three Thing Veterans, First Place.  You can download and play their game, just head over to their Raspberry Pi powered web site here.

Of course, it's not really about the winning, it's about what you learn by taking part. This is particularly true of my experience, where I've learned that relying on hardware that you haven't tested is a particularly bad plan. It was great to see so many returnees, it was also great to see all the games that didn't make the top six. If you want to find out more you can find the judging videos here. If your video isn't online yet, then please be patient as I'll be transcoding and uploading them in the next few days. If you want to add your own videos, please do, and add the tag globalgamejamhull2014 so we can all find them.

Thanks again to Platform Expo for organising everything, Hull College for a fantastic venue, Microsoft, Jagex and Sony for providing fantastic judges and prizes. 

And see you all next year. 

Ultimaker and Doodle3D Offer

This is officially a good deal. 

I've had my Ultimaker printer for a while now. I made it from the kit (a great way to spend a couple of days) and it works a treat. At the moment mine is printing out a rather nice vase based on a Koch snowflake design. 

Ultimaker have released a version 2 of their printer, but I reckon there is plenty of life in the old one yet. Particularly if you pair it with a Doodle3D device that lets you create and print objects really easily over a wireless network.

And now they have a rather nice deal where you can get the printer kit, plus an UltiController and a Doodle3D device for less than 1,000 euros. If you want to get into 3D printing, and want one of the best devices on the market, you could do a lot, lot worse. 

Open Day Ego Mania

We had an admissions open day today. First one of 2014. And it was packed, which was rather nice. I did the opening talk, as I do, and then we split up the attendees to allow the prospective students a chance for a lecture experience and us to have a chat with their parents. And someone asked me a question that I've not heard before, but struck me as a very sensible one. "We've been going round universities and looking at their departments for a while now. What has Hull got that they haven't?".

I could have said we have Three Thing Game or Rather Useful Seminars or Seed Software or Freeside or any number of things. Instead I said "I work here." It got a laugh, which was nice, and then we went onto mention all of the above plus a whole bunch of other things. 

As I was preparing to answer the question I looked across at Mike, John, Brian and Neil from the department and I knew that they were expecting me to say exactly what I did.......

Domain Name Suffering

Turns out these numbers are quite important

Every now and then I do something really idiotic. I try not to, but perhaps there is a "Conservation of Stupidity" thing at work in the universe which means that every half way clever thing Robert does must be compensated for with an action of outright daftness.

Anyhoo, yesterday I was working on www.wherewouldyouthink.com, a little site for use by anyone thinking about university. It has a bunch of bits and bobs about student life and whatnot. And I was re-hosting it all using glorious Squarespace Version 6. To make this work I had to update the DNS settings for the site. And I remembered that I'd done that for this venerable site only recently, so I might as well copy those settings.  So I opened up my doman name hosting folks and made some adjustments. And by mistake I ended up changing the IP address of my two sites to completely the wrong values. This turned out to be a very, very, silly thing to do. 

The IP address is like the telephone number of a host on the internet. It is now part of popular culture. There is usually a point in a crime/spy caper where the evil guys have been posting things on the internet and one of the tech guys says "I've got their IP address, let's go..." Cue onscreen map, squeal of rubber as cars hurtle down ramps and gunfight before end credits. 

We don't like having to remember phone numbers, so we have an address book in our phones that maps names onto the appropriate digits. This saves us work and it is also useful because when someone gets a new handset you can just update their number and stay in touch.

The internet works in just the same way. Normally we don't bother with 198.185.159.135, instead we put www.robmiles.com into our browser. But something has to do the mapping of names to numbers,  and that something is the Domain Name Service, or DNS for short. This is like the address book for the internet. It is very cleverly designed, with a hierarchy of servers giving out addresses for names.

If your computer asks the local network for a host and the network server doesn't know the address of that one it will ask the one above, and so on to the very top of the tree. When a new name is added to the internet it is added to the very top site and eventually the name/address pair percolate down to the all the machines in the tree.

Each server will keep local copies of the address values so that it doesn't have to keep asking the one above it for help. But every now and then it checks to see if the copy it has is up to date. This means that if the address at the top changes it takes a while for this to have an effect. 

So when I broke my DNS settings everything kept going for a while. But then my site started to become inaccessible. And in a very strange way. Depending on which network I used, the site would either work or it wouldn't, depending on whether the DNS data was "fresh" or "old". 

Of course I figured out what had happened very quickly, and fixed it fast. But it still took the best part of a day for things to settle down and return to normal.  Oh well, I'll be a lot more careful in future when I fiddle with those numbers.

Hardware at C4DI

Robin talks radio

Tonight we had our first "proper" Hardware meetup at the C4DI. There were talks from Robin and Mike about radio hardware and one from Robert about robots. With added robot. And I stood up and waved some flashing lights around and talked about our upcoming Arduino sessions. Very, very interesting.

The first two talks, about radio communications, were amazing. It was all about the challenge of using tiny amounts of power to send signals huge distances and of designing and refining analogue circuits.

Analogue electronics has always seemed like a kind of magic to me. I'm very happy with digital signals, where things are either on or off. But analogue signals are all about signals that can take any value. The good news is that the signals obey a bunch of laws, and we can use this to build circuits that process analogue inputs in particular ways. I'm used to writing instructions for programs that tell them what to do with data that comes in. Analogue circuit design is programming with hardware. You use your maths and physics knowledge to come up with component configurations and values that should work. Then you spend ages tweaking the imperfect physical realization of your design until it does what you want.

Robin and Mike described the challenges, but also the deep satisfaction that you can get from contacting people in distant countries using hardware that you designed and made yourself. And this technology also lets you communicate when you can't get any signal bars on your shiny smartphone. 

Robert then took another hardware tack. He'd brought along a robot which contained around 34 lines of program code. Not a lot perhaps, but enough to make it navigate round the room avoiding obstacles. It even backed up slowly (with appropriate warning beeper) if things got too close for comfort. Robert did a great job of explaining how what appeared to be complex behavior was actually very simple from a programming point of view. 

Finally I got up and talked about our plans for future developments. We thought it might be fun to do some Arduino sessions getting to grips with programming the device, and I suggested that the Sparkfun RedBoard Starter kit would be a good basis for our work. Then something amazing happened, Ross Hamilton, C4DI regular and all round good egg, offered to sponsor our sessions to the tune of 10 RedBoard kits. This means that although it would be useful for you to have your own hardware, at a reasonable cost of 36 pounds each (less than the price of a video game) now you don't need to. I've set up a special part of this site  where you can sign up for more information, and I'll post any materials that we produce up there as well. 

The Configurable Joystick Project

Some time ago Simon and I were wondering if you could make a game based around a configurable joystick. My vision for this would be of you flying your trusty spaceship through, er,space, while evil aliens shot off parts which caused your controls to break.  You would be having to plug and re-plug the control elements while you were flying the ship and decide whether you needed a fire button or a back control on the joystick as you limped home. 

We thought it might be a fun little project and so we made it the basis of our Global Gamejam entry. I was to 3D print the case and build the electronics and Simon and crew would come up with a game based on it. 

This is not quite how it turned out. 

What happened was that number one son was consigned to soldering hell, while I failed to print boxes that were the right size to fit everything in. And then at the end, we found a fundamental flaw in the circuitry that rendered the controller mostly useless.  Although we did win a prize for the "Most Ambitious Failure". 

But I've stuck with it. Above you can see "prototype one". And tonight I got it fully working for the first time. Each control element holds a resistor network that allows the controller to decide which socket it is plugged into. The 8x8 dot matrix screen is to be used for status displays. I've got it talking to the PC rather handily now, next step is to integrate it into the gameplay, 

Great fun. 

More Wrestling with Pyhon

Last year Warren, Simon, Robert, Mike and myself did a sequence of 6 sources for local teachers about programming with Python. They were great fun to deliver and we've now started the second sequence, with even more teachers and some new material. 

I've even gone and bought the domain www.wrestlingwithpython.com. This is where we are going to host all the content that we write over the weeks. I've even found a way of using the a new fangled feature of my new blog site. You can sign up for a newsletter and I'll send you alerts when anything interesting happens, python wise. 

The Squarewear Arduino

I'm getting quite keen on the Arduino devices. While they are nowhere near as powerful or easy to program as my beloved .NET Microframework platform  they do come in a huge range of prices and configurations. 

The Squareware 2.0 device you can see here is no exception. It is really designed for use as a wearable device. It has nice big holes that can be soldered into press-studs or connected to conductive cloth. It also has an on-board rechargable battery and recharging circuitry for an off-board one too. There are temperature and light sensors along with a buzzer and I reckon it is a pretty complete package.   It also has a pair of quite beefy drivers so it can switch more current into devices like larger lights or motors. 

You can pick it up from Tindie for 23 dollars, which I think is a reasonable price. Postage is reasonable too, and mine got here in only a week or so from the 'states. 

I've not done anything with mine yet, but I'm sure I'll think of something...

Driving a Hard Bargain. And weddings.

An action packed day today. First we were off to a wedding fair. I'm not getting married, but I know someone who is..... Anyhoo, it was fun. Lots of free cake. 

Then, after lunch, it was on to look at second hand cars. Again, not for me, but apparently I'm the "car expert" in the family, mainly because I used to drive a very old, first generation Mini, and you had to become a bit of a car expert just to keep those kinds of cars going. So it was my job to kick tyres and wear a leather jacket in a knowledgeable way.

Times have moved on a bit. In my time in this part of the market the principle question you had to consider was "How much of this car is actually metal?" as the vehicles of the age tended to turn back into iron ore (or rust as it is more commonly known) really easily. The cars that we saw today, although they were at the lower end of the market, seemed to have all of their metal still present, which is the good news. The bad news is that a modern cars have very expensive engine management systems and other fancy electronic gizmos that are pretty much impossible to fix and very expensive to replace. My Mini had fewer electrical things in it than you could find in the door of a car today.  So rules about low mileage and as new as you can get it still apply in spades.

We  took a car for a test drive. That was fun. The car was being sold as low mileage. As in "freakishly low". As in "we replaced the speedometer last year low". The garage staff had definitely read "Pro-tips for car buyers" Chapter 1, where it is written that "You can tell mileage of a car by wear on things like the top of the gear stick and the foot pedals."  This car had a brand new gear lever and shiny pedals, which shows enterprise on the part of the sales team, but the amount of wobble in the gear linkage and rattles from under the bonnet told a story quite at odds with the number on the dial. 

As we were leaving, promising to think about the purchase, a chap came out with another salesman and examined the car we had just tested. We left with him looking around the vehicle with evident enthusiasm, opening the bonnet, peering inside and looking genuinely interested. I got to thinking that perhaps, if a sale looks like it is teetering on the brink, they get someone to come and do that in front of a prospective customer. But then I am very cynical. 

I only know two things about buying cars. One is that it is a lottery and the other is that it is expensive one way or another. You reach a point where you just have to take a deep breath and take the lowest risk that you can afford. Bit like life really.

More precious than gold...

I was up town today and was surprised to notice a low flying police helicopter overhead. Then a convoy streaked through the streets, escorted by motorcycle outriders with their flashing lights on and sirens blaring. They all stopped outside a local stationary warehouse and two men got out in full body armor and carried a bulky package into the building while snipers on the rooftops provided cover.

Once the convoy had left and the fuss had died down I wandered into the store to ask what was going on. The assistant looked up from her magazine and told me "We've just had another delivery of ink-jet cartridges."

Actually this didn't happen. But I've just bought some more ink for my printer, and from the price I'm pretty sure that this is how they arrive...

Big Graduation Ceremony in City Hall

I was Graduands Marshall at the university degree ceremony today. That meant I had to give a speech at the start to tell people what to do and then make sure that all the graduands (people who have qualified for their degree but not got it just yet) are present in the right order to go up on stage to strut their stuff in front of the Chancellor.

We were in Hull City Hall and the place was packed. I was told that there were only a handful of seats free and the place is big. I did my usual opening speech (with the appalling joke at the start) and it all went very well. I'd taken my own advice to turn my phone off and I've discovered that, lovely though the camera in my Lumia 1520 is, it doesn't work very well when the phone has been shut down.  So no pictures this time I'm afraid. 

Congratulations to everyone who got a degree today. 

Wearable Technology Workshop

I wonder what the Guides will be able to do with this?

A student in our department, Charlotte, is based in Bristol for the year and doing great things to engage folks with technology.

She has set up a crowd funded event with a local Guide Pack, which is a really good idea. But she needs a bit of help funding the event. You can find out more here. 

Departmental Research Conference

We had our annual departmental research poster conference today. With some cracking research to talk about. Unfortunately I had to head off to a meeting after the first hour, but I would have loved to stay and see all the presentations. Great stuff.

Tech@Hull Launch Event

Students have loads of ideas, inspiration and (whisper it) are sometimes capable of working really hard on their projects. Andre Hitchman, a student in our department, is keen to find ways that students can harness all this potential and get going building stuff.

So he has created Tech@Hull, a way that students from the region can get together, share experiences and expertise and make plans for future projects, collaborations, startups, you name it.....

Andre is getting sterling support from Hull Digital and C4DI who are hosting the launch event on Wed 12th Feb, 5:30pm to 7:00pm. You can sign up here. 

I'm going to go along, although I stopped being a student a startlingly long time ago. If you're studying in Hull at any of our many seats of learning, then you should come along. They've got a sponsor for the event, Campaign Monitor are paying for the first few beers.....

XBOX 360 for Education

Now, those of you with long memories will recall that XNA is a C# game development framework that is a great way to teach how to program by writing silly games. It was released way back in 2006. I've used it in our teaching ever since, written three books on the platform and I even spoke at the launch event in the UK.

You could say I rather like it.

Unfortunately, not everyone at Microsoft does (or did) and it was recently "sunsetted" or whatever the trendy name is for "made not really around any more". This was sad, but it would have been even sadder if that had been the end of the story. Fortunately, because of those wonderful folks at MonoGame, the framework lives on in a form that makes it possible for programmers to take their XNA skills and use them to make iPhone, Android, Playstation Vita, Windows Phone and Windows 8 games. And that's where the story was until today.

Microsoft UK have just done something very interesting. They've put together a package of hardware, software and educational materials that makes it very easy to set up a course that teaches programming and game development using XNA on real console hardware. And the fun thing for me is that they are bundling in all the XNA teaching materials that I've written over the years.

You can find out more, and sign up, here.  (although I must admit the website mystifies me at the moment, as I've no idea what a "Microsoft Volume Licence Agreement Number" actually is). However, Lee Stott will be able to help I'm sure. If you just want my XNA book you can find it here.

As a kind of celebration I've dug into my copious archives and found the first video of a set I made ages ago for a local video game webzine. It is a little bit out of date (Visual Studio 2008 anyone?), but still mostly valid. If you want to see the rest of the series (it's worth watching just for the animated titles - in XNA of course - and the catchy theme song) then let me know and I'll transcode and upload them. Enjoy.