Open Data and the Leeds Data Mill at C4DI

You can learn some really interesting things from data. And there is a lot of out there, freely available to anyone with a theory to test or an idea for an app. Mark Barrett and Simon Zimmerman work at Hebe Works where they are trying to make more data available and tell interesting and useful stories from what is already visible.

Yesterday they came over to C4DI to talk about what they are doing and tell us all about Leeds Data Mill.  Mark took to the stage and told us all about the challenges of making data available. He is also the chap behind the GP Ratings App for iPhone, a wonderful program that leverages thousands of patient ratings and uses them to show you how good the doctors are in your area. 

This was a very thought provoking talk with an eye on the future. Mark and Simon reckon that open data is a great way to create completely novel applications, as well as giving people much greater insight into how the services around them actually tick. 

I headed over to the Data Mill and had a look round. There are some interesting data sets that you can just download, or hit with ready made Python, Ruby or JavaScript templates. I happened upon one that give the incidence of parking fines in the city and how many miscreants have paid up. And I started wondering if people who get fined in the morning are better payers, or worse, and when during the day they take the most fines. And I was hooked. Not written the program yet, but there is a good chance I will. And there are over 150 (and growing) data sources to go with that one.

C4DI are working with the Hull City Plan to bring this kind of open data to us. I'm really looking forward to seeing it all come together.  

Rather Useful Raspberry Pi Lecture

Today I did a Rather Useful Seminar all about the Raspberry Pi and how to get started with it. Someone asked if I could record the screencast. So I did. You can find it above. 

Python, Methods and Testing

Today we had another in our sequence of "Wrestling with Python" sessions for teachers. It was all about creating Python methods and then testing them. Tests are always good. You can find the slide deck and the lab notes here if you fancy having a go.

Which Computer Science Option Should I choose?

After my First Year lecture today someone asked me an interesting question: "Which Computer Science option should I choose for next year?". Our course is structured so that you can choose your specialism (Computer Science, Software Development, Game Development, Information Systems or Computer Systems Engineering) at the end of year one. I think (although I may be wrong) that the person asking the question was primarily concerned about the best option to choose from an employ-ability point of view.

My answer was that you should pick the one you are most interested in. When you go for a job it is very likely that your prospective employer will not necessarily be looking for someone with a particular specialism. They will just be looking for someone who is keen on the field of Computer Science and shows the prospect of being useful.

To me this means a candidate who has done lots of things that aren't on the syllabus and can talk about the things that they have made "just for the fun of it" as well as the good grades they got on their set coursework.

So, do the thing you enjoy, and do stuff that you haven't been told to do, and don't worry quite so much about being a good fit with what you think the employers might want. 

Games Tm Game Development Article

I like the Games TM magazine. It has a solid mix of reviews, comment and retro stuff. And this month it has an astonishingly good article about what to do if you want to enter the games business. There are a whole bunch of things to do which all make very good sense to me. Well worth a look. 

Non-Existent Saturday

Eight hours of today were lost due to time zone shenanigans. And I spend the rest of the time asleep. 

Flying Home

Got up bright and early today and the weather was lovely. Made a quick trip over to the Microsoft store to see if they had any Microsoft Bands in stock but unfortunately they hadn't. Oh well, with a bit of luck I should be getting one fairly soon. 

Then it was into a metal tube and away into the sky. I hate leaving Bellevue/Seattle. Even though it rained for pretty much our whole trip it has been a lovely place to visit. Here's to next year. 

MVP Summit Ends

Another great MVP Summit. Fun had. Friends well met. Stuff learned. Free food and drink consumed. Here's hoping I can make it to the next one.

Thanks to the Microsoft folk for being so welcoming (as usual).

Making a Universal MonoGame Project

At one of the sessions earlier this week we were talking about game development and I found out something really interesting. Thanks to Giles for passing me the link.

If you want to make a MonoGame solution that contains a Universal Application for Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 8.1 you can find a build of MonoGame that contains templates that just work here.

You can deploy to phone or pc just by setting the start project. The distribution also contains the new content management stuff. I'm going to make an example application and a little screencast about how to use it when I get back to the UK.

This is completely wonderful. It will make it so much easier to make games which will be rady for both the Windows Phone and the Windows stores.

MVP Summit Day 2

I used amazing "Sky Camera" technology to get this photograph while we were waiting for Satya Nadella.

Another day of good stuff at the summit. I always leave these affairs with a whole bunch of things that I want to try out.

In the evening we had a Welcome Reception where Satya Nadella came along. All very interesting stuff. After all that I was a bit exhausted and staggered back to the hotel and bed. Early start tomorrow.

On the way back I grabbed a shot of Bellevue at night.

My quest for a Microsoft Band is ongoing. The offer here still stands.

Living with a Surface Pro 3

My Surface Pro in its natural habitat......

So I've had my  Surface Pro 3 now for a couple of months or so. We've had our ups and downs:

Ups: Reading magazines at full size (and weighing less than the printed copies). Running full fat Windows apps at blistering speed away from home on battery power. Snapping in and out of the dock with ease. Being very shiny and pleasing to own.

Downs: the time it refused to start up in front of a full class of first year students. And then later the same day hid my Bluetooth mouse and keyboard in front of a slightly smaller audience.  Getting a horrible experience using Hyper-V (which you need to emulate but not write Windows Phone apps)

I think it is fair to say that I now love the device. If you're thinking of getting one, here are my tips for how to get to love yours too:

Don't enable Hyper-V (f you don't know what that is, skip to the next paragraph) I’ve turned off Hyper-V and don’t intend to turn it on again anytime soon. Hyper-V has broken pretty much every machine I’ve ever used, starting with my Samsung Slate whose usb drivers were just not able to handle it, going through my Sony Ultrabook and earlier Surface systems. If not having Hyper-V is a deal-breaker for you, then think hard before acquiring a Surface Pro 3. I now write Universal apps and debug them by deploying to the machine. That works without Hyper-V being enabled and if I want to debug on the phone I plug one in and deploy to that. Not sure if this is optimal for everyone, but it works for me. If you want to turn Hyper-V on and off there are a couple of batch files you can use here.
 
Shut down before you undock if you have hard disks connected to your docking station. I always shut my machine down before I undock it. To me this seems like common sense. If I corrupt one of my big USB drives I might have a data recovery job on my hands which I’d rather avoid. I’d use eject if I could be sure that I’d always do it. The machine boots from cold in under a minute or so and this doesn't seem to be costing me much time. If you don't plug your Surface into an external monitor while it is undocked and you haven't got any storage devices attached to your docking station it should be fine to use the dock as it is meant to be used, just snapping the tablet in and out as you go through your day. 
 
Be patient when you hit the power switch. I’m working on acquiring more patience (if only I could get that in a hurry). I give the machine time to get going after I press the power button and I've turned off "Allow this device to wake the computer” for the Surface Type Cover in Device Manager. It’s so that I don’t open the cover, turning it on and then press the button and turn it off again. 

A few years ago a machine like the Surface Pro 3 would have seemed like impossible magic. And now it is here and working for me.  And I really like it.

MVP Summit Day 1

Today was very, very, wet. Turns out that spending a bunch of time in a room with no windows has its advantages. Some great content though, and a chance to catch up with some splendid folks I've not seen for a while.

Seattle Tourism

I thought I'd spend some time today as a tourist. So I took the 550 bus from Bellevue to downtown Seattle. This is one of the best ways to spend $2.50 around here. You get a lovely drive over the floating bridge, a spectacular view of the skyline and then a ride in the tunnels underneath the city. 

I got out at the Westlake Centre and slipped down to Pike Place Market for a look around. Took in the Comic Book store in the marketplace, along with the craft stalls down there and then headed back up to Westlake and the monorail terminal

There I bought a return ticket to the Space Needle and then I just waked straight into the lift (no queues) and rode up to the top where I enjoyed a coffee and took some snaps of the view.

Then back to Westlake and Barnes and Noble for a look at some books. Finally I got the bus back to the hotel and spent a happy hour or two playing with the pictures I'd taken.

Wonderful.

Heading to Seattle

Turns out that if you point a smartphone out of the window as you land you do get a picture.

Flew out to Seattle today. 

Via Amsterdam and New York. 

The circuitous route was the result of searching for the cheapest tickets. And I did get to see the inside of JFK airport. Turns out it looks like every other airport. I wasn't able to focus much on the decor though, as I was rushing to get through Homeland Security before boarding my ongoing flight, which left around an hour or so after I arrived.

However, everything when smoothly. Although when takeoff was delayed "Because we are loading some baggage that arrived late." I had an awful vision of my big awful suitcase being the one that was holding everyone up.

But we got to Seattle early and I'm now writing blog posts at "don't know o'clock" in the morning. And really looking forward to the next few days. 

Halloween Three Thing Game Kicks Off

Three Thing Game is going strong, and I'm sad. We've got over 150 students in the department working on games overnight and I'm not going to see what they have made.

Thanks to the vagaries of airline ticket pricing (who knew it would cost so much to fly on Sunday) I have to head out the MVP Summit on Saturday morning, leaving the event in the capable hands of David.

We started the event with a fantastic presentation from Dean and Dominique about MonoGame. A few things of note from the session:

• A really good way to make a name for yourself (and get jobs etc etc) is to get involved with the Open Source projects.
• You should publish what you make. The first one probably won't be an overnight success. But the fifth one might be.
• MonoGame is all grown up, with versions for pretty much every platform including the PS4 (and I reckon the Xbox One won't be far behind)
• The new Content Management stuff is awesome

Of course we had pizza. Five hundred pounds worth of pizza.

Lee and Simon building a "pizza fort". 

I think we managed to feed everyone OK. The lass on the phone at Domino's listened with increasing incredulity as the order built up, and they had to send out two pizza packed cars to deliver it.   Thanks so much to Lee from Microsoft for sponsoring all the cheesy goodness.

I took a bunch of pictures before I had to zoom off and pack. Above is a sample. You can find them all here.

I Want a Microsoft Band

Microsoft have just released their Band, a smartwatch/fitness device that looks really nice. They are selling very well apparently, which means that I might have problems getting one when I head out to Seattle for the MVP Summit. And I really want one.

Now, I fully realise that the pursuit of gadgets is ultimately fruitless as they lead an ephemeral life, doomed to be superseded by the next iteration and driven by a marketing beat. You could argue that people who try to validate their existence by surrounding themselves with the latest technology are perhaps only proving their ultimate shallowness. And in the end the accumulation of material goods is ultimately futile (for a full discourse on this matter listen to the wonderful "Mountains'O''Things" by Tracy Chapman).  

But I still want one. 

If anyone finds themselves in a position to get me one (medium size should fit I reckon as I'm, half way up the strap on my Pebble) I will do the following for them, in addition to paying for the device:

• supply them with a printed, autographed copy of the latest C# Yellow Book
• write a poem for them (I am a published poet) on any subject they nominate
• provide them with a unique Windows Phone Controlled Wedding Light,  in case they have a daughter getting married in the near future who needs table decorations. I'll custom build it with a choice of base colour and ship it to you anywhere in the world. 

Like I said, I may be shallow and gadget obsessed, but I really want one of those bands.

Three Thing Game Monogame/XNA Rather Useful Seminar

Did a Rather Useful Seminar all about Monogame and XNA today. I took a screencast of the video which you can find above. If you want the sample program code you can find it here. If you want the slides you can find them here.

Yet More Python Wrestling

Today we restarted our Wrestling with Python teaching series. We've been doing these for around a year now, and some stalwarts returned to the wrestling fray, along with a few newcomers too. 

For this course we are trying out PyCharm. This looks like a great place to write Python code. My advice if you are just starting is to not worry too much about all the options, but work through something just to get the feel of it. You can find the exercises that we did here. 

If you are a local teacher who fancies free food and programming company of a Tuesday night there is still some space left, get in touch if you fancy coming along.

Three Thing Game Auction Fun and Games

We had our Three Thing Game auction today. We had around 150 things to auction and around 50 minutes to do it. I had sterling support from Mo and two Caitlins (thanks for coming folks) and I set the timer on each round to 15 seconds per thing. I reckoned we should be OK.  

We weren't. Not sure why, but 45 minutes in we still had a whole slew of things to get rid of. So in the end we just dished out the last lot and ran for the door.

We also noticed that "auction sniping", beloved of eBay, made an appearance for the first time ever. Bidders would wait until the very last second and then shout out a large number. One chap did that and outbid himself massively, which was amusing, but it did make it rather hard to work out what was going on. 

Caitlin suggested that we might make the length of each auction random, say between five and ten seconds. I thing this is a great idea, we'll definitely do that next time. 

Anyway, if you turned up with money and hope, plus a desire to get something which was at the end of the list, I'm sorry that you didn't get what you wanted. There's always next time....

Three Thing Game Starts Monday

Spent a big chunk of today updating spreadsheets and printing and cutting out cash for the Three Thing Game Thing Auction tomorrow. We've got 46 teams and 140 or so folks turning up, which will be great.

If you are in a team we will be auctioning all the things at 2:15 tomorrow (Monday) in Lecture Theatre 1 in the Hardy Building. You can find a list of the things that will be going under the hammer here. We have around 150 things to auction in 50 minutes, so you'll have just 15 seconds per lot to make up your mind....