Today we had another of our hardware meetups at c4di. Great fun was had by all who attended. We had two activities, playing with coloured leds or creating a Larson Scanner. Ross had brought along a little quadcopter with a video camera and much fun was had with that too. I'm not saying you should get one, but if you fancy making an investment you can find it here.
Python wrap sounds like the kind of dish you don't pick off the menu, or perhaps a piece of music that you really don't want to hear. But in this context I'm talking about the last of our "Wrestling with Python" sessions for a while. They have been great fun to deliver, and it has been lovely to watch people come to terms with the artful business that is programming.
This week we were making good on our promise of a "Soup to Nuts" implementation, going from problem description to working code. And we added some File Handling, just to make it even more useful. You can find the slides and completed code here.
We'll be running more of these next year.
At the C4DI Meetup on Wednesday we are going all Christmassy with coloured lights. I've been soldering up some kits for folk to play with. Should be fun. You can sign up (if you havn't already) here.
This is the perfect time of year for a ghost story. And Remember Me is a perfect ghost story. Lots of secrets and weird goings on. And a few unhappy endings. If you'e not seen it before, find a way of catching up on the whole thing before the final episode goes out next Sunday.
There's a new series of Lego Minifigures out. Including a video game player and a Pizza delivery chap. Perhaps we should use these two as the emblems for our departmental parties...
Our First Year students are busy at the moment working on their Assessed Coursework. They are implementing computerised versions of Tactical Space Cheese Racer, a board game that we've invented just for this year.
One student came to see me today and told me that he was having problems getting the code to work. Each line of his breathless report was prefaced with "And then it does this...." as if the code was some kind of malign being that he was fighting against.
After listening for a while I had to remind him that he is not in a battle here. The program is something that that he created, and therefore he really should focus on the steps that it follows and why it does what it does. Just poking the beast by moving code around and adding and deleting statements will not actually tame it. What you have to do is focus on the sequence of operations it goes through when it does these bad things.
We started going through the code and finding stuff here and there that could be fixed, and by the end he was referring to the thing as "my program", which I think is progress.
James Croft came to see us yesterday. He now works for Black Marble and they were kind enough to let him slip across from Leeds to give a Rather Useful Seminar all about the Microsoft Imagine Cup competition. I've been involved with the Imagine Cup as a mentor, judge and competition captain and I think it completely rocks. But I'm very old. I thought it would be more meaningful if someone who has actually taken part came along and said how good it is. Which is just what James did in a well put together presentation.
Microsoft have done some neat things with your pathway into the competition so that you can build up your development, from pitch video to working software, over the weeks leading up to the finals and get credit, feedback and prizes at every stage. There are the usual three challenge areas, Game Development, App Development and World Citizenship. The World Final is in Seattle and involves trips to Microsoft Campus among other places. And the prizes are awesome.
The bottom line is that if you're a student you really should engage with the competition. I say this not because I'm convinced you will win (although students from Hull have an enviable record) but because taking part adds hugely to your personal value as a developer and communicator and also sets you up with valuable industrial contacts who will give you feedback, advice, a reference and maybe even a job. It has happened.
Anyone from Hull who is thinking about forming a team should come and see me so that we can start making plans.
Thanks for coming and doing such a good job James. I took a video of the session but something strange has happened with the dimmed lighting in the room which has caused awful banding effects on the picture, making it hard to see. Never mind though, James will be doing a webcast of the presentation later on his YouTube channel. Follow him on Twitter and find out when it becomes available.
We did some more Python last night. Going from text to objects by means of a bit of noun-finding. Great fun (even if it did bend the brains of folks a bit). You can find the whole presentation, and sample code, here.
Today was completely mad. It started at 6:00, getting up to grab breakfast and zoom up town to review the newspapers with Radio Humberside. Which was fun. Then over to C4DI to chat with David Burns (again on Radio Humberside) about technology, Hull and the exciting things going on at the moment. And all against a fantastic sunrise which I managed to grab some snaps of. You can find them here.
David Burns and Jon Moss of C4DI get the wide angle treatment. With a guest appearance of my knees.
If you're quick you can get to hear the broadcast here. I arrive around 20 minutes or so in...
Then it was back to the department to give a 10:15 First Year programming lecture in the nick of time. Then more lectures, labs, delivering chocolate brownies to a cake sale and finally a bit of Python Wrestling.
By 7:15 pm I was wandering around the lab bouncing of walls and muttering "Today has been great, and busy, and all, but I'd quite like it to stop now...."
A while back I put the C# Yellow Book on Kindle, just to see what would happen. Turns out that people quite like it, which is nice. You can get a free PDF here and of course if you are sensible enough to come and study at Hull we'll give you a free printed copy for your first year course. Or you could buy a copy :)
I'm going to spend some time on the text over Christmas and bring out an updated version in the new year. Some of the text and program samples got a bit mangled in the transfer to the Kindle format and I want to make it a bit tidier.
But I'll be leaving the good jokes in there. Both of them.
Spent the afternoon watching the Grand Prix and making lights come on when we pressed buttons. Good times.
Grand Theft Auto 5 is a game about mostly horrible people doing horrible things. With guns, cars, planes and large ugly dogs. But I reckon it is a towering work of art too. And on the next-gen consoles it is even better.
I spent a happy afternoon watching number one son run through a few missions in the new First Person View and it really is disgustingly great. Even if you have played the previous versions on your PS3 or XBOX 360 I reckon you should get a copy for your next gen console too.
I love the .NET Micro Framework. We used it for years in our teaching of embedded systems. This year, with the robots and other components showing their age we moved onto the new fangled Arduino platform. It's nice enough, and very popular at the moment. But I really miss being able to run (and debug) C# code inside a tiny embedded device.
But how the Micro Framework might be roaring back. Colin Miller (the chap that wrote the foreward to the wonderful book above) recently wrote a blog post about new plans for the platform. With a bit of luck, and the rise of the Internet of Things (tm), it might be that the "little platform that could" might be returning.
I certainly hope so.
Today I reduced the number of emails in my inbox from around 1,400 (stupid number) to around 20 (much more sensible).
Go me.
The title kind of says it all really. This week's Rather Useful Seminar was all about app publication. With special guest appearances of Cheese Lander and Rob's Rednose Game.
By popular demand I've recorded it (i.e. someone asked me to).
I think I picked up the phrase "Soup to Nuts" when I was in the 'states a while back. I used it in a session today and all was confusion and hilarity. It simply means "all the way from the beginning to the end".
We're doing some "Soup to Nuts" work at the moment in the Wrestling with Python sessions. I've put together something that looks a bit like the kind of assignments that are being used in schools in the UK and we are all going to work through it over the next few weeks.
If you fancy having a go you can find the assignment here.
One of the nice things about owning a Windows Phone is that, well, it's a Windows Phone. And lovely. One of the less nice things about it is that a few things are not available for the device just yet. One of the things you can't do is Smartwatch integration.
Except that you can. Sort of.
I've started using my Pebble watch that I got a while back. As a watch I rather like it. Some of the watch faces look really nice and I can make it talk with my Lovely Lumia using a program called Pebble Watch Pro that you can get from the Windows Store.
The program does the best that it can in difficult circumstances. It can show you tweets, and the weather, and let you control your music. It also lets you download and install watch faces, applications and firmware updates for the watch. If you run it under the lock screen it will work when you are not using the phone too.
It's kind of got me sold on the idea of a watch as an extension of the phone, and I'm looking forward to getting proper integration at some point in the future. When my Lovely Lumia is running Windows 10 and allows background applications this will all get a lot easier.
While I was in the 'states I got myself a new mouse. My beloved Presenter mouse from way back has reached the point of no return I think. Mind you, it must be quite a few years old now. The replacement one is a Sculpt Comfort Mouse with a fancy blue tag that you can use to scroll between open applications and open the start menu. A great match to my blue keyboard and a really nice device to use.
So nice that I nearly lost it.
I left it in Lecture Theatre A after the last Rather Useful Seminar on Wednesday. I remembered this as I was walking past the theatre on Friday and thought I'd drop in and see if it was still there. It was, along with around 100 students who were expecting a lecturer, not someone who would bound up to the lecturn, exclaim "Ooooh Goody. And it's still working", show the bright blue light underneath to the assembled multitude and then leave cackling.
Actually, I've just had a horrible thought. Perhaps there was somebody in there lecturing at the time I burst in. Oh well.
Which brings me to my business idea. It might have been done before. I don't know. But what I really needed was a program on my PC that told me when the Bluetooth mouse had gone out of range. We can do this with things like the Nokia Treasure Tag, so why not with mice?
(If you make a million from this idea good luck to you, just a few percent will keep me happy)
Repeat after me Rob: "I must hold my phone still when I take pictures with it...."
Anyhoo, today I did my second stint for Platform Expos. This is an artistically blurred picture of the audience. However, the good news was that fun was had and the demos worked.
Simon, Liam and I took a bunch of Raspberry Pi devices into Hull today to do a bit of Minecraft and Hardware interfacing with folks who'd come along to Platform Expos 2014.
Great fun was had, in spite of the rain which made carting the equipment around a rather wet affair. You can find the notes for the hardware exercise here.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
Begin to Code with JavaScript is now available for purchase and download. You can find it here
