As it says on my departmental profile, I'm now a member of the Dependable Systems research group in the department. V. exciting. I've not done any "proper" research before.
My profile page also gives the impression, via my picture, that every now and then I wear somebody else's hair. Which is not true. But there are also links through to a couple of PhD projects that you might be interested in.
Nokia make some fine APIs for Windows Phone. And now they've just released a couple more. Their Imaging API is great, and make it really easy to add image processing to your applications. It has just graduated from Beta to a formal release.
The Sensor Core API, just released as a beta, is a very interesting development. It takes Windows Phone into a domain it hasn't been before. Up until Sensor Core it was impossible to do things like track user activity and do things like count the number of steps walked by the phone user, find out where they had been etc etc. But Sensor Core provides the stuff to do all that for you.
From my experience Nokia libraries are well written and beautifully documented. I'm going to get hold of them and have a play. If you are into Windows Phone, you should too.
One of the many lovely gardens spread around the site.
Today we headed off into the Yorkshire Dales to take a look around the Forbidden Corner. This is part theme-park, part country gardens, part awesome place to explore. We'd heard good things about it from numerous different sources and so we were expecting a good time.
We got one. The weather was kind to us and we had great fun wandering round. Admission is by pre-booked ticket only, which means that the place is never overwhelmed by visitors, and there are lots of things that scare, intrigue and amuse. Plus some things that squirt water at you or, better yet, the people with you.
There's a cafe with nice food and a gift shop with sensible prices and Yorkshire memorabilia. I enjoyed it at my age. If I'd been six I would never have wanted to leave.
There is actually some blue sky in this picture. No. Really.
This is Orca the dredger. She'd make an awesome Lego model.....
Today we celebrate 100 years since the King George Dock was opened in Hull. To me this means a chance to go and take some pictures. We got the first bus out of Hull to the dockside and were there at the very very start. Which was nice because we got to go straight onto the boat and take a look around. I was trying out the ultra wide-angle lens.
I'm very proud of the fact that I didn't touch any of the buttons or levers....
The dredger was huge. It is basically a floating container that they take out into the estuary and fill with mud. Then they sail somewhere else and drop the mud off. The cabin was massive and had lots of interesting consoles and controls. I took pictures of all of them.
On the way out I did something by mistake that I plan to do again. I changed the colour temperature on the camera settings. This is the thing that makes colours look "right" in different lighting environments. Normally I leave it on automatic, but by pressing the wrong button I changed it to "incandescent". This is not really a problem, I can fix it later, but it does mean that you get neat colour effects sometimes.
Interesting. But wrong.
I'm not suggesting that you do this as a matter of course, but if you want to get a strange "other worldly" effect on your shots it is definitely worth a try every now and then.
We wandered into a massive warehouse that they'd set aside for exhibitions and bumped straight into Warren and the Seed crew. They were there to show off what Seed can do (which is quite a lot).
I'm not sure what Warren made of me, what with the Autgrapher pinned to my T-shirt and two cameras round my neck (actually, I am quite sure what he made of me - I just don't want to think about it) but it was nice to see them all there. At the time we turned up things were just getting going, so I think they were in for a busy time of it.
Waiting for the flood....
I had some lawns to mow and stuff to do at home (no - really) and so we had to head back to Hull. After a game of "hunt the bus" which went on for a bit longer than it really should have, we got to sit on the top deck at the front. Which was nice.
Mr Burns seems to like 3D printing....
The department is running a new initiative this year. We have a bunch of undergraduate students working as interns for a couple of months over summer. They are being paid to work on interesting projects "just to see where they go". The idea is that this will lead to research efforts and other interesting stuff. The prospective interns were interviewed a few weeks back and they'll be starting in July. It's going to be fun.
One area of interest is 3D printing, which is rather nice. It means that the departmental 3D printer (which doesn't have a name - yet unlike Una) will be getting even more use over summer. At the moment he/she/it (really must find a name) is busy printing out parts for our robot army (not sure if I should be talking about that). Perhaps we need another printer. Of course, we'll need another name then....
I really hope that the Summer Interns scheme becomes an annual thing. It provides a great way for students to explore just working with things to see what happens.
I stole this picture from the Hull Devdays twitter tag. How many Hull folks can you spot in the crowd?
Oh to be young. And not to have to go to exam board meetings. But then again you don't read my blog to hear about my problems....
Lee from Microsoft was in town running the first ever Hull Devday. All the time I was in my meeting I was sneaking peeks at the folk who were all having a much better time than I was. I really hope they do it again, and I also hope that it doesn't clash with marking next time.....
Tom Cruise in good film shock horror. Yes, it is a genuinely splendid piece of Sci-Fi action with Tom in the starring role.
Groundhog Day meets the D-Day landings meets War of the Worlds. And a standout performance by Emily Blunt too. You really, really should go and see Edge of Tomorrow. Really.
You still here?
This pictures is entitled "Unsuccessful Cheese Movement Number 1"
The "Wrestling with Python" sessions on Pygame are progressing well. Today we got some cheese moving around the screen under keyboard control. Next week we will add some more sprites and get some proper game action going. You can see on of the first attempts at moving things above. Perhaps we should clear the background after each draw.....
It occurred to us (in a rather nervous-making way) that we are exactly four weeks away from the big event on campus when folks are going to come in and make and show off games. But everyone is learning stuff and having fun, so actually I'm quite looking forward to it.
If you want to find out what we have been doing you can download the content from here.
I've always liked wide angle lenses. I've been playing with one and taking pictures around campus which turns out to be great fun. Places, like the area outside the Student's Union, suddenly look different and strange, and you can get some really interesting angles that you can't get any other way.
If you are interested (and why should you be) the lens I've been playing with is an 8mm focal length FishEye from Samyang. For such a bespoke piece of optics the price is very good, particularly if you get the cheaper silver one. The lens is completely manual, you have to set the focus and aperture by hand, but I rather like that and the cleverness in the camera seems to take this in its stride. The results are pin sharp in the centre of the frame and very good around the edges, particularly if you stop down to F8 or so. The colour rendition is good too, with hardly any fringing.
I'll certainly be taking it on my travels from now on, it gives a very refreshing angle of view to familiar scenes so it should do amazing things with unfamiliar ones.
Yesterday we took number one son's home made tri-copter for another spin. Last time it flew very well, and so we thought we'd add a GoPro camera to see what kind of pictures we could get. We fitted the camera by the simple process of just sticking it on the front plate of the device. This seemed to work OK, although for the first few shots we had the battery wire in the frame.
Turned out that there was more than enough lift to take the camera into the air, although it is a tiny bit more wobbly than we'd have liked. The video came out pretty well, all things considered.
We had an Open Day at the University today. The place was nicely busy, and of course I took pictures of the folks that turned up. Except that for the first group I forgot to put a memory card in the camera. Which was not optimal. Sorry about that folks. I got you to smile and everything, and then took a picture that turns out not to exist.
Anyhoo, the talks went well (at least I thought so) and some of the Wedding Lights made a guest appearance. I hope you all enjoyed the trip. You can find the C# book (and a fair few other things) here.
These are the hardy survivors. Well done folks.
We had had a great time yesterday writing our games. I left around 10:30 pm having made a good start on my game. Then I was back developing at 7:00, along with lots of the other teams who seemed to have stayed all night and loved it. I lost a few hours doing academic things around the department, but at the end I've got something that I'm kind of proud of (at least from the outside - the code is horrible) and I'm going to get it into a demonstrable form.
I'm not sure what the market is like for "Old School" text based adventures, but I'm going to find out. By the end we had 7 teams who finished up with demonstrable games. And by that I mean proper games. With a beginning, middle and end. And artwork and sound effects. Amazing, and in just about a day. Simon and Kevin wandered around judging and I followed with a wobbly camera. You can see the results here:
The standard was astonishing. The winners were 1.21 Gigabytes,
Great game, well worth worthy prizes.
The judges also highly commended these two teams.
BetaJester made not one, but two different and attractive games, both of which stuck closely to their theme.
Rusty Spoons ended their TTG career with something rather special that I really hope makes it into the marketplace.
It really was a fantastic occasion. Thanks to Dave for letting us play with his lab, Simon and Kevin for Judging, David, Simon and Martin for running the night shift, John for dropping round from C4DI and kudos to all the folks that took part. And book now for Three Thing Game Autumn, running from 31st October to 1st November.
There are more team and winner pictures here.
Update: Forgot to mention. The voting for the People's Choice award is still open. You can vote until Tuesday morning next week (the 17th June). The survey is here.
We got our things today for Three Thing Game. Most people got one or two things they wanted. The bidding was fast and frantic, although some words that I thought would sell big didn't really go that well. Anyhoo, I ended up with "Adventure", "Dressing Up" and "Crying Baby".
I really wanted Adventure. It was the first word to be auctioned and so I rather cleverly spent all my money on it. After that I was forced to take whatever was left, which turned out to be the other two. I've got a plan though.....
Three Thing Game Summer 2014 starts tomorrow, Thursday 12th of June. We will be holding the Thing Auction in Lecture Theatre A in the Robert Blackburn Building. Doors open at 1:00 pm, when teams can collect their team packs and "Bank of Thingland" money and the auction itself starts at 1:15 pm prompt.
This is a list of all the things in the auction. There may be some "special guest things" in addition to the words on the list. These will be inserted at random during the auction. The things will be auctioned in alphabetical order. And here they are:
Adventure, Alien, Anti-aircraft gun, Apocalypse, Assassin, At the Circus, Attack, Balloon, Banjo, Box of Tricks, Bread, Butler, Cheese Sandwich, Crying Baby, Cube, Diploma, Downstairs, Drainpipe, Dressing Up, Eiffel Tower, Electric, Enormous Hat, Enormous Pie, Fan, Fishing, Flying Fish, Fruit, Frying Pan, Gems, Gentleman Thief, Going Downhill, Gong, Hairy Arms, Hand grenade, Hunting, Inventor, Last Bus Home, Locked, Mayhem, Ninja, Ocean Liner, Of Fun, Pirate, Puzzler, Ring of Power, Robot, Rubber, Screwdriver, Shop, Slippery, Spacecraft, String Vest, Tidal Barrier, Triangles, Undersea, University , Violin of Doom, Wearing a Boiler Suit, Wombat, Yeti, Zeus, Zombie.
Folks can bid for any item that comes up, and spend all their money on the very first word if they like. That's mostly what I'm planning to do. I'm in a one man team called "Alien Robot Adventure". We'll see how that goes.
We've been running our "Wrestling with Python" course for a while now. An intrepid bunch of local teachers have been coming in on Tuesday evenings to learn a bit about the Python language. Today we started up with our final sequence of the year. We are going to get folks writing games using the Pygame framework.
Then they are going to get their classes writing games and we are going to get a little "local school Three Thing Game action" going on. This is going to end with a hackathon in July with over 100 kids coming into the university and spending a day completing and presenting what they have done. Scary stuff, but we reckon we can make it work.
So today, as a way of getting started, we drew some cheese. As you do. Next week we will have bouncing cheese and possibly a cheese cannon. And why not.
You can find out what we have been doing and download the slide deck and lab sheets here.
There's a little Imagine Cup shaped hole in my life this year. For the past few years around this time I'd be fretting about scoring and judges and stuff and getting ready to go and help out with the world finals. The Imagine Cup has given me some of the best experiences of my professional life. From the first ever World Finals in 2003, when "Team Random" and I made it to Barcelona and Third Place, to travelling the world as part of the judging and competition management team, the Imagine Cup has been part of my routine for quite a while.
I've loved seeing the difference that the competition makes to the lives of the thousands (probably millions by now) of students that have taken part over the years. I always say to folks that they can split their lives into two chunks, the bit before you take part and the bit afterwards, and I've seen the "Imagine Cup Effect" go to work time and time again as folks do things that surprise themselves and everyone around them.
This year we've got some Hull involvement, which is splendid. James Croft is going over to Seattle to take part in the finals as a Microsoft Student Ambassador and Danny Brown is in the UK team helping to make Ripple a worldwide winner.
Me, I'll be watching the World Finals with interest. It's great to see that Satya Nadella, the new Microsoft CEO, is taking part in the judging. It puts into a very strong context just how much Microsoft value future talent from all over the world.
If you are a student you really should take part. Today it's all about "getting yourself out there" and the Imagine Cup is one of the best "out there" places I know.
Having the house to myself this morning I thought I'd record a video of the 08120 Programming 2 Exam walkthrough. I try to remember to make these when I've finished marking the papers. I can cover lots of the questions that folks might have about the right answers and I like to do this when the marking issues are still fresh in my mind.
Of course it wasn't as simple as I expected. I hadn't done a video for a while, so I had to find the headphones and the microphone, install Camtasia (my favourite program for recording stuff), find that the headphone and microphone weren't working and that sound playback was also broken. Fix all that, set the screen size to work properly, create a PDF that I can browse through and finally, after half an hour of faffing around, get to sitting down and recording something.
And I thought that modern technology was here to make life easier....
It rained a lot today. Here's a picture of slightly less rainy times. Thursday evening to be specific.
I've spent a chunk of today performing Seed exit vivas. This is where students on our industrial placement module have to come along and explain why they should get 5 out of 5 for Project Management. Or whatnot. We discuss things for 45 minutes or so and finally agree on figures for each marking category. Sometimes the figure goes down, but in a surprising number of cases we end up delivering the happy news that we think that they have undervalued their work. Which is nice.
One thing I like to do is point at pages that have been supplied as part of the thick folder of documents and ask "What's that for?". This can be quite illuminating. For example:
"What's that for?"
"It's the Risk Analysis."
"OK, where did it come from?"
"Well, at the start of the project we wrote down all the risks we could think of, and that's the result."
"Did you ever look at it again?"
"No. Should we?"
.. at which point the conversation goes downhill a little bit. Risks should be identified and then tracked over the project. At regular intervals the document should have been produced and checked over to make sure that nothing has changed, and that none of the risks were becoming critical.
If you are going to take the trouble to make a document that is part of your development then you are making an investment in your time. It is important that the investment pays off. Documents should "earn their keep".
The Risk Analysis document should be checked and updated at regular intervals to make sure that risks are managed. Minutes of meetings should record who was there, what was said, give people actions and check on actions from earlier meetings. Specifications should be signed off. Tests documents should be acted on and then the results of the tests recorded and used to drive future development. I could go on (and in fact I did - quite a bit).
I got the feeling that some of the documents were shoved in "because we thought we had to write them". I also got the feeling that some folk thought that writing all this was a distraction from the proper job, which was creating the solution for the customer. However, this is very, very, important stuff. It can make the difference between success and failure in a project. And doing it right will definitely get you higher grades....
We had our fourth in the series of Ardunino hardware meetups tonight. Peter was in charge, and he had folks attaching infra-red receivers to the Arduino boards and creating remote controlled lights. This involved making cunning use of TV remote controls specially purchased from Poundland (you'll never guess how much each one cost).
You can download the exercise from here if you fancy having a go.
Great fun for all, and a few new folks turned up, which was very nice. Hope to see you all at the next one.
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.
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