Cross Country Ski Race is Coming

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This is not an assignment about graphic design - obviously...

This is not an assignment about graphic design - obviously...

Kevin and I are just putting the finishing touches to the assignment for Programming 2 for this year. We always set two different scenarios, one a game and the other a line of business app. For the game we are doing "Cross Country Ski Race". For the line of business app we are doing "Cross Country Ski Race Manager". Almost like we have planned it. 

.it might not be one about UI design either..

.it might not be one about UI design either..

For the game, players have to steer their player down an increasingly tortuous ski run, avoiding the deadly, and somewhat improbable, "horizontal avalanche" that seems to have erupted. Fortunately an explosion at a nearby cheese mine has left their path littered with life giving cheese which they can use to recover their strength. 

For the manager application they have to track competitors, generate reports and produce a fully tested solution. Should be fun. 

Hyper Busy Open Day

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If you want to see a higher quality version of the picture, and find yourself on it, you can click though the image to the version on Flickr

If you want to see a higher quality version of the picture, and find yourself on it, you can click though the image to the version on Flickr

Another hyper-busy open day today. Thank you all so much for coming to see us, hope that it was worth the trip. Everybody left clutching their free copy of the "Bananas" edition of the C# Yellow Book that we are using with the First Year at the moment. On the right you can see an exclusive image of the latest printing of the book, with the hyper-realistic 3D rendered cover art. 

Theme Park God

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One of the fantastic things about this job is the capacity of students to surprise you with the things that they do. Yesterday, in the First Year Labs, Michael asked me if I wanted to have a look at the game he'd been working on for a little while.

It's really nice.

It's a Theme Park simulation written in Scratch. You can have a go here. Quite a few thousand people already have.  I told Michael that he must promise to start writing a blog about the game and how he made it, and I really hope he does. 

.. and we're back

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Cottingham station at 6:30 am. Looks more model than real. 

Cottingham station at 6:30 am. Looks more model than real. 

Monday was not a great day. I staggered home after my last lecture and went straight to bed. And stayed there. Mostly. Yesterday I found out that the same thing had happened to number one son. And we'd both eaten at the same burger place on Saturday. 

Oh well. 

I'm back at work now, which is nice, frantically trying to catch up with two days of this'n'that. 

Raspberry Pi 3 - Most Interesting

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The first Raspberry Pi was a nice device. At the time it was ground breaking. The Raspberry Pi 3 looks at least as ground breaking. It's faster, of course, but it also has WiFi and Bluetooth built into it, which makes it a ready to roll, fully connected Internet of Things device. Previously you'd have to use a physical  network cable and then directly connect your Pi to the device you wanted to talk to. Now you can do it all without wires.  

You can get the Windows 10 Insider Preview that works on the Pi 3 from here. 

I've ordered mine. 

Fingerlights for robots and photographs

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These look useful. Particularly if you happen to want to attach them to a robot so that another robot can see it and charge towards it. As you do. 

They might work well for light painting too. I saw them at the Science Museum yesterday in their gift shop. They are a set of battery powered coloured lights that you are supposed to attach to your fingers. You can find them on eBay (search for finger lights) at really stupid prices. I'm tempted to spend a tenner on 40 or so sets and go nuts with them. 

I wonder how long the batteries last?

Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age at the Science Museum London

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Just go. Go now. It has a little while to run. You can book tickets and find out more here. We went today. It is a breathtaking exhibition. They've got some stunning things to see, including the actual capsule used by the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova. It looks more like a wrecking ball than a spacecraft, covered with insulating material and with a hole where you get in and out.

There are things I wasn't sure were still even around, prototypes of satellites and lunar landers and some completely awesome artwork and drawings. I'm just about old enough to remember some of this when it was happening and I find it amazing that all these years later we can go and see the actual stuff. The only snag (for me) is that you aren't allowed to take pictures. But you'll bring back a whole bunch of great memories. 

(and a few postcards and T shirts - which are half price at the moment)