I did a bit of surgery on my Fez Micro Framework Robot yesterday. I took off his “bustle” at the back. I say his bustle, because my Micro-Framework robot is now called Jason, in honour of the JSON framework I’m working on to give him simple two way communication with a host machine.

The bustle was fine, but it hung out over the back a bit, and I wanted to make him (it?) a bit leaner and meaner. The new slim line Jason has all the sensors on his nose. He has a range finder right at the front and a pair of line followers underneath and coloured LEDs he can use to tell the world how he feels. At the moment he zooms around the living room nearly bouncing off things. I must admit it is great fun building him and writing programs to control what he does. You can write any number of desktop apps, but there is something very satisfying about seeing your code make the robot rush up to a wall, notice it, spin round and then vanish under the sofa. I’ll put up some more construction details later, when I’ve finished playing…

I must admit I was a bit underwhelmed when I first saw Kodu. At first glimpse I couldn’t see how it would help to teach people how to program.

It turns out that this is because it is not really a teaching tool as such.   The point that I seemed to miss was that the intention was to put people in touch with the experience of making a machine do a fairly complex task under their control. Rather than teaching programming, they were aiming to teach the joy of programming. Then, with a bit of luck, folks who find this fun will move into more formal ways of making this happen and turn to real coding.

I downloaded the free Kodu Technical Preview which runs on the PC (you can also get the program on Xbox Live for 400 credits) and had a play. It is great fun. In no time at all I had created a world and had my little creature running round after the ball and picking it up.  I want to have another go with this.

I can see this being one of those things you show your kids and then after a while they will grab the gamepad and kick you off the machine so that they can have a go at finding all the things you can do with the environment. At first I was comparing the system with Little Big Planet, which also offers a way you can build your own worlds, but I think Kodu is better in this respect. It is presented from the start as an environment where you create behaviours, rather than as a platform game you can add things to.

From a teaching perspective it is great in that it gets you thinking about a program as a sequence of actions and decisions, and that is fine by me. 

I must admit that I’ve not actually played the game. But I have watched number one son play quite a bit of it on his laptop. Seeing him play you could have mistaken the action for a movie. The dialogue is so seamless, with the voice acting so pitch perfect for the various options he was choosing that it was only when I saw the screen that I figured out that he was actually making selections, and not just watching a cut scene.

The action looks good too, with a rich (if a bit scary) story beginning to play out. Anyone who doesn’t think that video games can stand alongside other art forms is seriously behind the times. This really is a new medium, and games like this show just what you can do with it.

Excellent.

I was talking to our .NET Development Postgrad students and we decided that there were a few things that you should be familiar with if you want to become a “proper” Software Engineer. These are the things I think you should do:

Read “Code Complete 2” by Steve McConnell. Perhaps the best book ever on software construction.  Then keep your copy where it is handy, and have a policy of reading a bit now and then, just to keep up to speed. If you can track down a copy of “Rapid Development” you should read this to.

Read I.M. Wright’s “Hard Code” blog. And buy the book if you like.

Read “How to be a Programmer”. Excellent stuff.

This is not everything you should do. There are other good places to look. But it is a start. Oh, and if anyone out there has other ideas about good, pragmatic texts for budding coders, then let me know and I’ll add them.

I spent some time this morning working on the logo for the 2010 Where Would You Think T-Shirts. We give these away to guests who attend our Admissions Open Days in the department and they have a slightly different design each year.

The release of the design is of course an event eagerly awaited by the fashion press, and it is rumoured that Chanel, Christian Dior and Yves Saint-Laurent actually hold back releasing their spring collections until they see what we have come up with.

The byword this year is “Tag chic”. You can point your cameraphone at the design and the magic of Microsoft Tag will take you to our admissions community site.

One of the people in this picture is a Microsoft employee. See if you can spot him. Clue: He has his eyes shut….

..and in case the other side of the room were feeling left out…

Andy Sithers from Microsoft came to see us today. We  all went for a meal in Staff House, had a quick meeting with the Imagine Cup teams to discuss their entries (looking good people) and then he gave a presentation as part of the Inspiration Tour. Great fun.  He dished out some hoodies and T shirts as prizes and then left me with some which I’m going to give the team that comes up with the best looking game idea to enter into the Game Design Challenge for the Imagine Cup.  One of the hoodies that was left is XL, i.e. my size. Better get those ideas in before the end of the month folks, or I’ll have something new to wear…

I got very angry tonight. Banging the table angry. Not like me at all. Really. I was recording another in the XNA Screencast series (you can find the previous ones here). Normally I do the whole thing in one continuous take. That’s not to say that everything always goes right, it is just that I try and keep going whatever happens.

Anyhoo, this time I made a rather serious blunder, and was forced to stop and re-record a section which I then had to tidy up. Big mistake. The program I was using to prepare the screencast has an interesting foible on my machine. When editing things the mark points are never where you think they are. Whenever I cut out a phrase the program actually removed out another part of the soundtrack so editing just got more and more frustrating as I tried to compensate by cutting the “wrong” parts in the hope I would get what I wanted. I didn’t. In the end number one wife came in to find me thumping my desk with annoyance and told me I was being stupid, which I was.

Eventually I figured out that by cunning use of the undo command I could refine my edits to the point where I actually got what I wanted. And it only took me an extra hour or so. I’ve now resolved not to bash the desk any more. It doesn’t achieve much. And it hurts.

A couple of new resource postings you might have missed:

• Find out how to load images into your Flash/Chumby programs here.
• Find out how to reset your TinyCLR Micro Framework device if it has got stuck here.

I’ve just about got my JSON serialiser working to send and receive JSON structured messages between the Micro Framework robot and another machine. When I’ve got the whole thing sorted I’ll post all the source. It lets you create message frameworks and then push status information between two systems.

I think I’m on a quest to find the smallest and slowest computers around and then put Windows 7 on them. Latest contender is my venerable old Fujitsu Stylistic Tablet PC. One of the first tablet PCs ever, this boasts a mighty 800MHz processor and 512MBytes of ram.  I had this idea that, in the absence of the iPad any time soon, it might be a useful handheld device that I could use to sit around and read Safari books on.

And it mostly works. I had a bit of fun when I installed the “proper” graphics drivers. For some reason it didn’t register the installation properly, and so I ended up with a machine with three or four graphics devices, which didn’t end well. And every now and then the display would go black because these drivers didn’t support the correct version of Direct X. I solved these problems by using the original Microsoft drivers, which means I can’t rotate the screen, but it works fine in landscape.

..and it works!

All the hardware apart from the tablet buttons works properly, even the WIFI card works perfectly. Performance could be better, but browsing is just peachy and I’m even thinking about putting Office on there so I can look at documents. I might even upgrade the RAM to a massive 768MBytes to get even more speed. I guess the lesson here is that you really can bring dead machines back to life with the magic of Windows 7.

Went to York to do some shopping today. The weather was great for photographs. I took a quick bunch of the Minster and then stitched them together. The above isn’t perfect, there are some rather strange shadows here and there, but I’m still quite pleased with the result.

And we bought a laptop. We managed to get quite a powerful beast for dad with 4G of RAM, 500G hard disk and Windows 7 64 bit edition. All for less than 400 pounds. Which got me to thinking. This is the entry level price for the Apple iPad when it comes out in 60 days and 60 nights or so. Why would you want to buy something small and shiny when you could get something much more useful for less money?

I remember coming up with a similar argument against the iPhone when that came out. For the same money, I reasoned, you you could get a really nice little 3G SkypePhone, and an eePC.  (You still can).  Much more sensible. And yet the iPhone was a roaring success and I’m expecting the iPad to do just as well. People are going to use it and fall in love with it. A whole section of users (those who don’t really aspire to an all powerful computer) is going to appear and, having had what the iPhone offers, buy the same on a bigger platform.  And number one wife quite fancies one too. Case closed.