robmiles.com

What do you do if you have had a rotten day, where pretty much nothing has gone right?

You give two lectures in quick succession at the end of the afternoon, to the .NET Post-Grads about class design and the First Year "Friday Afternoon Club" about inheritance in C#. Wonderful stuff. Special mention to the First Years, who were great fun and quite mad. I think teaching someone something is a great way to cheer yourself up.  And Tom had a copy of my book to show me, first time I've ever actually seen one. Perfect. I'm going home for Fish and Chips now.

Oh well, best laid plans and all that.

The good news is that my book is now available from Amazon.com. The bad news is that it has already attracted two unfavourable reviews. The worse news is that nobody has actually read it yet.

The problems started when it was decided to not include CD-ROMS with the book itself. This is actually quite sensible in a way. Since you need a network connection to actually use XNA on an Xbox 360 it seemed reasonable to drop the content and make it available on-line. And at least that way we could ensure that the content was up to date.

But not before the Amazon blurb (and Barnes and Noble too) had gone out with the promise of shiny disks. Not surprisingly the early adopters (the ones whose opinions are most important) have heartily slammed the book for not delivering on the promise. I can understand where they are coming from too. If I'd bought something which was mis-described like this I'd be angry too.

I think this is really a failure of process. Microsoft Press and Amazon (et all) should have a proper mechanism whereby when the description of an item changes all the existing purchasers of the item are informed of the change and given the option to back out of the purchase. I'm pretty sure I'm not the first to have been caught like this. But it still hurts.

Last week Bill Gates (you might have heard of him - used to run a software company as I remember) announced a new Microsoft initiative called DreamSpark. This gives all students (even those unlucky enough to be at places which are not in the Microsoft Academic Alliance) access to free Microsoft software, including Visual Studio 2008 professional, Windows Server 2005 and Microsoft Expression Studio. And they also provide students with free 1 year XNA creators club memberships. You just have to go on to the site and sign up. If your institution isn't listed as one of the authenticating places (for some reason Hull is not on the list) you can use your Athens username (which all Hull students have) to get access.

To find out how to do it you can read more at Ed Dunhil's blog, where he describes the process. I've just tested it (don't ask me how) and it works fine.

This is wonderful, since it means that any student with an Xbox 360 and Xbox Live membership can now write games for their console. And with the upcoming community developments it means that in the slightly longer term they will be able to publish them out to everyone on Xbox Live.

Such is life. I've only been back from the San Andreas Fault ridden California a couple of days and we go and have our own earthquake in the UK. 5.3 on the Richter Scale too, whatever that means (in our house this equates to "Rattling of windows, scary whooshing sound and ponderings as to the brick resistant properties of an 11 tog duvet.").

Actually it was rather frightening but there doesn't seem to have been any damage done. For me the worst part was the silence afterwards. It really was eerie.

I find the "naked" one rather scary

They had these in the GDC exhibition. They are called Pleos and are actually rather neat. Very like an Aibo, but with a much more organic feel to their movements and behaviour. You can get them in the UK, but they are of course at rip-off prices compared to their American cousins. Ebay beckons......