Marking Minesweeper

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Spent pretty much all of today playing MineSweeper. Around 23 times. All of the first year get 15 minutes each to show off their programs and so Mike, Simon and myself were looking at how well they had done implementing this classic game.

It never ceases to amaze me how different people find their own way to write a program to solve the same problem. Some worse than mine, some better than mine. And just about all of them working.

In fact, some of them should make an appearance on Xbox Live at some point. They really were that good.

Minesweeper Fun and Games

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The first year course is busy working on the Minesweeper programming problem that is the second piece of assessed coursework. This is proving to be a nice problem to solve, with a good mix of simple behaviours to play the game itself, and some more complex parts for those who want to get their teeth into something more challenging.

The marking starts on Thursday, I’m looking forward to seeing what folks have come up with.

So Much for the Second Year

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I was doing a lecture on our Software Engineering course today. We were talking about UML (Unified Modeling Language) and how to map language specific features (for example C# properties) onto UML diagrams (if you want to find out more about this you can go here for some useful ideas).

Anyhoo, I thought it would be a good idea to show an example of a property in action so I wrote some C# on the board:

Rob.Age = 21;

The idea was to start an instructive discussion about the difference between fields and properties in C# objects. I asked the class to consider the statement and comment on it. A hand at the back shot up. “What do you think the statement means?” I asked. The reply came straight back “That you’re a liar”.

Thanks for that.

Gain Weight with Live Mesh

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I really like Live Mesh. This is a Microsoft file synchronisation thingy where selected folders on your machine are reflected onto the Live Mesh storage out in the cloud, and also onto other machines that run the Live Mesh add-in. It runs quietly in the background and doesn’t seem to intrude much on normal life (unless you are daft enough to make changes to files on two different machine before connecting them both to the network – at which point you will have to resolve a bunch of conflicts).

I’ve got all my courseware for the current year stored on Live Mesh. You get up to 5G of space on the server behind the system and this is plenty for a year’s worth of PowerPoint slides and Word documents.

The really good news for me is that I now no longer care which machine I’m using. As long as I allow it a few minutes to “catch up” with the latest versions (if I’ve not used that particular machine for a while) then I can use any device. The net result of this is that I no longer carry the same laptop to and from work.

I guess I could have used an external drive for this, but I’m always afraid of dropping/losing/having stolen the device which holds the only copy of my stuff. Live Mesh means my data is held on multiple machines, as well as on the central server.

However, my bag is now much lighter and easier to carry, and this means that I’m missing out on some exercise and will probably gain some weight as a result.

But I reckon it is worth it.

Danger and Excitement

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I was doing a tutorial this morning and I had just run the program when all the power in the building went off. The students present were most impressed, they had never seen a program that could turn off all the lights.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) it turned out that it wasn’t my code. The power came back on after five minutes or so, and later on we got an email saying that owing to problems at the local sub-station we would have to shut down the university and leave early as “any delay could cause catastrophic problems”.

I had this vision of people standing around a pair of glowing wires and someone playing the Scotty role and saying things like “I dinnae think she’ll take much more captain..”

Unfortunately it meant postponing my 4:15 VB lecture. Sorry about that folks, we were going to learn all kinds of interesting things about file paths too….