Hello from DevDays 2010

Setting up for Geek Night tonight. I just love those groovy chairs. Yes, that is a Windows Phone on the desk. And a robot…

It turns out that writing code in airports at 5:00 am actually works sometimes. I was able to get a new version of my program working and even find the source of all my hardware troubles. A dodgy network cable……

My first session is at 3:05 this afternoon, if you are at DevDays 2010 in the Netherlands then feel free to drop along and see more demos than you could shake a stick at…

For those of you not at the conference, I’ll be putting all the sample code and the presentation up on here later today.

Update on 2010-03-30 11:36 by Rob

Oops. Earlier version of this post (there have been a few) incorrectly referred to the event as Tech Days. Wrong. This is Dev Days. Sorry about that. It's not as if it isn't written just about everwhere around here...

Some Days Nothing Works

I spent a big chunk of today making things not work. It was as if the god of “Things Not Working” decided to pay me a special visit. It was all really annoying, in that the emulations all worked fine, but the real thing failed in the strangest of ways.  In the end I was reduced to opening the fridge door and watching the light come on, just because I wanted to see some hardware that did the right thing…..

Now with Added Pigs

Pepsi and Galaxy. Not sure why they are named after high calorie snack fodder, but there you go.

Two new arrivals chez Miles today. We now have even more guinea pigs. I actually like having guinea pigs as pets, they are one of the few animals that I’m fairly sure I’m cleverer than.

Edward Bowden Art at Hull

People at the Open Day on Saturday probably walked right past this amazing artwork on the wall of the entrance to the Applied Science building without noticing it. It was made in 1963 by Edward Bowden, quite a famous artist. He used expoxy resin and the lid of a coffee jar to get the indentations and shapes on the wall.

Great stuff.

What’s Wrong with this Picture

Some time ago I bought a book about Actionscript development. Paid full price too. I wanted to find out more about the language that powers my Chumby device. In the section on working with date and time values I found the following gem.

Did they test this? What time value did they use?

I had to show this to number one son to make sure that wasn’t going mad…

Mega Open Day Madness

Some of the audience. Captured with the big camera.

We had a really big Open Day today. Really big. We used the big lecture theatre and I had to do my talking bit twice. Because the Open Day was so big.

Great fun though. Two very good audiences, thanks for coming along folks and I hope you found the day worth the trip. I took the proper camera with the wide angle lens, the tripod and the remote release to guarantee the quality of the pictures. Unfortunately I then left the lens on manual focus and so most of the pictures came out a bit blurred….. Oh well, I’ll know for next time.

There was even a jazz band in Staff House. Good stuff.

Update on 2010-03-15 20:03 by Rob

It seems like at least two people who attended on Saturday have bought a copy of my book! Well done folks, let me know how you get on.

Frozen Monday

I’m bored with winter. Particularly if I’m still scraping ice off the car each morning.

Using a Webcam as an Elmo Display

 

For those of you thinking about the fantastic toys, I’m afraid I must disappoint you (although the toys are great). I’m talking about the digital presenter tools which you use during talks to show things to the audience. I’ve used them in the past when doing talks about mobile phone development or to show small devices like the Micro Framework ones.

I did a talk today about the .NET Micro Framework and instead of using an Elmo I used a webcam. I tried using them ages ago but the quality of the pictures was so bad that I ended up using a camcorder instead. But this time I had one of the new Microsoft webcams, the LifeCam Cinema.  This boasts a proper 720P resolution and an auto focus lens made of real glass. And it works a treat. The quality of the pictures was excellent and it comes with a neat program that just shows you the camera view that you can use on screen. It also has some nice adjustments that you can use to pull down the brightness so that display screens look good.

This is a completely un-retouched picture of the Zune HD homescreen. There are some more shots on Flickr.

All I need now is little portable tripod and I have my own Elmo, which is much easier to use than switching video signals over.

XNA at St Bede’s College

A good audience. (If you want to see a larger version of this picture, or to see the other  one I took, click on the images to get to my Flickr pages.)

I did  a talk at a college today. Not done one for a while so I was a little rusty. Fortunately I had a great audience and ended up really enjoying the visit. Thanks to the college for inviting us and to Dr Keith Porteous for giving such a good talk before mine.  I’ve put all the resources on the blog if you want to take a look:

• Presentation
• Hide the Gamepad XNA Game
• Bread and Cheese Complete XNA Game
• BedeCheese XNA GAme

You can find more links to XNA resources, along with my XNA ScreenCasts here: http://verysillygames.com/

Hull Girl Geek Dinners

The Girl Geek Dinners at Hull are going from strength to strength. We started them a while back and their next event is scheduled for next week on Thursday 11th March at Hive in our department. Girl Geek students from the university can even register at a discount. For the event details and a programme for the evening you can go here:

http://hullgirlgeekdinners11032010-rss.eventbrite.com/

Donate Somebody Else’s Money with Bing

Microsoft are doing this deal at the moment for where for every 10 searches you make using Bing they will donate 5 pence to Sport Relief. This means that you are doing good and raising money for charity just by searching the web. Which you would do anyway. Works for me, even though I had to download and install a little app to count the searches.

Amazing Sunset

Drove home into an amazing sunset tonight. Of course this isn’t a picture of it..

Letting the Smoke Out

An engineer friend of mine has this theory that electric things are really powered by smoke. He bases this on the simple observation that if you let the smoke out of anything electrical it promptly stops working. I did this today with our shredder.

I have a deep seated fear of Identity theft (along with a puzzlement that anyone would really want to pretend to be me).

Anyhoo, to deal with this I have a policy of never throwing anything away that might divulge identity type information. This is kind of futile I suppose, in that pretty much anything you want to know about me is out there on the interweb, but it keeps me amused. And shredding.

To keep things shredded we used to use this little shredder and I was happily shredding bank statements and the like when it suddenly stopped. And the smoke came out. And now it doesn’t work.

I was wondering if I could just use a two bins technique instead. Rather than shred things I could just have two bins. Anything secret is torn into small pieces, some of which go into one bin, and the rest into the other. Then I empty one of the bins every other week. This means that to steal my identity you would have to go through two lots of rubbish. Or perhaps I should just stop worrying…

Jetlag Levels

Jetlag Level 0: Normal amount of incompetence.

Jetlag Level 1: Forgetting things, but remembering you have forgotten them.

Jetlag Level 2: Forgetting things and not noticing.  Or caring.

Jetlag Level 3: Inability to do two things (such as walk and talk) at the same time.

Jetlag Level 4: Inability to one thing at the same time.

Jetlag Level 5: Staring at the PUSH sign on a door and not understanding its relevance to the problem that the door won’t pull open.

Jetlag Level 6: Can only recognise and use the simplest of things. Namely, a bed.

Missing Sunday

Not sure what happened to today. Bits of it seem to be missing.

Flying Home

Nothing like an 18 hour journey. Nothing. When we got to Amsterdam we found that the weather had laid on some special fog just for us.

With a two and a half hour stopover I had plenty of time to take pictures.

This is all we saw of the sun all day..

Hull Reunion

I met up with Phil, Andrew, Andy and James today for lunch. They are graduates from Hull (and three of them are also old hands at the Imagine Cup). They all now work for Microsoft on various development teams around the company. It was nice to see them, even though they made fun of my haircut. Or lack of it…

Packing for Seattle

It is that time of year again, when I head off to Seattle for the MVP Summit. I’m really looking forward to this year’s event. It is always nice to meet up with folks I’ve not seen for a while, and talk about technology.

Of course this means that I have to choose which gadgets get to go with me. I’ve left the trouser press at home. Three is a good chance that the hotel room will have one anyway…..

Hull Students: Freeside Needs You

If you are a CS student at Hull you might consider getting involved in Freeside. This is a student run organisation that operates out of our department. Their primary focus is on building systems that can host student services and they have been know to build the odd cluster.

They are also linked to Hull ComSoc and are involved in running game servers used in the department. Jon from FreeSide used some time in my lecture this week to give a short presentation about the group and recruit new members. He made the point that the skills you can get from Freeside will stand you in very good stead for future employment. Apparently big chunks of the server management team at Last.FM are ex Freeside stalwarts.

First Open Day of 2010

Another satisfied customer wins a PSP in our Open Day draw from Mike. With a copy of FiFa you can even play as Hull City….

We had a bunch of people up to see us today. Thank you very much for coming folks, we hope you found the visit worth your journey. This is the time of year when we start to get busy, we have a bunch of open days over the next few weeks.