Hello from DevDays 2010

/

Base Camp in the Tech Days 2010 Speakers Lounge
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.

Some Days Nothing Works

/

Daffs

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…..

Mega Open Day Madness

/

4432548209

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.

4432525271

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

Using a Webcam as an Elmo Display

/
2010-03-06 20-23-35.974 

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.

2010-03-06 20-24-09.804

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

/

4407253792

4406491303

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:

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

Hull Girl Geek Dinners

/

4389429267

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/

Letting the Smoke Out

/

4390198564

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

/

4379500541

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.