Got switched over to my new “Super Speedy” broadband today. This should have increased my browsing speed, it has definitely increased the rate at which money is taken from my bank account.
After some tests I find I have a speed up factor of around 6 or so, but this was coming from a very poor starting position. The next thing to do is try twiddling with the router and the cables to see if I can improve on this.
Hull city centre yesterday, looking pretty spry.
Spent some of today putting up blinds. The old “Stand on tiptoes holding a vacuum cleaner hose in one hand and an electric drill in the other whilst trying to make a hole in the inside of a window opening with neighbours outside watching and taking bets on whether I will end up in casualty or not” routine. I’d say “Great fun”, except that it probably wasn’t.
I took this on the way back from my First Year Lecture. I heard someone say “He’ll be putting that on Flickr next”. Correct.
I’m supposed to be going out to give a session at Tech-Days in Portugal next week. You can find our more about it (in Portuguese of course) here. That was before the volcano blew its stack. At the moment things are a bit “not up in the air” but we will have to see. I’ve got all the slides and demos ready and the robot is set to travel. I really hope that the cloud clears and I can make it over to Lisbon, I suppose we can’t really argue with mother nature at this level.
Final day of the holiday today. I’ve been very good, and done hardly any proper work. I’ve even done some gardening, which is most unlike me. Today we went off to Dalby Forest in North Yorkshire. One of the best places in the universe.
One day I’d like to stay here for a while.
We especially like the Bridestone walk. These are massive rock formations along the side of the valley.
Some of the paths can be quite steep, but always look good.
I didn’t actually buy much yesterday at the Gadget Show. Just a pair of enormous headphones from Sure that sound amazing (I daren’t tell number one wife how much I paid for them but they were heavily discounted) and a Bamboo Fun graphics tablet. They had them at 20% show discount and although they didn’t have any left to sell I was able to order one for home delivery the following day. I was thinking “Yeah, right.” as I gave my details, but the company were as good as their word and the tablet arrived today.
The thing about the Bamboo fun that had me most interested was that it supports multi-touch input as well as pen based control. It turns out that multi-touch is indeed supported, but not in a proper Windows 7 way. The Windows 7 touch API is designed for screen only use, there is no support for multi-touch tablet input in the operating system. Instead the tablet driver produces cursor and keyboard commands that allow you to do things like pinch zoom in compatible programs. This means there is unfortunately no way you can use it for things like the Windows Phone emulator, where multi-touch input would be very nice. I’m not that bothered though, the device comes with a very good software bundle including a free copy of Photoshop Elements 7 and it is a nice tablet with a responsive pen which will make image editing easier.
Went to the Gadget Show today in Birmingham. They released a whole bunch of extra tickets and so number one son and I thought that it might be worth a visit. So off we went. Got there with out a hitch and got in nice and early. I took the tiny camera to snatch some pictures.
There was a lot of 3D out there, with funny glasses all over the place. We tried the Sony one and there was definitely a 3D effect, which of course you can’t see above.
It’s all very well setting up a monster system like this, but why let a five year old drive it?
As a connoisseur of convoluted clocks, this one looked very interesting, but I daren’t ask the price.
They were showing off Split Second in the gaming area. This is being developed by Black Rock, a developer which is part of Disney Studios and is based in Brighton (and numbers a few Hull graduates amongst its employees). The game looks absolutely awesome, it is a racing game with an amazing interactive environment you can use in the game play. Think Burnout with bigger explosions. Then add some even bigger explosions. That one’s going on my shopping list.
This game isn’t on my list. Why would anyone pay 24.99 for a Forklift truck simulator? I spent a few weeks one summer driving one and they can be quite fun (especially doing drifts with a tonne of frozen peas on the front) but even so…
BTW number one son is playing Just Cause 2 and it looks really good.
Went to Scarborough today. They have a CSI Pinball table at one of the amusement arcades there. Great fun, with some very good sound samples from the show. When I am rich I’ll get a table of my own. I took the big camera with the fat lens and the weather was very kind to us.
This panorama was taken from walls of Scarborough Castle, which must have looked very impressive until the Civil War in 1645, which doesn’t sound very civil at all, and resulted in the flattening of one of the towers.
Castle and sky.
This is the Master Gunner’s House. Now serves a very nice cup of tea..
Did a whole bunch of not much today. Lovely.
Travelled back to Hull today. Not by train unfortunately.
When on a proper train trip today. Unfortunately they wouldn’t let me drive.
.. although some parts look quite hard work.
I’ve no idea what this tower is. But I could see it from my hotel room at DevDays and it looked nice against the sky.
Thought of a really good April Fool’s day joke today. Doh! Must put it in my diary for next year.
Today marks the start of a week away from work. Sort of. Let’s see how long I can go without touching a keyboard..
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.
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...
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…..
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
I’m bored with winter. Particularly if I’m still scraping ice off the car each morning.
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.
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/
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
