Ring in the New

Some old gadgets. And a new one.

Been clearing out the cupboard in my office as part of a stocktaking exercise. Somewhat nostalgic.  Do you remember all these?

Marking Fun

Spent pretty much all of today marking. I’m half way through my first red pen.

A Hot Day for writing Custom XNA Content Importers

In between gardening and feeling very warm I wrote a custom content importer for XNA 4.0 today. This is the way that you can bring in your own content into an XNA game. I’m playing around with some game ideas and I needed to get a bunch of data into my game engine so I can twiddle with it.

Turned out to be a lot easier to do than I thought it would be. Actually, the whole content setup is lovely to use in XNA. If you ever want to do this, you can find a really great start here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb447754.aspx

The stuff seems to work fine in Windows Phone too. I really know how to enjoy myself in summer…..

Sad Rob

We were talking about different versions of Windows today and I mentioned that in Number 10 Downing Street they still use Windows XP on their systems. I told everyone that I’d seen it on the “historic” pictures taken inside the Prime Ministers’ residence during the election aftermath.

For some reason knowing this was regarded as sad…

Rob’s Guide to Marking

See rule 5

It was my “big” exam yesterday. Two hours of panic for the students. Four days of marking for me. So, nobody comes out of it particularly happy I suppose. For any academics out there I present Rob’s guide to marking.

1. Don’t try and do it all at once. You will fail. Make a big hole in your schedule and set out how much you want to get done each day. Then you can point to a day in the future and say “I’ll be clear of marking then”.
2. Make yourself a nice place to work. I used to cut up the question paper and stick it into one long strip that I could have by the answers so I didn’t have to keep flicking between question and answer as I marked. Now the students write their answers underneath each question. Easier for them, and much quicker for me to mark.
3. Use a really nice pen. I’ve been known to spend up to twenty minutes in the Student Union shop choosing a pen with the right colour, feel and heft. Actually, this might be a displacement activity, but if the pen makes you enjoy writing the marks then at least some part of the marking process will be fun.
4. Take regular breaks. I’ve got Professor Layton and the Curious Village fired up on the Nintendo DS. A puzzle every 12 scripts or so stops my brain from melting.
5. On no account should you make a single pile of all the scripts that you have to mark. This is invariably depressing.

Watch this, and then Watch it Again

Thanks to Ginny for the link via Twitter. Find out more here.

Update on 2010-05-18 08:13 by Rob

If you want more insight into what makes developers tick and how to motivate them this video from underbelly is good too. The points that are made right at the end about interesting products are right on the money.

Financial Crash

Last week I paid off the wrong credit card by mistake and I now have a positive amount of money on it. I’m going to sign up for a balance transfer and see if it brings down the entire banking system.

Marking Time

Been in the labs marking for the last three days. Today I did the last few presentations before I sit down and enter the whole lot into our system. Students have been making games or banking applications. I have seen some lovely stuff. It’s very hard work, I must have asked “..and what does this bit do?” loads of times. But great fun. Thanks to the first year for turning up on time and to Simon and Mike for sharing the work.

Fashion Victim

According to The Guardian children are now taking 3D glasses, popping the lenses out and wearing them in the playground as fashion accessories. As you can see from above, I’ve been ahead of this particular trend for years.

Christian Aid Humber Bridge Cross

Today we walked across the Humber Bridge for money. The money wasn’t for us, it was for the Christian Aid appeal that has organised these sponsored crossings for several years. We’ve done the walk many times. The first time, with very young kids and a pushchair we managed to cross the bridge four times. Since then the weather has been nowhere near as good, but today it was bright and just a bit blustery so we managed to get over the bridge and back again.  Of course I took the big camera and the wide lens.

That windmill used to be used to grind chalk.

Obligatory tower shot.

Farewell Jake

I got some bad news over the weekend. Jake has passed away. He came to see us way back in 2005 and I grabbed a snap of him which has turned up in my XNA books and lots of talks and demos I’ve done. He was the nicest dog I’ve ever met.

Steaming Idiot

Bought a steam engine today. It was a reduced price bargain. And it has a generator. And lights. So buying it actually made perfect sense. Took it home, got it out of the box and then dropped it on the floor.

Idiot.

Fortunately not much harm was done, except that the “very important pin” that the piston pushes seems to have born the brunt of the landing and is now slightly bent. I’ve straightened it to the best of my ability and it seems to work OK. The whole thing makes a pleasing chugging noise as it runs, and the lights even come on. Great stuff. I’m now wondering if I could power a .NET Micro Framework device from it.

Free Java Books

Along with sticking new pictures on my walls, I’m also getting rid of a bunch of books that I have had for a while. If you are after any Java books feel free to drop round to my office and take a look.

TechDays 2010 Session Fun and Games

My desktop setup. A robot, a PC doing desktop sharing, another PC running a video call and a final Micro Framework device running a web server. And it all worked. Eventually.

Thanks to everyone in the audience, and Luis for setting everything up. I wasn’t in Lisbon, but thanks to cunning camera work and a nice fast network I got as close as I could. I could even see the audience on my screen (which probably freaked a few people out at the start).

We had the audience hitting web sites that caused my programs back in Hull to hit breakpoints (which must be the largest debugging session ever). And then I let the everyone out there send commands to Oscar the robot who, right on cue, tried to jump off the desk.

The audience were fantastic. As usual from Portugal. Thanks for taking the event in such good sprit folks.

To try and make everyone feel at home, and add some “TechDays 2010 Portugal” flavour I did up the office wall behind my chair…

Luis during the, slightly fraught, setup.

Some of the audience at the start of the talk.

Thanks folks. That was the best conference I’ve never been to….

I mentioned in the talk that I’m going to assemble some resources for Windows Phone and .NET Micro framework. I am, but I’ll put them up tomorrow. Off to bed now….

Ash Stranded

I had everything ready. My bags were packed and I’d heard on the TV last night that they were reopening all of the airports. Thing is, KLM hadn’t heard this.

And so I’m not going to Portugal. So, I’m going to have to bring a little bit of Portugal to my office tomorrow and beam my sessions at TechDays from Hull. Whatever else, it will be interesting.

Super Speedy

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.

Blind Ambition

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.

Ash Landed

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.

Dalby Forest Friday

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.

Wacom Bamboo Fun and Games

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.