SS Great Britain

The SS Great Britain was one of the first large propeller powered vessels.

Up until the SS Great Britain nobody thought much of making ships out of metal. Especially iron, what with its well know lack of floating ability. Isambard Kingdom Brunel reckoned it would work though, and built an enormous ship to prove it.  I wish I’d thought to have given one of my kids the middle name “Kingdom”, but I digress.

Today we went round the first “modern” ship ever built. Instead of using wood, with lots of internal bracing and strengthening, Brunel decided you could make a perfectly workable boat out of metal plate. Moreover, making it really large would mean that you could carry enough coal on board to power the thing on long journeys.

And it worked. The ship had a long history, from carrying 200 passengers across the Atlantic in absolute luxury to carrying 600 would be gold diggers to Australia in conditions that must have been a lot less comfortable.   It ended its days as a gently rusting wool store in a bay in the Falkland Islands. Fortunately, after a lot of fund raising and effort it was brought back to Bristol, its spiritual home, and you can now go around and beneath it.

Well worth the trip. While it is sad to see the state of the vessel now, which must be mostly rust, it is very encouraging to see the work being done to keep it alive, and the imagination shown in making a look round as interesting as possible. They even have an “Isambard Brunel” wandering around in full Victorian dress, sideburns and stovepipe hat that you can chat to.

The weather was very kind to us, and I took loads of pictures which will find their way onto these pages over time I’m sure.

Heading for Hols

Having a few (hopefully well earned) days off this week. Today we headed down south to visit number one son for a few days. It is rather nice when your kids reach the age where you can go and stay with them. He is claiming to have a really fast network connection, we shall see.

Back to Hull

This is not Hull

Got back to day, sat down and woke up an hour later. Gotta love jetlag.

Last Friday Tutorial of the Year

Friday at 5:15 is not the best time to have a tutorial. Particularly on the very last day before Easter. Kudos to the hardy souls that turned up to learn stuff, I hope you found it worth your while. As a reward I brought along some sugary sweets left over from Three Thing Game last month.

Headphone wires aren’t what they use to be

All I have to do now is solder them onto a plug. Yeah, right.

My lovely (and so expensive I never told number one wife I bought them) Ultimate Ears headphones have broken. The wire that goes into the plug has failed on one of the connections. Being a chap who’s not afraid of hardware (perhaps because I don’t know that much about it) I was happy to get a new plug and solder it on. That is, until I saw what passes for wire these days.

In the Olden Days ™ headphones were wired with the next thing down from mains cable, which could be dismantled and worked on with industrial scale tools. My old Sony phones were much tougher too. They even survived a trip around the robot vacuum, which took a fancy to them one day.

Nowadays, with fancy “litz” cables and stuff it looks like it is pretty much impossible to mend the darned things. And they aren’t even heavy enough to serve as a decent paperweight.

Bulgarian Mystery

I picked up this sticker thing from a stand in Bulgaria last week. I’ve no idea what the instructions say. Any ideas folks?

Mega Open Day

This is some of the audience for our mega Open Day. Great turn out.

It is scary how fast time goes by. We are running towards the end of the  Open Days for this academic year. We are going out with a bang though, the turnout for today’s event was huge. This placed a certain amount of strain on the rooms that we have. We didn’t actually make the design lab bulge, but we came close. Thanks to everyone who came along, hope you had an interesting and enjoyable time with us.

As usual we gave away a copy of my book as a price, here is Warren handing it over. Note that we have now got some copies of the latest version (in all the shops now).

Another Open Day, Another Winner

Warren hands out another free copy of my book. We should have the proper ones for posting out tomorrow.

We had another great open day today, loads of people turned up and I hope you found it worth the trip. One group had travelled up from the south coast, well done. Perhaps we should have a prize for the most travelled guest.

An Open Blog Post to Adobe and HP

This will not print correctly.

I am not normally given to ranting. I consider myself quite a balanced soul really, and where computers are concerned I usually have enough good nature and technical skill to deal with most problems that come my way. But some things are just beyond the pale. I would like to think that to think that computers generally help to make people’s lives easier and when I find something that is so crass, stupid and ignorant as this I feel I have to write something.

The problem is a simple one. I have a brand new copy of Photoshop Elements 9, a recent model HP printer (C7280) and a desire to take a picture out of the former and print it on the latter. So that it fills an A4 page. And appears on the paper as it does on the screen. This does not happen. It does not even seem to be possible. I can get close, but the picture is always cropped or scaled so that it doesn’t fit. I was printing pictures with my Amiga around 20 years ago with fewer problems then I’m having now. I had the same trouble with an older version of Photoshop and in my ignorance I assumed that they would have fixed this by now because someone would have got back to them during their extensive testing to tell them they had made a product that was fundamentally useless in this respect.

I’ve just wasted two pages of expensive paper, and a lot of expensive ink, printing the wrong thing in the wrong place. The reason I wasted the second page was that I asked the printer driver to show me the page before it printed and it ignored me.

Photoshop will let me print collages, albums and all kinds of stuff I don’t want. The HP printer is clever enough to tell me that the ink has run out in a cartridge before it actually has. This technology is state of the art, and it stinks. I’m now reduced to carefully scaling printouts wrong so that they print out right. There is probably a fundamental setting that I’ve missed somewhere that could be adjusted to make all this work, but I’ve not found it yet.  And if there is, why isn’t it set on by default?

Anyone like me who has been unlucky enough to invest in these useless products has my sympathy and an apology on behalf of those of us who have been promoting computers as a way to make things easier.

Scarborough Fair

Scarborough Castle

Went to Scarborough today. Good weather, good food, great pinball machine.

Name the TV show…

Robs Red Nose Day Game Takes Shape

Now with added Nose Images and High Score

The Red Nose Day game is coming along quite well. For something I started at 2:00am in the morning last week while jetlagged it is actually progressing in a reasonable manner. Some time back I read a very good interview with Jordan Mechner, the man behind “Prince of Persia”.

He said some very sensible things about game development and one point he made really resonated with me today. He said that it was OK to play around with ideas and mess about with your game until you find out what it is really about. Once you have got your central game theme sorted you must then build on that like crazy. And you must defend your idea against all.

Up until today I’d got some bits and pieces moving around the screen and some text drawing and screen swapping code, but I didn’t really know what the game was about. But now I do. I’m not saying it is going to be awesome. But it is going to be quite fun.

I’m hoping to finish all the bits and pieces, add some music and get the game into Windows Phone Marketplace by the end of the week so that everyone can get a copy and play with it on their Windows Phone, and donate lots of cash to Comic Relief.

/RedNoseDay

Definitely Not Fixed

We had another Open Day today. And another Prize Draw. The winner of the copy of my book, pictured above, had the surname Miles. This was not fixed. Not at all.

Note: Eagle eyed readers will of course have spotted that the book above is for version 2.0 of XNA, not the more recent version 4.0. This is because it seems that the copies of my Version 4.0 book are presently in a warehouse near Sheffield, waiting for me to go and pick them up. This is thanks to a particularly shy delivery company who don’t seem to want take the package to anywhere that might have someone able to receive it. Mr. Miles will get his proper version of the book sent through as soon as we have got hold of ours.

Wearing a Jacket Might Make You Nasty

I’ve started wearing a jacket for work. I’ve been referred to as “dapper” twice over the last week. Very nice. However, I’ve found that it has made me slightly more nasty. In lectures I’m now trying to stop people from talking as much at the back, and generally getting folk to turn up on time and take part. This doesn’t seem to be a case of “clothes maketh the man” as such, but it does seem that clothes maketh the man slightly more grouchy.

Or perhaps it is the jetlag.

Flying Home from Seattle

Time to fly home today. It has been a very brief visit but well worth the trip.  Best MVP Summit ever. Thanks to all the folks at Microsoft for being so forthcoming about the future.

Best Flight Ever to Seattle

The lady in the red blazer came up to me as I was standing in line to check in for the flight. “Would you like me to find you a seat with more legroom?” she asked. Would I??? With a flourish of boarding passes I was moved to a seat that they had been keeping for tall people. Wonderful. The flight itself was very smooth and much shorter than expected, so I arrived feeling, if not as fresh as a daisy, certainly not as the crushed flower I thought I’d be. Hmm. Perhaps I’d better work harder on my similes in future.

Anyhoo, during the flight we had a good view of the coast of Greenland, and so I took some snaps. I’m here for the MVP summit which starts on Monday, in the meantime I’ve been meeting up with people I know and forgetting to remember their names. Great fun.

Friday Tutorial Fun

Friday at 5:15 pm is not really an auspicious time for a programming tutorial, but we do our best. Considering the horrible hour there was a pretty impressive turnout today,  and we did have fun. We were drawing text with XNA and playing with multiple draw operations to get fake 3D effects.

Great fun. Hull students, you can find the clock code in the lecture content for week 4.

More Open Day Fun

This is the lucky prize winner from the Open Day today. We had another great crowd.

These are some of them. Thanks for coming folks, hope you learnt something from the trip. I was asked if I had any ideas for things to do over summer to prepare for starting a Computer Science course. So I though I’d put some thoughts together.

First thing is to make sure you get good grades in your exams in summer. I’d hate to think that time spent playing with computers caused to you fail those.  But once you’ve done your exams I’d advise you to get hold of an introductory text on programming and have a go. You can get our First Year course here:

www.csharpcourse.com

There are links to my Windows Phone programming notes and also a version of my XNA book which you can download. If you are still a student I’d advise you to head off to Dreamspark and get hold of some free software. If you are not a student you can get free versions of Visual Studio here:

http://www.microsoft.com/express/

I wouldn’t try to do too much, but I would read the yellow book and try to get a feel for programming and what it is all about. A clue: it is not really mathematics, it is more about organisation.

Bronte Country

The six Bronte children had a pretty raw deal in many respects.  Their father, Patrick, lived long enough to see every one of them die, along with his wife and, from the look of the church graveyard, loads of the local population.  Haworth in the nineteenth century was a world apart from the neat town it is now, with squalor and disease running rampant.

The three Bronte sisters grew up watching loved ones die around them, starting with their mother and two sisters. That they chose to escape into a made up world of stories is not terribly surprising. When they grew up they took this story telling into the wider world and produced a collection of books that was like nothing before.

I’m not a great fan of their writing, but I do like going to the Parsonage in Haworth where they grew up and wrote their greatest works. There are only a handful  of  rooms in the small building, but actually being in the room where Charlotte wrote “Reader, I married him” is pretty darned cool, although I did rather spoil things for number one wife when we were in the shop on the way out and I pointed at a row of paperbacks saying, in tone hushed with awe, “Hey, they wrote books as well!”.

I also insisted on buying a genuine Bronte Parsonage combination spirit level, torch and screwdriver tool. Apparently Emily used to use one just like it it to change the batteries in her digital watch.  Or something.

Getting to Haworth was made much more interesting by the unexpected arrival of a large amount of snow overnight. This made driving great fun and meant the first thing we had to do in Haworth was find somewhere that sold wellington boots.  On the other hand, it did make the pictures nice. And I was lucky to see a steam train arrive at Haworth station. (although of course you know that Haworth was not actually connected to the railway network until some time after the death of the sisters, who had to travel to the station at Keighley when they wanted to go to London to meet their publisher).

Of course I took a camera, and a bunch of pictures.

Genuine bona-fide steam train

Platform

Haworth rooftops

Fairly quiet for a Saturday..

Haworth graveyard

Train home

Night Driving and Getting Lost

A couple of rules for night driving:

1. If you ever decide to not bother with the Sat. Nav. because you’ve been there before you are instantly dropped into a parallel universe where your destination is now on the other side of the road from where you remember it being.
2. If you are driving slowly in the dark on an unfamiliar road a dirty great big 4x4 with enormous headlights will instantly appear behind you.

Never mind, at least we got there eventually.

Morning Papers and Hull Platform Expo

Early morning guitar shop.

I did another paper review for Radio Humberside this morning. It seems that I’m doing a lot of early rising at the moment. And there is a surprising amount of traffic at 6:30 in the morning.

Anyhoo, we had fun talking about some tech stuff and Twitter. I tweet as RobMiles and Andy Comfort, the breakfast presenter,  as andycomfort (which shows we both have the same level of originality I guess).

Andy even let me have some time to chat about PlatformExpo, which is going from strength to strength.  It all happens on 27th March and you can find out more here:

http://platformexpos.com/

We are going to have the results of our 24 hour game development competition, live interactive music and art, demos of 3D technology, digital showcases and I’ll be giving a session about Microsoft Kinect – having not slept the night before. One of those rare occasions where the audience has to keep me awake….