Roomba Magic

I actually own a useful robot. Amazing. I've got some useless ones too, but this one actually does something that number one wife thinks is good. It does the vacuuming. You plonk it down in the middle of a room, give it a kick and off it trundles, bouncing off furniture and cleaning as it goes. And it does a creditable job. To be sure, we did have to clear a bit of junk off the floor to give it a free run, and it does take longer than I would, but the evidence in the dust collector is clear, it cleans.

We set it loose in the bedroom and it rumbled about for a while. When I caught up with it later it was coughing a bit, and upon inspection it had picked up a lot of dust (it had been wandering about underneath things), an umbrella cover and 20 pence. I emptied it all out, charged the battery and off it went again. The device itself is beautifully engineered. It bristles with sensors so that it really can follow a wall, detect and manage collisions with obstacles and avoid falling down stairs (it is especially good at that one). And it has a bunch of brushes and proper filters and stuff. It really is a vacuum.

The funny thing is that I didn't really select it for its cleaning prowess. I was more interested in the interfacing potential for the Micro Framework book that I'm presently writing. The robot exposes a software interface into which you can plug a computer. It works too. I've had C# programs in a Micro Framework telling the robot what to do, which is very nice.  But now number one wife wants it to clean the conservatory, so I'll have to get on with something else.

Holiday for Banks

Today is Easter Bank holiday. Wish I worked in a bank.

Laura Viers Sings

Indeed she does. Very well. Number one son spotted that she was appearing in York, and so off we toddled. I took the big camera, but I might as well have not bothered. The lights were a bit low and even with the camera gain turned up to 11 it was hard to get any good photos.

Laura in red (and that is a sock over the microphone)

She played mostly new stuff, which was alright by me. She does have an amazing voice and her band were absolutely top notch.

Media Friendly

Number one son was supposed to be a restraining influence. He was supposed to drag me away from temptation and stop me doing things like buying Sony Media Centre PCs, even if they were half price. Unfortunately he was no good at all. So now I've got this Sony XL-201 thing lurking under the telly and I've thrown all the silver boxes out.

And it used to work very well. It was running XP and Media Centre 2005 but of course I wanted more. I wanted Vista. Well, today I got it. We left the machine upgrading while we went up town. When we got back all looked fine, which is bad. One of Robert's rules of computers is that "Everything useful requires payment in pain".

When things seem to work OK my heart tends to sink, because it means that the bits that are going to not work are going to be swines to fix. I'd much rather have a completely black screen and nothing happening, because I can attack that up front. With this variant of the hand of fate I have to find out what is going to be wrong before I can fix it.

Well, later today I found out what is wrong. Nothing too important, just that when you turn the TV on the computer crashes. The NVidia drivers just can't handle the fact that the TV is saying hello down its HDMI connection. They show their surprise by blue screening the box. As I am pitching this device to number one wife as the answer to all our problems, the media hub to end all hubs, the thing that only needs one remote control this is a bit of a sticking point.

We have tried various versions of the drivers and all have the problem to a different degree. By not turning anything off, ever, things work OK, but I don't see this as energy efficient. Actually, I see it as darned annoying. I have a Sony TV plugged into a Sony computer running drivers downloaded from the Sony site. And it crashes when you turn the TV on. Do they test this stuff? Do they ever turn it off? At the moment the best I can do is live with it until NVidia (for I suspect they are to blame) ship something a bit more resilient.

Then this evening we went round to see Ian. Everyone beat me at pool, which is bad. But I beat everyone at table football. Which is good.

And yes, I did churn out a bunch of book pages in the meantime.

Respect

My father in law has style. He showed this by getting out some of his record collection:

Ying Tong indeed

This is the sleeve from a Goons EP that he bought many moons ago. He still has the record too. Great stuff.

Then it was back onto the motorway for the journey home. On the way we passed a lorry loaded with stuff which the sign on the back referred to as "Equestrian Bedding". We think they mean straw.

Once more for the ducks

I always know exactly what to do when you have a crashing deadline looming. You go on holiday for a couple of days. So we have. We've rumbled down to Bristol to meet up with the inlaws. And, as is our wont, we've gone to look at some ducks.

But first some nice flowers

..swan of those days

Slimbridge Mission Control

If the birds learn to read we are all in trouble

There's a kingfisher in the middle of this. Yes, really.

Lovely plumage

Then it was back to the ranch. I did get around to writing a few pages though...

Product Idea

I'm going to create a new garment. It will be a waterproof jacket with a search engine on the back. I'm going to call it a Cagougle.

Doomed

Yesterday I was really concerned that we only have a couple of weeks to finish "The Book". Turns out that I was wrong though. We actually only have ten days. Arrgh!

The good news is that number one wife is very keen on the robot vacuum, which should arrive tomorrow. And I have written around 10 pages today.

Good Looking University

The university is looking wonderful at the moment. I took the biggish camera in to work specially to celebrate this.

Nice Flowers

Big Library

I've put some more on my Flickr account.

In search of robot vacuums

The .NET Micro Framework book is coming along OK. And I've managed, by means of some clever wangling, to get myself permission to buy a robot vacuum cleaner as part of the job.

The reasoning is that we need something to control with our Micro Framework device, and the Roomba vacuums from Irobot look fun. And you can control them via a serial port. So I've been digging up references and making plans. Should be fun.

PS3 Download Content Works

So it was up with the lark (in a manner of speaking) and onto the PS3 to see if the games had arrived.  And they had. And they all work well.

Tekken is Tekken, looking much better now than it did in San Francisco. For the price it is very good value. It is obviously not a next-gen game, there are some graphical issues which mark it as a kind of PS2.5 release, but for the price it is darned fine value and should satisfy my need for a fighting game until something less demanding than Virtua Fighter comes along.

Flow is weird. You guide a strange creature around by tipping the gamepad in the desired direction. You eat food, you get bigger and other things try to eat you. Quite mesmeric for a while, but with an attention span like mine I'm not sure it will get a lot of play. Then again, for less than the price of a packet of cigarettes it is OK.

Lemmings is a blast of old school fun. I played this one a lot on the Amiga, and was worried that the absence of the mouse would make it tricky. However, the game has been slightly altered for gamepad navigation and I must admit it works well. And they still make that nice sound when they die.

Home Shopping with Sony

After the excitement of the last couple of days it is back to real life with a trip up town. One of my favourite shops (sort of) used to be Dixons, which was one of the few remaining purveyors of gadgety type stuff in the teeming metropolis with is Hull city centre. However, that has now changed to "Currys Digital", which seems to have resulted in a huge influx of white goods. I'm not impressed. If I want to look at washing machines I'll go into our kitchen. And the gadget potential of a fridge freezer is somewhat limited in my opinion. The result of this was that I spent nothing. Number one son actually spent more than me. This might be a record.

Fortunately, those awfully nice Sony people have found a way of relieving me of funds even when I'm sitting in front of the telly. Using my shiny (but irritatingly dust attractive) PS3 I can go to the Sony Store and purchase games and stuff. So, for fifteen quid I got Flow, Tekken and Lemmings. They are all set to download overnight, I'll let you know what they are like tomorrow.

Imagine Cup UK Final

So, after getting up bright and early we headed onto the coach for the trip to Reading and our moment of truth...

"Team Pizza" with their bag. Seems about the right size.....

Ready for the off

Photo Op

The Seedlings shaping up

Is this a secret weapon?

Team Roundtrack

The "Pizza Eaters" doing some product placement

Team "404 File not Found" and their poster

Kevin from Microsoft gets things going

It was great to see James and Tom again. They were in last year's team and I went with them to Delhi for the world final. They now work for Content Master and had been given leave to come and tell us about the experience.

James in full flow

Tom watching....

..is this what Tom is thinking?

Nibbles

The food was good, and they just kept delivering it.

Halfway through the day the top three teams were selected to give their presentations. Sadly my team, "The Irresponsible Pizza Eaters", were not in the top three, but kudos to them for quality and commitment. You rocked.

Team "404 File not found" were selected for special commendation and "The Seedlings", another Hull team, were one of the three finalists. So, at this stage in the competition we had one commended and one in the top three. Not bad.

The Seedlings, preparing for the off

The pitch.

After the presentations and considerable deliberation the judges revealed the winner. None of this drum rolls and long pauses rubbish. Just a simple slide:

Hull Wins!

The Seedlings had prevailed. Huge congratulations to James Alexander, Michelle Goddard, Matthew Steel and Matthew Steeples. And also to their mentor from Black Marble, Rob Hogg. They all get to go to Seoul later this year to take on the world.

Flying the flag

That makes 3 out of the 5 Microsoft Imagine Cup UK Software Design Challenge competitions have been won by teams from Hull. Go us!

There are some more pictures on my Flickr site.

Quizmasters

After a very smooth journey down the Reading the Hull team bus arrived at the hotel. There is a tradition that on the eve of the Imagine Cup finals Microsoft run a quiz for all the teams as part of the entertainments. So, after a Korean-themed meal we all sat down and had our brains stretched.

We had to draw pictures of each other. I think he caught my best side.

I think Tom knows the answer. But is it the right question?

One of the tables we beat...

One of the other tables we beat....

Branded Chocolate....

As last year, I had taken the rather cunning precaution of choosing the table with all the clever people on, and so we just managed to run out joint winners. The prize, a couple of Cube People, will keep me amused for a while.

Tomorrow the fun really starts, when the gloves come off and we all compete to find the UK Imagine Cup winners.

Cheese Cam

David has just sent me this. Yum.

The Apprentice and bad hearing

"The Apprentice" has started again. This is a gameshow/reality TV thing where a bunch of people pretend to be interested in working for Sir Alan Sugar whilst playing to the camera as much as possible and preparing for a career in daytime TV. But it is quite compulsive viewing.

I had a weird moment where I thought I heard the announcer say "..all the contestants are competing for a single bacon seat...". I had just conjured up this a very strange vision of what they were after when I realised I had misheard.

Twitterified

Interesting. On the day that the papers are talking about how people are stopping blogging I find a new thing which takes the art of blogging to a new level.

The new thing is Twitter. This is kind of "blogging on speed". You post on Twitter what you are doing at regular intervals, short sharp messages that keep all your Twitter friends informed of where you are. I've not yet seen a Twitter post that says "going to the toilet" but I'm sure there is one somewhere.

I can see this as being great for students, and those with more than one friend. You could be continually in touch, a kind of message based digital herd. I'm not convinced that it will be much use for me.  Thinking of something pseudo-witty to say once a day is hard enough. Doing it every twelve minutes would probably cause my brain to melt.

Having said that, TwitterVision, a mashup where you can see posts from people appearing on a map of the world, is compulsive viewing. And I will be posting live reports from the Imagine Cup finals tomorrow and Friday on my Twitter account, it should be perfect for that.

Tennis with Zombies

Tonight we finally got around to playing Sega Virtua Tennis on the PS3. It is really fun. We started off playing singles, but after number one son had beaten me a couple of times I figured it was time to move on. So we had a go at doubles. We squared off against a couple of computer controlled players who wiped the floor with us. So, in an attempt to make our game easier, we turned one of the computer players into a girl and tried again. And they wiped the floor with us once more.

The game is tough. Getting the ball back over the net is not that hard. Getting it back in such a way that your computer controlled (or otherwise) opponent can't then immediately smash it past you is a bit more tricky.

I was especially interested in the graphics of the game. It is one of the few that runs in the highest resolution mode that the PS3 supports. And it looks jolly good. The various locations are rendered with loving care, and the crowd looks amazing, with hundreds of individually animated people watching intently as you blast the ball out of the back of the court.

The only real problem I've noticed is that the players, although wonderfully rendered and with fantastic motion capture, have a strange, unearthly pallor which makes them look to me a bit like the undead. Not that I've seen many undead up close you understand, but I've watched a lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, if that counts.

I know that drawing people is really hard, and that this is state of the art. I've noticed a similar effect in other computer generated content that tries to depict real people and I'm not sure what can be done about it. To my mind the simple cartoon graphic faces of the players in the Tennis game in Wii Sports look more "human" than the beautifully drawn players in this game.

What I really want I suppose is a game with the depth and visuals that Sega has, but with the warmth, character and easy controls that Wii Tennis gives you.  But in the meantime, I think that Sega Tennis is going to provide quite a bit of fun.

Update on 2007-03-28 20:25 by Rob

I've been asked to make it clear that when we made our game "easier" by adding a lady player to the opposition, we lost by an even wider margin.Go girls.

Back on the 'phone...

I'm moved to wonder if people really care that I'm now using a Smartphone instead of a Pocket PC. Then again, I do see myself as a beacon of light, shining upon the path to gadget heaven and true enlightenment.

And anyway, it's my blog, so there.

Anyhoo, I've given up on the Pocket PC as a phone. I've gone back to my good old Imate SP5 Smartphone. This gives me pretty much everything that I had on the old machine, including the wonderful push email support via Exchange. What the Smartphone doesn't give me, and the reason I've gone back, is a need to use two hands, and frequently a stylus, to do something tricky like, say, phone someone from the address book or find out who called me last. It also makes a much smaller lump in my pocket. I've tried to love Pocket PC phones many times, from the Jasjar daddy of them all down to the neat little Vario that I used to use. But I always end up back on the Smartphone trail.

I've really no idea precisely why, but I think that it has to do with my austere upbringing, where putting fingermarks on things like glass tables and the TV screen was severely dealt with. I think this has left me with an aversion to touch displays that makes using a Pocket PC too hard for me.

I was worried that the constantly connected GPRS connection that Exchange needs might sap the battery of my little phone, but so far it is holding up very well.

Open Day

We had our final big Admissions Open Day today. We had a monster turnout. That is not that a load of monsters turned out, but that a large number of people, who were definitely not monsters, turned out. If you see what I mean.

Wide angle audience arriving....

Thanks for coming folks. Some of you had traveled a very long way to see us, I hope you found the journey worthwhile. As is usual, we had a draw for a Playstation Portable.

The holder of ticket 17 gets his dues from Dr. Rayner

We have some university open days later in the year, and then in September it all starts again....