The TechEd Universe

Earlier this year I was lucky enough to go to the Imagine Cup finals. These are organised by Microsoft and provide a great opportunity for students from all around the world to take part in the finals of a whole bunch of different electives. At the time I reflected that when you were at the finals you were effectively at "Planet Imagine Cup" where normal rules don't apply and we could all revel in fun technology.

I'm presently in the TechEd universe. This setup is huge. Everything is bigger this year, from the venue (there is a huge extra building I've not even been in yet) to the number of sessions. They have crammed an extra day's worth of material and have provided a big thick book with tear out pages to keep track of what is going on.  All the sessions are being recorded, and delegates can view the ones they missed.

I was here last year, and they seem to have found a way to make it even better. Wonderful stuff.

Micro Framework Fun and Games

Today Dave Baker and I strutted our Micro Framework stuff in front of our TechEd audience. Someone had rather kindly told Dave that "He must be mad to present with Rob". If I had a pound for everyone who has said that.....

We had some very nice toys to show off

The talk went very well, in spite of the fact that I told my favourite and second favourite jokes. I'm saving my third favourite for the talk tomorrow. We gave away a bunch of T shirts, a copy of the book and a complete development kit, so there were some very happy delegates. We had loads of questions, which I reckon is a good sign.

At the start of the Dave and Rob show

After the talk I headed off to "Ask the Experts" and spent a happy ninety minutes admiring all the new .NET Micro Framework platforms that seem to have appeared since I last looked, and meeting up with Roger and Colin, who had come al the way over from Seattle to run some porting classes and talk to delegates.

The way that Microsoft are prepared to send over the people who actually make their stuff always amazes me. Delegates can actually talk to the programmers who actually make the products they are working with. It must be hugely expensive in time and effort, but I'm jolly glad they do it.

Sunny Barcelona

Had a nice flight out to Barcelona this afternoon. Paid the "Tall Persons Tax" to get a seat with leg room and the flight was fine.

This isn't Spain, I took it at the airport in Leeds

The conference starts tomorrow. We are on at just before tea.

Long Lens

I bought a long lens for the SLR today. It wasn't expensive, but it seems to work quite well. Of course it is unlikely that I will encounter anything worth photographing, but if I do, and it is in the distance, and I have time to do the lens swapping thing, I'll post the pictures.

Orchid Power

The orchids in the kitchen have gone mad. Each Sunday we listen to, but don't understand, the local gardening program, and a recurring theme is how hard orchids are to grow. We just leave ours on the kitchen window sill and wait.

Which seems to work quite well..

.NET Micro Framework Demo Fun

What with the TechEd presentations less than a week away, today seemed a sensible time to start working on the code we are going to demo. We had a good idea of what we wanted to do, so today Dave Baker and I starting putting the final code together.

I've not played with the Micro Framework for a while. It has all been XNA for me for the last few months. But going back to it again I've re-discovered how neat it is. Dave had made a little application and needed to connect it to a pretend serial port so that we could demonstrate the emulation features. So in a couple of hours I've been able to build a custom emulator, put all the components that we need into it, map the emulator behaviour directly onto the real hardware and wrap it all around Dave's program. And it works. And you can flick an option and target the device and debug the code.

I'm really looking forward to the sessions now. If you are at TechEd come and see us. Sessions 201 and 301. If you are any good at poker you stand a chance of bagging an Embedded Fusion board at the first session. If you have hot breath you might win a board at the second.

We will also be running a little competition where we are going to give away the Micro Framework book that I co-wrote. First prize is a copy of the book. Second prize is two copies.....

200 Wrong Answers

At around half way through the semester we have some tests for our students. I'm doing a whole bunch of courses this year (including teaching Visual Basic - which has been interesting) and so I have to invent the quizzes. Each test has 25 questions with one correct and four incorrect answers.

That makes 200 wrong answers to be invented. Plus the sample tests as well. You might think that inventing wrong answers is easy, but actually it is a bit tricky. You have to have ones that kind of make sense, but are not right. If they are too right they are confusing, and if they are too wrong they are too easy.

Wonderful fun.

Test picture post

This is a test

Update on 2007-10-30 13:36 by Rob

Name the game for bonus points.....

Bridge Pictures

I took these pictures a while back, but I came across them earlier today and I thought they were worth putting out here. I must remember that this time of year is very good for sunsets.

CollectorMania Again

Perhaps I'm getting too old for this. Perhaps not. At least the fact that we british are messing around with our clocks again this weekend meant that the half five start didn't feel quite so painful, what with the extra hour in bed and all.

Anyhoo, it was off down the motorway to get autographs and stuff. Lots of things to do, and stuff to wish we could afford.

 
Jewel Staite does the business

..or we could have a new kitchen...

The Milton Keynes tree

Wii Table Tennis

Some time back I got a copy of table tennis for the xbox 360. When the Wii came out I remember thinking how great the game would be on that platform. So I was well pleased when I found a copy up town. I checked the reviews and they seemed ok so I bought it today expecting great things.

And it has been downhill ever since. I just can't get the hang of the controller and the game just isn't fun for me. I'm going to have a few more goes before it gets traded in, but if you are thinking about this title I'd advise you to try before you buy. Like I wish I had.

Get Paint .NET

I've been messing around with images and for some time I've been using a free program called "The Gimp" which can do useful things like layers and transparency. It can probably do lots of other tasks too, but it is such a pain to figure out how it works that I will never know.

For some time I've been looking for a decent free graphics editor which doesn't make me tear my hair out, and luckily I seem to have found one. Paint .NET started life as student project and now is a very well specified graphics editor which is great to use. It has a bunch of artistic effects as well as those features that I need to create images for the XNA games.

If you are after a good program to work with images, take a look here.

Resolving the Eternal Struggle

Some questions may never be asked. Others might be asked, but probably shouldn't be. But that doesn't stop us asking anyway. Questions like:

Which is mightier, the Bread or the Carrot?

In an attempt to answer this, XNA, in association with VerySillyGames.com, will soon give you the chance to take to the table cloth of destiny and find your own answer by scoring cheese goals of fate between the tomatoes of goalpostness.

Maybe the carrot isn't so hot after all.....

This is a simple mod to one of the games in the XNA book that I'm working on at the moment. It took me one "Division Bell" by Pink Floyd to complete. I started writing the code at "Cluster One" and I'm just listening to the end of "High Hopes" at the moment. It's a great album by the way.

The full version will be coming to VerySillyGames.com soon, with full on eight player action using four controllers.

Delayed Answer

Our new answering machine is a bit tempremental. It seems that sometimes it takes a while to tell us about new messages, and it doesn't always give us all of them. This could of course be us not using it properly (as if) rather then a fault. Either way, it got me to thinking.

Perhaps one day there will be a market for unreliable devices. Perhaps people will pay extra for a slightly duff model so that they can say "Oh, sorry, the machine must have lost that one, sorry I didn't get back to you".

With the guaranteed delivery of SMS and universal voicemail, maybe we will eventually welcome a little bit of uncertainty in our lives. Perhaps our machine isn't broken, just ahead of its time. 

Inspiration on the Road

Today we had Ed Dunhill and Ben Coley from Microsoft over to see us as part of the Microsoft Inspiration tour. These guys work hard. A five hour drive to Hull, a three hour presentation, and a five hour drive on to the next gig. Tough stuff.

Ed and Ben in the Large (lecture theatre)

Some of the students limbering up

Keeping your audience watching....

The talks, about SilverLight, XNA, Embedded Development and why everyone should enter the Imagine Cup this year, were excellent, despite some comings and goings from students who had to head for timetabled lectures.

If you are at a college or uni. and you haven't got these two coming round to visit, you are missing out. If you check on the web site, I think they have a few slots free next year.

If you were at the talk and want to find out more about the stuff they showed off the best place to look is in Ed's blog, which you can find here.

How to turn a laptop into a paperweight

Lose the power supply.

I've just spent the thick end of an hour (and I mean the very thick end) looking for a little black box which is not worth a lot on its own, but given the fact that it has the right funny shaped plug and strange voltage output makes my little UMPC laptop worth having. I found it in the last place I looked.

Wish I'd looked there first.

Insomniac Dreams

I keep having this dream where I'm lying awake, trying to get to sleep.

Or at least, I think am.

Second Worst Place To Live in Britain

Some idiot Channel 4 program has just published a survey that makes out that Hull is the second worst place to live in Britain. This morning I thought I'd take a few pictures of the horrible place where I live.

The Spurn Point light ship as was. You can go round it if you like.

Princes Quay shopping centre

Posh boat

Awful place, isn't it.

Kewl bridge

Town Centre

Go Hull.

Campus Pics

I love autumn. You get the most amazing light and colours.

 
As close to artistic as I'm ever going to get...

Frosty Sports Field

Loten looking good

Black Marble for the Micro Framework

This evening it was up to Black Marble for a talk about the .NET Micro Framework. This is the technology which lets you run your C# programs on tiny hardware platforms. I'm co-presenting a couple of sessions at TechEd 07 in Barcelona and those that turned up got a sneak preview of the material.

The talk went well, although the jokes could have been better received (although I see this as a failure of the audience, not of the jokes - of course...)

Next stop Spain.....