Selling at the speed of eBay

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I think I've finally figured out how to sell things on eBay. Previously I've had real problems, with items hanging around for ever and then being bought by people from far away places with no Paypal. Not good.

Last night I put a couple of things up for sale and I tried a different technique. I just checked to see how much the last couple of identical items had gone for and then placed my items with "Buy it Now" prices five pounds or so less than these figures. Both items were sold by the morning, so it seems to work. Furthermore, because I've used Buy It Now it seems that buyers "Pay for it Now" which means that you aren't hanging around waiting for the money before you can ship the items.

Vista Time Travel

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I love it when systems are designed to accommodate my own stupidity. Like when I half remove a bunch of camera drivers, fully install the new ones and then find that, not surprisingly, things don't work any more.

Previously there would have been a lot of cursing and muttering and attempts to get the system back to a "known good state" (i.e. before I started fiddling with it).

But with Vista I just fire up the recovery menu and step back in time to the good old days, when things worked, and try again. And I made an interesting discovery, which is that if I don't do stupid things it works a lot better....

XNA Fun and Games in Dublin

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We were up bright and early for a "Breakfast Round Table" discussion with academics from all over Ireland about the teaching of XNA and Computer Science.

Some of the delegates had got up at scarily early hours to travel here and take part. Once I got over the disappointment that the table wasn't actually round a great discussion was had. It was interesting to hear how the computing scene in Ireland is not that different from the UK.  Quite a few places are getting their students to write games as part of their teaching, others are starting game development courses. At Hull we have been doing this for a while, and so I delivered a bit of insight into how we make things work. And gave the book a good plug.

Then the student presentations started. Due to popular demand we were running two tracks and so everyone gave their sessions twice.  I took some pictures of the audience looking happy at the start of my sessions (I always take the pictures at the start, in case it all goes horribly wrong).

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The audience for session 1

The first session went really well with a great audience. Then I staggered out of the lecture room and into the second session.

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The audience for session 2, how they appeared at the start....

However once I got the laptop working on the projector things settled down a bit and I was able to focus on the job in hand....

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Another superb audience.

I had another great session with these folks, and then it was off to the airport for a flight back to Hull.

The XNA European tour goes on tomorrow to Vienna. You can find out how they are doing on Charles Cox's blog here.

Sunday in Dublin

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The hotel had some really posh flowers

Sunday finds me in Dublin, for the XNA European tour. This evening I met up with the tour team, who face the enticing prospect of seven European cities in as many days. Charles and Dave from the XNA group were amazingly chipper, despite having arrived only today and being deep in jetlag country. We had a splendid meal out and talked technical and non-technical (including my delivery of the "Orange for a head" joke - which probably represented the low point of the proceedings).

I'm just around for the Dublin event, I'm giving a couple of sessions tomorrow. Should be fun.

York Trip

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What a way to start the day

Today we headed off to York for a family get together. I had a plan to get yet another camera (don't ask) and in the process rationalise my camera collection a bit. The weather was pretty horrid, and I wasn't very hopeful of any nice pictures. Nice sunrise notwithstanding.

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York Minster and Moon

Seems like I was wrong. We ended up going on the York Wheel at the Railway Museum. You really should go there - the museum is free and wonderful and the York Wheel, while no London Eye, is really good. And you do get some nice pictures.

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York Station

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The Wheel

Yes, I did get another camera. If anyone wants to buy a Canon EOS 300D (lovely camera, just not quite as nice as my new one) then let me know.

.NET Micro Framework Resources

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A couple of weeks ago, at the TechEd 2007 sessions in Barcelona I was giving with Dave Baker of Microsoft, I promised that I'd be putting up the sample code that we used. Apologies for the delay folks, but they are now here: https://static.squarespace.com/static/5019271be4b0807297e8f404/52c5bcfce4b0c4bcc9121347/52c5bd05e4b0c4bcc9123e9f/1195635219027/TechEd%20Demos.zip

If you are into the .NET Micro Framework (and if you aren't, you should be) then take a look at their blog. There is some really good stuff on there about hardware interfacing. I'm not just linking to it because it mentions me. Oh no.

http://blogs.msdn.com/netmfteam/

Roam the world with Skype

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A nice man from 3 sent me a couple of phones to play with this week.  They are Skypephones. This is a very clever idea. The mobile works as a mobile, but because it has 3G, and is therefore connected to a nice fast network, it can use Skype as well.

Skype is an network based telephony solution. I find it very useful when I travel abroad and want to call home, because the bulk of the time a call uses the Internet to deliver the data, I only have to pay for the short hop from Skype to the actual phone in at the other end. It means I can phone Hull from anywhere in the world for around 2p a minute.

If the person I'm calling is on Skype too, rather than on their home phone, then the call is free. Up until now one snag has been that there is that there has been no mobile solution. Until now, and the 3 Skypephone. If your 3 contract includes free internet access then you can call other Skype users (or other Skypephone owners) for nothing. Anywhere in the world. Very clever. If you must call a "proper" phone the call will not cost much either.

The only snag that I can think of is those magic three words "Fair Use Policy". I've not been able to find out what constitutes reasonable use of your 3 "unlimited" internet connection. Voice shouldn't take up too much bandwidth, and it should allow for reasonable levels of use, but I wouldn't expect completely unlimited talk time.

The phone hardware is neat, very small and works. There is even a browser (although you can't use it to read this hallowed blog). The price (even for pay as you go) is very good. It will even support Microsoft Live Messenger at some point, and there is a Skype messaging service too. I think you can use a Skype phone as a modem on your computer (although I've not made that work yet and 3 might not see that as appropriate use). The phone has a little camera and supports Bluetooth, and you can plug in memory cards with music and media on them.  All in all a good device.

If I had loads of people abroad that I wanted to be in regular contact (say I was an overseas student) this would be an ideal solution. Dad could use his computer at home to call my Skype mobile at no cost to him, or me.

If you're at Hull and you want to see my Skype phones, give me a yell. I've only got them for a few more weeks, but they are worth a look.

Killing Chapter 12

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It always helps to read what you've written. Last night I finished the final chapter of the XNA book. And then I read through it. And then I threw it away.

It was very worthy, concise and carefully written. It gave as good an explanation of component based development as you can get into 35 pages. But by gum it was boring.

So I've ditched it. Risking the wrath of my editor I've embarked on a rewrite to make it more interesting. Rather than class diagrams we are going to have "Hide the Controller", "Pell Mell Pelmanism", "Simon Says Party" and "Bread vs. Carrot".

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Art was never my strong point.

I'll explain the code that makes the programs work, whilst giving people some very silly games to play.

Much more fun.

Why Software Sucks...

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There are some books that anyone working with computers should just read. Code Complete by Steve McConnell is one of them. And now I've found another one.

Why Software Sucks... (and what you can do about it)  is by David Platt is a book you really should get. It is not hugely technical. It is not hard to read. It will make you laugh (and if you are a developer promptly feel guilty). It is a text which takes as its starting point the fact that we are not really very good at writing software.

It ties in rather neatly with a lot of things that I tell our students when they are writing programs for other people to use, but it also touches on security and a whole host of other issues, always with humour and always grounded in real life experience.

Even (or especially) if you are not a programmer you must read this book. Excellent stuff.

Computers Just Know When to Break

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I'm just trying to get the last part of "the other book" finished at the moment. So of course this would be a good time for my word processor to break. Suddenly Word 2007 wouldn't start. When it did run, after a wait for ages, it just sat there grinning at me. If I tried to do anything it froze up again.

Of course the first question I could ask is "How does it know I'm under pressure here?", but I long ago stopped worrying about this. Computer systems just know. Many years ago, when I was writing lots of presentations, my copy of Powerpoint developed the ability to crash whenever I thought "I really need to save now". It did this three times in a row.

I've had so much experience of things failing just when it would be most inconvenient that I'm now convinced that computers just know when to put the boot in.

After some serious digging around, and a near re-install, I found out the cause of my Word problem. I use a network printer at work which I have set as the default printer (which is kind of sensible, since it is where I do most of my printing). This means that Word looks for it when it starts up. Of course the printer can't be found on my network at home, so Word just sulks for ten minutes and then gives up the ghost.

At tip. If you have the same problem, just change the default printer on your PC to one that is always there (for example the document writer) and the problem goes away.

I was feeling very smug this morning when I figured that out and fixed it, and reckoned that I'd got one up on the universe.

Then my monitor abruptly stopped working....

Time machine

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For ages the clock in my car has been eight minutes fast. I quite liked this as it seemed to me that I always arrived earlier than I thought. However, this week I decided this was silly and so I set it to the exact time. Snag is that I still seem to arrive at the same time that the clock says, making me late.. Most confusing.

It is as if the car clock is some kind of absolute time which can't be changed. I'm going to set it to an hour fast and see if I arrive at work before I left home.

Live Writer Goes Live

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It looks like Live Writer (the thing that I'm using to write this blog) has finally gone, er, live. It was in beta for ages, and the "Help About" screen in my version still says Beta, but now it looks much more like a finished product. All the nice features are still there, along with the plugin structure (which seems to have sprouted a bunch of extra plugins - but nothing as nice as my Flickr Inkifier of course).

If you write blogs and want a lovely place to work, you should take a look here:

http://get.live.com/writer/overview

Easy Money

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I won 10p yesterday. I had a bet in a lecture that:

i=0;

j = ++i;

- would set j to 1. (it does, because the increment is done before the assignment). Someone didn't agree, a bet was made. Sample code was written and executed. And I won. I didn't keep the money. I handed it back with a magnanimous "Get yourself a drink on me" which shows how out of touch I am...

I went into today's C# lecture with hopes for similar financial gain, but it was not to be. I think the word may be out that I am some kind of hustler. I really like teaching the first year course. Every year we seem to get a great batch of students who ask sensible questions and enjoy learning how to program. It is rather nice at the moment because we are looking at things where there are no "right" answers, just ones which fit the context better than others. So we can debate these issues. Great fun.

Super Zune

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If you've got a Zune (and why not - they are neat devices) then congratulations. You've just got a new one, thanks to a spiffy new version of the firmware that has just been released for all the Zune devices.

I picked a Zune up in the 'states while I was out there earlier this year and they are rather neat. Kind of an ipod with a wifi twist and a nicer (to me anyway) music management tool. And they let you rent your music, which I really like.

If you are signed up with Zune you should be hearing about the upgrade soon.  The biggest improvement concerns the wifi support in the Zune device, which previously limited me to sharing audio files with the only other Zune owner I know in the UK, who lives in Wales. You can now sync over wifi which means that I should now be able to wirelessly sync content with my home network. I'm looking forward to playing with this, with a bit of luck I'll be able to move recorded TV programs onto my Zune to watch when I'm out and about. There are also some very stylish changes to the user interface and the Zune marketplace has started to sprout free, unprotected MP3 files for your Zune too.

And the new PC based Zune player program is just beautiful.

In fact the only thing about the Zune I don't like is that it isn't on sale in the UK yet.....