Number one son is very confused about the way that I insist on producing a blog post every day. Even though sometimes there are intervals when nothing appears and the posts are obviously made retrospectively. Well, I don't care about any of this. Obviously.
So, that's Sunday sorted...
Number one son brought home a copy of Guitar Hero 3. This is the new fangled one with the wireless guitar, which is very nice. It also has a very wide range of different songs supplied with it. Hardly any of which I've actually heard of, which is a bit of a problem really.
The first Guitar Hero was packed with tunes that I knew. They were not the original versions, the weasel words "..as made famous by.." appeared next to most of the artist names, but that didn't matter to me. At least they were covers of stuff that was familiar.
The new version seems to have gone the other way. Rather than copies of very well known material they now use original versions of stuff that nobody knows. So I end up trying to pick may way through a tune that I've never heard before, and don't particularly want to hear now. They've also fiddled with the two player mode and added stupid battle modes where you can snap your opponents strings and overload their amplifier, which all seems really silly to me. Add to that some daft duelling parts in career mode and I think we are talking about video game franchise that is in the process of jumping the shark.
Some modern computer games are deep. Very deep. Mass Effect is like this. Far too deep for me. It is a role playing game where you have to interact with a whole bunch of people to get the job done. What happens to you do depends on what you do, and how you treat other people. This aspect of the game is very impressive. To someone watching the gameplay it looks very natural, and the feeling of actually being there talking to the other characters is very strong.
Number one son bought a copy of Mass Effect for the Xbox 360 last week, set himself up as a straightforward, honest and caring engineer, and went out to right a whole bunch of wrongs across the galaxy. He doesn't like the inventory management, but he does like the gunplay and the plot is quite compelling. I've seen the game on sale for less than 25 pounds, which represents fantastic value for something which could keep you busy for a rather long time.
From "Star Wars weapons development, the early years"
The "Light Shovel"
After a "proper Christmas Lunch"(tm) we went out for a walk. Turned out we had another nice sky.
Sky and bridge
I took this picture this morning. Lovely way to start the christmas season.
Happy christmas and a prosperous new year to all (or perhaps both) my readers.
I quite like some kids films. They have fewer bad things happen in them and, give or take a bit of singing, they are usually great fun. A well written one can be a treat, with slapstick for the kids (which I love) and some quite zingy dialogue (which I love). Enchanted hits the spot on both counts. It gives a nce take on fairytale vs. real life with some funny moments and some genuinely touching ones too. You get a standout performance from the princess and the ending is a properly happy one. Well worth a look.
I love my iPhone. It is a highly covetable device which is a genuine pleasure to use. It is just a pity that it is not quite as useful as I'd like. I end up having to put the sim into my Smartphone when I want to do something useful like manage my email or work with Word documents.
But I've been doing some sums and playing with other toys and I've fallen over something very interesting. An iPhone costs around 270 quid, and you have to sign up for a scary 18 month contract that will cost you at least 35 quid a month. Scary money. For roughly the same outlay you can get a SkypePhone, an eeePC and a cheap USB Bluetooth adapter. You get all the internet you can eat for around 10 pounds a month and you can walk away when you like. And the eeePC is not the same as an iPhone from the style point of view, but it is a whole shed load of useful. It works a treat over Bluetooth with the Skypephone to give a proper 3G browsing experience. You don't have quite the posing power, but you can do everything that the iPhone can do, plus an awful lot more. Worth a thought I reckon.
I was thinking of changing my name to "Rob Abacus".
Then people really could count on me.
I got the front matter stuff for the book back from for approval today. I'd contrived to get the name of the commissioning editor wrong and misspell Acknowledgements. Ho hum.
I think I'm getting bored with movies packed with magic and mystery. I've seen too many bits where one character looks at another and asks in awe "You mean that this might be the chosen one?" And later someone says "..but no one must ever know..". And then we get a "..and took away my rightful throne...".
Well, The Golden Compass is all that and more, you even get a "..Luke, I am your father" moment towards the end. And you end up thinking "Meh. So what?".
Everyone plays their part quite proficiently. There are good goodies and bad baddies and baddies who might be goodies and I'm sure if they ever get to make the other two in the series we'll find goodies who are turned to the bad side by something or other. The special effects are pretty good, apart from a few "video game" moments in the fight scenes. Nicole Kidman, who must have been sponsored by a detergent company judging by the amount of white she wears, plays her part very well and even the child with awesome powers carries off her role with a certain amount of verve, even if her accent slides around a bit from scene to scene.
It is based on a book that I've not read, but it stands up well enough on its own if you like that sort of thing. And the problem for me is that there has been a lot of that sort of thing over the last few years.
Went to a party today. We had our "office do" at Fudge in Hull. Very nice it was too. Great food, great company, great times.
And no photographs. (I forgot).
Then it was back to Paul's, where he strapped a propeller on his back and tried not to fly around his garden. No. Really. Paul is a recent convert to paragliding, having just helped to create the world's first paraglider simulator. He wanted to show us his new rig and was offering drinks and sweeties, so we were all round there like a shot. So it was that, drinks in hand, we watched as he fired up his machine and tried to use it to blow cast iron garden furniture around. Now this I did get a picture of.
Fan man
When Paul bought his house, it came with a collection of plates. Including this one.
I'm not sure if it is dishwasher safe, but it does have a unique style.
After the party we wandered back to the office for some gaming. I had to zoom off early and do some other bits and bobs, but I did manage to win at Wii tennis (although Warren beat me at Guitar Hero).
I really must stop doing this. Whenever I come into some money (in this case some modest royalties for a CD-ROM I wrote some time back with number one son) I spend it on a computer.
This time though I've got a little peach. It is an Asus EeePC. I'd heard these were hard to get hold of. That's like a red rag to a bull where I'm concerned. If you want one, and they are really neat, I'd recommend trying your nearest Toys'R'Us, where I managed to pick one up, after considerable agonising, yesterday. They cost around 220 pounds. For your money you get a tiny laptop with a little 7 inch display. Of course you can get "proper" laptops for only a few pounds more, but the EeePC is interesting for a number of reasons.
For a start it really is small. If you want a proper laptop as small as the Asus you would be hard pushed to get one for less than seven or eight hundred pounds, and it has a battery life of over three hours, which is again very promising for the price and size. It also has no moving parts to break, unless you count a little fan and the keys, and uses an internal 4GB solid state drive for storage. There is an SD slot for additional memory, three USB slots for external devices, WIFI, a webcam, a wired network connection and even an external monitor socket. It feels very robust and is powered by an Intel Celeron processor tied to 512Mb of memory.
It can run Windows XP, but it is supplied running a variant of Linux which contains all the bundled applications that you would need to make the machine useful, including Open Office 2.0, Firefox for web browsing, a collection of Picture, Music and Media utilities, some teaching applications and a few games. The user experience is very like Windows, with just a few rough edges here and there. It booted up, connected to our WIFI and worked a treat. The only scary bit was getting it to print, which involved compiling a printer driver and installing it (good job that Number One Son was around to do that bit).
If you want a tiny PC to take with you on trips, and would like something that won't break the bank and you won't fret about too much, then I strongly recommend it. If you are thinking of getting your kids a notebook PC, but are worried about their fragility and price(the notebook that is, not the kids), I'd recommend it very strongly. It is also a hackers delight. It is essentially a PC platform, but small and cheap and very easy to develop for. I'm going to put Mono on mine so I can keep writing C# goodness. Number one son wants to put one on a robot. There are stories of an Eeepc that has been made to run Vista (quite well so they say) and an XP version will be available in 2008 which will be very interesting.
What I want to do next is couple it up to the SkypePhone so that I've got a portable, high performance, network terminal. If I put XP on it I could do this tomorrow. The machine is supplied with a set of XP driver disks and I really am tempted to do this.
Last night I went to see Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of War of the Worlds played live by a forty two piece orchestra, full band and a real Martian tripod. I even sent a smug post from row 16. I took the little camera, and managed to squeeze out some happy snaps.
The Tripod fires the Deadly Heat Ray(tm)
Just some of the technology they were using
Curtain call
The release version of XNA 2.0 is now available for download from the XNA Creators Club. This means that the XNA 2.0 beta was actually only around a month or so, which I reckon is just how long a beta period should be. This version lets Creators Club members run Version 2.0 games on their Xbox 360s an also provides networking support for games, including Xbox to PC gaming.
They had a big yellow crane at the university today. It looked really good in the sunshine.
But they wouldn't let me have a go driving it.
I took some time off from the glossary to have a go in our Deathmatch challenge today. We've run these before and they are always great fun. We write C# programs that control bots in Unreal Tournament and pit them against each other. I'd not had much time to write any code so I quickly knocked up a "happy camper" who grabbed a gun and then took pot shots at anyone who wandered past. If you want to run your own challenge you can find out more here. The going was tough.
A tense moment
Darren's Ripper Santa does the business (note my best score)
Zoe takes first prize from Darren
I'm presently writing the last, last, bits of the XNA book at the moment.
Pre-order it here in the UK and here in the US. You know you want to. You know I want you to. So go on. The best book on programming ever written. And the only one with cheese based gameplay.
The plan is to have a glossary at the end which describes all the programming terms. Good idea, except that I have to write it. Each time I used a term that I wanted to expand on I put a note in the glossary file that I needed to go back and fill that bit in. And the time has come to do the filling in. That means over 40 pages of writing.
I'm around half way through ("N is for Namespace") at the moment. It is due for the end of tomorrow.....
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
