Imagine Cup Open for Business

I've been lucky enough to go to quite a few Imagine Cup finals. Each host nation works really hard to give the contestants the best time ever, and this time it is the turn of France. I was looking forward to this. If there is one thing the French are good at, it is having a great time.

First off we boarded the bus to the opening ceremony, which was being held at City Hall. I had been told this place was pretty impressive. We shall see...

On the way there we drove straight towards the Eiffel tower, which was nice.

City Hall is impressive. Very impressive. The ceilings in the entrance staircase were good enough, but when you got into the main rooms things got serious.

The poshest ceiling I've ever seen. We got to mill around and take pictures (I took lots - there are more on Flickr). It was nice to meet up with old friends from previous finals.

Each team got to walk up the "stairs of fame" into the competition, to a round of applause from those in the hall. This is the UK team having their moment of glory. Then we had a few speeches.

This is the Deputy Mayor of Paris, the chap on the right is his interpreter. I'm quite proud of the fact that I understood some of the bits that he said in French.

Jean-Phillipe Coutois very cool He talked about computers from way back when, stuff that I actually remembered using. Young developers have it so easy these days....

Joe Wilson made the very good point that this is probably the largest gathering of international students there has ever been. With teams from 61 countries here, there has never been a gathering like this before. That in itself makes the Imagine Cup pretty special, before you even look at the entries.

Finally Eric Boustoulier rounded things off by reminding everyone that we actually are going to go out there and build something of the future.

Once the ceremony had completed, and the competition was underway it was time for some food and a look around Paris.

Our train back to the hotel.

Tomorrow the judging gets underway.

Return to Planet Imagine Cup

Set off today to Paris, for the Imagine Cup world final. I've again been appointed as a judge, which is great. I thought I'd take the train.

Hull Trains to London

St. Pancras Station (spelt correctly for a change)

The streets of Paris

Taking the taxi

I've just got to my room, next step is to bounce back out again for he opening ceremony.

Strawberry flavoured milk at St. Pancras

Did you know?

In the UK strawberry flavoured milk and petrol cost exactly the same per litre. But I know which tastes better.

Flower Power

The Lily in the garden is out.

..as is another, as yet unidentified (at least by me) flower.

FreeSat Fun and Poor Sports

The man came today to fix my FreeSat. FreeSat is a new service in the UK that delivers high definition TV from a satellite. And, now that I have a shiny dish pointing in the right direction, it works.

The only real problem is a lack of content. The only reliable source of High Definition TV  is the BBC channel, which fortunately tonight was showing just what I wanted to see, which was the Wimbledon match between Andy Murray and Richard Gasquet.

The picture was truly amazing, with fantastic detail and no compression artifacts. The game itself was great to watch as well, apart from the braying idiots in the Wimbledon crowd, who shouted, booed and took flash photographs during the points. I hate it when people cheer if the person they've decided is "the opposition" makes a mistake. I ended up rooting for the french player, just because it would really have upset the people watching in the stadium.

If you are thinking about FreeSat it is definitely worth a look. However, remember that there is not that much to look at just now (even Channel 5 is presently missing) and that things like recording programs are presently not possible. However, if they keep developing it and adding new channels it could well become a must-have.

Server Quest

This is fun, in a cheesy retro kind of way (some of the questions are a bit hard though).

Hewlett Scrapyard

Just had over an hour of "the wrong kind of fun" courtesy of an HP printer. Under normal circumstances I have a lot of respect for HP products. Their printers give good, reliable, results and I've never had one of their ink cartridges dry up on me. Always a bonus. When people ask me which kind of printer to buy I used to say "HP" out of reflex, because I reckoned they would get a good device that will not let me down.

Until now.

Dad got an HP "all in one" disaster area with scanner, printer, colour screen, card reader, WIFI, Fax and some kind of personality module that is permanently on stupid. During my tussles with the darned thing I explored the very limits of disbelief that something could be so stupidly over designed. The printer software installation itself takes around half an hour on your computer, then you start to grapple with the printing process.

The initial problem was that the printer buffers incoming printing, so that it can receive a lump of data over the network and then print it. Nothing wrong with that. It even stores the data in non-volatile memory, so that it can recover from power outage. Nothing wrong with that too. But if the printer is given a partially completed, corrupt, file to print this stays in memory for ever. Each time we turned the printer on it tried to print the file, and then locked up. There is no command to flush the printer buffer, no way to get around this and it means that if data sent to the printer is damaged or incomplete it turns into a noisy, expensive paperweight.

I've written embedded code myself in the past. One of my golden rules was that it should never, ever, be possible for your device to lock up. There must always be a button that can be pressed to get control back. My devices never got stuck. Not once. Never.

HP are not in my league. Not close. We ended up playing a game of skill where we had to cancel the print before it crashed the printer. Fortunately my video game powers came in handy and so we got past this duff job, at which point the idiot device pumped out every failed print job since then. We ended up putting the same pages back into the input tray again, to save paper. Of course it probably cost us a bit on ink....

So, finally the printer was working. But no. Now when you printed a page it produced it many times, over and over, like the bit from the Sorcerer's Apprentice, where Micky can't stop the brooms from fetching water. At this point we felt like taking an axe to the printer as well...

So, we gave up on network use (the main reason why we bought the printer in the first place) and went back to USB. Which when I left (at speed) was working OK.

I'm not sure which printers to recommend any more.

Splitting Fibres

I've just found a very neat solution to the problem where you have a single optical input on your HIFI, but you want to plug more than one device into it.

These people will sell you a splitter and a couple of optical cables for around a fiver which you can then use to share the one input with, say, your Xbox 360 and a Freesat box. And they work a treat.

Spot the Graduate

Somewhere in this picture of Durham is hidden a recently graduated "Master of Mathematics". See if you can use your skill and judgement to pick him out.

Kudos to number one son. Well done sir.

Building Works

Our department is being seriously done up. We had a taste of this a couple of years ago, when we made our new open area, but this time the whole building is getting the treatment. This means nothing on the floor or ceiling and a lot of drilling and hammering.

But it will be nice when it is finished.

Sailing the Amazon

I've now taken advantage of the Amazon Connect service to add a little bit of Rob to the pages of Amazon.com. Hapless viewers of information about my books on the Amazon site will also get excerpts from these hallowed pages, as well as a link to my new Amazon blog with book related content.

To celebrate this I've uploaded the second section of Simple Simon, an XNA pattern matching game which has nothing to do with pies, to verysillygames.com.

Hot Deals

This is an interesting site if you are after bargains.

St Anne's Masterclass

We had a bunch of students come to see us today from St. Anne's. They were great. As usual I took a picture of the audience at the start, while they were still smiling.......

Audience View

At the end of the talk I did a kind of Aibo vs. Pleo thing, where I turned Digby and Trevor loose together to see what would happen.

Will they fight?

They seemed to ignore each other most of the time, although Digby did keep trying to climb off the edge of the table.....

The FreeSat Plot Thickens

(I'm wondering why you should care about my satellite TV woes. But then again, it's my blog. So there.)

Anyhoo, yesterday left me with nothing working and a pile of broken bits on the floor underneath the dish. Today Dave from next door came round and, hearing of my plight, offered to go up his ladder and take a look for me. On the windiest day of the year. What a guy.

Actually, it wasn't that windy round the side of the house. And we were able to establish that actually the dish hardware looks fine. The bits I found on the ground must have been left by the Sky+ installer ages ago. That or we have a really clever prankster out there (I'm tempted to go round to the place where someone I really don't like lives, and leave a pile of slates on their front lawn in a similar kind of vein - but then again there's nobody out there I really don't like, and I'm very lazy - so it probably won't happen).

I wonder if my shiny new box is broken?

Update on 2008-06-23 12:13 by Rob

After a chat with Ian it seems that the LNB things in the Sky dish don't like being left out in the cold with nothing to talk to. They show this by never working again. So now I've signed up for a man with a ladder to come round and put a shiny new dish up.

Fun with FreeSat

Every now and then I do something silly-ish. Just to remind myself that if I was constantly sensible life would be really boring. Today I bought a FreeSat box so I could ignore the European Cup in High Definition (not that keen on telly football to be honest). The internets had told me that it would work with my old Sky dish, which is presently rusting away gently on the side of the house. We did away with Sky last year, when I got a Media PC which does all the bits that Sky+ used to do, without costing me 36 quid a month.

Anyhoo, FreeSat is free, once you have bought the box. So I bought the box and plugged it in. And it doesn't work. I was kind of expecting this. After a particularly loud storm some time back I found some bits of satellite hardware on the ground underneath the dish, but I figured that since Sky+ uses two LNB receivers, and I'd only found one on the floor, I might be able to get away with it.

Note to self:  Every time I find myself thinking "You might be able to get away with this" I must remind myself (perhaps with a slap around the face to make the point properly) that I am Rob, and therefore not destined to get away with anything.

I went next door to borrow a ladder so I could go up and have a look, but then number one wife found out about this and banned me from climbing up there, what with my fear of heights and everything.

So at the moment I have a dish that doesn't work, a FreeSat box that doesn't work, or some wire that doesn't work.  Ho hum.

Hull in the Evening

Went up town this evening to fetch number one daughter. Took the little camera (of course) and the light was very kind to me.

New York has definitely seen better times

Fast Food

Cars that never made it

These names were not dreamed up in a Staff Meeting. Oh no. I spent the entire time paying careful attention and making copious notes.

The Ford Caveat: "The car with the hidden surprise"

The Fiat Scenario: "The car that sounds like a great idea"

The Renault Gravitas: "For the driver who wants to boost their presence"

The Seat Ulterior: "You'll never really know why it just did that"

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Tonight we went to see the latest (and probably last) Indiana Jones movie. It felt like this is one of those films that you are obliged to go and see and so we went and did our duty. At the end of the day I reckoned that it was a proper Indiana Jones movie (but then again I watched some of the originals recently and formed the same opinion about them).

Much has been made made about the directors' determination to use "real" special effects rather than the inferior computer generated ones. This approach seems to have extended into making the CGI effects that they did use look rubbish, one or two sequences would have looked bad in a computer game. And some of the model work was so obviously a model that they didn't need to add a trademark camera wobble to give the game away as they panned over it. But they did.

And for a movie produced by seasoned professionals the continuity was very bad. I'm not very good at noticing things. Just ask number one wife after she has had her hair done. But even I spotted the way that the sauce bottles mysteriously stood themselves back up again in the diner scene.  All this served to detract a bit from the lush locations and expansive musical score.

At the end of the day, as I always say, "If you don't like what it says on the tin, don't open the tin". This was always going to be a big, dumb, action movie with one or two good set pieces. I don't think anyone has a right to ask for anything else. If that is what you want, you'll love it. Like I did.

Discussion of Video Gaming

If you want a detailed, and really good, discussion of Video Games, what they are and where they are going, you should take a look here.