the Day the Earth Stood Still

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We had a great office lunch today. Good food, good company, and I also got a set of measuring spoons in my cracker. Excellent.

Then, in the evening we went out to see "The Day the Earth Stood Still". This is a remake of a classic Sci-Fi film from way back, a tale of an enigmatic alien, his giant robot and shiny spherical spaceship on a mission to destroy all human life. Oh, and a mother with issues with her stepson.

Keanu Reeves didn't have much of a challenge playing the man from outer space. The biggest surprise to me was that nobody referred to him as "Mr. Anderson" at any point in the movie.  

The plot was pretty hackneyed, but resolved neatly enough at the end. One rather striking thing was the sheer number of product placements for a film where, at the climax, every machine in the world stops working. There was one bit where the heroine picked up her LG mobile phone just before checking her Citizen watch. The camera lingered just long enough for the names of these consumer durables to register, completely ignoring the fact that she didn't make a call, and at the end of the world perhaps the last thing that you really want to know is exactly what time it is. 

As a bit of escapism with full on special effects it does the trick, but don't go expecting anything else.

Christmas Bash

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We had our Christmas Bash today. Went rather well, right up to the point where I opened the box with the game disk for the quiz, right at the end, and found that it was empty. So, no quiz. But we did everything else and much fun, and pizza was had. It is a moment of great personal pride to think that I managed to get to the point where all of the 60 or so students were full up. We nearly had food left over. Amazing. I took the big camera and loads of pictures.

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Sam gets into Half Life 2

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Drinks and nibbles (and pink christmas trees)

Thanks for coming and thank to everyone who helped out.

Video of Micro Framework Presentation

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If you have an hour to kill (and I do mean kill) you can now watch the TechEd 2008 presentation I did in Barcelona in November. This is the one about the .NET Micro Framework where I make my Christmas tree lights flash red when I add a new post to this hallowed blog. I've just managed to watch a few minutes of it through the gaps between my fingers. Hopefully you might last a bit longer:

http://www.microsoft.com/emea/teched2008/developer/tv/default.aspx?vid=70

Dare To Dream Different Round One Ends Monday Night

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If you have an idea for an embedded device there is still just time to enter the Dare To Dream Different challenge for the .NET Micro Framework.

http://www.dreamdifferentcontest.com/

The first round entry closes at midnight on Monday 15th December. You don't actually have to build anything, just pitch a good idea that you and two of your friends have had.

If you make it to the next round you get some hardware to play with, and the prizes are well worth having. You could also get help to turn your idea into a money making business opportunity.

..and if you a student from Hull the first few to show me their submitted entries will get free T shirt from the ones that I have left in the office.

More Than One Can Play on Windows Azure

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Some time back I wrote some web services for turn based gameplay on mobile devices. They provided an easy to understand lobby and game move framework which I used to demonstrate how easy it is to create web services and consume them from Visual Studio programs. I still think this is wonderful.

Now I've moved them onto the cloud. This was much easier than I expected. Once I figured how how to publish the project (thanks to http://davidpallmann.blogspot.com/search/label/Azure for the info) I had a working set of web services out there. I'm not sure how much time I'll have to play with this stuff (I'm supposed to be doing lots of other things at the moment) but I'll try to dig out and test some sample games that I wrote for this framework.

You can find out more here:

/more-than-one-can-play/

Au-Revoir Windows 7

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Or should that be "à bientôt"? I've replaced my test version of Windows 7 with my original Vista installation. I've not had any specific problems with Windows 7, in fact the whole experience has been really good. It is just that there are a few things I want to do which don't work too well on Windows 7. I can't get the Cloud development environment to work for some reason, and I'd like to have back the buttons on my MacBook.

I'm leaving 7 on the tiny tablet though, the performance hike is something that I really appreciate on that device.  If you have a machine that chugs a bit under Vista then you should think seriously about moving onto Windows 7.

I used the restore option to put back the Vista image I made a while back before I went out to PDC. I always image my machine before I take it out and about, and so all I had to do was drop back the documents directory and I'm back up to date. Oh, that and install a whole bunch of updates....

The restore option worked really well. I just left the machine for an hour or so and when it rebooted I was back in the past.

You Can't Beat a bit of Rehearsal

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Went to Doncaster today. The University of Hull validates a couple of their degree programs (Integrated Technology and Business Computing and so I had a couple of meetings to attend, followed by a presentation to their students. The meetings went well and then I had to do my talks about the University and what we do, with particular reference to projects. They were a great audience, and asked loads of sensible questions. I wish I'd taken the trouble to read through my slides before I started the talk, I'd used them before but kept having déjà-vu moments, where I put up a slide all about something I'd just said. Oh well, next time I'll give them a read through first.

Thanks for making us so welcome folks, and I'm looking forward to seeing the projects next year.

Lousy Software

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I hate bad software. It gives us all a bad name. I particularly dislike it when the program makes a job that could be simple a lot more difficult, whilst at the same time trying to seem friendly.

Yesterday I got a couple of photo album and paper things from HP. The idea was that I would print out some pictures and make some nice personalised gifts. I was further encouraged in this when I found that the package came with some HP Photosmart software that would arrange the pictures for me and put them into some nice looking templates.

That was the plan. I had this simple minded idea that I would pick pages from a template, drop pictures into them from my hard disk and then print out what I wanted.

Not so. First off the program insisted in cataloguing all my pictures. And I have rather a lot so that took a while. In fact, it got so slow that in the end I made up some directories holding a subset of my photos and turned it lose on that. Next it forced me to select from a slow moving and hard to use menu which pictures I wanted in my album. It then stuffed these into the album pages in no particular order, forcing me to move them all into the right place. I had no way of choosing the order of the pages, or deleting excess ones. But of course it saved the best bit until last.

Just as I was finishing off my design I noticed a "settings" option in the top right hand corner. Thinking that this might let me re-arrange pages or delete them I clicked it. It had some fairly useless options that were no good for what I wanted, so I tried to get back to my design. Which had vanished. All my work had gone away, without so much as a warning. Wah.

Sometimes there is great satisfaction to be had watching the uninstaller do it's business.

Zombie Fragfest

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One of these people is a zombie....

Dropped in on the Hull Com. Soc. Frag Fest today. I was in a bit of a hurry, so I didn't take my machine with me. After I saw what they were playing I rather wished I had though. It was a hilarious mod for Half-Life 2, which pits survivors against a zombie horde which increases steadily as each human player falls prey to the creeping death. I had a quick go and, needless to say, I got zombified really early on each time, but it was still great fun. I took the camera with the toy lens (of which more later) and got some nice pictures.

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Nobody who is anybody has a machine with the lid still on......

Converting Windows Bitmaps to XNA

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If you have ever wondered how to convert Windows Bitmaps into XNA textures then wonder no more. This method will do it for you. It is not particularly elegant (or fast) but it will let you take images off your PC (or the web) and put them into textures for use in XNA programs. Note that this will only work on XNA programs that are running on a Windows PC, the Xbox is not allowed to do this kind of thing at all. You need to add a reference to System.Drawing to your project and use the System.Drawing namespace.

Some of the code is a bit messy because of namespace clashes, and I'm sure there is a neater way of doing this. But it does work.

private Texture2D XNATextureFromBitmap(
               System.Drawing.Bitmap b, GraphicsDevice device)
{
    Texture2D xnaTexture =
               new Texture2D(device, b.Width, b.Height);

    Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics.Color[] dots =
         new Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics.Color
                                           [b.Width * b.Height];

    int x;
    int y;
    int pos = 0;

    for (y = 0; y < b.Height; y++)
    {
        for (x = 0; x < b.Width; x++)
        {
            System.Drawing.Color sourceColor = b.GetPixel(x, y);
            dots[pos].A = 0xff;
            dots[pos].R = sourceColor.R;
            dots[pos].G = sourceColor.G;
            dots[pos].B = sourceColor.B;
            pos++;
        }
    }

    xnaTexture.
           SetData<Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics.Color>(dots);

    return xnaTexture;
}

Adverts on Exams

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One of my students has noticed that some institutions are now selling advertising space on their sample exam papers:

http://consumerist.com/5100958/teacher-sells-ads-on-tests-to-cover-printing-costs

I told him that I've got a few companies lined up for mine:

  • "Hutchinsons Resit Revision Aids"
  • "Johnsons Find and Destroy Lecturer Service"
  • "NeverRunOut pens Inc."
  • "The Cheater's Tattoo Parlour"

Deep Zooming with Ed

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Ed Dunhill from Microsoft came to see us today as part of the Inspiration Tour. He gave an excellent talk to a whole bunch of students. One of the things he showed us was Silverlight and Deep Zoom. This is wonderful. A bit like Photosynth, but you can create your own images into which web users can zoom and zoom and zoom. And zoom. Don't take my word for it, have a look at the Hard Rock Memorabilia site.

If you want to make your own Deep Zoom pictures you can download the Deep Zoom Composer for free here.

Microsoft are Coming to See Us Tomorrow

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A quick reminder to anyone at Hull who reads my blog. That's both of you...

Microsoft are coming to see us tomorrow. They are taking their Inspiration Tour on the road and will be giving their presentation starting at 2:15 pm in the Physics Large Lecture Theatre, which is in the same building as the Computer Centre, but up the big stairs and all the way to the back.

Be there, talk is of some free T shirts....

Full York

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Did you go shopping in York today? You didn't? I'm surprised, because everybody else seemed to be there. I've never seen so many people in a city centre.  It was like being at a very crowded cocktail party, with no food or drink and freezing cold.  I was surprised to see so many out in the midst of the current credit-crunch but it was noticeable that only a few were actually carrying full shopping bags....

I took the little camera, and managed to take some happy snaps.

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The Ouse, once the mist had cleared a bit