Micro Framework on Sunday

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Ian came round this afternoon with his new toys (well, it is just after Christmas). He is thinking of doing some work using the .NET Micro Framework and has got hold of one of the new boards from GHI. This has a huuuge LCD touch screen which looks amazing. He also had one of the tiny GHI master units which he had managed to solder down onto their carrier boards so that we can play with it properly. This does seem a very easy way to get into embedded development. The price of the hardware is starting to get sensible and you can now create Micro Framework applications with the free version of Visual Studio 2008 Express. 

The ease with which you can get proper C# running on a tiny target board and start controlling hardware is very impressive. If you have an idea for a hardware based device but have previously been put off by the difficulty of writing the code I suggest you take a look at the platform.

Party Buzz

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We had a few folks round tonight for a "Late New Years Eve Party" kind of thing. I got out the Buzz game that I bought for the Departmental Christmas Bash (and then forgot the disk) and we had a go. It was very successful. There are four wireless remotes with selector buttons which are used by the players to answer questions on a range of subjects in a well presented quiz show format.Great fun.

Apparently the voice of Buzz is Jason Donovan, which is interesting (well, it interested me for a second or so anyway). If you want to keep a bunch of folks amused for an hour or so it works well. The in game characters you can select are great fun and the format, although a bit repetitive after a while, works well. I think you can create your own questions as well. Anyone fancy a C# version?

Of course the best ever computer quiz game was "You Don't Know Jack" which was absolutely hilarious...

Farcry 2 is Wonderful

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Number one son picked up a copy of Farcry 2 earlier this week. Anyone who doubts the ability of computer games to create a believable world should take a look at this game. Just about everything works as it should and the appearance of the game world is amazing.

I went to a session at GDC earlier this year where they were talking about how they "grew" the scenery programmatically.  Rather than having artists who placed each tree and blade of grass they actually wrote code that simulated the way that that everything grows from its starting point. Very impressive.

A Foolish Consistency

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Alfred Thompson had a good post on his blog about the way that programmers persist in using single character identifiers (i, j and k etc) for counters in loops.

I posted a comment on the post in which I put one of my favourite quotes - "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" from Emerson.

I'm presently going through back filling all my blog posts so that I don't have any gaps in the days.

Go figure.

Logitech Harmony One Remote Control Review

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Hmmm. What kind of fool spends the thick end of 100 quid on a remote control?

I think we both know the answer to that question.

It was one of my (many) Christmas presents to myself. I can remember when the only remote control that was available for your telly was a brick, and you could only use it once to turn the TV off.....But now we have five or so remotes floating around the living room and changing from one device to another means pressing buttons on most of them. So I thought that a programmable remote that supports multiple devices would be a good plan. And I had just got paid.....

Turns out that it works rather well. Setting it up is something you have to work at though. You run the program supplied on a disk with the device and then it goes on line and forces you to register so that you can then tell it all the devices that you own. It then downloads the control codes from the Internet and you plug the remote into a USB port so these can be squirted into it. You now have a single controller that you can use to control everything. If you have a device that it doesn't know about it has a learn function that you can use with the existing remote. I'm wondering if I could teach it to control my helicopter....

Anyhoo, once you have got all your devices identified the fun really begins. You can now create "Activities" which perform a sequence of actions across them. So, to watch TV mine now turns on the amplifier, selects the correct input, turns on the TV, selects the correct input on that and then tells the Media PC to output Live TV. When I switch to something else it makes the appropriate changes to the settings and so on. When I press the power button it turns off all the devices that it knows are turned on. You have a lot of control over precisely what each activity involves and the keys that are exposed to the user and what they do when they are pressed.

The hardware itself is very swish, and it comes with a docking cradle which also serves to charge up the built in battery. You even get a cleaning cloth (which works great on spectacles as well).

For someone like me, who quite enjoys fiddling around with things to make them work, it is wonderful. You can even make it display pictures on the tiny colour touch screen on the top. If you expect it to solve all your problems right out of the box you are in for a tough time though. 

Helicopter Sales

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Went up town to the sales today and bought a helicopter. It is a twin bladed Chinook type thing, which was knocked down to fifteen quid in Red5. Number one son has shown quite a talent for flying the thing, which seems a lot more controllable than the single rotor ones that we had bouncing off the furniture earlier this week. He can actually make it hover in one place and it has this fancy way of tipping the front rotor to make very controlled turns.

I think these will sell out real quick, but if you get the chance to buy one I'd recommend you do.

Ubiquitous Software

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I was having my hair cut yesterday (I was picking up number one daughter and I thought it might be good if she was actually able to recognise me) and the girl doing the cutting asked me what I did. I told her and she said that she had no real idea what computer programming was. A few years ago I would have had a problem at this point, because it used to be kind of hard to explain what computers were actually used for. Nowadays it is much easier. I just had to mention the Xbox 360 and PS3 and say that we produce students who write the games that go into them.

Afterwards I had a think about this and the way I see it, computer programmers now write the stuff that makes pretty much everything work. Just about any device that you buy with a mains plug will have a computer processor in it, as do all cars and so on.

When I started in this business we had one computer at the university, nowadays I don't think anybody knows how many there are on campus. I had no idea when I started in this business, but I'm very glad that I did, because it really is the stuff that makes the future go.

Of course, we also produce the stuff that makes it hard to print out things, but I'll let that pass for now. (Actually, and this is a  tip for all Photoshop Elements users, if you want to make a book of pictures you don't actually want to make a Picture Book, you want to make a Collage. A Picture Book is pre-formatted for an on-line printing service, whereas a collage is just a themed collection of pictures which can span several pages).

Useless Software

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Imagine you were thinking about buying a car. It had a satnav, heated seats, electric windows, a hundred and one extras that you will probably never use. It is attractively coloured and pleasing to the eye. You can almost afford it.

But it won't turn right.

Would you buy it? Me neither. And yet people are happy to buy and use software that fails just as spectacularly. I mentioned some time back my torment at the hands of some software by HP which purported to let me create albums but actually just messed me around until I removed it from my disk.

Today I've been playing with Adobe Photoshop Elements. This lets you create similar albums and, after a while, I've managed to get the images I want.

But I can't print them. That is, I can get them onto paper but the size is always wrong. I've wasted a couple of pounds worth of paper and ink. As I type this program is randomly resizing the images behind Windows Live Writer in a way that does not inspire confidence. I've tried numerous combinations of printer and paper configuration, screen preview and all manner of settings to try and get what I want, which is pictures on paper the same size and shape as the ones on the screen.

This is insane. I'm supposed to be good at this stuff. How someone less well versed in printer configuration would get by I have no idea. What you really want is a big red button that says "put these on the paper how they look on the screen". What I have got is several buckets full of confusion. I hate this. I would never let software go out of the door with this mix of complexity and uselessness.

I've had this before with various printers and programs. I M Wright has some things to say about the way that programmers always want to work on the advanced features and leave out the boring stuff like making the program actually do what it is supposed to do. How right he is.

Amazon Music Store Fun and Games

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Amazon are moving in to music distribution. Alongside books, computer games and toys you can now download unprotected MP3 files at very good prices including some albums at a loss leading 3 pounds each. So I had a go.

First mistake was to try and use the university network. So that meant a big hello to the university firewall and everything locking up and timing out. So, after a number of retries I just closed the notebook and went home, hoping that the machine would fire up and keep going on the home network.  Which it did. Problem was that I had initiated the download several times, and the rather stupid Amazon download tool insisted on fetching the same thing three or four times, just to be sure. So that was an entire evening of bandwidth out of the window.

However, once I'd got the files off the machine and tidied up all the excess copies I reckon it is a pretty good deal. The files are standard MP3s captured at 320K bps, which means that they will play pretty much anywhere with good sound quality.

Worth checking out, but don't press the download button more than once.