A Short Course in Reading

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Went to Reading today. Spent a bit less time there than I planned, thanks to slow running trains. I was there for a meeting about the Imagine Cup. They had some student teams presenting UK projects and the Microsoft UK academic team, along with Joe Wilson, who heads up the contest.

The students did a couple of presentations and were then subjected to what we call the “Imagine Cup Grilling”. This is where we look at what they have done and suggest ways it could be made better. I was very even handed, in that by the end I think I had managed to offend everybody in the room, at which point I left to catch my train home. Settling down in my seat I was chatting to a lady next to me who was most upset that she had just had to pay 84 pounds just to get back to Nottingham. I responded, rather wittily I thought, by saying that I’d pay that amount just to get out of Nottingham. I’ve really no idea why I said it. I’ve nothing against the place really, and it didn’t go down too well. (actually, I think anyone who knows me can readily imagine me doing this. Oh well. I think I’m too old to change now.)

Anyhoo, the meeting was very interesting. Microsoft’s continuing commitment to the competition is very commendable, particularly in the face of present economic conditions. I think at the bottom line they recognise that the kind of people who enter the Imagine Cup are the future, and engagement with them is a good thing. I told the students that just taking part in the competition and surviving a grilling makes them better professionals and adds a huge amount of value to them as potential employees. I really think this is true, and perhaps the best reason for anyone to enter the competition.

Windows 7

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Decided to celebrate my completion of everything by putting Windows 7 Release Candidate on my laptop. I did an upgrade, which seems to have worked fine except for my Nero InCd service, which I didn’t even know I had.

The desktop looks much nicer and seems quite a bit snappier than before. The system has even spotted the broken battery and told me that I might need to buy a new one, which is quite clever.

Nick of Time

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Is the art of good planning where you have everything ready months in advance and just watch the deadline arrive with cool detachment? Or is it when you have things finished just in time, and finish within minutes of the due date?

I always try to aim for the first one, but then end up doing the second. But the good news is that the book is now complete and the Dare to Dream Different video is now with Microsoft.

And now I’ve no idea what to do with myself.

Making Movies

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I quite like programming. You can take an idea and just make it happen. And every now and then you end up making something much more wonderful than you thought it would be when you started.

Making videos seems quite different to this. You start off with all the ideas OK, but when you try to film them you end up with something quite different you then have to hammer into some kind of shape, and you don’t end up anywhere near where you started.

However, both do have one thing in common, in that they seem to take twice as long as you thought, even if you you allow for this.

My original plan was to make a video in one 10 minute take. The batteries in the camera were up for this, but they turned out to be the only thing that was. And I have always regarded myself as a natural video performer, but this is unfortunately not how the camera sees me.

Anyhoo, Ian came round with Andy as cameraman and we managed to get a good chunk of video “in the can” as the professionals call it. The only problem was that for the group shot of “Team Building” as we call ourselves (well, I thought it was funny) the camera exposure seemed to have gone a bit awry, in that all you could see of me and Ian was eyes and teeth. And they are not necessarily our best features.

So I’ve made a rough cut of a few bits and pieces and we have having a reshoot of some scenes tomorrow. I know how Steven Spielberg feels now.

.NET Micro Framework Dare to Dream Different UI

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The .NET Micro Framework Dare to Dream Different competition round closes on Friday. We have to have a working prototype and a video of it working, all ready by 11:59 PST. So this seemed like a good time to build the product.

Actually, we’ve been working on it for some time, getting the sensor class design sorted and the physical sample sensors built up, but the User Interface needed to be built, and so I started that today.

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The first menu display. The touch buttons work too!

The device will be entirely touch screen controlled, with no need for buttons at all. I’m building the display components on the fly rather than having pre-rendered graphics. The device seems plenty fast enough to do this, and I’m caching the components once I’ve drawn them. (If I run out of memory I might need to rethink this, but I only solve problems when they are problems, and not before).

I’m using a combination of events from the touchscreen and background timer to get a responsive display that is easy to use. So far it seems to be going OK. Once I get the components working I’ll post the code.

Great Service from Griffin

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For some time I’ve been looking for a gadget that l can use to play my music in the car. The previous vehicle had a cassette player, and so I got one of those “fake cassettes” that let me connect my MP3 player of the day into the sound system.

Then, thanks to some rather off-putting clunking noises when I went over bumps, I swapped my old car for a newer, shinier one. What with progress and the like, the new car of course had a CD player. I tried putting the fake cassette into the slot and it wouldn’t fit. So that was that.  I burnt a few disks of my favourites and just played them.

A few weeks ago the urge to play MP3s in the car returned though, mainly because I fancy being able to listen to podcasts and the like. Eventually I settled on a Griffin RoadTrip, because it doesn’t have any trailing wires. It just plugs into your cigarette lighter (I wonder if anyone still uses those things to light cigarettes) and you attach your MP3 player to the other end. It finds the quietest parts of the FM spectrum and then uses them broadcasts your tracks, including the RDS data, into your car radio. And it works a treat with the iPhone. I had to pad out the fitting with a bit of insulating tape to get a nice snug fit with the connector and stop the whole thing from slowly rotating out of the socket, but apart from that it worked fine.

Then I tried to use it with my five month old iPod. Which, of course, is an old model. The RoadTrip comes with a bunch of adapters  which doesn’t include my apparently ancient and unsupported one. This reflects a kind of lack of foresight on my part I guess, but we’ll gloss over that.  I sent Griffin an email bemoaning this and they instantly came back and said they’d post me a missing adapter. It arrived today, all the way from the USA. Great stuff. In these days of the internet and telephone helplines it is nice to see that some companies keep the idea of good service alive.

Are you a “Best Banker” or do you have the “Strongest Pong”

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Today and tomorrow I am going to be mostly in the practical labs marking first year programming work. The students can produce either an implementation of a Bank Account management program or an XNA version of the Pong game and they have to show it off and chat about how it works. The marking is is very time consuming, but I love doing it because it lets me chat to the students and see what they can really do.

To make things even more interesting I’ve produced some stickers which anyone who gets more than 90% will get either a “Best Banker” or “Strongest Pong” sticker.

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Well, could you get one?

Windows 7 is Lovely

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I’ve been running Windows 7 Beta on my tiny netbook for a while. This week, having downloaded the Release Candidate I thought I’d step up to that. I had to do a complete re-install, which was a bit of a pain, but the effort is well worth it. Everything seems a lot more polished and there is some lovely artwork in the desktop and background themes that you get with the distribution.

From a technical point of view it doesn’t seem to have lost any of the responsiveness of the earlier releases and it found and used all the hardware in my device. If you are using Vista, or even XP, you should take a serious look at this, it really is very nice.

JSON and the Micro Framework

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Our entry to the Dare To Dream Different competition is coming along nicely. We’ve spent a goodly chunk of today working on how we are going to pass messages from the Micro Framework device and the server it is attached to. Number one son suggested using JavaScript Object Notation, or JSON.

We could have used XML, but this has always struck me as a rather verbose way to pass data. JSON on the other hand is nice and tight, and has the benefit that its entire syntax can be expressed on a single web page. We are presently writing a set of JSON classes for the Micro Framework. This is actually proving to be quite fun (there might be ready-written versions out there but I quite like writing my own versions of these kinds of things, just to keep my hand in).

If you are interested in a beautifully simple way to express a design for data structures you should take a look at this page and see how the author has done it. I’m also thinking that if you are looking for an exercise for your programming smarts you might want to create a library of classes that will read and write data in this form.

Once I’ve got ours working and I’m happy with it I’ll post it out there so that the Micro Framework can use this rather neat data structure.

Simpsons 20Q is Fun

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I thought I’d got a good deal getting a Simpsons 20Q for 8 quid up town. But Amazon have them even cheaper. I’ve long been a fan of the original 20Q device, which guesses what you are thinking by asking you 20 questions about it. The  original has an astonishing ability to guess random things, from lava lamps to artichokes to the air.

The Simpsons one is nowhere near as good, but it is quite fun, and does seem to have been programmed by people who really know a lot about the show.

Worth getting at the new low price, but if you haven’t got a 20Q (and everyone should have one) then get that instead.