Steam vs Robot

I was a bit late back from the tip yesterday. I went up town and bought a steam engine. As you do. The model shop in the middle of town was having a 10% off sale, and I couldn’t resist getting a little Mamod steamroller. As it happens, number one son was at home for the weekend, and I’d put him on to building a .NET Micro Framework powered robot that I’d had sent to me. Long story.

Anyhoo, when we get them both working we are going to see which is more powerful, the age of steam or the age of robots…

Place your bets..

The Micro Framework robot is great, although we had (or at least number one son) had to assemble the tracks a link at a time. I think at the end of the day it will all come down to traction, so my money is on the robot at the moment.

Lofty Ambitions

I’m tidying up our loft at the moment. This turns out to be hard work. For the last fifteen years I’ve been putting things up there “In case I might need them some day”. This includes cardboard boxes, spare lengths of carpet, old curtains, floppy disk boxes and 10 year old computer magazines. Lots and lots of them. For the last month I’ve been making numerous trips to the tip each weekend. The chaps there now address me by my first name and I think I’m getting an invite to their next staff party. Although they seem curiously uninterested in what I’m throwing out.

I made another trip to the tip today and I now have half of the half of half of the loft clear. Of course, as soon as it is clear I’ll fill it up again, but this has got to count as progress in some way or other.

iPhone 3Gs

Of course I had to get the new iPhone. I feel kind of bad about this although, as I said to number one wife as I headed off to Carphone Warehouse “I don’t drink, gamble or chase women. I just get gadgets”. She may have muttered something under her breath about how much cheaper it would be if I did those things instead, but I can’t see what the problem is really. After all, I am letting her have my old iPhone…

Anyhoo, down to the shop, out with the proof of address and away we went. I was taking out a new contract, and so I had to have a new number. They actually try to charge you for “memorable” numbers. If you want repeating values, or sequences of digits in your phone number you can pay up to sixty quid for the privilege . I had this vision of a room full of “number miners” going through all possible permutations and shouting “strike” when they found a really good one. I suspect they use a computer program though. I didn’t pay extra for two reasons. Firstly I was spending enough as it was, and secondly I couldn’t see anything special about the more expensive ones anyway.

The new iPhone is very nice. The old one was nice too, but this one is nice faster. It has a compass, which means that it can orient the map relative to the way you are facing, which is massively useful. It looks pretty much exactly like the old one but the glass seems to shrug off fingerprints, which is nice.

I was quite looking forward to using the Voice Recognition feature, but unfortunately it turns out to be rubbish. Having experienced the wonder of Voice Command on Windows Mobile devices many years ago I was very keen to find out how the field had advanced on the iPhone. Turns out it has gone backwards. Voice Command used to let you do everything on your phone including play music albums by calling out their names. It never needed training and it always worked. Whereas the voice recognition on the iPhone does things like make phone calls when you want to listen to music, play music when you want to make calls and so on. I hope this is a difficultly with English accents or some other teething trouble, because at the moment it really is poor.

Overall I’m pleased with what I’ve got. I can’t see massive queues forming for this new device though, it is mostly evolutionary. When the new version of Windows Mobile comes out next year I reckon things are going to get even more interesting in the mobile space.

If it’s Thursday it must be Doncaster

After a journey north yesterday, today I headed south to Doncaster College . We were having the exam board for the Integrated Technology degree that is taught at Doncaster and validated by Hull.

We saw some very good work. At tip. If you live in Doncaster and want to do one of the best Integrated Technology degrees in the country, you have a wonderful place just on your doorstep. And you can do them part time, some of the best students were actually doing degree level project work as part of their jobs.

Ho for Northumbria

I’m now officially an External Examiner. I’ve even been to an exam board meeting and said stuff. An external examiner does just what it says on the tin (although we don’t actually arrive in a tin). We go into other institutions and make sure that what they are doing is OK. We look at coursework and exams, check the marking and make sure that the students are being treated correctly. At Hull we have several external examiners, one for each of our courses, and I’ve watched them in action, and worked with them over the years.

Northumbria University invited me to be the external on their Games courses and I went over there today to take part in their exam board. I decided to drive over there, and hired a car for the trip. The car that turned up was a lot posher than I expected, a huge VW Passat. It even had electrically heated seats. I found this out when I turned them on by mistake, that was a genuinely scary experience.

The drive up to Newcastle was very smooth though. I reckon that whatever else you say about the human race, we have got very good at making cars. This might turn out to be our undoing of course, but it did make the journey very comfortable.

The exam meeting was fine. I never thought I’d say that, but it turns out that other people’s exam board meetings are much more interesting than your own. It is always nice to see a room full of professionals working hard to make sure that they do right by the students, and that is exactly what I saw. Well done folks, and I’m looking forward to seeing you all again.

Then it was into the shiny car and back home.

Going for my Jabs

I’m off to Egypt in a couple of weeks for the Imagine Cup World Finals. I’m really looking forward to it, but before I start to pack my bags I have to make sure that I’m up to date with all the injections that I’ll need.

Today I wandered over to the Health Centre and filled in a form saying where I’m going and what I’m doing, and they’ve called me back on Friday for some injections. If I see a tanker parked outside the surgery when I turn up, I’m not going in…

XNA Videos in Thirteen 1

I’ve been doing some videos to try and teach XNA development. They are being put out by those nice people at Thirteen 1 magazine.

I’ve just finished recording one tonight, it took me three goes because the microphone made me sound like I was on a boat in a stormy sea. If you want to view the first one you can find it here. Just turn over to the next page and there I am.

Using the Canon T1i/500D with Photoshop Elements

If you have a Canon T1i/500D you have a lovely camera, but it gets less lovely if you want to import the raw image files it produces into your copy of Photoshop Elements. The problem is that the camera has a new sensor design, which means that the CR2 files that it produces are not compatible with the Raw importer that Adobe supply.

They have recently released a Release Candidate for version 5.4 of the filter, but rather annoyingly they’ve only supplied the installer for the big, expensive, versions of Photoshop. Which I don’t have.

Turns out though, that you can extract the required filter from the distribution that they do send out, and it works a treat.

• Go to http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Camera_Raw_5.4 and download the plug-in from the link.
• Open the zip file and find your way to:

cameraraw_5-4_rc_win_052109.zip\extensions\AdobeCameraRaw5.0All-190509032617\Assets

• Copy the file 1003 onto your desktop from this directory in the archive, and then rename it to camera.raw.8bi. This is the new version of the filter.
• On your computer, find your way to:

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop Elements 7.0\Plug-Ins\File Formats

• If you are using Photoshop Elements 6.0 there is a directory in an analogous place for that.
• Move your new file into this directory, overwriting the existing camera.raw file (you might want to make a copy of this file first, in case there are any problems later)
• Now you can open the raw files.

Updating your raw importer is actually a good idea whatever kind of camera you have. Adobe keep adding new features to this tool.

Hull Marina

Lovely weather today, so we went for a walk around the marina in the middle of Hull. I took the big camera.

Jolly Boating Weather

No, it wasn’t a catamaran.

Wii Motion Plus and Grand Slam Tennis

I’ve always liked the Wii. This doesn’t actually translate into playing with it that much as it turns out, but I still like the device itself.  My favourite game on it has always been the Wii Sports Tennis, because it feels a bit like playing the actual game. Nintendo have just released a controller upgrade for the Wii remote which is supposed to add even better motion detection (it contains a rotation detector so that the games can when you are twisting the controller). At the same time (and rather cleverly bundled with it) they have released a new tennis game.

Of course I got one. The tennis game itself is very good, and the improvements to the control over the way you swing the racket and direct the ball really make a difference.

Of course I can’t do it. I think I may have to unlearn a whole lifetime of tennis, squash and badminton. In Grand Slam Tennis you can use the control to direct the ball after you’ve hit it (something I always wanted to do in my tennis days, but never quite managed). Unfortunately for me this means that I direct the ball out of the court nearly every time, but I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it at some point.

The game doesn’t try to make the characters lifelike, setting instead for cartoony representations of all the big tennis names. This actually works a treat, and looks a lot better than some other tennis games where the players get stuck in the middle of the “uncanny valley” with zombie flesh and strangely glowing teeth. The fact that the Wii can’t actually render to the standard of the other two platforms must have driven that decision, but I think the game looks better for it.

I’ve yet to try multi-player, I have hopes that will be fun too. Until Microsoft come out with Project Natal this will do for me.

Last Friday

Last Friday of the semester. Spent most of the day either discussing examinations or marking them. Great fun.

Summer Bash

Time for another bash. We had a good turnout, even though it was the last but one day of the session and lots of folks had headed home for free food and drink.

We had our first Unreal Tournament Bot programming event at a bash, which was fun although next time I’ll hopefully have a bot that does something more than stand in the corner.

I took the big camera, and got some happy snaps. There are more on Flkickr, tagged with 2009Hullsummerbash.

Subtle product placement?

A useful prize for a change?

Rock Band gets some hammer (that mysterious black blob at the left side of the picture is my camera case…)

Adam looks superior, as well he might…

Butterfly Wings and Multiple Choice Questions.

They say that a butterfly flapping its wings over Mexico can cause a tiny turbulence that can build into a hurricane on the other side of the world.

I’ve no idea about this, but I do know that miss-typing the right answer for a single multiple choice question means that you have to go through and manually correct 140 quiz entries…

Marking Tuesday

I can’t remember today. I’ve been marking.

Röyksopp Forever

Every now and then Amazon recommends something I might like. I assume that it does this because it likes me. The recommendations are based on purchases I have made, and since a lot of these were presents through the years and included tapestry design books and DVDs of the film Mama Mia, most of the things it thinks I should get are somewhat wide of the mark. (I’ve noticed that you now have the option to disown some of your dodgier purchases, so that they don’t have any impact on what Amazon thinks you might like – which is a good thing).

Anyhoo, for some time the Amazon algorithm has been recommending I listen to some Röyksopp and so a while back I bought a CD of theirs. I didn’t buy it from Amazon though, I suppose I’ll have to tell them about it….

I like the music though. If you like Air you probably will too (I think this is how Amazon knew to put me on to it). Electronic ambient stuff (although the latest CD, Junior, has a much more electro-pop feel). Good for driving and background music. Some of it sounds like soundtrack music crying out for a film on top, and it has been used quite a lot for albums and films.

Worth a listen.

Rubbish Tip Etiquette

Made another trip to the tip today. I’m clearing out the loft so that I can put some different junk up there. I’m also adding some flooring, so that I won’t put my foot through the ceiling again. I now know the fundamental principle of installing loft floor panels:

Do not screw the first panel down tightly because then you can’t get any of the others to fit into it.

It has actually been great fun. Even the trips to the tip have been interesting. I’ve been worried that recently the  kind of people you meet at the tip has been declining. Last time I even saw a car there that was the same age as mine. However, this time things were back to normal. Folks were arriving in brand new Audis and Saab convertibles to drop off their stuff. I was sitting in the queue pondering on the etiquette of the tip. Cars look very similar these days, and I wondered what would happen if you accidently went back to the wrong car and started emptying it by mistake. Would the owner get cross  because you are messing with their rubbish?

I finally came to the conclusion that it is OK to empty somebody else’s car, as long as you don’t put the stuff into yours.

Coraline Movie Review

Went to see Coraline tonight. It was in 3D, which explained the unexpectedly high price and the glasses we had to wear (and they actually let us keep this time).

Coraline is a stop motion film where they used proper models, from the same stable as The Nightmare Before Christmas.  I suspect some computer trickery was involved during some of the sequences, but overall it remained true to its roots in the real world.

The story, about a child who finds a parallel world which seems much nicer than her dreary real one, is well told with some genuinely scary moments (even for a grown up like me). But the real star is the world itself, which looks fantastic.

If you like a scary tale it is worth a trip. If you enjoy good graphic art and design you should definitely go.

Broken Bot Server

The plan was to add Unreal Bot programming to our Summer Bash. This is a great way to use your C# smarts to control a player in an Unreal Tournament game and try your hand at writing game playing AI.

Unfortunately, fate had heard me thinking this, and so the server promptly broke. It is an aging Dell machine that sits in the corner of my office quietly chuntering to itself. I took it’s lid off, blew out the dust, re-seated the RAM and it still didn’t work. So I had a word with Adam, who came up with a pair of probably compatible memory SIMMs that I put in and it seems to work now, which is nice. It has twice as much memory as it used to have, and so it fair whizzes along now.

I then spent an entire lunch hour writing a Bot that gets itself stuck in corners.

Towards a Healthier Me

I’ve been trying to use Wii Fit to get myself slightly fitter. I can now use it upstairs, out of sight of everyone, and means I tend to use it more than I did before. It was rather disheartening to get on the machine and have it tell me I hadn’t visited for 300 or so days, but at least my weight had only changed by 4 pounds in that time.

Although it hadn’t gone down.

Anyhoo, I’m now trying to establish a routine which involves a quick 15 minutes or so each day, and I’m getting quite good at the step game. I want to complete the entire thing on perfect, just to see what the program does if you do that.

Summer Bash

We are having our biggest ever bash on Thursday 11th June. The department now has a licence for Team Fortress 2, and so we will be using this, along with all the usual attractions and even an Unreal Tournament programming competition.

The arrangements are as usual. Tickets will cost £2.00 and go on sale on Monday 8th of June in the Departmental Office at 10:00 am.

The bash will run from 4:00 to 8:00 pm, in room 312 of the Robert Blackburn Building, among other places....

You can keep track of the details at /events