Imagine Cup Open for Business

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Today the Imagine Cup 2009 started properly. I've been involved with this competition for a very long time, since computers filled entire rooms, and were programmed using punched cards.

Actually no. But I did attend the first World Final in 2003. Lots of things have changed since them of course. The competition has gone from 14 teams to 70, and it now takes on many forms with strands involving such things as robotics, embedded, photography and short film.  My favourite part has always been the original contest, which is the Software Development one. Nowadays I'm involved as a judge, as well as promoting the competition to students back at Hull, and I really love taking part and seeing just what enthusiastic people can do with technology.

Tomorrow is when all the judging actually starts, but today we had the opening ceremony which took place at the citadel in Cairo. We even had Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's Chief Technology officer give a presentation to the students, which was a great thing to see. That the guy who took over from Bill Gates reckons the competition is worth taking seriously is an indication of just how important Microsoft takes this contest. I took a camera a long (of course) and got a few pictures.

 

Outside the Citadel

 Inside the Citadel

The ceiling is fantastic

Joe Wilson gets things started.

The view on the way out.

 

Blogging the Imagine Cup with Flickr

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I’m trying a new approach to blogging the Imagine Cup this time. I’ll be putting bits and bobs up on these hallowed pages (of course) but I’ll be also putting up shed loads (if you can load a shed onto a server) of pictures on Flickr, with the usual insightful comments.

From what I’ve seen of Cairo this is going to be great, follow the magic at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/robertmiles/

everything breaks

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image231969356.jpgI was pretty much set for the trip to Cairo for the Imagine Cup. I'd squeezed all the required bits into the case and finished agonizing about taking the big camera (decided not to in the end) and all was well. I opened the laptop for my final email check. It was dead. Very dead. Take the battery out and it still won't work dead. Not good. In fact very bad. It had all the things on it I needed, plus a bunch of stuff I was going to work on. Wah!

The only good news was that if it had done this a day later I would have been totally stuck. And I had taken a backup the day before (perhaps that is what caused the problem).

Anyhoo, I'm presently sitting in Terminal 3 at Heathrow with my trusty NetBook in my bag. It has most of what I need on it, thanks to some feverish installing last night. I'm always nervous about going away, but fine once I get on the road. I've never been to Egypt before. This should be fun.

Klaus at Pixel Creations

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Many years ago I used to work with Klaus. This was when robots were wildly fashionable. You wouldn’t think that things like engineering research have fashions, but they do. Klaus was doing things like making robots weigh chocolate bars, figure out where they were and all sorts. Great fun.

That was a while back, and I met him today when he was buying a flash gun. As was I. I’ve not done any flash photography for a long time. The first flash gun I ever bought was a Sunpak DC3. This was solid state, made a fantastic whistling noise like the scary bit at the end of the Silence of the Lambs, and was very optimistically rated by the manufacturer. So much so that the first roll of, very expensive, colour slide film that I used it with just showed lots of pictures of eyes and teeth glinting in the darkness. I’ve not been that keen on flash photography ever since. But I’m told that the new flashguns can do very fangled things by talking to the camera and you can use them for fill in effects and all sorts. So I thought I’d get one.

Klaus was buying one for his business. He now works as a professional photographer and is really enjoying his work. You can find him at http://www.pixelcreations.co.uk/.

Who’s Captain Kirk?

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For Father’s Day I received a box set of the original Star Trek season one. It looks fantastic because even though it was filmed years ago they used proper 35MM film. I started watching the first ever broadcast episode (The “Man Trap”) last night. When I saw this the first time it gave me nightmares for ages. It is not quite as scary now, but still darned good fun.

If you’ve not seen it before (although I find this hard to believe) you are in for a treat. If you have, it is still worth a look because of the way that they have redone the shots of the Enterprise. It now looks really good.

My New Book is in the shops

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A man from UPS dropped of a big box today. In it were 10 copies of my latest book. One of the many nice things about writing for Microsoft Press is that they give you 10 free ones.

I’ve been through the text and not found any mistakes so far, which is rather nice.

Oh, and for the student who won the Super Geek Word search at the Summer Bash, your prize has now arrived……

Paul Moves On

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Paul Chapman left us today. He did is degree at Hull a while back, went off and did a lot of Seabed Visualisation (that is what is PhD is about), came back to Hull, taught a bunch of courses, did a lot of work on the Venus project and even found time to play some music. And jump out of planes. And build the world’s first paragliding simulator. And then buy his own motorised paraglider and fly it over the university taking pictures.

Paul is taking up a position at Glasgow. They are very lucky to have him, and we are very sorry to lose him.

Neil Young

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I’ve not been to a rock concert for ages. I’ve never been to one where the headline act is 64 years old. But today I found myself in Nottingham Arena, surrounded by lots of people of a certain age, waiting for Neil Young to come and play his guitar at us.

By gum he was good though. I’ve not been a huge fan of his in the past, but I can see I’ve been missing out.  I knew quite a few of the songs because they are standards, and they were all delivered with a gusto and energy that belied both the age of the performer and the fact that he must have played them many times before. It must be particularly strange for him to sing songs he wrote ages ago about being 24, but he did it all very well.

I took a camera and was a bit worried about taking pictures, but I knew I was OK when the security folk started ducking so that they would not be in my line of sight.

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The support act were very good too. I’m afraid I didn’t catch their name though.

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Great night out. I enjoyed it so much I even bought a T shirt…

Windows 7 is a Dog

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I mean this as a compliment. I’m finding that I can treat it like a dog and it remains utterly faithful. By this I mean I can close and open my laptop lid, plug and unplug monitors and devices and generally use the machine exactly how I want and it just comes back for more. It has not failed me once.

I’m pretty sure that most of this behaviour is down to the fact that the hardware driver writers have got their collective acts together and Microsoft is being more mean to them to make things work. At least, I hope so. I had some horrid times with Vista at the hands of certain hardware vendors whose idea of making a machine “Vista Capable” was to slap a sticker on the box. But those days seem to be long gone.

I’m also rather liking the way that I can find things more quickly, and that switching between windows, and moving them around on the screen is easier. I’ve not really explored many of the proper new features of the platform, but every now and then I’ll stumble across something that is now suddenly easier, like connecting a monitor for a presentation or opening a document from the program menu.

Roll on the full release I say.

Yorkestra

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Tonight we went to see number one daughter play in the York Concert Orchestra. I went because I have an innate love of culture and music and also because she said they were playing the Muppets theme music. Which they did, very well. There is nothing quite like an orchestra going at it with a good head of steam and they sounded great. I took the big camera and took some snaps during the noisier bits.

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I will give an enormous prize to the first person to tell me what tune they are playing…

Steam vs Robot

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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…

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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…