Warwick Castle is ace. Having great weather probably helped, but the place was pretty cool too.
View from the top
Castle and Mill
Ballista power.
The two big round things on each side take a person each, who walk inside them to lift up a four ton weight that is used to propel the payload a heck of a distance. If someone rocks up outside your castle with one of these you should really let them in, because in the end they are coming in whether you like it or not…
I’ve hardly touched a keyboard or mouse for the last few days and I must admit that I quite like this. I have had to use the computer to get pictures off the camera though…
The weather is being very nice to us.
We went off to LegoLand today. I really do know how to have fun me. We went on all the rides that make you wet and guess what? We got very wet. I love the models though.
Not Really Real
I had a rush of blood to the head, and I got a copy of the new Mindstorms 2.0 kit which is awesome and lets you make a walking robot. I’ve starting playing with the software that comes with it, and I think I’ll have a go with the Microsoft Robotics Studio next. Great fun.
Went down to Bewley today and took a look at their town museum that promises “A surprise around every corner”. I wouldn’t quite go that far, but there were some nice photo-ops.
A bit like my garage
Then we went on to the Severn Valley Railway.
Not steam, but nice all the same.
And so to the holidays. Packing up the cameras and the computers so we can go and live for a week without broadband.
Maybe we could be in for some good weather, which would make a nice change.
If you have been wondering about what all the “Today I have Been Mostly Writing” posts last month were all about you can find out as the courseware is now available on Microsoft Faculty Connection:
This is a complete programming course which is designed to be taught over 10 weeks at a rate of 6 sessions a week (although you can pull individual sections out and use them if you wish). There is a course matrix that sets out how to sequence this.
The course teaches programming from first principles, using XNA games as the basis of all the sample code. There are extensive tutor notes on the slide decks and a sequence of step-through labs for students to follow. There are even revision tests for each section. It is based on the chapters in my textbook, which is the first link in the above list.
You can download the material without signing in, by selecting the “Skip this Step” option on the download page.
If you are going to use the material in any way I’d love to hear how you got on.
I’m really pleased to find out that there is now a Digital Community in Hull:
They are organising a live event in October which has some interesting speakers:
I’ve persuaded my boss to pay for a ticket, and I’m really looking forward to it. I’m pleased to find that they do student pricing for the event (which seems to me quite reasonable) and with a bit of luck we can involve some of our students in their events in the future.
One of the most important things about computing is that the field is constantly changing and professional development is something you really need to work at if you want to keep your skills up to date. Hull Digital looks like it will be a neat way of doing this.
Spent lots of today driving a big van. It was time to move number one daughter to her new pad in London, and so it was up with the lark and off in the big tin box on wheels that I’d hired for the day.
I like van driving. Everything in a van cab has been carefully designed to do a job. There was even a little clip in the dashboard into which you could put your delivery notes and a big area under the windscreen for your copy of “The Sun” and empty MacDonald's boxes. They also have monster (and completely un-burstable) engines and sound systems. And other people get out of your way. I’ve even figured out how to reverse them. Great stuff.
One of the problems with ultra high resolution screens is that they often display text in ultra low sizes. My little Toshiba tablet is a case in point. It has a lovely display with loads of dots that I can't read. If you have a similar problem you might be interested in a Windows 7 feature that is rather nice. In the screen resolution dialogue box there is an option to "Make text and other items larger or smaller". If you select this you can enlarge most of the hard to read things on the screen by 125 and 150 percent.
It doesn't work for everything, programs that insist on rendering their own dialog boxes for no good reason (step forward Adobe Photoshop Elements) will still be hard to read, but it beats the alternative, which was to set the resolution to a value that didn't really fit the display and then have everything slightly blurry.
People, you really should read this:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4111/dirty_coding_tricks.php
Number one son bought a copy of Batman, Arkham Asylum yesterday, and spent the evening playing it while I watched. Very, very good. Batman has managed to recapture the joker after a suspiciously easy chase and accompanies him to the asylum to make sure the joker is properly re-habilitated. And of course it all goes wrong.
The action seems quite linear, in that you have to work your way through a series of challenges to unravel what has happened and rescue everyone, but the thing I really like is the whole setup. The artwork and sound have been beautifully realised to create a very impressive environment in which batman has to make every move really count. I especially like the “detective view” which seems to work just like those “X-Ray” specs you saw advertised on comic books claimed to. Batman himself is nicely gritty and ironic, and very mortal, for all his gadgets.
Great fun, and another example of just how close to film realistic video games are getting.
We put Windows 7 on the Media PC today. I got hold of a 1 Terabyte hard disk, slapped it in a spare drive bay and left the machine to get on with it while we went out shopping. When we got back the system was pretty much sorted and except for some kerfuffle with the (now very old) TV tuner cards that needed some blast from the past drivers the install went very smoothly.
It works a treat. I was looking forward to some tweaks to the Media Centre and I wasn’t disappointed. It now supports digital Teletext, which is great, and it also has some really neat user interface touches. My favourite is that when you move through a recorded programme you get a little thumbnail of the image at that point in the show.
Windows 7 provides the speedup that I was expecting (which is nice) and the whole thing has given my two and a half year old media PC a new lease of life. I’m actually bringing machines out of retirement so that I can put Windows 7 on them and make them useful again. My old Toshiba Tablet loves Windows 7 and I’ve persuaded the boss to buy me a new battery for it so I can take it on the road again.
There was a tradition that new versions of Windows drove hardware sales, as people upgraded their machines to cope with the demands of the new operating system. Whilst it is always nice to have a new machine (I love shiny boxes) I think this time you won’t have to. In fact the upgrade will feel like a real upgrade (which I guess is how it is supposed to be).
The good news for students is that the Microsoft Academic Alliance version of Windows 7 being given away free is the Professional edition, which includes the Media Centre component. Previously students were given the Business edition of Vista, which didn’t have media centre support. If you are lucky enough to go to an institution which, like the University of Hull, has joined the alliance then you will be able to get your own free copy of this rather nice operating system.
While I was spending my summer mostly writing, number one daughter and me had a little lunchtime diversion called Project Runway. It is a reality TV show for aspiring dress designers. Each week the contestants are given a stupidly short time to make some kind of clothing and then, after a fashion show, the weakest one is kicked out. A bit like “The Apprentice” but with sewing machines. Just the kind of thing I’d expect to hate.
I love it. I like the way that the people taking part really can do stuff. They can draw a design, make the pattern, cut out some cloth and then sew it together, and at the end they have something that looks like what they wanted. Part (all right, most) of the appeal of “The Apprentice” is discovering just what kind of people have crawled out of the woodwork and been allowed by the producers to take part, and then watching them fail at whatever footling task they have been given.
But the appeal of Project Runway for me is that the people taking part are there because they really want to get into fashion, not just appear on the telly. The big prize is a chance to run their own fashion show and by the end of it you can really see where each of the designers is coming from. Good stuff.
Went out for the day today. Any idea where?
.. we had good weather though..
Nice place
Last night I thought I’d print out some pictures for my office walls. I’ve just switched back to using my venerable HP inkjet as I think it prints better colours than the Canon one I got last year. And 7dayshop were doing a good deal on proper ink cartridges for it. So off I went. Of course, I’d forgotten how horrid HP printer drivers are, and coupled with the “quirkiness” of Photoshop Elements (I’m being very generous here) I had a much rougher time than I expected.
I discovered that if you are daft/clever enough to try and print with the preview enabled in the printer driver (which is one way I try to avoid wasting a quid's worth of paper and ink) the driver just hangs up, with no way of clearing the print job. You have to delete the printer and make a new one. Of course I didn’t find this out straight away, I had to waste half an hour doing reboots and trying lots of other things before I finally managed to get the thing to work.
And the printing looked horrid. There were awful smears showing through on the page. I stared (and this is true) at the page coming out of the printer for at least 30 seconds before it dawned on me what I’d done. I’d put an already printed page through the printer. I’d used some enormously expensive amount of ink ruining a perfectly good picture, which I’d popped into the paper box to stop it from getting creased.
Idiot.
Google is a verb. It means “to search for on the internet”. Perhaps one day it will also mean “to take over the world”. Perhaps not.
Anyhoo, like everyone else I’ve used Google for all my searching needs since forever. Today I had a go with the Microsoft competitor, bing. I’d heard nice things about it, and so I thought I’d give it a go. And the big surprise is that it is actually quite good. I’m not convinced it is as good as Google for everything, but it is certainly good enough to make make wish I had two search boxes on my browser toolbar, one for Google searching and another for Bing. The two actually complement each other quite nicely.
Bing is good for entertainment and travel, and displays its home page and the search results with a graphical pizzazz that Google lacks. Google is good for stuff a bit more off the beaten track and does maps better. But it is nice to see some proper competition in the search arena.
Imogen Heap is ace. We saw her live in York ages ago and she has gone from strength to strength since then. She has just (today) released a new album, Ellipse, which I downloaded first thing this morning before going to work. It is a wonderful thing this internets, you can go from wanting to having in a remarkably short time.
Anyhoo, on first hearing the album is nice and tuneful with some neat vocal touches and sound effects. I’ve not heard anything to top “The Moment I Said It” from her previous album “Speak For Yourself”, but that is actually quite a tall order and these things do grow on you.
Worth checking out.
That’s it. The notes for chapter 16 is now on their way off my system and I’m on my way to getting my life back.
I’m suddenly being followed by loads of new people on Twitter. I can think of two possible explanations for this:
I’m now onto the last chapter of the course notes. It is a nice feeling doing these things for the last time.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
