University Open Day

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We had our first University Open Day of the season today. We had a huge number of people turn up, which was great.

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I like a nice audience.

Thanks for coming along folks, I hope the day was useful to you. The links I mentioned are:

www.csharpcourse.com – you can get the C# Yellow Book from here

www.verysillygames.com – there are some XNA C# samples here

www.wherewouldyouthink.com – our admissions site

Zune HD

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I’ve just managed to get my hands on a Zune HD. It is a personal music player from Microsoft. The Zune brand has been around for a while. The first players appeared a few years ago and have been developing ever since. They are rather like ipods; but they have one or two nice extra features, including built in WIFI and radio but they have always something of also-rans when compared with the all-conquering Apple product.

However the HD version might change that. It has a superb OLED display and an all new multi-touch user interface. As the name implies, you can put high definition video onto the machine and get video output into an HDMI display.  The whole package is lovely and the hardware is beautifully made and very stylish.

It also runs XNA, so you can take C# games that you have written for the framework and they just run on the device. Your games can even take advantage of the multi-touch interface and the accelerometer inside the Zune. I managed to convert a game to use them in just a few minutes. I’m going to write some posts nest week about porting games over onto the platform, but there won’t be much to say as it is all so easy to use.

The only problem with the Zune is that you can’t get it in the UK yet.

Undergraduate Welcome Party

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Today was the day of our welcome party for those new to the department. There was free drinks, free food, silly games and my evil quiz.

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This is the team that won. You should have seen this picture before I removed the red-eye…

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These folks came in second. The prizes this year were a bit smaller than previously, so we could pay for extra beer…

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This is the third placed team, obviously deeply moved by the generosity of the department.

Windows Live Mesh Rocks

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I’ve been using Windows Live Mesh now for a while and I must admit I love it. I now no longer have to bother about keeping files on my various machines up to date. I just have a couple of Live Mesh synchronised folders and I lob all the important stuff into there.

Live Mesh gives you on-line storage that is synchronised to the hard disk of one or more computers. Each computer runs the Live Mesh software which makes sure that whenever you change a file on one of the machines the copies on the other devices are automatically updated next time they connect to the network. It even provides a log of your activity, so you can track back what you have been up to.

Now, when I take my portable along to a lecture I don’t have to worry about putting the latest presentations onto it because I know they are already there. If I forgot the machine completely I could even use a web browser to pull the files off the Live Mesh online storage.

You get 5Gbytes of storage for free, and that is more than enough for a year’s worth of lecture notes and other teaching stuff. In fact, the service is so good that I’d pay to have more than that. If there was an annual subscription like I could put all my important stuff out there and I’d be happy to pay for that.

For students I can’t think why you wouldn’t use it. It would mean that you never lost your notes or programs, even if someone made off with your precious laptop.

Find out more at:

https://www.mesh.com/welcome/default.aspx

Making a Fool of Yourself the Rob Miles Way

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Turns out to be surprisingly easy. Here is your simple 7 step guide:

  1. Stand around talking after a lecture and forget that you are due in another lecture.
  2. Remember, panic and run to the lecture room.
  3. Note with surprise that your room is already occupied, and that a bunch of students are stood outside not knowing what to do.
  4. Assume that the there has been a timetabling error and apologise profusely to the students.
  5. Ring the office, and ask if there has been a timetable clash.
  6. Find out that you are in fact stood outside the wrong room sympathising with some students who you have never seen before, and that your class is in fact patiently waiting for you in the room across the corridor.
  7. Apologise to everyone. Twice.

Oh well. At least the lecture went well in the end.

Sometimes the Internet is less useful than you think

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Rob (on mobile phone in car, having waited 20 minutes to find a parking space):”So, you haven’t got any left in stock, despite me having specifically reserved one online before coming up town?”

SalesPerson:”No. Sorry about that. You can have the one that has been out in front of the shop if you like…”

Rob: “No thanks.” (sound of muttering and reverse gear being engaged…)

Useful Computer Science Links

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These are the links that I mentioned at my Computer Science introductory lecture.

Departmental Student SharePoint site:

http://intra.net.dcs.hull.ac.uk/student

08101 Module Site

http://intra.net.dcs.hull.ac.uk/student/modules/08101/default.aspx

08128 Module Site

http://intra.net.dcs.hull.ac.uk/student/modules/08128/default.aspx

Departmental Forums

http://intra.net.dcs.hull.ac.uk/student

eBridge

http://ebridge.hull.ac.uk/

Note: You will need to log into these. If the login doesn’t work try putting adir\ in front of your user ID.

Twitter

http://twitter.com/HullCompSci

Yellow Book

http://www.csharpcourse.com/

FreeSide

http://freeside.co.uk/

Hull ComSoc

http://www.hullcomsoc.org.uk/

Girl Geek Dinners

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=44205850218&ref=share

Rob Miles blog

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Girl Geek Dinners at Hull

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Girl Geek Dinners started in London some time back. The idea is to give girls who are interested in technology an occasion where they can get together and chat about life, the universe and everything.

The idea has now spread all over the world. We even have them in Hull now. The department is sponsoring the next one which will be in mid-October. If you want to find out more, there is a Facebook group “Hull Girl Geek Dinners” which you can join. If you are at Hull you should also keep an eye out for the posters that will be going up soon.

Start of Semester

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Everyone seems to have come back to Hull, which is nice. We have even had quite good weather today, which makes the whole thing even more pleasant. The corridor has been full of queues as people wait to register.

Being a new student seems to be a succession of standing in a queue to get a piece of paper that tells you to go to another queue and so on. As you go you accumulate lots of more bits of paper until at the end of the day you have a whole bag full. Then you sit through sessions where people tell you stuff that seems important but you probably aren’t taking in because you are concerned about being in the right place now and getting to the right place for the next session. And so on.

Don’t worry. It will all come right in the end.

Fingerprint Removal for Beginners

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I was doing some vacuuming today, as you do. The machine sucked up a couple of ball bearings (no idea where they came from) and proceeded to rattle like mad.

As an engineer, I knew how to fix this. I removed the little cover over the pipe and turned the vacuum upside down so that the bearings would fall out.Unfortunately, while doing this I left the machine plugged in. The biggest design flaw with our Dyson is that it is very easy to catch the power button and start it off. Which is just what I did next, with my finger still stuck inside it.

Apparently my screams were quite impressive. Number one wife even heard me, and she was downstairs on the telephone at the time. She snapped instantly into action “Rob’s just made a really strange noise” she said to the caller, and continued with her conversation.

When I got my digit out the end of the finger was all shiny, just as if it had been polished by thousands of strokes from a rotary brush. Which is not surprising really. It was also very warm. After I held it under the cold tap for a while it started to return to something like normal size and colour, and I think that no real damage has been done. I can still play the piano as badly as before I’m sure, and typing speeds seem unaffected.

The biggest worry is that it is one of the fingers that they check at US airports before letting you into the country. I wonder what they do if they discover that one of your fingers no longer has a print…