Dreamspark Goodies

Andy pointed me at a feature of Expression Web that does a similar job to the Balsamiq user interface designer:

http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/Sketchflow_Overview.aspx

I had a quick play and you can make diagrams and design the navigation between the forms in your use interface. However, I found it a bit more complex to use than Balsamiq (although it has to be said that it does an awful lot more, and actually lets you construct the interfaces as well as play with them).

For students the interesting thing is that it is available for free from DreamSpark:

https://www.dreamspark.com

If you are a student on an academic course (and have an Athens username to prove it) then you can get hold of all kinds of goodies here, including operating systems and Visual Studio.  You can even get XNA Creators Club memberships so you can deploy your XNA programs to an Xbox 360. Well worth a look.

True Hitch Hiker?

Strange things. In a week when a new volume in the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy series is released (although sadly not by Douglas Adams) a company releases this.

Makes you think.

Fantastic Mockup Software

Adam put me on to this software. He plans to use it for his design documents for his Final Year Project. It is really nice if you want to make mockups of your user interfaces and storyboard your programs before building them.

http://www.balsamiq.com

The supplied templates look really good, in fact I’m tempted to get a copy myself…

Windows Live Mesh Rocks

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

Useful Computer Science Links

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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HullCompSci Twitter Account

For any students at Hull who are interested in keeping up with what we are doing in the department we now have a Twitter feed. Keep up to date with the department at:

http://twitter.com/HullCompSci

Dirty Coding Tricks

People, you really should read this:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4111/dirty_coding_tricks.php

SkyDrive is Superb

Fancy 25G of online storage for free? Thought so. It gets even better though. You can have public storage, private storage or anywhere in between. Everything is done via the web, so you can push files between PCs, Macs and anything with a browser. I’m getting into the habit of lobbing important stuff up there just to keep things safe.

If you have a Windows Live account you are in business. Just head up to http://skydrive.live.com and start uploading files. The biggest downsides for me are the fact that you have to drag individual files into the storage and that my home broadband makes uploading a rather slow experience.

Great stuff.

Reading Twitter Feeds with LINQ

LINQ (Language Integrated Query) is a really neat feature of .NET which makes it very easy to work with structured data. I’d always thought this meant things like databases and stuff, but it also works with XML. This CodeProject article shows how you can use LINQ to read information out of Twitter feeds.

http://www.codeproject.com/articles/35668/How-to-Read-Twitter-Feeds-With-LINQ-to-XML.aspx

Very clever. It took me around five minutes to make a simple Twitter Viewer application based on the code given:

https://static.squarespace.com/static/5019271be4b0807297e8f404/52c5bcfce4b0c4bcc9121347/52c5bd03e4b0c4bcc91238f5/1240577347000/TwitterViewer.zip

Wookieepedia

Geoff sent me this. Brilliant.

http://www.wookieepedia.org/

Fantastic Blog Site

Abhinaba Basu is a Microsoft Developer working out of Hyderabad in India. He works on the Compact Framework Team, take excellent photographs and even finds time to paint great pictures.

He has written some great blog posts about how the internals of the Compact Framework and you really should read them. If you have ever wondered how Garbage Collection works he has one of the best explanations I’ve seen. You can find his work blog here.

Must have Thumb Drive Apps

If you carry a memory stick around with you all the time (and who doesn’t - I’ve got one on my keyring) here are some great ideas for applications you can put on it.

http://crazeegeekchick.com/blog/25-must-have-thumb-drive-apps-for-geeks/

Clusty to the Rescue

I’ve spent bits of today trying to get my .NET Micro Framework devices to work. For some reason I want to take my smallest PC away with me next week to Portugal, and this has meant a certain amount of heartache.

The PC is an Advent netbook. I bought it earlier this year and I love it to bits. It arrived running Windows XP, and I’ve just put the beta version of Windows 7 on it. This turned out to be really easy. I just plugged in an external DVD drive, tweaked the BIOS to make it boot from the DVD and then booted from the Windows 7 disk. I did a brand new install, wiping out the original operating system and, of course, removing the recovery partition. I don’t do things by halves, me.

The installation was smooth and surprisingly quick. The only problem was that I had to find my way to the RealTek site to locate and install the WIFI drivers, but once I did that I had the machine on the campus network with very little fuss.

That was a week ago. Since then I’ve installed Microsoft Office 2007, Visual Studios 2005 and 2008, Photoshop Elements and a bunch of other programs, all of which seem to work fine. Unfortunately, when I tried to install the USB drivers for some of my .NET Micro Framework devices, things started to get a little tricky.

The drivers that were supplied with the hardware didn’t work. I read somewhere that Windows 7 refuses to install drivers that have not been signed, and so I did some digging and found that there is magic that is supposed to switch this off.

Unfortunately it didn’t seem to work for me. I did a lot more digging and kept hitting brick walls, trying increasingly more complex searches for the drivers that it seemed like I needed and not finding anything. By lunchtime I’d resigned myself to taking my heavy old Toshiba away with me.

Then I remembered Clusty. This is a clustering search engine that I’ve used in the past to good effect.  You get your search results nicely categorised, which makes finding your way through them must easier.  I fed in the same search string that I’d been using unsuccessfully on Google and it came back with a list of hits that made it very easy to find just what I wanted. And it worked. So it looks like I’ll be writing code for tiny devices on a tiny device, which I guess is just how it should be.

Great Principles of Computing

I’ve been watching videos during my lunch breaks over the last few days. This one is really superb. Very interesting if you are not sure what Computer Science is about.

The answer, by the way, is everything.

SmallBasic

If you want to rediscover the joys of writing little programs and doing fun things with computers you could take a look at SmallBasic. It is inspired by the tiny Basic interpreters that you used to get with your Commodore 64 or BBC micro and lets you write programs using a very simple language in a friendly IDE.

I’m a great believer in starting to program by keeping your focus on the algorithms and things like this can only be good. Although I’m not sure about the Goto statement figuring quite so large....

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/devlabs/cc950524.aspx

Poladroid

I used to have a little Polaroid camera. I loved the way that the pictures appeared over time, and the strange way it had with colours. Nowadays such technology is being replaced by digital, but the Poladroid application does give you a way to recapture that old magic. It takes pictures and gives them the Polaroid treatment, right down to the borders and the way that they take time to appear. You can actually watch the image develop, and even take snapshots of the slowly appearing picture.

You can get the application from: http://www.poladroid.net/

    

A couple of snaps which have been converted.

Great fun.

Update on 2009-01-28 15:12 by Rob

Then again, Polaroid might be making a comeback:

http://www.the-impossible-project.com/

New Free Stuff

The smartest thing I did last year was to give something away. The result of putting the "Famous Yellow C# book" up on the blog has been a huge increase in traffic and thousands of downloads over the last few months.

Loads of people have been in touch saying how useful it has been to them. A number of courses are using it as one of their texts and it has even made its way onto the digital bookshelf of some leading software manufacturers. And of course quite a few new typos have been discovered....

I got a query today from someone who is moving from Java to C# and I remembered that some time ago I wrote some notes about this. I put them up on this site ages ago, but I've tidied the text up, converted it to pdf and put it in a coloured cover (this time orange). You can find the new material alongside the Yellow book on the same site:

/c-yellow-book/

Update on 2009-01-30 09:53 by Rob

I've made some tiny changes to the text, and fixed some typos. It never looks good if you get the words wrong in the introduction.....

Songsmith

The people behind SongSmith reckon that "Everybody has a song inside". I just hope that in my case it isn't "Shaddap You Face".

Anyhoo, the program itself is rather clever (as it might be, coming from Microsoft Research). It will orchestrate a tune that you sing, adding accompaniment in one of 30 styles. It does this by analysing the notes that it hears and then using some clever algorithms to pick chords that would sound the best alongside.

It is a free download, and looks like fun. Perhaps it might be useful for some cheap and copyright free game soundtracks....

Watch This

Amazing.

Little Boots

You might have heard of Little Boots. She might be the next musical sensation. I quite like the sound of the free track you can download from iTunes at the moment.