Heading for Berlin

Today I was up at 3:00 am. Not that I’m complaining that much, after all we are going to Berlin for TechEd 2009. We had a nice shiny hire care to drive to Liverpool airport where we would board one of the few direct flights to Berlin. Once we had arrived and unpacked it was time for a stroll. Of course I took the camera.

The Russian Embassy

Brandenburg Gate

I love the colours of the stone in this light.

Nice buildings at night.

I’ve put some more pictures on Flickr. I think we are going to like it here..

Have a Cow. Or Two

Got today’s picture nice and early.

Oh, and Happy Friday! Have a cow.

Bonfire Night

I tried to get some pictures of the fireworks around our house tonight. Set the camera up, opened the shutter and got lots of pictures of a window frame.

Oh well, here’s a tea strainer instead.

Daily Pictures

I’ve decided that there is no point in having a nice camera if you never use it. So from now on (until I get bored with the idea) I’m going to take and post a picture every day.

Don’t you just love those Zune plug caps…

Question of Time

So…. What time does the clock say?

Project Tuva – Richard Feynman Lectures

If you’ve not heard of Richard Feynman then you are very lucky. It means that you can have the experience of finding out all about him for the first time.

Richard Feynman was a Nobel Prize winning, safe cracking, bongo drum playing, beautiful women painting, atom bomb making genius.  Go and read Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman! to discover more.

And now you can get to see the man in action delivering a set of lectures about physics that have been put in the internets by Microsoft at their Project Tuva site. This lets you view the presentations with annotations and additional linkable content. A great way to spend a lunch hour or two.

Dollhouse Sunday

By gum, it really rained today. Far too wet for gardening. Much more sensible to stay indoors, play with the Zune software and watch a couple of episodes of Dollhouse, the new show from the pen of Jos Whedon, who created Buffy.

I’m starting to really like the program a lot. Some people reckoned that the early episodes were a bit weak, but I enjoyed them and it is starting to get very interesting as the characters develop.

The program itself is a sort of cross between Joe 90 and Probe.  “Dolls” or “actives” have their brains filled with the person they need to be to do their assigned job, be it escort, private eye or assassin (but never pool cleaner – or at least not yet). They are then sent out into the field to fulfil their task and then hauled back to be wiped and reused. 

When not at work they live in the Dollhouse of the title as amiable blank slates. Of course things don’t always work quite right, and so there are back stories of NSA investigations and rogue actives and the whole setup has a moral ambiguity which means you are never sure whether or not the Dollhouse itself is a force for good or evil.

The series aired on the Science Fiction channel in the UK, but I don’t think it made it to terrestrial, which is a shame. Fortunately you can pick up season one at a reasonable price,  and I reckon it is well worth the investment.

London Trip

Off to London today. In a brand new train. So new they didn’t have any  cups to dish out the free coffee for the posh people in First Class. Heh heh.

Millennium Bridge Handrail

View from Tate Modern.

We went off to Foyles, best bookshop in the world:

The bad news is that the Computer part of the shop is now the Cookery part of the shop. Then again, perhaps more people need to eat than need to write programs…

The good news is that they had three copies of my book. Go me!

Album Shaker for Zune HD

I’ve been playing with the Zune HD and seeing what you can make it do. The answer would seem to be lots. I’ve just finished a little demo that is an alternative way to find your music. Since XNA gives you access to all your album artwork I thought it would be nice if all the album pictures bounced around the screen and you just touch the one you want to play. Turns out that XNA is a great thing to write this in:

This is going to be one of my TechEd demos now, it really does work well.

A prize for anyone who manages to name all the artist and track details.

Fun with MineSweeper

I spent some of today working on the coursework for our First Year programming course. Every year we get our students to create a simple game. Last year it was Battleships. This year it is MineSweeper, a game with a long and honourable history, having been shipped with every version of Windows right up to Windows 7.

One of my rules is that I don’t ask the students to do something that I can’t. At least not in the First Year…

So I spent a happy afternoon putting together a simple version of the game and writing the notes to go with it. I’m so pleased with what I ended up with that I might make a version for the Zune. It is a really nice platform for that kind of thing.

The first part of the lab goes live next week and should be great fun.

TechEd 2009 Test Firing

I’m doing a session at TechEd 2009 in Berlin:

DEV08-IS Writing Games and Exploring the Microsoft Zune HD in XNA 3.1

Wed 11/11 | 17:30-18:45 | Interactive Theatre 2 - Orange

I got that information off the TechEd schedule builder. So it must be true.

As part of the preparation I delivered my first pass of the session this afternoon at Hull to a bunch of students and staff who were nice enough to turn up. Thanks for coming along folks. I’ll put the slides and sample code up on my blog after TechEd.

Idiot

Last week I wanted to take the Tosh tablet home to do some work preparing it for TechEd. But it wouldn’t come off the docking station I keep in my office. The lever kept jamming when I tried to remove the machine.

I cursed this for a while, concocted a theory where something inside had got stuck and put the whole thing, laptop, docking station and all, into a carrier bag and took it all home for repair. I reasoned that I just had to pop the back off, release the offending catch by hand and then all would be well.

The back of the docking station is held on by twelve screws. I undid ten of them and noticed that the back would not come off. So I laboriously refitted all ten and, as I was tightening the last screw, I noticed the remaining two. So I took all the screws out and then discovered that to get the back off the docking station you have to also undo some fittings on the top of it. Which was presently stuck underneath the laptop, which was still securely fixed on.

So I cursed some more and had a cup of tea. As I was taking a sip I noticed a little lever on the side of the docking station that I hadn’t seen before. It had a little padlock drawn next to it.  I moved the lever to the other setting, unlocking the tablet and allowing it to be easily removed.

Idiot.

Monday Picture

What a nice view to start the week with.

Another Reality Fault

I love Windows Media Center. I’ve used it for a couple of years, ever since I got rid of my Sky box.

A couple of weeks back the Freeview system was “upgraded”. I got loads of difficult to remove messages on the TV telling me that I would have to re-scan and find all the channels again. What the message didn’t say was that after the “upgrade” pretty much nothing would work any more. All my TV channels are broken apart from Five.

Now I quite like CSI and Flash Forward, but there are actually other things I fancy watching as well. But I can’t. Kind of ironic really. An upgrade to improve the reception of Five has broken everything else.

Of course all my other digital tellies work fine, it is only the Media PC that is broken. Initially put it down to the TV tuner cards I’m using as they are a bit old.  So I tried playing around a bit. I managed to get the Sony PlayTV that I normally use with to the PS3 to talk to the computer and that duly found all the channels. But it would only show me channel Five. Wah.

This is very, very strange. If it wasn’t for the fact that it was happening I would say it was impossible. There is some muttering on the interwebs about changes to multiplexes and signal strengths, but nobody has reported the same problem I’ve got.

I call this kind of thing a “Reality Fault”, in that everything is working fine, it is just that reality around it is broken. Oh well.  If I can find a cheap enough TV card I’ll put that in and rebuild everything I suppose.

Don’t you just love progress?

Nice Weather

This morning the weather here was horrid. Wet and grey and just right for going out and not getting what you want from the shops.

So I did.

In the afternoon things picked up a bit.

Nice tree and sky.

Not Intrepid

We got a letter today. Someone had tried to deliver a package and failed because “our house is not on a road”. Well, I looked outside and the road was still there. True enough, a road near where we live is blocked at the moment while some new flood drains are installed, but we can still get in or out. And the letter managed to get here….

I rang the delivery company and told them that it is actually possible to get to where we live. I guess that as soon as they saw that the way the SatNav was pointing was blocked they must have given up.

What?

I’m collecting stupid error messages. This is one of my favourites:

Every time I see it (which is often because our eBridge system has some links to insecure pages in amongst its https) my brain does a double flip as to what it might mean. Show someone that message and ask them which of the buttons is the dangerous one and I’ll bet they’ll look at you as if you were from Mars. Why can’t they just say:

The “Ultimate Steal” is Back

If you are a UK student I have some very good news for you. The Ultimate Steal is back. This is a deal from Microsoft that puts its software into your hands at less than video game prices.  You can get Office Ultimate for 39 pounds and Windows 7 Home Premium for 30.

Well worth checking out.

http://www.microsoft.com/uk/education/studentoffer/default.aspx

Up Movie Review

Go and see Up. Just go.

Rob at TechEd 2009

I’ve just found out that I’m giving a session at Microsoft TechEd 2009 in Berlin next next month. It is Breakout Session DEV08-IS: Writing Games and Exploring the Microsoft Zune HD in XNA 3.1 and it is in Interactive Theatre 2 – Orange on 11/11/2009 at 17:30-18:45. I’m really pleased about this. I’ve done TechEd sessions before and they are always great fun.

If you are in Berlin and attending TechEd 2009 I’d love to see you there. I’ve even come up with a new joke to use during the session, this alone should make it worth attending…

If you are are in Hull I’ll be “test flying” the session(and the joke) in the department before I go. The presentation will be in Lecture Theatre D in the Robert Blackburn Building at 2:15 pm on Wednesday 28th October.