Scarborough Fair

Went to Scarborough today. They have a CSI Pinball table at one of the amusement arcades there. Great fun, with some very good sound samples from the show. When I am rich I’ll get a table of my own.  I took the big camera with the fat lens and the weather was very kind to us.

This panorama was taken from walls of Scarborough Castle, which must have looked very impressive until the Civil War in 1645, which doesn’t sound very civil at all, and resulted in the flattening of one of the towers.

Castle and sky.

This is the Master Gunner’s House. Now serves a very nice cup of tea..

Easter Monday

Did a whole bunch of not much today. Lovely.

Back in Hull

Travelled back to Hull today. Not by train unfortunately.

Train Trip

When on a proper train trip today. Unfortunately they wouldn’t let me drive.

.. although some parts look quite hard work.

Good Friday Foolishness

I’ve no idea what this tower is. But I could see it from my hotel room at DevDays and it looked nice against the sky.

Thought of a really good April Fool’s day joke today. Doh! Must put it in my diary for next year.

Today marks the start of a week away from work. Sort of. Let’s see how long I can go without touching a keyboard..

Windows Phone FAQ

I’ve decided to start building up my own little set of Windows Phone resources. I’m going to put down answers that I managed to figure out, so that I can look them up again if I ever need to. You can find my FAQ (it is a bit quiet at the moment, but I’ll add more as I find out more) here:

/windowsphonefaq/

This is all based my trial and plenty of error, I’ve left comments open on all the posts, so if you know different for any of them, feel free to put me right.

That’s All Folks

This is my final test, from LiveWriter. Expect to see quot in the static link to this post.

But if I modify the content, the quot disappears.

It's another test

This post is being sent directly from the web interface.

Update on 2010-04-01 08:43 by Rob

Aha!. Posts sent via MetaBlogger have their characters escaped. Posts sent via the web have such characters removed.

It’s not working

This is a test post for the Twitter plugin for Live Writer.

Update on 2010-04-01 08:41 by Rob

Hmm. It seems that editing a post which has a title containing quote (or perhaps other) strange characters causes the link generated by the Live Writer plugin to break. This is because such characters are removed from the post title when the update is put on the server.

Taking the Wrong Train Home

Waiting for the Wrong Train

After the fun and games last night it was time to pack up and go home. Having successfully negotiated the tram to the station I was feeling quite happy. I know the Dutch for “Schipol Airport” (it contains the word ‘Schipol’) , and having heard the announcer use the phrase in reference to the train on the platform I was quite happy to leap aboard in the confident expectation of going there. Unfortunately I don’t know the Dutch for “does not go to”, which meant that after 45 minutes or so I had to leap out of the train and find one that did.

Thanks to a very helpful lady who not only understood panic-stricken English but also knew where the right train was I was able to change direction and get to the airport in time for the flight.  I’m taking a phrase book next time…

Geek Night Files

My name in lights…

After the fun and games of Geek Night I’ve now put all the source files and the presentation up.

• You can find the presentation here.
• You can find all the sample code here.

There are also some more audience pictures on Flickr. Click on the picture above to find your way to my photostream and take a look. I’m off to find a tram, a train and a plane now…

World’s First Windows Phone Controlled Robot

Oscar, my tiny Micro Framework powered robot has become the other first robot to be controlled by a Windows Phone. Charlie Kindel was kind enough to take part in my demo and give the robot commands during the talk. Thanks for that.

I nearly didn’t make it work though, loading the wrong firmware into a device is never going to end well, but in the end all the components fitted together and a happy ending ensued. I’ll have more pictures, and the slide deck that explains how it all works, along with demo code, tomorrow.

This was the setup, you can see Oscar next to my laptop, the Micro Framework board I used as a web host is on the far left.  I also had my own router and WIFI access point so that I could get the phone onto my own private internet…

Update on 2010-04-01 08:53 by Rob

Clint tells me that this is not in fact the first Windows Phone controlled robot. I've ammended the title of the slide accordingly. You can find out about the other one here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/coding4fun/archive/2010/03/16/9979874.aspx

Also, because of problems with the updating of my original post I've had to delete it and make a new one, so some comments have been lost. Thanks for them though.

Devdays 2010 Windows Phone Game Development Talk.

Here is the content from my session. Thanks for being a great audience. This is actually the content from my TechDays 2010 Portugal session. I, ahem, overwrote the text in the original post. Sorry about that.

• Slide Deck
• Demo1: DamageCalc Silverlight Application
• Demo2: PatternMatch Silverlight Game
• Demo3a: StarLight XNA Game using XNA Accelerometer Emulation 
• Demo03b: Windows XNA “Game” Serving Gamepad accelerometer
• Demo04: WP7 Phone XNA Multi-touch Piano
• Demo05: WP7 XNA 3D Triangle Drawing
• Demo06: WP7 XNA Particle System

The code works on the current version of the CTP for the Windows Phone system. You can download this from here. If you want to use demo 3B to serve out accelerometer information to your phone app make sure that the program is running with Administrator privileges, and that you have modified the URL in the Phone Starlight program to address this host (localhost should just work).

If you want to get started with Windows Phone you can find a list of useful lines (and some FAQ entries) here.

Charlie Kindel Plays my Windows Phone Game

High score of 1 eh?  Impressive.

I’ve actually seen one of my programs running on a real device, which is nice.  This is the Pattern Match game that you can download from the my demos.

Hello from DevDays 2010

Setting up for Geek Night tonight. I just love those groovy chairs. Yes, that is a Windows Phone on the desk. And a robot…

It turns out that writing code in airports at 5:00 am actually works sometimes. I was able to get a new version of my program working and even find the source of all my hardware troubles. A dodgy network cable……

My first session is at 3:05 this afternoon, if you are at DevDays 2010 in the Netherlands then feel free to drop along and see more demos than you could shake a stick at…

For those of you not at the conference, I’ll be putting all the sample code and the presentation up on here later today.

Update on 2010-03-30 11:36 by Rob

Oops. Earlier version of this post (there have been a few) incorrectly referred to the event as Tech Days. Wrong. This is Dev Days. Sorry about that. It's not as if it isn't written just about everwhere around here...

Some Days Nothing Works

I spent a big chunk of today making things not work. It was as if the god of “Things Not Working” decided to pay me a special visit. It was all really annoying, in that the emulations all worked fine, but the real thing failed in the strangest of ways.  In the end I was reduced to opening the fridge door and watching the light come on, just because I wanted to see some hardware that did the right thing…..

Now with Added Pigs

Pepsi and Galaxy. Not sure why they are named after high calorie snack fodder, but there you go.

Two new arrivals chez Miles today. We now have even more guinea pigs. I actually like having guinea pigs as pets, they are one of the few animals that I’m fairly sure I’m cleverer than.

Ready for DevDays 2010

If you want to find what all these demo programs do and get the inside track on Windows Phone development come along to my DevDays 2010 session at 15:05 on 30th of March.  I’m also giving a session at 20:15 on that day as part of Geek Night. With robots.

Windows Phone Imagine Cup Competition

Oh to be young again. Students writing XNA or Sliverlight programs (including ones in the First Year at Hull who are turning out very good looking games for their coursework) can now take part in a development competition which is part of the Imagine Cup. The closing date is 24th May, which gives you plenty of time to work up something special. All the entrants who make it to the World Finals in Poland will get a Windows Phone. Lucky people.

Find out more here:

I wonder if they want any help with the judging….

Cletus Clay Rocks

Cletus Clay, in the flesh at Platform 2010

Yesterday at Hull Platform 2010 we had a really good talk from Sarah Web who told us all about Cletus Clay, a new videogame which is being made using “Claymation” animation. This looks absolutely fantastic, with lots of down home humour and cow abducting aliens. You can find out all about Cletus, and even discover how to build some of the game characters yourself at http://www.cletusclay.com/

I am definitely going to get a copy of this game when it comes out…