Final day of the holiday today. I’ve been very good, and done hardly any proper work. I’ve even done some gardening, which is most unlike me. Today we went off to Dalby Forest in North Yorkshire. One of the best places in the universe.
One day I’d like to stay here for a while.
We especially like the Bridestone walk. These are massive rock formations along the side of the valley.
Some of the paths can be quite steep, but always look good.
I didn’t actually buy much yesterday at the Gadget Show. Just a pair of enormous headphones from Sure that sound amazing (I daren’t tell number one wife how much I paid for them but they were heavily discounted) and a Bamboo Fun graphics tablet. They had them at 20% show discount and although they didn’t have any left to sell I was able to order one for home delivery the following day. I was thinking “Yeah, right.” as I gave my details, but the company were as good as their word and the tablet arrived today.
The thing about the Bamboo fun that had me most interested was that it supports multi-touch input as well as pen based control. It turns out that multi-touch is indeed supported, but not in a proper Windows 7 way. The Windows 7 touch API is designed for screen only use, there is no support for multi-touch tablet input in the operating system. Instead the tablet driver produces cursor and keyboard commands that allow you to do things like pinch zoom in compatible programs. This means there is unfortunately no way you can use it for things like the Windows Phone emulator, where multi-touch input would be very nice. I’m not that bothered though, the device comes with a very good software bundle including a free copy of Photoshop Elements 7 and it is a nice tablet with a responsive pen which will make image editing easier.
Went to the Gadget Show today in Birmingham. They released a whole bunch of extra tickets and so number one son and I thought that it might be worth a visit. So off we went. Got there with out a hitch and got in nice and early. I took the tiny camera to snatch some pictures.
There was a lot of 3D out there, with funny glasses all over the place. We tried the Sony one and there was definitely a 3D effect, which of course you can’t see above.
It’s all very well setting up a monster system like this, but why let a five year old drive it?
As a connoisseur of convoluted clocks, this one looked very interesting, but I daren’t ask the price.
They were showing off Split Second in the gaming area. This is being developed by Black Rock, a developer which is part of Disney Studios and is based in Brighton (and numbers a few Hull graduates amongst its employees). The game looks absolutely awesome, it is a racing game with an amazing interactive environment you can use in the game play. Think Burnout with bigger explosions. Then add some even bigger explosions. That one’s going on my shopping list.
This game isn’t on my list. Why would anyone pay 24.99 for a Forklift truck simulator? I spent a few weeks one summer driving one and they can be quite fun (especially doing drifts with a tonne of frozen peas on the front) but even so…
BTW number one son is playing Just Cause 2 and it looks really good.
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..
Did a whole bunch of not much today. Lovely.
Travelled back to Hull today. Not by train unfortunately.
When on a proper train trip today. Unfortunately they wouldn’t let me drive.
.. although some parts look quite hard work.
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..
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:
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.
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.
This post is being sent directly from the web interface.
Aha!. Posts sent via MetaBlogger have their characters escaped. Posts sent via the web have such characters removed.
This is a test post for the Twitter plugin for Live Writer.
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.
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…
My name in lights…
After the fun and games of Geek Night I’ve now put all the source files and the presentation up.
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…
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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…..
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.
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.
