Super Speedy

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Hull Centre Blossom

Got switched over to my new “Super Speedy” broadband today. This should have increased my browsing speed, it has definitely increased the rate at which money is taken from my bank account.

After some tests I find I have a speed up factor of around 6 or so, but this was coming from a very poor starting position. The next thing to do is try twiddling with the router and the cables to see if I can improve on this.

Blind Ambition

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Hull Centre Trees
Hull city centre yesterday, looking pretty spry.

Spent some of today putting up blinds. The old “Stand on tiptoes holding a vacuum cleaner hose in one hand and an electric drill in the other whilst trying to make a hole in the inside of a window opening with neighbours outside watching and taking bets on whether I will end up in casualty or not” routine. I’d say “Great fun”, except that it probably wasn’t.

Hull Imagine Cup Success

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ImagineCupMicrosoft

The “Instinctive Input” team show off their certificates. If you look really closely you will see that they are all individually signed by Bill Gates. Well done folks.

We didn’t win, but one of the two teams we sent down to compete in the UK Imagine Cup Finals came a creditable third place. Many congratulations to the “Instinctive Input” team who took there eye tracking system down to Reading, hardware demonstration and all, and managed to put on a great show by all accounts. 

Congratulations to the Outcry team as well, who also got a finalist place. I’m really pleased that Hull managed to get two teams into the UK finals for the Software Development Challenge, this must make Hull the most successful entrant in the UK competition.

The teams had a great time down at Microsoft UK Headquarters. They saw demos of the latest technology and presentations from UK Game Development houses. Great stuff. I’ll have some more pictures and team details next week.

For Hull the Imagine Cup story is not quite over though. Christophe and Daniel found out earlier this week that they have made it through to the next round of the Game Development competition.

Ash Landed

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HIP_293108531.731835

I took this on the way back from my First Year Lecture. I heard someone say “He’ll be putting that on Flickr next”. Correct.

I’m supposed to be going out to give a session at Tech-Days in Portugal next week. You can find our more about it (in Portuguese of  course) here. That was before the volcano blew its stack. At the moment things are a bit “not up in the air” but we will have to see. I’ve got all the slides and demos ready and the robot is set to travel. I really hope that the cloud clears and I can make it over to Lisbon, I suppose we can’t really argue with mother nature at this level.

Fun with Visual Studio 2010 Tech Days in London

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Tech Days 2010 London Pick your Door
Which door would you choose?

Went down to London today to give a session as part of tech-days Visual Studio Developer Days. It was great fun, even though just about everything broke at some point during the talk. Richard from Black Marble was on before me and did a very impressive talk about the new testing features in Team Foundation Server.

Tech Days 2010 London Richard Fennell
Doesn’t Richard look like Bill Gates?

When my turn came my laptop had gone to sleep and forgotten to produce any video output. Then I had all kinds of finger trouble typing in programs and my microphone broke and fell off twice. But it was all good…

Tech Days 2010 London Blurry Rob Miles
A blurry version of me, which is how I felt at the time…

Tech Days 2010 London Audience
Some of the audience, all of whom were absolutely great.

The whole thing took place in a cinema, so I had the biggest screen I’ve ever used in my life.  You can find the presentation here and the demo code here.

As part of the day I was interviewed for Underbelly, a new Microsoft website for developers. you can find my interview here. If you really want to…

Imagine Cup UK Finals

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Dalby Forest Trees

Matthew came to see me today, he is a member one of our Imagine Cup teams who are travelling to Microsoft UK on Thursday for the UK finals. Of the six top teams Hull have two, which is nice. Both of our teams are limbering up for the event and have some nice demonstrations and stories to tell.

Exploding Images with Photoshop Elements

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Dalby Forest Fence

Every now and then I fall over hilarious bugs that really shouldn’t be out there. It kind of cheers me up. I’ve never written software with holes like these, and they are selling theirs as product.

I’ve found a truly smashing one in Photoshop Elements. I have a love-hate relationship with this program. I stick with it because it does what I want eventually and I can’t be bothered to learn another program. I have the feeling that it could do pretty much anything, although I also have the feeling that I’ll never figure out how to use it.

Anyhoo, the bug/feature has to do with bulk processing of images. I’ve started reducing the size of my pictures before I send them to Flickr so that they don’t take too long to transfer. I make them 1500 pixels in width, which seems to work OK. I did one batch, and then tried to do another.

And my machine stopped. For quite a while. Eventually I killed the Photoshop export and tried to figure out what had happened. Turns out that the program remembers the number that you enter to resize your picture, but not the units. The program was busily creating a bunch of images 1500 cms wide. Or around 450 feet. This begs several questions.

  • Why does it just remember the number?
  • Has anyone ever really needed to produce a picture that big?
  • Did anyone ever test this?

Oh well.

Clash of the Titans Movie Review

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image 
Looks a bit too much like Wayne Rooney for me. And no, I don’t mean the one with the snakey hair.

We saw the first Clash of the Titans movie (the one with the clockwork owl) on our honeymoon many years ago. The new one has moved things on a bit. The clockwork owl has been replaced by Gemma Atherton (something of a step up I reckon, although number one wife was less convinced) and we now have a lot of CGI. The story remains broadly the same, and is none the worse for that. 

There is plenty of derring-do from the good guys and Ralph Fiennes, who seems to be cleaning up in ultimate bad guy roles, does a very nice “Voldermort with better hair” kind of act as Hades. The funniest bits are when we are at home with the gods, whose exploration of aluminium foil based clothing has to be seen to be believed.

If you want to see a big dumb action deity powered movie, a sort of “Transformers with Myths” then you will not be disappointed. I wasn’t.

Dalby Forest Friday

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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.

Dalby Forest with Horse

One day I’d like to stay here for a while.

Dalby Forest Bridestone

We especially like the Bridestone walk. These are massive rock formations along the side of the valley.

Dalby Forest Path

Some of the paths can be quite steep, but always look good.

Wacom Bamboo Fun and Games

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Lights

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.

Gadget Show 2010

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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.

Sony 3D TV

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.

Six Screens

It’s all very well setting up a monster system like this, but why let a five year old drive it?

Aspiral Clock

As a connoisseur of convoluted clocks, this one looked very interesting, but I daren’t ask the price.

Split Second

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.

Fork Lift Truck Simulator

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.

Scarborough Fair

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CSI Pinball

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.

Scarborough Panorama

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.

Scarborough Castle from Headland

Castle and sky.

Scarborough Castle Museum

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

Windows Phone FAQ

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Novotel

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.