Ada Lovelace, a woman ahead of her time, from the wonderful http://2dgoggles.com/
If you have not yet discovered The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage then you are in for a treat. Fantastic drawing and actual historical quotes thrown together with outrageous plots to make something quite unique. Kudos to number one son for the link.
..now I really want a steam powered computer..
Bought a steam engine today. It was a reduced price bargain. And it has a generator. And lights. So buying it actually made perfect sense. Took it home, got it out of the box and then dropped it on the floor.
Idiot.
Fortunately not much harm was done, except that the “very important pin” that the piston pushes seems to have born the brunt of the landing and is now slightly bent. I’ve straightened it to the best of my ability and it seems to work OK. The whole thing makes a pleasing chugging noise as it runs, and the lights even come on. Great stuff. I’m now wondering if I could power a .NET Micro Framework device from it.
A student gave me a Mars Bar at the end of my last lecture of the session. It is kind of a running joke thing, in that I keep promising the class Mars Bars and never delivering. Anyhoo, thanks very much. It was delicious.
The next version of the Windows Phone 7 CTP is now available for download. This version plays nicely with the release version of Visual Studio 2010. Some folks have been reporting fun and games updating but, for some reason, my update went fine. The only issue I’ve hit is when opening an old Windows Phone project I was told I needed to add some lines to one of the configuration files. Unfortunately the lines can’t be copied out of the message for some reason, so if you need them you can cut them from here..
<Capabilities>
<Capability Name="ID_CAP_NETWORKING" />
<Capability Name="ID_CAP_LOCATION" />
<Capability Name="ID_CAP_SENSORS" />
<Capability Name="ID_CAP_MICROPHONE" />
<Capability Name="ID_CAP_MEDIALIB" />
<Capability Name="ID_CAP_GAMERSERVICES" />
<Capability Name="ID_CAP_PHONEDIALER" />
<Capability Name="ID_CAP_PUSH_NOTIFICATION" />
<Capability Name="ID_CAP_WEBBROWSERCOMPONENT" />
</Capabilities>
Today’s Hull Digital MeetUp was interesting. We had a presentation from TechMesh, who provide networking (of the human kind) between like-minded IT and Telecoms business in the area, a talk from Nick Riley from Hull University Logistics Institute about the use of RFID and a few words from MediaSat3. And very nice free food and drink.
Hull Digital are organising a very interesting event next month. Hull Digital Question Time brings together a bunch of experts, including the Vice Chancellor of the university, and invites the audience to ask questions. Should be fun.
Along with sticking new pictures on my walls, I’m also getting rid of a bunch of books that I have had for a while. If you are after any Java books feel free to drop round to my office and take a look.
I’ve printed out a bunch of my pictures and stuck the on the wall, in place of the TechDays logo I used last week. I must say I’m quite pleased with the results.
If you are not sure what Agile Development is then you can find a very good description about what it is (and isn’t) here.
I picked up a copy of this last week. The Videogames Hardware handbook is a collection of articles from Retro Gamer magazine which describe consoles and games from the seventies to the nineties. There is pretty good coverage of the platforms, especially handhelds, and there are game top tens for all of them as well. There are some missing (I’d love to have had more about the Amiga CD-32 for example) but overall it is a great read.
If you want to relive your memories of old machines then this is a great way to do it.
“The church looks lovely inside today” said the chap watching me take photographs in Hulls’ Old Town.
I asked if it was OK to have a look around, and maybe take some photographs. “Sure” he said “You get a great view from the pulpit”
He wasn’t wrong. The font you can see at the end of the Nave weighs two tons. William Wilberforce was baptised in it. Mind you, there were some other pretty amazing views to be had as well.
..and finally, outside
If you live in Hull, and have not been around Holy Trinity then you are missing out. I got there early this morning and pretty much had the place to myself, which was wonderful for me, but rather sad really, in that more people should be seeking out “the largest parish church in England” and having a look round. Breathtaking.
ACA009 Creating Windows Phone Games
Here is the content from my session. Thanks for being a great audience.
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.
ACA004 Giving Robots Life with the .NET Micro Framework
I left Oscar the robot powered up overnight by mistake. I was very impressed to find that he still had plenty of battery power left this morning. Fortunately nobody had been sending movement commands to him via the secret URL otherwise he could have gone anywhere!
If you want to get hold of a robot and Fez controllers you can go to:
If you want to get hold of the Web Server board you can go here:
http://devicesolutions.net/Products/Tahoe.aspx
If you want the most powerful Micro Framework board I’ve ever seen you can go here:
http://www.ghielectronics.com/product/125
The Micro framework at Microsoft can be found here. There are links to platform manufacturers and a very useful forum. You can even propose enhancements to the platform.
My desktop setup. A robot, a PC doing desktop sharing, another PC running a video call and a final Micro Framework device running a web server. And it all worked. Eventually.
Thanks to everyone in the audience, and Luis for setting everything up. I wasn’t in Lisbon, but thanks to cunning camera work and a nice fast network I got as close as I could. I could even see the audience on my screen (which probably freaked a few people out at the start).
We had the audience hitting web sites that caused my programs back in Hull to hit breakpoints (which must be the largest debugging session ever). And then I let the everyone out there send commands to Oscar the robot who, right on cue, tried to jump off the desk.
The audience were fantastic. As usual from Portugal. Thanks for taking the event in such good sprit folks.
To try and make everyone feel at home, and add some “TechDays 2010 Portugal” flavour I did up the office wall behind my chair…
Luis during the, slightly fraught, setup.
Some of the audience at the start of the talk.
Thanks folks. That was the best conference I’ve never been to….
I mentioned in the talk that I’m going to assemble some resources for Windows Phone and .NET Micro framework. I am, but I’ll put them up tomorrow. Off to bed now….
I had everything ready. My bags were packed and I’d heard on the TV last night that they were reopening all of the airports. Thing is, KLM hadn’t heard this.
And so I’m not going to Portugal. So, I’m going to have to bring a little bit of Portugal to my office tomorrow and beam my sessions at TechDays from Hull. Whatever else, it will be interesting.
The Girl Geek movement in Hull is going from strength to strength. Their next event is on May 4th. You can find out more here. They also have a Twitter feed: http://twitter.com/HEYGGD
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.
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.
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.
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.
Micro-Mart, a weekly UK magazine about computing has a really good item about XNA and Indie game development in it this week. Starts at page 92. Well worth a read (as is the whole magazine actually).
Of course I’m only really telling you about it it because I’m actually mentioned (and even quoted) in the article.
Matthijs Hoekstra from Microsoft Netherlands has put my DevDays Netherlands session from a couple of weeks back up on Channel 9. You can find it here.
Note to self. A black T shirt under a white polo shirt might be a fashion statement, but it isn’t a statement that you really want to make.
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.
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…
A blurry version of me, which is how I felt at the time…
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…
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.
