Day 1 – Heading for Venice

..in which our hero has a go at travel journalism for no good reason.

Today marks the first day of my proper holiday. We are heading off to a couple of places we’ve never been to before, Venice and one of the Italian Lakes. We flew out of East Midlands airport this afternoon courtesy of Ryanair. We fly with them because we quite like the colour of the seat backs in the plane (a particularly garish yellow) and because they are by far the cheapest way to travel. There are no other reasons to fly this way. Having said that, and ignoring the scrum to get the seats with legroomthe cabin crew were pleasant and the plane arrived on time.

My travel tip for Ryanair: Have the “double drink and chocolate muffin” deal”. This only costs 10 euros for two of you and almost represents good value.  Oh, and don’t buy the lottery tickets. You are almost as likely to win these as you are to be involved in an air crash. And you shouldn’t tempt fate to go for the double whammy. Imagine how fed up you’d feel fingering your winning scratch card as the plane plummeted towards the earth.

Once we arrived at the airport (which is almost, but not quite, near to Venice) we grabbed a coach to the hotel. Another tip. Make sure you have a 10 euro note (preferably a newish one) to buy a couple of coach tickets. Get them from the machine while you wait for your luggage to turn up.

Staying in Venice is very expensive. So we didn’t. We found a hotel in Venice Mestre (I think Mestre is Italian for suburb). This place is only around 10 minutes or so from Venice proper.  We stayed in Hotel Aaaron.  This is both a hotel and an experiment in capsule living. Our bedroom was exactly that. A room just big enough to hold a bed, a tiny desk and bathroom. But everything was shiny new, the staff were great, the WIFI worked and the breakfasts were lovely. And since you don’t go on holiday to sit in a hotel room, it is perfect. Tomorrow we head for Venice proper.

Windows Phone 7 Goes Gold

Windows Phone 7 has “gone gold”. The term comes from the old, CD-ROM, days when software manufacturers would send a "gold” master CD to the duplication plant. In the case of Windows Phone it means that the phone manufacturers have been given the final version of the product to put into their handsets.

I’ve been using Windows Phone 7 for a while now and I love it. Going back to the iphone turns out to be hard work. Windows Phone is one of those clever interfaces that grows on you. The more you use it the more of these little touches that you notice, like the way that icons rotate when you change the screen orientation. And moving between programs using the back button is really easy. Microsoft have a really big mountain to climb with this new platform. But they have also made something rather special. With a bit of luck the phones themselves should not be long coming as well.

The whole Windows Phone team deserves immense respect for what they have achieved in such a short time. Kudos folks.

Rob Miles is not on Kindle Yet

Who, me?

I got my new Kindle from Amazon today .  Of course, the first thing I did was search for myself in the Kindle store. Imagine my surprise when I found that I’d put three books on there and was charging over seven pounds each for them (that’s more than they are asking for Tony Blair’s memoirs – so they got that bit right). Either I’ve uploaded them and set the price in my sleep, or there is something strange going on here. I’ve asked Amazon to find out what is going on.

As for the Kindle  itself. It is a perfectly formed device that is going to spell the death knell for a lot of paper books. I got a Sony E-Reader some time back and quite liked it, but loading books was  a pain and the display was useless for anything interactive.

The Kindle fixes both these problems. You can even use it to browse to my blog and the pictures look strangely wonderful in grey scale. As a paperback replacement it is fantastic. It is ultra-portable (at the moment I’m using an A5 envelope as a case) and the screen is really easy to read. The integration with Amazon is impressive to the point of scary. I got the one with the built in 3G phone and stuff just arrives as though by magic. It also has WiFi which works fine at home but not on the university campus. This is because the Kindle doesn’t support the WPA2 Enterprise security that we use at Hull.

It is a bit glib to say that the Kindle will do for books what the ipod did for music. But I don’t think that it is far from the truth.

One reason for getting the Kindle was to experiment with page layouts that work best on the small screen. I’ll be putting properly a formatted version of the Yellow Book on the Kindle store soon.

But the ones there are the moment are not from me.

Live Writer Twitter Notify and Oauth

If you use Live Writer to write your blog posts (and you should) you probably use the Twitter Notify plugin to send your follows a tweet when you make a new post.  Today Twitter changed their authentication to use the Oauth protocol (which makes the authentication process much more secure). Unfortunately it also breaks programs that used the old authentication method, including the previous version of Twitter Notify. However, an updated version is now available from here.

Pricey Filter

Just found this on Amazon. You’d better hurry, they’ve only got one left….

Whitby Photos

Today was a Bank Holiday. Which means that we get the day off. We went to Whitby. The weather forecast was a good one, although the day did have a rather cloudy start. I took the big camera and a collection of lenses which was amply sufficient to really annoy number one wife as I kept changing them over every ten minutes.

I think this will do for the desktop.

I’ve been trying to get a decent picture of these beach huts for ages.

This is the walkway out to the harbour entrance. I quite like the colours.

Click on the images for bigger versions on Flickr.

Hull Classic Car Show

Went off this afternoon to a Classic Car show in Hull East Park. The park is a fantastic place. Beautifully landscaped gardens, wide open spaces and, today only, a lot of very shiny cars.

A nice shade of purple

I used to drive a Mini. But it was never as shiny as this.

Now, that’s what I call an engine.

Ring Light Fun and Games

The ring light does give your pictures a strange set of shadows I quite like.

A ring flash is a flash gun that fits around the lens of your camera. It is noted for taking photographs that contain no shadows (since the light source is around the lens) and being very expensive.

A ring light on the other hand is a ring of LED lights which fit around the lens and is much cheaper than a flash. It is a steady light, which means you can use it for movies as well as stills. The major disadvantage is that it is not as bright as a flash. As far as I’m concerned this is not a huge problem, since I really want to use the light for close ups.

If you want something for your SLR that will give your pictures a bit of extra pop, and is great for portraits (no shadows means no wrinkles) then I’d recommend that you take a look.

Never Ignore the SatNav

Nice view from the new flat though. Very suburban.

Drove down to London today to do some heavy lifting for number one daughter, who is moving flat. On the way down I did something that turned out to be very dangerous.

I ignored the SatNav.

She said A1. I went M1. At the time I thought nothing of it, and she didn’t say anything. But I’m sure that she started plotting….

Next route she sent us on involved a lot more “off the beaten track” than earlier ones. Twice we got sent towards roads that had six foot six wide gaps on them which the van couldn’t get through.  After a couple of hilarious (I’m being ironic here) U-turns backwards into traffic we started ignoring any suggested routes that didn’t send us towards dual carriageways.  And I’m sure we got sent through the same set of traffic lights at least three times.

Then, on my final route home there were loads of right hand turns onto busy roads with no gaps in the traffic, a long drive along twisty roads and finally, against my better judgement, I ended up on the A1 after all.

So, never ignore the SatNav.

Cube Mania and Web Development

I think I may be getting too far into this Nissan cube thing

I really like my Cube. I went out last night to a Hull Digital Developer group meetup. There ware two good talks, one by John Polling from “The League of Extraordinary Developers” (great name) about SASS and Compass and CSS and another by James Greenwood from Strawberry about HTML5.  Both speakers knew their stuff and the content was interesting (although I’m not really a web developer type person myself).  But I must admit that my thoughts kept going back to my little tin box outside and the drive home in it…Next time I’ll be more focused. 

Oh, and don’t forget if you are from Hull that you need to register for Hull Digital real soon. Looks to be a good one.

The Misleading World of Atari Box Art

These are really funny. And these.

Windows Phone Screen Stealing Status Bar

I got some very useful comments on my post about how to make XNA games use the full screen of the Windows Phone. The thing that I didn’t make clear was that in an XNA game you will lose screen space even if the bar is not displaying anything. The best way to view the effect of this is to go into the settings of the phone (or emulator) and change the Background to light (Phone>Settings>theme).  Above shows what you get. The status bar is drawn white and the game screen area is scaled down by that lovely hardware in the phone itself. As you can see, your game is losing out on screen space.

If you want to make full use of all the screen you just need to add this line into the constructor for your game:

graphics.IsFullScreen = true;

Much better.

Windows Phone 7 Games

I hate this sign

I had a student come to see me today. One of our soon to be second years. He had spent some time working on a Windows Phone game and wanted to try it on a real device. He was using the accelerometer and not sure he was using it correctly.

Worked first time.

He had a touch controlled configuration menu and everything. Excellent stuff.

If you are on the Hull campus and want to try a Windows Phone app on a real device give me a yell and drop round some time.

Got Cube

Picked up my shiny, new-ish, Nissan Cube today. It is every bit as great as I thought it would be. And it has footwells that light up in different colours.

Best Joke Ever

I Tweeted this joke last week to riot of tumultuous indifference. I’m putting in the blog now, mainly so that I don’t forget it.

“I got fired from my job at the zoo because in meetings I would always mention the elephant in the room.”

The Evil of Block Copy: Volume 99

Can you tell what is wrong with this code?

if (DrawPosition.Contains(
        (int)location.Position.X,
        (int)location.Position.X) )
{

I can, but it took me a bit of head scratching….

Windows Phone Jump Start Still Jumping

 
Ryan, one of our satisfied customers wearing the T-shirt he won on the last jump start. Looking good…

We have had loads of hits on the Windows Phone Jump Start videos.  And we are planning another set of sessions in September, which will be bigger, brighter and bang up to date.  More details soon.

Saying Au-Revior to Concorde

Now, that’s what I call a flight deck.

We went to see Concorde at Filton today. I always feel a bit sad when we go over there. The plane is amazing but it doesn’t deserve to be stuck on the ground. It really should be out there doing what it does best, and what nothing on earth can do any more.

This time the affair was even more poignant because as of later this year the plane will not be open for visitors at all, which is really sad.

Anyway, I took the big camera and a selection of lenses and tried to get a few shots.

Not surprisingly the team at Bristol is very busy at the moment as people take their last chance to see the plane for a while, but if you can get yourself down there you won’t regret the trip.

Windows Phone Phone Calls

It will come as no surprise to you that your Windows Phone programs are interrupted when the phone rings. However, if you are running an XNA game at the time it will not actually stop. This will probably annoy your game player though, as once they come back from explaining that they don’t want any double glazing just right now they will probably find that all their lives have been lost and the game is over.

To get around this you should make your XNA game drop into pause mode when a call comes in. You can get notification of things like phone calls by binding to the Activated and Deactivated events.

this.Activated += 
                  new EventHandler<EventArgs>(Game1_Activated);
this.Deactivated += 
                  new EventHandler<EventArgs>(Game1_Deactivated);

You can get Visual Studio 2010 to do all the hard work here, just type “this.Activated +=” and then press Tab in response to the magic that happens next.  Then put code into the methods that are generated and away you go.

Note: This is not what happens if the player presses Windows or Back. In those cases your game program is stopped. But that is a subject for another post I think.

Windows Phone 7 Training now Live

Relive the magic… (and thanks again to pinksugarface for the pic)

If you want to get started on Windows Phone development head on down here for 12 hours of training, neatly broken down into bite sized sections. Andy and I cover getting started, Silverlight, XNA, the Windows Phone Marketplace and lots of other things besides. And if you stay to the end you get to find out who wins their own private jet. Really.

Update on 2010-08-20 08:04 by Rob

I've just discovered that we have had over 11,000 hits on the first episode on Channel 9. Amazing.