Running Ruby on Windows Phone

Ruby on Windows Phone

If you are interested in modern languages you have got to get this for your Windows Phone.  For a mere two pounds you get a Ruby runtime and editor which lets you create and run programs on the device itself. Let me be clear about this; it means you can create brand new programs and store and run them on your phone, without using a PC or anything else. Astonishing.

The installation comes with a bunch of programs including a Twitter client and a passable Tetris clone.

I’ve not played with Ruby much, but I’m always fancied having a go,  and now I have the perfect platform. You can find out more at http://www.iron7.com/

Wonderful Adobe Reader

Does anyone know why Adobe Reader still does this? And why it takes so long? And why the document looks rubbish when it has finished? And why the message is wrong, even though it has been been wrong for the last few versions of the stupid program? (all of which have a stupidly laborious upgrade procedure)

There. I feel much better now…. Oh, hang on, the reader has just crashed..

Update on 2011-01-06 13:43 by Rob

And yes, I have spotted the irony of just having distributed a PDF version of the Windows Phone Blue Book.

Helpful instructions?

Why not just put the instructions on both sides?

Windows Phone Blue Book Pdf

As well as getting a copy of my Windows Phone from Microsoft Faculty Connection you can also now get the text in pdf form from http://www.csharpcourse.com/ where it is displayed alongside my other coloured text books. You can also get the sample code there as well.

No Coffee Blues

Went into work today (after getting up at what seemed to be the middle of the night and scraping ice off the car for the first time in a week) to find that the coffee room was closed and both coffee machines in our building were broken. And I had a big pile of marking to do.

Wah.

Rewind and Reset

Buster clock by Sally Prangley. Use your deductive skills to work out what time the picture was taken….

Now that everyone has gone home we can spend some time putting our lives back together ready for the Bright Prospect of the New Year (tm). I even washed the cars, so at least they will be clean underneath the layer of dirty they will undoubtedly acquire tomorrow…

Shazam and Zune Pass can damage your street cred.

I heard a tune on the radio that I quite liked this morning, so I used the amazing Shazam program on Windows Phone to find out what it was, and then downloaded it onto the phone for free using my Zune Pass. I thought this was quite impressive.

How was I to know it was Kylie Minogue?

New Year Resolution

My first New Year resolution is not to make any jokes about monitors and pixels on January the first. Absolutely not.

New Years Eve Sheep Shearing

We’ve played a bunch of silly games over the last few days, what with having company and all. One of my favourites was this one from Lego. It is very simple to understand, and you can be quite nasty to your fellow players which is great fun.

A happy New Year to all (both?) my readers.

Christmas Sales?

We went up town today in search of bargains. To be honest, I didn’t find a lot that impressed. Although we did manage to fill the back of the car somehow..

Full House

We have got a bunch of folks over for the New Year, and a mini-reprise of Christmas. That meant even more presents to unwrap, which was rather nice.

Fit to Write

Feeling a bit better today. I managed to spend a chunk of time going through the chapters for the next book. According to Amazon it will be available at the end of next month. Scary.

Great Ideas and Fevered Minds

Note to self. Computer game ideas that you have while lying in bed at three in the morning trying to get to sleep are not actually as great as they seem at the time.  Assuming you can remember them.

Christmas Bug

From this….

… to this in one festive season. Well done number one son.

Along with my presents it seems I’ve also acquired a “Christmas Bug”. This pretty much laid me out today, so that I was reduced to lying in the back of the car and watching the frozen scenery go by as we rumbled home.

Big Pile of Presents

I got a huge pile of presents today. I don’t actually remember being that good over the last year, but I’ll take the presents if they are put in front of me….

I hope you all got plenty of presents too.

Driving to Christmas

Drove down to Christmas today. The weather (which has been threatening all sorts of nastiness) was actually quite kind. Although it was very cold.

Bye Bye iPhone

Today is a fairly momentous one (if you can have fairly momentous days). I’ve reached the end of my 18 month iPhone contract and it is time to formally move all my mobile phone stuff over to my Windows Phone device. I’ve been carrying two phones around for a while, which has been a pain. Anyhoo, today is the day that the number transfer goes through so that in the unlikely event of anyone ringing me up, they will now reach me through the wonder of Windows Phone.

I’ve really enjoyed using an iPhone. It represented a genuine advance on the field when it came out all those years ago. It is a delightful device which is a pleasure to use and has served me very well. I went through three iPhones in total in my time with the platform. However, I’ve used Windows Phone for a while now and I prefer it. Stuff seems to take fewer presses to achieve. When I use my iPhone I find myself pressing the screen for a back button that isn’t there and the way you move between applications seems clunky to me. Some of the more recent advances to the OS seem to have detracted from the initial simplicity that it had.

The Windows Phone has a way to go. There are a few iPhone features that I’ll miss for a while but I reckon that Windows Phone will catch up over time.  And I love the idea that I can write C# for the device.

PS3 Disk Upgrade

I’m having some quality time off work this week. And by quality I mean messing around with technical things. Today I upgraded the hard disk in the PS3. I’ve had this console since the day of release, when 60G was quite a large amount of storage (as opposed to about enough to put in a phone). Anyhoo, the upgrade process looked easy enough. Buy a new disk, back up the old one, drop in the new one and do a quick restore.

And that’s how it turned out. The only real problem was finding a FAT formatted disk for the PS3 backup (the program in the PS3 is a bit fussy about this). However, having set up a disk appropriately everything went well. The only tricky thing apart from that was getting the bracket off the old drive. It had been fitted with screws that seemed to  have been tightened by Superman’s stronger brother. And of course I’d hidden the only screwdriver that stood a chance of not destroying the heads of the screws. But with a bit of care and a Swiss Army pen knife (apparently Swiss Navy ones are much harder to come by) we prevailed.

If you fancy giving yourself a bit more space for media and stuff on your PS3 I strongly recommend going for the upgrade.

Christmas Party

We had our Christmas party today at work. Good food, good company and no photographs, because I was having such a good time I forgot to take any.

Optimus Quest Winner

Well, I’ve had a fun weekend going through all the Optimus Quest entries. By the end I’d had loads and it has taken a while to take a look at each one. Quite a few people had submitted multiple ideas, which was great but meant even more stuff to go through. For each of the entries the questions I considered, in order, were:

• Can this application actually be made to work on the phone?
• Can I see anyone using/playing the application?
• Has it been done before on Windows Phone?

That narrowed things down a bit, and then I moved on to picking a winner from the ones that are left.  Which was very, very, tricky. At the end I settled on “Magic Finger” from Marcin Limanski. A very nice idea that I hesitate to describe in too much detail in case someone else takes it on and gets there first. If you want to contact me Marcin we’ll see about getting the phone sent to you.

The Bad Taste award goes to “Poo Shoot” from Marc Cutsforth which was pretty much as disgusting as the name implies. The Most Amusingly Useless award goes to “Spinning Bow Tie” from ‘Ignorant Pom’.

Honourable mentions go to Emma-Jane Alexander,  Beverley Usher, David Parker, Simon Johnson and Jason Wakefield for workable ideas that really should be taken further.

Thanks to everyone who took part, and thanks again to Sheryl at LG for supplying me with such a nice prize to give away.