Bletchley Park Fun and Games

We’ve been meaning to go to Bletchley Park for ages. Today, thanks to the efforts of Emma, we managed to get there. It meant that we had to set of really early from Hull, but nobody minded that much.

This is us, gathered in the “Music” room for a briefing. If you don’t know about Bletchley Park, you should. It is how we won the Second World War. All the way through the war this place was effectively a “decoding factory”. Great minds like Alan Turing figured out how to break the German cyphers and an army of engineers, technicians and clerical support staff produced thousands of decoded messages every day. They even managed to build the first electronic computer to read the messages sent by German High Command.

The secrets of what went on in this unassuming country estate only started to come out in the nineteen eighties, over forty years after the end of the war. Now you can walk around, meet up with some of the people who were there and see the machines that were built to crack the codes.

This is what we were up against. A battery powered, portable encoding machine called “Enigma”. By a cunning combination of a plug board and encoding wheels this mapped whatever the user typed onto a meaningless sequence of letters. All the receiver has to do is set up another Enigma machine with the same arrangement of plug board and wheels, type in the encrypted text and out comes the original. The encrypted messages were broadcast so that anyone could receive them (including us) but unless you knew the settings of the the sender all you would see is guacamole.

However, the clever folks at Bletchley Park built machines that could try thousands of possible settings of the machine, looking for stock phrases and exploiting the few weaknesses in the Enigma machines. These devices, called “bombes” (apparently because the Polish mathematician that first thought of them did so at an ice-cream shop and bombe is Polish for a type of ice cream) would click through combinations looking for a “stop” which might be the code settings for that message.  And it worked. On an industrial scale. Thousands of people worked on site receiving, analysing and finally sending a steady stream of intelligence back to UK commanders.

Not content with cracking “every day” signals they then moved on to cracking encrypted teletype signals used for high level communication. These were manually transcribed onto paper tape which was then analysed by an electronic computer called Colossus, the world’s first.

This is the five hole paper tape containing the incoming message. This was decoded by hand from graphs of the teletype signal that were read by human eye.

The front of Colossus

Some of the valves

Some of the wires….

That it worked at all was astonishing, nobody had built anything of its complexity before. But work it did, on one memorable occasion the UK high command was able to read messages before they arrived at their German counterparts.

Bletchley Park is also home to a Museum of Computing and a whole host of other interesting exhibitions. But these are for another post.

We clambered aboard the coach just as the museum closed and made our way back to Hull. Great day. Thanks again to Emma for sorting it all out.

Talking the Talk and Walking the Walk

We had a couple of presentations in the department today. Team Yellow and Team Purple (Tentacle?) gave the initial presentations for their group projects.  To say that the teams had been working together for  a week or so and it was their first stand up together they did very well.

One thing that did stand out though was some of the phrases that were used and this brought home to me how you need to be careful how you talk in front of an audience, particularly if you want to convince them you know what you are doing.

For example take the phrase “User Friendly”. It is all very well to say “We are going to produce a user-friendly solution”. You want to convey that you think this aspect of a system is important. However, saying it like this is pretty much meaningless. The customer is not expecting you to produce something that is “user-hostile”, but the phrase could also be expressed as “We’re not going to make something that acts as if it hates you”. 

It is far better to say what you are actually going to do to solve the problem. “We are going to closely involve the end user in the design and implementation so that they find the system easy to use.” is a much better way to express your intentions.  Take a similar approach when you talk about security. Rather than saying you think something is important you must say what you are going to do about it.

The other thing that came out from the presentations was partly my fault. I’d said earlier that it is very important to make the customer aware of those aspects of the system that you are not going to implement. For example, you might be expecting the customer to back up the data rather than providing data backup as part of your solution. You need get this over, but I’m not sure you should have have a slide with the heading “Things we are not going to do”.  It is far better to say things like “The server infrastructure that you are using will be used to back up our data along with that from other systems”. This puts the responsibility in the right place without sounding like you are avoiding work.

If all this sounds a bit like the dread “marketing speak” then I’m very sorry about that, but I do feel that it is important that you make sure that things you say are backed up with a some kind of action plan and you should avoid sounding negative about your intentions.

A Couple of Good Windows Phone Apps

When I had my iPhone I used to enjoy browsing the App Store and downloading and playing with little programs. You could pass an hour or so spending a couple of pounds on things that caught your fancy, searching for that neat app you could show of in the Tea Room the following day.

Windows Phone Marketplace is nowhere near as full as the App Store, but it has now reached the point where I can go in there and pull out some diverting programs. Here are a couple I’ve found recently. Both are free and both are fun.

This gives you your own personalised fireworks display on the phone, that you can drive by tapping the screen. There is a good range of different firework types and colours with satisfying explosions and even haptic feedback (the phone vibrates when the fireworks go off). You can capture images of the displays and also use any picture as the backdrop.  Great fun, if totally useless, and free. Search the Marketplace for Fireworks.

This program is excellent. It is a dictionary of British Slang. If you want to know the true British meaning for words like Gazump and Wally you can use this program to find out. It also defines some words that you might not want your kids using, but it might even be useful for those of you around the world not from these shores, and it is very amusing for us locals too. Another good, free app. Search the marketplace for “British Slang Free”.

First Open Day of 2011

The first “Lucky” winner of a copy of my book. Sorry about the picture, I didn’t take it.

We had our first Admissions Open Day of 2011 today. Thanks for coming folks, hope you enjoyed the day. I did my talk and then at the end we had a prize draw for a copy of one of my XNA books. I was going to have a second prize of two books, but I couldn’t find any more….

Some more of the assembled throng. Hope you had a good journey back.

Words of Wisdom from Rob

In celebration of my new book those nice people at O’Reilly asked me to share some words of wisdom on their Answers site. I’m not normally known for being wise. I actually asked my dentist to put in some wisdom teeth the last time I had a check-up. However, if you want to find out what I came up with you can go here:

http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/2456-robs-tricks-and-tips-for-a-better-programming-life/

Why You Should Enter the Imagine Cup

If you are thinking of getting involved with the Imagine Cup Software Design competition I’m hosting a couple of Live Meetings where I describe why you should.  The meetings both contain the same content, one is in this evening and I’m trying not to think about the time of the second one…

You can find details of how to sign up on the Imagine Cup Software Design page or you can follow these simple steps that I’ve stolen from it.

1. Install Microsoft Office Live Meeting. We recommend you do this in advance to avoid technical difficulties.
2. Join the meeting on February 7, 2011 at 19:00 GMT. Find out what time it is in your country/region.
3. Join the meeting on February 8, 2011 at 6:00 GMT. Find out what time it is in your country/region.

There will be fun, jokes and some rare Imagine Cup pictures from way back. Oh, and if you sign up and enter it might just change your life forever.

Update on 2011-02-07 20:00 by Rob

One presentation down, one to go. Thanks for being a good audience and staying to the very end. Some great questions too.

Update on 2011-02-08 08:49 by Rob

...and we're done. Did the second meeting at 6:00 am this morning. Thanks for being another great audience. With a bit of luck we might meet up for the next meeting. Stay tuned for dates and times.

Getting Students Started in the Windows Phone Marketplace

Getting started as a student in Windows Phone marketplace is actually quite easy, but there are one or two issues that you need to be aware of, and best practices to follow to make sure that you get going as quickly as possible. If you know how to do stuff the two issues that you need to be aware of are very simple:

• The validation of your account only starts once you have submitted an application for approval.
• You can only unlock a Windows Phone device once you have submitted an application for approval.

The bottom line here is that the first thing you must do when you have registered is submit an application for approval. Think of this as a “placeholder” that will move you through the process. You can remove it from sale later.

If you are an experienced Windows Phone developer this should be no problem. If you are not submitted before the process is simple enough, and to make it even easier I’ve made a tiny screencast that goes through it for you. In this I make a brand new application from scratch and then show how it would be submitted for approval. If you just copy what I do you can be sorted in around half an hour or so.

You can download and view the video here:

Windows Phone Marketplace Walkthrough

Note: The application that I submit during the screencast hasn’t appeared in the Marketplace yet. I’ll let you know when it does…

The King’s Speech

The King’s Speech is a great film. Colin. Firth. Must. Get. An. Oscar. Apparently Queen Elizabeth has seen the film and is of the opinion that it is OK. It must have been strange for the queen to see herself portrayed as a child in the film. Especially when she saw that her sister was actually that irritating little girl from “Outnumbered”.

The film tells of a man who was not born to be king but had greatness well and truly thrust upon him, in spite of being stuck with a terrible stammer. His wife finds him an unconventional speech therapist and the resulting collision of cultures is a great thing to watch. This is just a nice, uplifting film with a great cast and visuals that captures the spirit of the times beautifully. I’m not totally convinced that everyone was exactly as they are portrayed in the film, but that is by the by. Go and see it.

Get Your Windows Phones at Hull University

Quite a few students at Hull now have Windows Phones, which is nice. They are also writing games for them and Imagine Cup entries. Which is even nicer. If you are a student at Hull and you want a phone to play with I can lend you one for a little while. This offer is only open to people who turn up at my office and show me some neat stuff on the emulator, and I can’t let you keep the phones (shame) because we need them for teaching later in the semester. However, they should be useful to people who are stuck for a way of testing their program on a real device.

Later this month I’m going to run some “Bring Out Your Living” Windows Phone sessions on Wednesday afternoon where anyone can turn up with a XAP file and we can try them on a device and see what happens.

Oh, and if you want to make your Windows Phone work on the exchange server on campus the settings are:

Server: exfs.adir.hull.ac.uk

Domain: adir

Server Requires Encrypted (SSL) connection: ticked

Find your way to the advanced settings when the standard ones take you there. Use your university username and password and it should all work fine.

XNA 4.0 Book Now Available

The latest version of my XNA book, XNA Game Studio 4.0: Learn Programming Now! has just been released.  It must be good, it has an exclamation mark in the title!

The book contains content updated for Visual Studio 2010 and XNA 4.0. It also contains three chapters about Windows Phone game development, so you can take your XNA skills and show them off on the phone.

Bubblegum for Windows Phone pictures and Good Advice

Bubblegum is a new program for Windows Phone 7 (and coming to other platforms they say) that lets you take pictures and share them with your chums on Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. The application also has some very “hipsteresque” (if that is a proper word) filters that you can apply to the pictures before you send them. These make you look even more artistic and interesting.  As a true artist, I have of course posted a few of my own. My name on Bubblegum is, unsurprisingly, RobMiles it you want to take a look.

The program is free, and fun. It was written by a couple of folks from Microsoft who are also a couple, if you see what I mean. Aarthi Ramamurthy and Sriram Krishnan have done a super job in making a nice little program which does the job with flair and humour. Sriram Krishnan even has a blog. Everyone should read his “Stuff I’ve learned at Microsoft post”. Great stuff.

http://www.sriramkrishnan.com/blog/

Over Compressed Audio

These images don’t tell you you bad it is going to sound…..

This evening I thought I’d spend a few minutes taking some of my old records and making them into MP3 tracks. I’m not sure about the legal issues here, but since I’m not going to actually sell the recordings I think I should be OK. Years ago I recorded some albums by just recording the entire record and converting it into MP3.  What I wanted to do now was just pull out individual tracks. I used Audacity, the best audio editing program you can get. It is free and works a treat.  If you want to play with audio, get a copy here:

http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/

A tip, the latest beta (1.3.12) is the one that you should use for Windows 7 and works fine. It also seems to have the MP3 encode/decode built in.

Anyhoo, I opened up each large MP3 file and then laboriously saved the sections that held each track. And was rewarded with some recordings that sounded, well, horrible. Horrible, horrible. Then I realised what I’d just done. I’d taken a compressed signal, decompressed it and then recompressed it again. They tell you not to do this, and blimey they are right.

Next step is to dig out “Ye Olde Recorde Deqque” and re-record uncompressed (wav files I guess) of the records and then save sections of these to compressed form. Oh well.

One of the records I was converting was Andrew Gold, “What’s wrong with this picture” which has one of the best record sleeves ever:

See if you can find a high resolution copy of the image and find all 32 mistakes in it…..

Reference and Value Types

I reckon that the day I give a lecture and don’t learn anything is the day that I will give up teaching. I always take something away from a lecture, although sometimes it is only a decision not to use that particular joke again…

Today I was telling the first year about reference and value types in C# and I learnt something as well. For those of you who are not familiar with programming in C# (and why should you be?)  this is all about how data is held in a program.

Once you get beyond programs that do simple sums you find yourself with a need to lump data together. This happens as soon as you have to do some work in the Real World™. For example, you might be creating an account management system for a customer and so you will need to have a way of holding information about a particular customer account. This will include the name of the customer, their address and their account balance, amongst other things.

Fortunately C# lets you design objects that can contain these items, for example a string for the name, a number for the balance, a string for the address and so on.  In fact, C# provides two ways that you can lump data together. One of these is called a struct (short for structure) and the other is called a class (short for class). These two can be hard to tell apart, in that the way that they are created is exactly the same. But they have one very important difference. Structures are managed by value, but classes are managed by reference.

Today is the point in the course where I have to explain the difference between the two.  I’ve got a routine for doing this which I’ve used in the past, and it usually gets there. If an item is managed by value (for example a struct) you can think of it as a box with a name painted on it.  If we move data between two variables managed by value:

destination= source;

- the result is that whatever value is in the source box is copied into the destination box. If my source is a structure value which contains lots of elements all of these are copied into the destination. This is how simple variables such as integers and floating point values are managed.

However, if an item is managed by reference the effect of the assignment above is different. You can think of a reference as a named tag which is tied to an object in memory. If I assign one reference to another:

destination = source;

- the result of this is that both reference tags are now tied to the same object in memory.  No data is actually copied anywhere.

At this point in the explanation I usually have a room full of people wondering why we bother with references. They just seems to be an added piece of confusion. Now that we have references we have the potential for problems when the equals behaviour doesn’t do what we expect.  Why do we have these two ways of working with data? Why can’t we just use values for everything?

My answer to this is that using references allows us to provide different views of data. If I have a list of customers that I want to order by both customer name and account number then this is not possible with a single array of values. But if I use references it is much easier. I can have a list of references which is ordered by name and another list ordered by account number.

So far I’m going by the slides. But then it occurred to me to go a bit further, and think about the use of reference and value types from a design point of view. If I’m designing a data structure for a  sprite in a game (for example a single alien in a Space Invaders game) the sprite will have to contain the image to be used to draw the sprite and the position of the sprite on the screen. I posed the question which of these two elements should be managed by value and which by reference.

After some discussion we came to the conclusion that it is best if the image to be used to draw the sprite is managed by reference. That means that a number of sprites can hold references to the same sprite design. You see this a lot in computer games, where a game has multiple identical elements (soldiers, cars, spaceships etc) it is often the case that they are all sharing a single graphic. However the position of the sprite on the screen is a value that should be unique to each sprite, we are never going to want to share this, and so the position should be a value type.

We then went through a bunch of other situations where an object contains things, and pondered for each thing whether it should be managed by value or by reference. Generally speaking we came to the conclusion that anything you want to share should be managed by reference, but stuff that is unique to you should be a value.

Of course references bring a lot of other benefits too, which we will explore in the next few weeks, but the thing I learnt was that the more you can show a context in which a particular language characteristic is applicable the more chance you have of getting the message across.

As a little puzzle, one thing we talked about was the storage of the address of a customer in our account database. Should that be managed by value or reference, and why?

Save Dalby Forest

Dalby forest is one of my favourite places in the country. We go there a couple of times a year with a packed lunch and just wander round the place. Years ago, when the kids were smaller, we used to go and have barbeques. It’s just a nice place with loads of trees and some lovely walks.

And if the government have their way I won’t be able to go there much longer. They have this cunning plan to sell off, or lease, or give away, or whatever, the forests in the UK. This will save them some money and avoid them having to levy so much tax on very rich people. Or something.  It will also almost certainly mean that places like Dalby Forest will be out of bounds to folks like you and me.

I’m not a particularly political person. My theory is that whoever you vote for the government always gets in. I’m also very aware that there are much more important things out there than whether or not Rob has a nice place to go and have his picnics.  But I’m also aware that there are a lot of us packed onto this tiny little island,  and that the few really nice green spaces that we have left should be protected, not sold off for profit.

There is a petition you can sign up to if you want your voice to be heard on this matter. I’ve already done so. You can find it at the Woodland Trust web site:

http://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk

Lazy Sundays Don’t Exist

I was planning a kind of lazy Sunday. Soundproof my PC, wash the cars, find out who murdered Clarissa Lisle and so on. That’s kind of how it turned out. Except that nothing was quite as easy as it was supposed to be. First off was soundproofing. Having obtained a soundproof kit from http://www.akasa.com.tw/ I set about fitting it to the PC. This involved taking off all the panels and sticking what looked like a cross between foam and felt on each of them. The instructions mentioned that it was a bad idea to block up any ventilation holes and I agree with this, so I had to cut out gaps for the air to get in and out, which was kind of fun and left me with lots of odd foam shapes that I can put to one side in case they might be useful one day and then throw away in a couple of years’ time.

I managed to get all the cutting and sticking done and then carefully reassembled the PC and slotted it into place under the desk, forgetting the golden rule that is “Always test it before you put the lid on”. Of course, once I’d connected all the network, usb, video, power and audio cables I found that the machine no longer started when I pressed the go button.

A tip, if you are not sure whether or not power is reaching your PC, listen carefully as you plug in the mains cable. You should hear a tiny “crack” as the plug goes in. This is a smoothing capacitor in the power supply charging up. If you get this then there is a good chance that the fault is in the output of the PSU, not the input. I was hearing the sound, and so I knew that something was wrong inside the box. Of course. So I removed all the cables, pulled the machine back, took the side off and found that I’d managed to dislodge some cables from the motherboard. Since these were the ones connected to the power switch it was fairly obvious where the fault was. Pushed them back in, tested the machine with the lid off (even at my advanced years it is still possible to learn stuff) and then, having heard the happy sound of fans whirring into life, put everything back into place. It is a bit quieter with the padding. Most of the noise seems to be air moving around, which is difficult to silence completely. The machine itself seems nicely quick, and I’m looking forward to doing some serious work on it. I’ve even managed to get my old, broken, mouse back working again by the simple expedient of putting in some batteries that work, rather than a replacement set that seem to have been pre-flattened before I got them.

Next up was wash the car. Some people drive down to a car wash but I’m not one of them I’m afraid. I’m more of a “bucket and sponge” kind of guy. The main reason for this is because I like the idea of going carefully over the car looking for damage. Particularly at this time of year, when the authorities drop loads of salt and sharpened stones on the road which are then shot at your car by the tyres of the one in front. I was sad to see a bit of stone damage to the front of the Cube, which meant a trip down to Halfords for the right coloured paint and a little bit of touch up action, which sounds vaguely rude but actually just involved me and a very small pot of paint. I don’t think that the problem is completely solved, but at this time of year the best you can hope for is a holding action until the weather improves.

On the way back into the house I noticed that one of the tyres of the other car looked a bit flat. Or was it standing in a puddle? No, the tyre was on the flat side of flat. Something to do with the galvanised steel nail stuck in it. Ho hum. I’ve pumped the tyre up and if it still has some air in tomorrow this should get the car as far as the nearest repair place. So, I’ve done lots of stuff but still not found the murderer. I’m reading a story by PD James, “The Skull Beneath The Skin”. It took a while to get going, I was half way through before anyone got their clogs popped, but things are now hotting up nicely with a grisly death in a locked room and a whole drawing room full of suspects with their own motives and alibis. I do like murder mysteries, and PD James plays very fair with her plots. There is lots and lots of well written detail about the characters and the locations inside which are scattered enough clues to get you thinking. And this particular story even has a suspicious butler, which really marks it for greatness.

I’m reading the book on the Kindle, which is a lovely device for consuming things like this. Some books you want to own (those are the ones with big pages and coloured pictures) and some books you buy just to read once and throw away (those are the ones by John Grisham). The Kindle does the second type of books very well. I’d been put off the idea of an electronic book by the fact that you never actually own anything. It wasn’t until I realised that I didn’t want to actually own some of the books, but just read them that I actually cottoned on to the plot as it were.

The good news for us I guess is that eventually we will end up with a house full of books that are actually nice to own, rather than lots of paperbacks that we bought and now don’t quite know what to do with. Eventually they find their way down to the charity shop, which is fair enough but involves me having to do something, which is not great. And I often come back with more books than I took. We used to have a weekly pilgrimage to the library when we were younger, but I’ve not been there for a while. I used to get books about subjects that I found interesting, like advertising, and then read a whole bunch. I don’t have as much time for that kind of thing just right now, but I’d like to think I could go back and the books will still be there. Even with the magic of the Kindle and the interweb there is still something nice about walking down a row of books and picking out one to read. I hope we still have that in the future. Anyhoo, back now to a world of shady characters and murky plotting. And I might read some of the book as well...

Tangled Movie Review

Note: I’m having a long weekend. I’m making my blog posts at least 1,000 words long for the next couple of days. Just to see if I can. You don’t have to read them all. Normal, truncated, service will be back next week.

Tangled is the latest animated film from Disney. It follows in the footsteps of some pretty heavy hitters like Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. Unfortunately Disney has also made some pretty dodgy animated films as well. Anyone remember Lilo and Stitch? In a good way? Opinions in the reviews were pretty sharply divided, with critics either praising it to the heavens or calling it lacklustre and run of the mill. As we sat down with our popcorn I was consoled by the fact that most of the nastier reviews had been in the posh papers.

We were seeing the film in 2D instead of the much touted 3D. This was not because we couldn’t afford the 3D seats (although the difference in price had paid for the drink and meal combo that we carried gingerly into the theatre), but because we happen to prefer to see our movies the way that they are supposed to be made. Flat. There is a very good discussion of why 3D doesn’t work out there on the web somewhere, I recommend that you seek it out (search for “Why 3D doesn't work and never will” by Roger Ebert). Essentially he makes the point that when you watch a 3D movie your eyes have to focus at a fixed distance on the screen. But when you see 3D your brain thinks that the 3D bits are different distances away. The 3D seeing part of your brain then has to override the 2D part of your eyes to make the scene look right. In the 600 million years that the brain has been developing to give us useful 3D vision it has never had to do this before and the resulting mental tussle gives me (and lots of people) a headache after a while. Actually, there is another good reason why we only saw the 2D version. Due to a quirk of fate number one wife and I only have two good eyes between us (fortunately we were given one each) and so we don’t really miss the third dimension much. And anyhoo, although there were a few bits obviously added for 3D (point stuff at the audience and swing it around, lots of tiny particles etc etc) seeing it in 2D didn’t really make much difference. We were pleased to see that the theatre was packed with people who didn’t mind missing 3D either.

But back to the film itself. I’m not giving too much away if I tell you that the film is a reworking of “Rapunzel”, the fairy tale about the girl in the tower with the unfeasibly long locks. And they’ve done a pretty good job. If you know the story you’ll appreciate the stuff they’ve put in to make it interesting. If you don’t you’ll just appreciate the story. The villainess of the piece is very well portrayed, one of the better and more plausible fairy tale nasty’s and the hero and heroine are nicely matched. The music is not intrusive. It’s not a musical film (or of course I would not have gone) but the songs that they do are very well realised and enjoyable in a hum along but then forget after the film kind of way. The best one is the set piece in a lair of ner-do-wells which manages to echo some of the best of the song about Gaston in Beauty and the Beast (I don’t dislike all musicals, just ones that aren’t Beauty and the Beast).

The film is all computer rendered, but looks very lush. The fabric on the clothes is particularly impressive, especially the dress worn by the villainess (I’m wondering if we now call female baddies villains, in the same way that actor and comedian have now gone unisex. Perhaps this is something I’d best not dwell on). But the cloth does look very real, as if there actually was a character wearing clothes, rather than a surface with a texture on it. The characters look good, move well and fit their voices. Disney spent a lot of money on this film and it shows.

I liked the film a lot. It has been unfavourably compared with Shrek, another reworking but of a less popular children’s tale. I think this is unfair. Shrek had the advantage that nobody (or at least me) knew how it would turn out and did have some really standout actors voicing the characters. One big advantage of Tangled is that it is unlikely that we will see any massively inferior sequels, something that was unfortunately not true of Shrek. The critics also compared Tangled unfavourably to films by Pixar, saying that it lacks the wit and invention of some of their efforts. I kind of agree, but the producers are a bit constrained by the fact they are reworking a fairy tale. There is little chance of a cute robot or house dangling from balloons being able to make an appearance, and at least they avoided making any crass references to contemporary culture that can date a film faster than side splitting jokes about Betamax. The characters they have added to fill out the story are good, with a particular call out to Maximus the horse, who would get a film of his own if there was any justice in the world.

So, to sum up I really enjoyed the film. So did the rest of the theatre. If it can keep an audience made up of around 40% kids under 10 quiet (and me) then it must have something going for it. It is a genuinely nice story with well defined baddies and a good solid triumph of good over evil. The computer graphics are some of the best that you will see at the moment and it has the Disney trademark of lots going on in the background that marks some of their best work. The songs aren’t the best in my opinion, but they are OK and you will not leave the theatre feeling shortchanged. In fact you should work out feeling that you have just seen a really good film. I did.

CS Degree Pictures

I think I’m getting the hang of this. Thanks everyone for keeping still..

And these are the folks on the back of the stage. Well done folks.

Getting the First Degree..

Just done my first ceremony of the day. Everything went well and the audience were great (although to be honest I’ve never had a bad audience at a degree ceremony).

I’m really pleased with the photograph. It is made from three stitched together and actually came out very well. If you click on the photo you can get to my Flickr site and see the much larger version, where pretty much everyone is recognisable.

These are the students on the back of the stage, this panorama didn’t work quite so well because I didn’t hold the camera as still as I might have.

Another ceremony at 2:00. Great fun.

Windows Phone Power Packs

One of the nice things about a Windows phone is that you can take the battery out and put a replacement in. This is useful if the battery breaks, or runs down. And you can get spares really cheaply. These people are presently selling a pair of batteries and a charger for the unbelievable price of £7.90. I’ve no idea how long they will last, but they seem OK at the moment. For less than the price of a music CD they seem a good deal to me.

Talking Windows Phone 7

Took this picture in 2007 by mistake. And I love it.

Had a great time today. I’ve been talking to folks about teaching with Windows Phone 7. Saw some amazing XNA games produced by student teams and met up with some Microsoft people. Slightly marred by the four hour train journey back, but everything was on time, which was nice.

If you want to find out about teaching with Windows Phone or learn something about it (subtle plug) take a look at my Blue Book material which you can find on this link.