I’m doing another Lecture in Rhyme for Red Nose Day, March 18th.
The lecture will be all about Windows Phone Development and will be entirely in rhyme, except where I mention SilverLight, which doesn’t seem to have much that rhymes with it.
You can find out more, and how to sponsor me, here:
The Red Nose Game is also coming soon for Windows Phone….
Just got my first sponsor. Thanks James
Went to see “The Adjustment Bureau” today. Great film. A bit like Inception, but done better in my opinion. The story is based on one from Philip K. Dick. There have been so many films based on his writings that the next one will have to be a cinematic reworking of his laundry list. But I digress. The film tells of a pair of lovers star-crossed by fate or, more accurately, the Bureau of the title. Well acted, with very engaging leads. And a satisfying ending. It reminded me of a time I had to mend a desk in my office. Although actually that was “The Bureau Adjustment”. Anyhoo, enough of the bad jokes, good film, go see it.
Talking of “star crossed lovers”, here’s another pair. A week or so ago we went to see ”Gnomeo and Juliet” which tells of a couple of ceramic lovers of the garden gnome variety. This film has just enough wit and originality to sustain a 90 second trailer, which was unfortunately the thing I saw that made me decide to go and see it. Movies like this really make you appreciate Nick Park and Pixar, who can make producing this kind of fare seem effortless. If you are five you might like it I suppose, but for the rest of you, just watch the trailer.
Billed as ‘the film that cost over 20,000,000,000,000 to make’ the movie ‘Inside Job’ is a documentary that tells the story of that economic crash thingy that was all over the papers a couple of years ago. You know, that thing that is going to blight the lives of an entire generation or two and is set to recur every now and then until the world realises that banks that are ‘Too Big To Fail’ are going to keep trying to.
I caught this film on the plane on the way home. You must see it too, if not for the lovely helicopter shots of cities then for the squirming of some of the idiots daft enough to appear and try and justify the indefensible.
I’m sure it over-simplifies here and there and the viewpoint is not particularly balanced, but if only a fraction of what the film reveals is the case then the whole world (and I do mean everyone) has been taken for a massive ride. It has always puzzled me that things can just “go up in value” for no readily apparent reason. It turns out that they can’t, and if you base a business on this premise then every now and then we will have one of these massive crashes. If there ever was a job for the Adjustment Bureau then this is it.
I’m running two more Live Meetings next week, all about the Imagine Cup Software Design judging process. The first one is on Monday, I should have recovered from my jet lag by then.
If you are entering, or thinking about it you really should come along. Here’s how:
The Live Meeting will be Monday, March 7, 2011 at 19:00 GMT and again on Tuesday, March 8, 2011 at 6:00 GMT. The same content will be reviewed at both sessions, so choose the time that works best. To join:
You can find more details, and recordings of the earlier meetings, here:
Time to fly home today. It has been a very brief visit but well worth the trip. Best MVP Summit ever. Thanks to all the folks at Microsoft for being so forthcoming about the future.
Today we found out some more stuff about what’s coming for Windows Phone in the future. I reckon the only way to improve it would be to give away a free pie with each phone. Great stuff.
Say what you like about Steve Balmer, head honcho at Microsoft, but he can work an audience. We saw him in action today at the summit keynote. At the end of it I was left feeling that at the moment Microsoft doesn’t have all the answers, but it is certainly asking all the right questions.
In the evening we headed out to Jillian’s Billiards for some fun and games. The weather was dark and wet, something of a Seattle speciality it would seem. I got a bit carried away taking pictures of the traffic through the bus windows.
I think I was lucky to get this shot, which has the Space Needle in it – perhaps with a bit more post-processing I can actually make it visible….
We had a great time, I even managed to get a go at table tennis. And no, I didn’t fall off the table. On the way out to the taxi we were talking about business cards for some reason and I said that I thought it would be really cool to be able to whip out a playing card and say “The card you chose was the three of clubs” when someone gave me their business card. Well, I thought it was mildly amusing. Then Jeff produced this:
I think he had the other 51 cards with him as well.
Kudos to the Microsoft folks for a giving us such an interesting day and responding so constructively to the stuff that we said. Special shout out to Stephanie who is one of those organisers around whom the right things just seem to happen as though by magic. Thanks for making everything work so well.
I’ve got this cunning plan for my trip to Seattle to avoid the dreaded jet-lag. The idea is to go to bed early each night and then get up around 2:00 am and spend a few hours awake doing stuff (which usually means writing some software). I then go back to bed around 4:30 and get a couple of hours more sleep before rising for the day. This should mean that I don’t actually adjust to local time, so when I go home I shouldn’t suffer too much.
Unfortunately this plan was somewhat sabotaged tonight when I ended up out and about until 10:30pm…. But it was a good night though.
This is what you see in the hotel lobby if you look straight up.
We started the day with breakfast at Lowell's. If you ever go to Seattle you should just go there. Have anything, it is all great.
Good view of the bay too. I thought I’d take some pictures of signs.
I don’t think the sisters look that happy…
The lady in the red blazer came up to me as I was standing in line to check in for the flight. “Would you like me to find you a seat with more legroom?” she asked. Would I??? With a flourish of boarding passes I was moved to a seat that they had been keeping for tall people. Wonderful. The flight itself was very smooth and much shorter than expected, so I arrived feeling, if not as fresh as a daisy, certainly not as the crushed flower I thought I’d be. Hmm. Perhaps I’d better work harder on my similes in future.
Anyhoo, during the flight we had a good view of the coast of Greenland, and so I took some snaps. I’m here for the MVP summit which starts on Monday, in the meantime I’ve been meeting up with people I know and forgetting to remember their names. Great fun.
Friday at 5:15 pm is not really an auspicious time for a programming tutorial, but we do our best. Considering the horrible hour there was a pretty impressive turnout today, and we did have fun. We were drawing text with XNA and playing with multiple draw operations to get fake 3D effects.
Great fun. Hull students, you can find the clock code in the lecture content for week 4.
Quick test for all you programming experts. Will this stupid code compile?
public int InfiniteLoop()
{
while (true)
{
Console.WriteLine("Loopy");
System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(1000);
}
}
Note: All the namespaces are in place and the WriteLine and the Sleep are perfectly legal calls.
Turns out that it compiles just fine. The compiler is smart enough to work out that the method will never complete because it contains an infinite loop. This means that although the signature of InfiniteLoop defines it as returning an integer the compiler just says "Since the method never ends I'm not going to worry about it not returning a value when it says it should".
I'm not sure I agree with this behaviour. I saw it in the lab this morning and it surprised me. I would expect at least a warning, in case I'd put a loop in when I didn't mean to.
The compiler doesn't fail to compile programs containing unreachable code either, although this does produce a warning.
This is the lucky prize winner from the Open Day today. We had another great crowd.
These are some of them. Thanks for coming folks, hope you learnt something from the trip. I was asked if I had any ideas for things to do over summer to prepare for starting a Computer Science course. So I though I’d put some thoughts together.
First thing is to make sure you get good grades in your exams in summer. I’d hate to think that time spent playing with computers caused to you fail those. But once you’ve done your exams I’d advise you to get hold of an introductory text on programming and have a go. You can get our First Year course here:
There are links to my Windows Phone programming notes and also a version of my XNA book which you can download. If you are still a student I’d advise you to head off to Dreamspark and get hold of some free software. If you are not a student you can get free versions of Visual Studio here:
http://www.microsoft.com/express/
I wouldn’t try to do too much, but I would read the yellow book and try to get a feel for programming and what it is all about. A clue: it is not really mathematics, it is more about organisation.
This one is worth knowing about. If you are a student who wants to create things like 3D models for XNA games you can now get Autodesk software, including AutoDesk 3D, for free from those lovely people at Autodesk. The over also extends to academic staff. Wonderful stuff. Find out more here:
I was doing a lecture this afternoon to the first years and, frankly, it wasn’t going well. The microphone was not working, which meant I had to shout, and I’d not uploaded my slide deck correctly so I had to wait for my little laptop to download the presentation from Live Mesh. Then I fired up my first empty XNA project to show the class how it worked and was rewarded with this.
Not good. Id used the machine to write Windows Phone games with no problem and I’d never seen that message before. Fortunately we were near the end of the lecture and so I just showed that I could in fact get Windows Phone to work and then everyone had to leave.
Someone at the back had shouted “Use Reach” but at the time this hadn’t registered. Later, I took a look at the project settings:
Turns out that if you have fairly simple graphics hardware, like the one in my little laptop, it can’t handle the HiDef graphics and you have to select the Reach option for Game Profile.
I did this and everything worked, so I should be OK for tomorrow.
The Internet is an amazing place. I was looking for help because the backup battery in my Yamaha sequencer is flat and I happened across this lovely little video. The original track is worth seeking out too.
The six Bronte children had a pretty raw deal in many respects. Their father, Patrick, lived long enough to see every one of them die, along with his wife and, from the look of the church graveyard, loads of the local population. Haworth in the nineteenth century was a world apart from the neat town it is now, with squalor and disease running rampant.
The three Bronte sisters grew up watching loved ones die around them, starting with their mother and two sisters. That they chose to escape into a made up world of stories is not terribly surprising. When they grew up they took this story telling into the wider world and produced a collection of books that was like nothing before.
I’m not a great fan of their writing, but I do like going to the Parsonage in Haworth where they grew up and wrote their greatest works. There are only a handful of rooms in the small building, but actually being in the room where Charlotte wrote “Reader, I married him” is pretty darned cool, although I did rather spoil things for number one wife when we were in the shop on the way out and I pointed at a row of paperbacks saying, in tone hushed with awe, “Hey, they wrote books as well!”.
I also insisted on buying a genuine Bronte Parsonage combination spirit level, torch and screwdriver tool. Apparently Emily used to use one just like it it to change the batteries in her digital watch. Or something.
Getting to Haworth was made much more interesting by the unexpected arrival of a large amount of snow overnight. This made driving great fun and meant the first thing we had to do in Haworth was find somewhere that sold wellington boots. On the other hand, it did make the pictures nice. And I was lucky to see a steam train arrive at Haworth station. (although of course you know that Haworth was not actually connected to the railway network until some time after the death of the sisters, who had to travel to the station at Keighley when they wanted to go to London to meet their publisher).
Of course I took a camera, and a bunch of pictures.
Genuine bona-fide steam train
Platform
Haworth rooftops
Fairly quiet for a Saturday..
Haworth graveyard
Train home
A couple of rules for night driving:
Never mind, at least we got there eventually.
Just finished my Windows Phone Rock Star session. Now I can put the guitar back on the wall. Thanks for being a great audience and staying to the end. Some great questions too. You can find the sample code here.
There were some questions. If you are not based in the ‘states and are wondering how to get the tax side of things sorted you can find some interesting information here:
http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/19464.aspx
When I figure out how to do it myself I’ll put a post up explaining what I did.
You can find my Blue Book (and my Yellow Book) here:
Having hardware fun today preparing for the lab tomorrow when some of our second year students will get control of my little Micro Framework robot. We are writing serial port code that we are sending through the Xbee radio interface to make the robot dance across the carpet.
I love my job.
Early morning guitar shop.
I did another paper review for Radio Humberside this morning. It seems that I’m doing a lot of early rising at the moment. And there is a surprising amount of traffic at 6:30 in the morning.
Anyhoo, we had fun talking about some tech stuff and Twitter. I tweet as RobMiles and Andy Comfort, the breakfast presenter, as andycomfort (which shows we both have the same level of originality I guess).
Andy even let me have some time to chat about PlatformExpo, which is going from strength to strength. It all happens on 27th March and you can find out more here:
We are going to have the results of our 24 hour game development competition, live interactive music and art, demos of 3D technology, digital showcases and I’ll be giving a session about Microsoft Kinect – having not slept the night before. One of those rare occasions where the audience has to keep me awake….
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.
