LG Optimus Quest 2

Following on from the hugely successful Optimus Quest competition, we now have the inevitable sequel. I’ve got two brand new LG Optimus 7 devices up for grabs. This is a really good Windows Phone with 16G of internal memory, a lovely screen and a nice metal body.

This time the competition is different. All you have to do is send me your download stats from Windows Phone Marketplace and at the end of July and the end of August I’ll give a brand new LG Optimus 7 Windows Phone to the Hull Student with the most downloads. I’ll be checking the numbers with Microsoft, so no photoshopped graphs or tampered screenshots please .

Note that this is open to Hull Students only, and not those who have just graduated (sorry Harry). If you have applied to join us in September, you are eligible to enter too, as long as we have your details on file in our admissions system. 

Just email me your entries at optimusQuest2@robmiles.com before the end of July and I’ll send you a phone if you are the best. Then we do the whole thing again in August.

Some tips to optimise your Marketplace stats:

1. Always give a trial mode. If you are selling your game, make it a free download with a trial mode so that users can get an idea of what it is like for free.
2. Release updates. Don’t finish all the levels and then put the game out there. This means you will be late to market. Instead you can release level 1 in trial mode and then add features and functions as you go along. Harry Overs is doing this very successfully with Destruction Golf, which is picking up quite a following on the Marketplace. Bottled Games and Rusty Spoons also deserve a mention here too, as they have applications out there which are chugging along nicely.
3. Take trouble over your icon and description. Don’t do these the night before you submit. These are your “shop window” and the better they look and the more enticing the text the more chance you have of catching the eye of a customer.
4. Move your game around the Marketplace. If you are not sure which category your game fits into, move it into different ones (within reason) then you can find the one where it attracts the most attention.

Don’t worry if you only get a few downloads, send me your entry anyway. If everyone else forgets to enter you might sneak in and win the prize. Oh, and sign up for rewards at http://www.my-rewards.com. That way you will win something whatever happens. And enter the Windows Phone competition at the Microsoft UK Student Blog.

Update on 2011-06-10 14:24 by Rob

A little clarification here; the figures must be for a single Windows Phone app or game that you have placed in the Marketplace. What I want to see is the total number of downloads from Marketplace. It makes no difference whether it is free or paid, or paid with a free trial. You can't win twice, once you have one phone that's it.

Never Apologise in Advance

Over the years I’ve watched loads of presentations all over the place from students, professionals and even once, by mistake, from me on Channel 9. And one thing that has struck me is that there is one thing you must never, ever, do in front of an audience. And that is apologise in advance. If you say at the start of your talk “I’m sorry, but because I’ve not had time to prepare/got drunk last night/just ended an unhappy love affair (delete where applicable) this is is not going to be as good as it might be” then your audience is instantly expecting you to fail, and they will set their expectations appropriately.

Now this goes against a certain aspect of “Britishness” which is that we from the UK should at all times to be slightly self-effacing and modest. If a Brit tells you that something they have done is “quite good” then be prepared for something truly amazing. But you would never anyone from the ‘states saying that something is quite good. In America things start at “awesome” and then go up from there.

I’m not saying that you should attempt to deceive your audience, or that you shouldn’t apologise if something stops you from doing a good job during the presentation. What I’m saying is that you should not set the wrong expectations at the start. I’ve seen some superb talks from people who have come off the stage and told me how badly they thought it went. I’ve also done what I thought were barnstorming presentations to get a decidedly ho-hum reaction from the audience.

If you are not sure about something, say so during the presentation not at the start. If you put a downer on things right at the beginning you are not actually doing yourself any kind of favour.

Man Made Shed

This is not my shed, this is the showroom model. Mine looks similar, but with somewhat more tatty tools.

I’m spending a few days not on the computer. I’m either marking exam scripts or doing manly DIY type activities. Yesterday I failed to mend one thing (although I did also replace some broken pipe somewhere else, ending the day with a win on points).

Today I built a little baby shed which we are going to use to store all the gardening implements that I never use. I then bolted it to the floor and the wall. It has been a bit breezy lately and so I really don’t want it to fly away. If you have need for a tiny shed that is easy to make you could do worse. You can get it from B&Q here. It even has 13 reviews, 11 positive. I suppose it will shortly have its own Facebook page.

I Hate Plumbing

This is a picture of a cactus. You wouldn’t want a picture of anything else…

I don’t mind wiring things up. I know where I am with electricity. It tends to stay in the cable and not squirt out of joints at each end. Unlike water. The water pipe going into the toilet cistern has been leaking slightly and so I thought I’d improve on Fix #1 (a bowl underneath to catch the drips) with Fix #2, tightening the compression joint. (you just know this is going to end badly, don’t you).

Anyhoo, I attached my one good adjustable spanner (all the rest seem to have vanished) and gave the joint a twirl. This had the effect of twizzling the whole fitting round and shearing off part of the ball cock inside the cistern. This was extra annoying because I’d tried to use my other adjustable spanner (the bad one) to hold that part still and the spanner had just broken. So now whenever the toilet fills up after a flush I also get a four foot high jet of water into the air. Not good. So it was off down to the DIY store to get a replacement fitting. Which of course wouldn’t fit. In the end, by dint of a lot swearing and removal of skin from various knuckles I’m pretty much back where I started, with a bowl collecting the drips. I can’t replace the faulty part with a new one because all the new ones are the wrong size.

I think it might be new toilet time.

In the Reserves

I was a “Reserve Invigilator” today. This means that you get to sit by the phone in your office waiting to get called in to an exam. Fortunately everybody turned up, and so I was able to get on with some more lovely marking.

My “Revision Tweets” do seem to have had some effect, in that I’m getting answers to some of the questions that seem to have been based on what I said, which is nice. I’ve noticed that students make much less use of things like forums these days, perhaps Twitter is the way to go with this.

50 Things a Design Student Should Know

There is a lot of stuff here that applies to software development, and still more that applies to life in general:

http://www.jamiewieck.com/visual-essays/the-50-things-every-graphic-design-student-should-know/

See Sir Tim Berners-Lee for Free by the Sea

The university has obtained a limited number of places to go and see Sir Tim Berners Lee speak at the Yorkshire International Business Convention on Friday 10th of June at Bridlington Spa. His talk is on Friday lunchtime, so we will be leaving the university around 9:45 and getting back on campus at around 2:00, depending on whether we also go for a paddle or not…

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is widely acknowledged as the person who invented the World Wide Web and is chairman of the World Wild Wide Consortium.

If you are a student at Hull who is interested in coming along please get in touch as soon as possible.

Summer Bash

These are the “slightly processed” prize winners.

We had our last bash of the year today. It was great fun, even though we had some technical troubles. The camera on the PlayStation Move was definitely faulty, causing me to lose at Table Tennis. Fortunately the Pizza arrived on time, and everybody had fun. Some were there with tears in their eyes, with this being their last bash as students in the department.

I took some pictures, there are a few more on Flicker tagged Hull2011SummerBash.

Trying to get the hang of this panorama thing…

Panoramic York

Adventures with Panoramic Cameras in York

We went to York today. It only rained twice. Once for four hours and once for five.

Rob on Channel 9

If you want to watch any of the sessions that I recorded during my recent “World Tour” you can find them all nicely indexed on Channel 9:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Speakers/rob+miles

This even includes my Windows Phone Lecture in Rhyme, which is at least as much fun as it sounds. If you watch them all you can count how many times the same jokes come round…..

iPad 2 for Mad-ness

I really like my iPad 2. I bought it because I am always a sucker for the sales assistant saying “It’s the last one we have in stock”. And because I’d seen one. It is a very well realised device.The funky magnetic cover, whilst amazingly expensive (even by the standards of Amazon Kindle cases) does a very good job of providing a stand and protection, and the way you can turn the device off just by covering it is very neat.

I’m not keen on the way that you have to use iTunes to set it up and get things onto it, but I’m just about prepared to put up with this, even to the point of keeping a Mac lying around just to look after the iPads in our household. I reckon the secret of iTunes success is to run it on a Mac. My experiences with iTunes on the PC have never been good, and woe betide you if you ever try to remove iTunes from a PC. Actually, I do know how to do this, the first step is to reformat the PC and re-install Windows.

But I digress. If you do have an iPad there are a couple of programs that I’ve found very useful. The first is PDF Reader Pro which does a very good of rendering PDF files, which you can transfer to the iPad using the dread iTunes. Some time ago I bought Absolutely Mad, which is DVD filled with 50 years worth of Mad Magazine, all as scanned PDFs. The iPad is wonderful for reading this, so now I can carry around a few years worth of Mad for reading. I’ve just noticed that you can get National Lampoon on the same kind of thing, which is nice.

The second useful program is AVPlayerHD, which lets me carry around a few episodes of Veronica Mars wherever I go without having to fill up memory with large video files. This has very good presentation and lots of options you can use to make even highly compressed stuff look as presentable as possible.

Update on 2011-05-31 08:22 by Rob

Just discovered that you can get Star Trek, the complete comic book collection, in PDF on DVD rom from Amazon.com for 17 dollars. Very tempting...

Just when you are waxing philosophical…

Thanks to Joey deVilla for the link

Where did they find a cat that big?

Windows Phone Mango

The latest development tools for Windows Phone are now available for download. They are very good. There are lots of extra features, and a really nice new emulator which does location and accelerometer emulation.

I reckon that Microsoft stuff tends to get really interesting around the third version. MSDOS 3.0 was the first one that really worked well, Windows 3 was the one where things got really interesting, the third’ish version of Windows NT (NT 4.0) was rather good and so on. By the time the development team get to version 3 they have got all the core behaviours out of the way and can move on to the interesting stuff that they really wanted to do when they started.

Mango is the third version of the Windows Phone software.  This is really impressive, in that the phone itself has not been out for a year yet, and the first set of development tools only appeared just over a year ago.

While you can’t get your hands on hardware yet, thanks to the emulator support you can start to write programs that take advantage of the new features, which include background processing, combined Sliverlight and XNA applications, on-board database, sockets support and lots of other goodies.

You can get the SDK here. One thing you might need to do first is install Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 – which you can find here. (this actually took longer to install than the SDK for me).

There are also loads of new examples which you can find here

I must admit I find Mango really exciting. If you want to see some videos of the new consumer features (neat things you’ll be able to do with the phone soon) then take a look here.

Twitter Revision Experiment

I’m trying a tiny experiment today. The 08120 Programming 2 exam is tomorrow, and I’ve invited anyone with C# revision questions to tweet them with the tag #08120Revision. If I find them, I’ll answer them as best as I can in 140 characters….

2011 End of May Bash

We are holding our Summer Bash a little earlier this year. But the fun and games will be just the same. We'll have lots of games, Team Fortress, a Word Search (win a copy of my book) and lots of good stuff. Including Pizza. And cakes. If you want to come along you can get tickets from the Departmental Office from Thursday the 26th for a mere 2 pounds each.

Got a Hash Key!

One of my golden rules for developers is “Make yourself a nice place to work”. Of course I don’t always apply this to myself. For the last few years I’ve been using keyboards that I bought from the US which don’t have the proper keyboard setup for my machines. I’ve written a whole bunch of stuff on C# development using a keyboard that doesn’t have a proper mapping for the # key. Things are even worse when I use my MacBook, that doesn’t even have a # anywhere – I end up using block copy to get one, even though there is a strange “Picnic site + something or other” combination that you can use.

Anyhoo, I’ve just managed to get hold of a couple of bendy keyboards that actually have a # key on them in the correct place. My one worry now is how I’m going to get used to them.

FYI I prefer the Microsoft Bendy keyboards. These help a lot with things like RSI (at least for me). If you get any kind of wrist ache after a long bout of typing I’d strongly suggest investigating them. One of my big worries is that they might stop making them, which would be annoying. Fortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case at the moment, you can still get the one I like, albeit for a lot more than I paid….

Thwaite Gardens Open Day

This is right in the middle of Cottingham.

Thwaite Hall is one of the student halls at the university. At the back of Thwaite Hall is a frankly amazing garden (including the lake you can see above) and some greenhouses containing plant collections.  This is all managed by the Friends of Thwaite Gardens, who are working to make the gardens more accessible. They are open during the week for anyone to walk around and each year they hold an Open Day. This year’s Open Day was today, so we went down there with a whole bunch of cameras and lenses. And I took a bunch of photos. You can find all of them on Flickr here. Here are some of them.

This is just a small part of the gardens.

Trees

Cactus Greenhouse

Some of these cacti have amazing flowers

Flower

Cactus Flower

Another Flower

Using the bendy lens..

Lord Mayor’s Parade

Today was the day of the Lord Mayor’s Parade through Hull. I was in town at the time, and had the little camera with me. Unfortunately I also had a enormous suitcase that I’d just bought, which made moving around the crowd a little tricky, but I did manage to take a few shots of the fun and festivities.

This is as the procession went past. Note that there are some people in this picture who are even taller than me.

Only a really skilled photographer can manage to get a traffic light to grow out of the Lord Mayor’s head…

Sponsor Jenny Please

I just love this message. You can see it too when you donate.

Number one daughter is taking part in a Three Legged Race today. Since she only has the two legs herself, she has teamed up with Bronwyn and they will be trying to cover three miles on three legs.

The cause is a great one, and she would really appreciate your support, however small the amount. You can give with PayPal, it’s really easy and completely painless.

http://www.raceforlifesponsorme.org/jennifermiles72

Using the Texas eZ430 Watch with the .NET Micro Framework

Some time back I got a Texas Instruments EZ430-Chronos watch. One of my better investments. For only fifty dollars you get an LCD watch which you can program. What’s more, it contains a whole bunch of sensors and can communicate with a host device over a wireless link. Around the same time I got a ChipworkX board from GHI Electronics.

So, one lunch hour I decided to try and make them work together. It turns out to be very easy. The watch has a wireless connector (you can just see the PCB at the top of the picture) that appears as a USB serial port to whatever you plug it into. Since the ChipworkX board has USB hosting and serial port support it was an easy matter to get the two talking. A bit of searching and I found the accelerometer protocol for the watch, and away we went.

If you are interested, I’ve created a Watch class that abstracts the watch behind an object that will fire off events when the watch delivers new accelerometer readings. You can find a sample .NET Micro Framework project here.