We spent our last full day in Brno wandering round, having great coffee and buying a few souvenirs and presents. We have had a great time here, and would come again in a heartbeat.
We wandered up to the cathedral and discovered a bunch of fast cars. It seems like the Diamond Race was passing through town. So I took a bunch of photographs.
Cool Cars
I think the rusty effect is painted on.
Maybe next year I’ll enter with the Cube….
We went to see some caves today. And an abyss. David was kind enough to drive us out to the Moravsky Caves near Brno. They have some fantastic stalactites and stalagmites and even an underground river that you can go along in special electric boats. It was great fun.
This is a proper abyss. Of course there is a local legend which ends with a wicked woman hurtling down to the bottom. Isn’t it always the way…
There are some beautiful forests too, reminded me a lot of Dalby Forest.
We had a traditional Polish meal at the restaurant. These are delicious.
Thanks to David for looking after us so well.
A couple of weeks ago Andy Wigley and I spent two days taking about Windows Phone development, with a focus on the shiny new Mango features. We did it as a Live Meeting and it was great fun. Now the recordings of the sessions have been released here to a waiting world.
So, why not uncork a nice Chablis, retire to your chaise longue and watch us in glorious high definition on your 60 inch plasma screen…..
The Department of Graphics and Multimedia has a really nice courtyard. And you could play croquet on that lawn on the left…
Adam was kind enough to show us round his department (Computer Graphics and Multimedia) in Brno University of Technology this morning. It is s a great department, based in new and restored surroundings. It was interesting to hear about another department in a different country, and find out that many of the issues that they are addressing are also the ones we worry about at Hull too.
Another one bites the dust….
After that we went up town to Brno for lunch and then on to to Špilberk Castle. On the way we passed this amazing sign:
We’ve no idea what made them put the one in the middle on the lower row, and frankly, we don’t want to know…..
The castle was great, and if you go to the top you can get some great views of the city.
There are some great places to wander round here, and some superb pavement cafes.
Today we spent the morning wandering round Brno and then in the afternoon I went out to give a couple of Windows Phone talks.
As usual I took a picture of the folks who turned up, there is another on Flickr which shows the rest of the room. The talk was great, really good audience. You can find slide decks and demo programs for the two sessions here. The sessions you want are the Introduction to Silverlight (02) and Introduction to XNA (11). The decks are part of the Windows Phone Jumpstart series, you can find decks on lots of other interesting Windows Phone topics as well. In a little while there will be some videos as well.
After the talk we went out for a drink and then headed for a walk around Brno by night.
Enjoying a drink..
The bar had these really cool speakers
These folks were really (and I mean really) good.
Brno station by night.
Thanks for doing such a great job of guiding us around folks, it was a really splendid evening.
Today’s weather forecast for Brno for the last few days has been confidently stuck at “heavy rain”. So we put on all our waterproof stuff and headed out to explore the city.
No rain. Wonderful (and very hot) sunshine. We were torn between happiness that we had good weather and annoyance that we had far too many clothes on to be properly comfortable. Brno is great. Big squares, lovely looking buildings, a cathedral which is beautiful (although you’ll have to take my word about the insides as they don’t allow photos) and lots of those cafes you can sit at and watch the world go by. Which we did.
The even better news (I guess) is that ten minutes after we got back to our hotel it really, really, rained. Not sure what we are going to wear tomorrow though…
Taking artistic pictures while having tea…
True story. I was invited to speak at the Mobera mobile development conference in Brno in the Czech Republic. It was in the week that we normally have for holidays, but, seeing that it looked like it was in a nice place (never been to the Czech Republic before) I said yes and bought tickets for myself and Number One Wife. I was looking forward to speaking about Windows Phone development and then spending a few days looking around the city.
Then the conference was postponed. Oh well. Since we’d booked holidays and bought flights we thought we’d go anyway. Good move. The city (what we’ve seen of it) is very nice, the hotel (Hotel Europa) is super and great value, and we seem to be surrounded by great restaurants. I’m giving a talk to a user group on Tuesday night, so I even get to do some performing while I’m here.
Number one son today took it upon himself to fall out of a plane in aid of charity. I don’t have any pictures, but I’m assured that the chap he was strapped to will vouch for this. If you want to make a contribution to his good cause, then head over here and give him some cash.
For some reason I’ve been getting a lot more span recently. The university filter is usually pretty good, bur over the last few weeks I’ve seen an increase in people wanting me to help move money out of shady countries and I have had lots of attacks on bank accounts I’ve not got.
I’ve been pondering the best way to deal with this and I did start to wonder if the best thing to do would be to reply to every spam message that I get, but give invalid information each time. If everybody in the world did this then the spammers (who rely on getting responses from just the few folks daft enough to respond) would have a denial of service attack of their own to deal with...
Actually this is a very bad idea though, in that the best approach really is to not do anything, since it is best if they don’t know whether or not your account is active and if you make yourself visible it marks you as someone worth chasing.
We have another winner of an LG Optimius 7 phone. This time the result was actually pretty close. But in the end Michael Clayton came in with a well impressive set of figures for his Breakout game. Congratulations sir. Catch up with me in the department and I’ll give you your prize. Thanks to LG and the Windows Phone team for sponsoring the competition. Perhaps we’ll have more competitions soon…
If you haven’t heard the “Bud Lite Presents” series of radio advertisements then you are in for a treat. I’ve no idea when they were recorded, but they are excellent. I’ve always had a soft spot for Budweiser beer, ever since they started using my software to put datestamps on their bottles, and the adverts are just great.
My favourite is “Mr. Fancy Coffee Shop Coffee Pourer”, but you may have your own. Best used as part of a “random play” list on your favourite music player (mine’s a Zune). You can get the mp3s from here (although you have to wade past some annoying advertising).
Just noticed (to my abject horror) that my Sunday games was posted on Monday, and my Monday reminders were posted on Tuesday. I’ve fixed it with a bit of temporal adjustment.
Programmers have a thing about consistency, (it is one of the better ways to make things work and manageable) but perhaps I’m taking it a bit too far. One of my favourite quotations is from Ralph Waldo Emerson – “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
I remind myself of this whenever I make temporal adjustments and back-date blog posts just to keep my record of one post per day intact. I’ve only “missed” one day in around five or six years (as I remember). But then again, I’ve always had the philosophy that I blog for my own amusement, if anyone else likes it that’s just icing on the cake…
A couple of things to remember today:
Optimus Quest 2
If you want to send me some Windows Phone Marketplace stats before the end of the month (i.e. tomorrow) then you might have a chance to win an LG Optimus 7 Windows Phone. Send your screenshots of the Marketplace to optimusQuest2@robmiles.com
Job with Rob
The closing date for applications to the Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTP) which I mentioned earlier is quite soon. If you fancy working on a really interesting project in a nice part of the world you should get your applications in before Thursday.
Spent some of today playing games with no computer involved at all. Great stuff. Although I managed to destroy my car just before the final corner. Oh well.
While I was in the USA I picked up a gadget. Such a surprise. I went into Barnes & Noble, a US bookshop chain, and bought a Nook Color. This kind of a colour screened answer to Amazon’s Kindle, a portable e-reader for looking at books and magazines downloaded via WiFi. It has a nice screen and I figured it would work as a portable reading device, and maybe even iPad replacement.
Unfortunately you can’t buy the Nook in the UK, and if you do bring one this side of the pond you will be unable to use it as intended because all the content is region locked and you need a US credit card to make purchases. But I didn’t want to use it as a Nook. I’d read that if you put a micro-SD card into the device and turned it on, it would automatically boot from that card, allowing the use of other operating systems. I’d also learnt that there were a number of versions of Android out there which would turn this device into quite a handy tablet. So, that was the plan.
Armed with an SD card and a USB reader I set to work. The install process is quite straightforward. If you don’t mind the performance hit of running everything from the SD card it is as simple as just plugging in the card and turning the machine on. However, I went for the option of replacing the entire Nook operating system with the Cyanogen version of Android. After a few false starts and a bit of head scratching I managed to get a stable device built on the 7.1 Release Candidate. The device works with Android Marketplace so I quickly had quite a few applications running, including a free copy of Angry Birds and even the Amazon Kindle reader, which is actually rather ironic.
The device whizzes along quite happily, the only problem I’ve found is that it chugs quite a bit when watching TV from BBC iPLayer (although lower quality versions viewed via the BBC web site look OK). Battery life is very good and the whole thing is properly useful. I’m not completely convinced about Android itself, some of the operations are a bit fiddly and not intuitive to me, and I have a whole bunch of camera and phone functionality that is irrelevant on this device. However, I don’t regret the purchase.
If you are in the market for a well made tablet with good battery life and a nice screen, and you don’t mind getting your hands dirty, then the Nook will fit the bill nicely. I don’t feel to bad about “de-Barnes and Nobelising” it, I reckon they probably make a bit of profit on the hardware anyway.
Flowers for sale in Pike Place Market. From slightly warmer times.
Got back today. Actually managed to sleep on the plane. When we got back the cloud reached almost all the way to the ground. By gum it was raining. Splashed home just in time for fish and chips. And sleep.
I’d convinced myself that there was no point in going to Seattle. I’ve been before, it is a half hour bus ride and I had work to do. Then I saw the weather outside, and I went anyway. Monorail – Space Needle – Pike Place Market – wonderful.
This is the tower reflected in the building nearby. Amazing stuff.
Another view from the top of the needle.
I took a bunch of pictures that will no doubt appear on these pages over the years. Then it was time to board the return bus and head back to pick up my luggage and catch the flight home. I’ve been using this rather cunning (I think) trick of getting up around 3:00 am while I’m out here to try and trick the body into not adjusting to the Seattle time zone. In a couple of days I’ll find out if it works…
It’s been a great trip. Very intense, but very rewarding. Great questions and interaction with the audience. Thanks folks.
What the Outside World™ looks like round here. Pity Borders is closing.
We did the last sessions today. Great fun. Andy did most of the morning, and I did the afternoon. Lots of great questions and congratulations to Frank Mondorf and Kelvin Challcot who won Windows Phones and Alexander Shevchenko who won the “Private Jet”.
If you are looking for the content (all the slides and the sample code that we showed off) you can find it on the BornToLearn site for the course.
There were some questions that we couldn’t answer in detail during the sessions, I’ll try to remember what they were and put up answers on this blog. One I recall was about the Windows Phone Desktop Passthrough program (WPDTPT), which you need to debug applications on the phone that use media. You can find this on your machine in the tools folder for your SDK installation. This is where they are on my machine.
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v7.1\Tools\WPConnect
You run this in place of the Zune client if you want to debug programs that use media content on the phone. Normally such programs won’t work because the phone locks media when it is syncing to Zune. This is how you use it:
You can run the WPConnect program by double clicking from the desktop, but that makes it harder to see whether it worked or not.
More answers as I remember the questions….
Jeff takes aim
Did the first day of Jumpstart today. We had a bunch of winners, and we need some of them to get in touch so that if they win the phone (or the “private jet”) we can send it through. Here are the names of the folks that I copied down during the session. If you are on the list and there is a * next to your name, send me a mail at iwon@robmiles.com and we’ll sort you out.
We had a great time, some wonderful interaction and super questions. More tomorrow, including the XNA stuff. You can still sign up for the next day at http://bit.ly/Mango-Jump
Frank and Jeff solving problems.
Today was the in-studio pre for the Jumpstart tomorrow. This is when we set everything up and then try to see if it all works. It is kind of important that we are comfortable here because, as Jeff says “Your guys are going to be spending around 16 hours in those chairs…”.
Andy looking thoughtful
For tea we went to a place with a really good view, although by the time I got around to taking a picture the cloud had come in a bit.
Anyhoo, everything is pretty much good to go. We’ve even written the review questions and persuaded Stephanie to get us a private jet as the big prize. (some winners will have to make do with Windows Phones instead…)There’s still time to sign up if you head on over to Windows Phone Mango Jump Start. All fun, and all free.
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.
