Harry Harrison on Kindle

Riding on the train down to London today I was delighted to find that I can now get Harry Harrrison books for Kindle. Including the “Stainless Steel Rat” and my personal favourite “The Technicolor Time Machine”. One of the great questions of the age is “Why have no Harry Harrison books been made into films yet?”. His stuff reads like movie scripts in many ways and is just so darned well written and amusing that it really should be on the big screen.

If you like fast moving Sci-Fi with a humorous twist then you should get a one of his books and have a read. I’d recommend “The Stainless Steel Rat” for starters. Great fun.

Open Day Woo Hoo

This was a great audience. I even had folks going “Woo Hoo” whenever I said robmiles.com….

We had our first University Open day on campus today. Great fun and an amazing turnout. By the time I started talking we had the whole lecture theatre full. Thanks so much for coming, I hope that the trip was worth it. Sorry about the jokes…

Anyhoo, if you did come – or if you didn’t – here are some useful links

www.csharpcourse.com will take you to the C# Yellow Book pages. You can download our complete First Year text from there as a PDF. Come to Hull on an admissions visit and we’ll give you a printed copy.

www.destructiongolf.com is the site for our first 24 hour programming competition. It includes a link to the 360 magazine article that was written about the event.

www.threethinggame.com is the site for our second competition. This includes videos from all the teams about their entries.

www.wherewouldyouthink.com is the site for admissions, I’ll be updating this soon with departmental news and other stuff.

Goodbye Steve Jobs

I was taking a tutorial with the First Year this morning and I was talking about how difficult it is to make something that is easy to use. When you try to add a feature to make things “easier” for the user you often find that you have made your life as an engineer much more difficult. And then I thought of Steve Jobs, who passed away yesterday. He was legendary for giving his engineers hell. When they thought something was “good enough” he would refuse to accept it, repeatedly rejecting solutions that other companies would have shipped as “good enough”.  He ended up with products that were truly delightful to use, and by starting with the person and making the technology fit, rather than vice-versa he moved things on into new places time and time again. And his engineers loved him for it, because he got them to make things that they never believed they could. We will not see his like again.

If you want to read about the way he drove Apple to make the Macintosh and get a feel for the way he worked in those early days, I can recommend West of Eden.

Teaching and Partying at Hull

Did a 13 hour day today. And reminded myself why I love this job. Bunch of teaching on our new hardware modules, then a first year lecture, then a slew of project meetings, then the Postgraduate Party. This was another quiz and video game frenzy which kept me at work until 9:30 pm, but was great fun. Thanks to the Systems team for setting up both parties with speed and efficiency and to Simon for the scary picture quiz that has now got to be an annual feature.

The winning team with their big box of sweets

These guys came second.

These guys got to take away the coveted “White Chocolate Bar of Power”.

Another big day tomorrow.

Nokia Windows Phone Training Day 2

Not a bad way to start the day. Cooked to perfection as well.

Final day of training in Berlin today.

This time we were in the slightly more intimate surroundings of the cafe next to the college we were at yesterday. Really nice setup, with fantastic food. The food has been really good everywhere I’ve been on this tour.

They had even branded the conference table upstairs, which was rather sweet.

The German audience stayed tough on us. One of the things that I reckon is that if a course goes well the audience learns a lot. If a course goes really well, the teacher learns a lot too. And that is how it has turned out. Some of the technical questions that we got really had us digging deep to find answers and even writing test programs to show what was going on. And I now have ideas for a whole bunch of blog posts about Windows Phone development that I must write down before I forget.

Then it was straight to the airport to fly home. Busy day tomorrow. Is there any other kind?

Nokia with Windows Phone in Berlin

Today we did the first day of our Windows Phone training in Berlin. Of course I took pictures.

Not a bad view when you are having breakfast

What we are here for

Badges

They even had branding on the floor…

Jens Dissmann of Nokia Germany gets things started

A great audience, with some really tough questions.

I said I’d put up links to the content. Here we are:

You can get all the content, slide decks and more, from the Jumpstart web site here:

http://borntolearn.mslearn.net/wpmango/m/mediagallery/default.aspx

The ones you want are:

01 Mango Building Phone Apps
02 Mango Intro Silverlight
03 Mango Advanced Silverlight
05 Mango FastApp Switching
11 Mango XNA Winphone
12 Mango Selling applications

There are also other decks and samples you might find interesting. If you want to watch videos of Andy and myself delivering this content (and who wouldn’t) then you can find them on Channel 9 here:

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Mango-Jump-Start-01-Building-Windows-Phone-Apps-with-Visual-Studio-2010

You can find the Tidy ToDo application here. To use the WCF server project you have to have IIS installed on your machine and you must start Visual Studio in Administrator mode:

https://skydrive.live.com/redir.aspx?cid=a4ce6a659fd80c02&resid=A4CE6A659FD80C02!1482

Update on 2011-10-04 21:49 by Rob

Oh, and we got some questions about Codec support in Windows Phone. You can find the list of supported codecs for media playback here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff462087.aspx

Heading for Berlin for Windows Phone Fun

Why can you never find a mouse when you need one…

Flew out to Berlin today. The Nokia Windows Phone Training is moving on to yet another country. I wasn’t able to make the Madrid one on Friday, but I’m told it went well and that a good time was had by all. And here I am in Berlin. Lovely city. I’m wandering round remembering why I like it so much.

The hotel suite I’m in is the biggest one I’ve ever stayed in. It has a bigger living room than our house. I did actually get lost in it at one point. I’m only here for a couple of nights, back in Hull on Thursday, but I really could live in this place. Me and around ten of my friends…

Mango and Visual Studio 2011

Spent a little chunk of today upgrading my Windows Phone to the proper version of Mango. Some time ago I was lucky enough to get hold of the Release Candidate for Windows Phone 7.5 and last week they released the final version. When we did the Release Candidate upgrade we were told to make a backup of the phone and keep this safe, safe, safe so that we could revert back to the version from the mobile operator (in my case Orange) and then apply their upgrades too.

Of course I lost mine.

I can’t really think of a good excuse either. I just went back to where it should have been and it wasn’t there. I think I confused CTRL+Drag (copy) with Drag (move) and then ended up with one less copy of the file than I thought.

Never mind, the good news is that the Windows Phone folks have supplied an update that removes the need to return to any backups. This is also nice because it means that any SMS messages, phone calls and other stuff in the really useful messaging threads will stay up to date. The update runs twice, once to put the latest version of Windows 7.5 on your device and again to reconnect the phone to the update servers from your mobile operator. It works well, in fact the first thing that happened after I’d done all this was another update from Samsung.

If you have upgraded your phone to Windows Mango Release Candidate you should be getting the messages about upgrades real soon now. I’ve not noticed much new about the new version yet, but then the Release Candidate was pretty darned solid anyway.

Make sure that when you do the backup you do it on a machine which the phone is synchronised with. That way it will take (another) backup that might be useful in the future. I’m going to try very hard not to lose this one.

Update on 2011-10-03 16:25 by Rob

Oh, and the final version of the Windows Phone SDK is now out. Head over to create.msdn.com to get your copy. Great stuff.

Bathroom Fittings

Went up town today and bought some bathroom fittings. You wouldn’t believe how many different kinds of toilet roll holder there are.

Giving Away C# Books

The lab before we started. Apparently we’ve replaced over half the machines over summer…

Today was the first programming lab. Great fun. All the students turned up and were given a memory key (for files) and a copy of the Yellow Book for 2011-2012 (How quickly the years go by). If you want an electronic copy you can head over to www.csharpcourse.com for a PDF.

Trust me, in real life it is actually very yellow indeed.

My favourite moment in the lab was when a student asked me a question and I didn’t know the answer. “Can’t you tell me roughly"?” he enquired “I don’t know.” I said in my best gravelly voice.

Welcome to Hull.

Welcome to the First Year

Most of our new students, and Mike Brayshaw in the Large Lecture Theatre.

We did our first First Year lecture today. If you see what I mean. Went well (at least I thought so). Then on to the welcome party. We had Kinect, PS Move, Rock Band and of course Wii Sports. Along with the quiz. Thanks to Simon for the picture rounds.

Doing the quiz

The Winning Team looking mostly pleased with themselves…

A good night, well spent.

I’ve put a bunch more pictures on Flickr, you can find them here.

Welcome to Hull

Library looking good

Welcome to Hull for new students. And welcome back to everyone else. I love it when we start the semester with good weather. It really shows off the place, which is looking lovely at the moment. Each year I put up a bunch of tips for new students, so here goes again:

1. Make sure that you have all your updates installed on your system. It doesn’t matter whether it is a Windows PC, a Mac or a Linux netbook. Find out how to check for updates and get everything up to date. At some point you will want to connect your machine up to a campus network of some kind, and if you don’t have all the latest security patches you may be vulnerable to infection.
2. Do something about viruses. At the very least make sure that your Windows PC has Microsoft Security Essentials installed and running, that the databases are up to date and that you run scans at reguar intevals. If you really want to install an anti-virus program don’t feel obliged to spend a lot of money, the AVG free anti-virus program is good and will cost you nothing. Get it from http://free.avg.com/. Please don’t spend huge amounts on some of the more expensive ones. The benefits are dubious and they also have annual renewal charges too.
3. Take a backup of your machine and leave it somewhere safe (perhaps even at home). Find out how to use the backup software on your machine and take a copy of everything. Use one of these cheap external hard disks that you can pick up for around 35 pounds or so from places like http://www.ebuyer.com/ or Staples, or even Tesco. That way if it all goes horribly wrong when you get to university you can recover your precious music, videos and other stuff. Once you have the backup habit, take one every month or so.
4. Don’t spend huge amounts on software just yet. Most universities (including ours at Hull) have deals that get you some programs that you need cheaply. The same goes for books. In the computing field they are rather expensive, and you don’t want to pay a lot for a book and then find out that it is only used for a small part of the course. You can check the books out in the library, and you might also find that there is a second hand book sale on your campus where you can pick up the required volumes from other students quite quickly. You might also want to form a little cartel with fellow students to share books between each other and spread the expense (this is also neat because it can also give you a ready made study group).
5. Get a usb memory stick . Keep backups of all your work on it. You can also use it to take files into the university to work on. You will get some filespace on the university network, but it will not be an enormous amount, and having your files always with you is useful. Put a file on the drive with your contact details (just your name and phone number) so that if you lose the drive people can find out who to return it to.
6. Get some free on line storage. I like Windows Live Skydrive: http://skydrive.live.com/. This gives you 25 GBytes of space which you can access from anywhere on the web via a browser. The major limitation is that files can’t be more than 100M in size, but this is a perfect place to lob all those important essays and program source files. You’ll need a Windows Live account to use this and the uploading and downloading of files is all via browser which is a bit of a pain but there is a tool called Gladinet: http://www.gladinet.com/ that is supposed make this storage available to your applications although I’ve not used it. You can also use Skydrive to make your files available to other people. The access is controlled via their Windows Live Accounts and you can just email them a link to the download location or folder you want them to have access too.
7. If you have more than one computer and you want to make sure that files are up to date on all of them you can use Windows Live Mesh for that: http://www.mesh.com/. Mesh gives you another 5G of free online storage and you can even synchronise files to Windows Mobile devices. Anyone who just stores their important files on their laptop hard disk is an idiot. These services are free and mean that you can get at your files from anywhere, and you will not lose them. If you want even more online space take a look at DropBox at http://www.getdropbox.com/. Dropbox and Live Mesh are also very good for sharing files with each other.
8. Make sure you have insurance for all your nice toys. It would be terrible if they got stolen or damaged before they were insured. Take a look at cover from student specialists like Endsleigh: http://www.endsleigh.co.uk/Student/Pages/student-insurance.aspx (if anyone knows any cheaper deals feel free to let me know and I’ll update this post)
9. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. If something doesn’t make sense at the time make a note to follow it up later. Don’t let problems hang around until they seem to grow. Find someone and sort things out as soon as possible. Every department has people who know how everything works and can give you help. We have a fantastic team at Hull (I’ll let you find out who they are). If you have a problem, please come and let us help you with it.
10. Don’t worry. Really. You’ll be fine.

Milan Nokia Jumpstart Partner Day

This is the audience at the Nokia Windows Phone Partner day sessions today. On the far right you can see Gregg and Andy. Another great audience, some really good questions (and a chance to see an astonishingly fast Alienware laptop – the red one in the middle).

The Microsoft office in Milan is brand new and in really nice countryside. I took a few minutes before we started to take some pictures.

Not a bad outlook.

This would make a reasonable desktop background I reckon.

Oh, and there is no truth in the rumour that Andy, Gregg and myself were actually here for Milan Fashion Week.

Nokia Windows Phone Jump Start Milan

Today we are in Milan. Great audience again, although they could have looked a bit happier when I took this photograph….Click through the image to my Flickr page, where there are some more pictures. For those of you at the event (including Antonio) you can get all the content, slide decks and more, from the Jumpstart web site here:

http://borntolearn.mslearn.net/wpmango/m/mediagallery/default.aspx

The ones you want are:

01 Mango Building Phone Apps
02 Mango Intro Silverlight
03 Mango Advanced Silverlight
05 Mango FastApp Switching
11 Mango XNA Winphone
12 Mango Selling applications

There are also other decks and samples you might find interesting. If you want to watch videos of Andy and myself delivering this content (and who wouldn’t) then you can find them on Channel 9 here:

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Mango-Jump-Start-01-Building-Windows-Phone-Apps-with-Visual-Studio-2010

Update on 2011-09-26 13:11 by Rob

You can find the Tidy application here. To use the WCF server project you have to have IIS installed on your machine and you must start Visual Studio in Administrator mode:

https://skydrive.live.com/redir.aspx?cid=a4ce6a659fd80c02&resid=A4CE6A659FD80C02!1482

Heading for Milan

Italian Designer Water

Made it to Milan this evening for Italian leg of the Nokia Windows Phone 7 Tour. Despite standing in the queue for the flight to Madrid for 20 minutes…….

Hull Holy Trinity Church

Went up town in Hull today and took some more pictures in Hull Holy Trinity Church. Great place.

Windows 8 on the Acer Iconia Tab

Spent some more quality time with Windows 8 this evening. I’m still a bit confused by the user interface (I keep wanting the Start button to show me my Programs menu), but I am impressed by the way that it just seems to work.

I put Windows 8 on the machine last week and I don’t regret the move. I made a DVD from the ISO image and installed the 64 bit version of the operating system. Since then I’ve been fiddling around with the platform and it works fine for me, the touch side of the experience is especially impressive. I’ve even had some updates install themselves and this evening I added the Bluetooth drivers from the Acer site. They are supposed to be for the 32 bit version of Windows 7, but 64 bit versions are in the file you can download from the Acer product support site.

I’ve now got a working keyboard and mouse and the system might even become useful in the future. I can’t track down 64 bit versions of the accelerometer drivers and the display seems curiously unhappy to flip to portrait mode but apart from that the machine seems quite useable.

I’ve installed Windows Live Essentials (the install went off and fetched .NET 3.5 half way through) and I’m now typing this blog post on the tablet using Live Writer. The only snag really is that I’m down to only around 9G free on the 32G hard disk, but I can plug in a 32G SD card if I want to store some more stuff. Then again, Live Writer has crashed a few times so I don’t think Windows 8 would be a good place to spend real life.

However, if you are looking for a way to get a tablet with Windows 8 I can recommend the device. I can fire up Visual Studio 2011and have a go at writing programs, but it is a bit slow. I didn’t spend much time in Windows 7 after I got the machine but I think it would even make a reasonable portable Windows platform.

Nokia Paris Partner Day

We had our second day in Paris as part of the Nokia and Windows Phone tour. Great fun. At lunch we ended up right on top of the building, looking out over the river and the Paris skyline.

Photogenic train

Taking lunch

Nice afters too….

The delegates were another great bunch, and were even kind enough to laugh at my “favourite computer joke in all the world”.

Some of the audience.

CDG airport terminal on the way back looking good.

We are taking the roadshow, and my favourite jokes, to Milan next week.

Nokia Windows Phone Jump Start Paris

Andy, Gregg and myself have just had a great day talking Windows Phone.   

Hi to the audience, great job folks

This was on at the same time in the conference centre. I was able to use the line “It’s not Rocket Science. That’s next door….” I said I’d put links to the content we described. You can get all the content, slide decks and more, from the Jumpstart web site here:

http://borntolearn.mslearn.net/wpmango/m/mediagallery/default.aspx

The ones you want are:

01 Mango Building Phone Apps
02 Mango Intro Silverlight
03 Mango Advanced Silverlight
05 Mango FastApp Switching
11 Mango XNA Winphone
12 Mango Selling applications

There are also other decks and samples you might find interesting. If you want to watch videos of Andy and myself delivering this content (and who wouldn’t) then you can find them on Channel 9 here:

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Mango-Jump-Start-01-Building-Windows-Phone-Apps-with-Visual-Studio-2010

After the sessions we went up the tower. Used the stairs. Cheaper and no queues. Great fun

More tomorrow. Looking forward to it.

Update on 2011-09-23 11:11 by Rob

Julie from Nokians.fr has posted a very nice sequence of live tweets from the event. My French is not that good, but it looks like she enjoyed the day, which is nice. Read the whole stream here:

http://nokians.fr/2011/09/formation-windows-phone-a-paris/

Welcome to Paris–Mostly

I’m here in Paris as part of the Nokia Windows Phone Jumpstart tour. Should be great fun. It starts tomorrow. Our hotel is just across the road from the tower in the picture, which is really nice. With a bit of luck we might find time tomorrow to go up it.

But I have learned one thing about travel, and that is “Don’t go abroad with a brand new, recently imaged” laptop and expect for stuff to keep working”. I tried to log in to Facebook and it said “Aha! Not seen this machine before and Rob seems to have changed country. I’ll lock him out”. Not a huge problem in the great scheme of things, but very irritating all the same.

I logged into the Facebook site to try and fix the problem and Facebook went “Aha! We are in France, I’ll give Rob the French version of the site and no obvious way to change this”. So now I’m being asked security questions in French about things I’ve never told it. The last five characters of my driving licence? As if? So I plump for a Facebook innovation, passwords by pictures. This was even more disastrous. I have quite a few friends, and many I have never actually met in person. So I don’t know what they look like.

Towards the end Facebook threw in the towel I reckon, and showed me some pictures of family members. That worked and I’m now back on line again. But my Flicker account steadfastly refuses to work. They’ve made it so secure it is unusable.