Marking Evil Squash

This is a much better logo than my version. Thanks Jamie

I’ve spent the last three and a bit days in the lab marking first year student work. And it has been great fun. There were four of us down there watching students go through 15 minute presentations of their Evil Squash implementations. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Evil Squash is a board game for up to 4 players. It is a kind of cross between Snakes & Ladders and Ludo. We invented it just for the practical session and we are going to invent another one next year.

Our first year students had to create a program that implemented the game, getting all the arrows on the board to work, along with the “Squash” behaviour that is triggered when one player lands on top of another. We provided a “special” dice sequence which allowed us to test all the game actions and we watched each program run through this. Then we took a look at the code, gave marks for style and any extras (some students added AI players who could take on their human counterparts), checked on user documentation and test reports and finally gave out a mark.

We always do a game development for the first year course, but this is the first time we’ve used a brand new game of our own devising. It has worked rather well. Everyone got into the spirit of the development and we have seen some very impressive implementations of the game, including a few Windows Phone versions in Silverlight and XNA. Expect to find Evil Squash in the Windows Phone marketplace soon.

Once nice side-effect of using an original game was that there was no code out there for people try and use. When people get into trouble with a development there is sometimes a tendency to leap onto a search engine and look for code that solves the problem. This is never a good thing to do. A lot of code out there is buggy and hard to understand and often takes you further away from where you want to be. During the marking we ask for bits of the code to be explained to us, and I found that for the ones I marked everybody knew how their code worked. Even those unlucky souls who hit bugs during the presentation were able to say “Aha! I know what is wrong and how to fix it” and point to the code block that was causing the problem. 

We saw some great work, and gave some great marks out. I’m really looking forward to what they turn out next semester.

Project Hawaii For Windows Phone

Project Hawaii is a set of cloud services for Windows Phone users which make it really easy to do things like heavy computation, storage, location mapping, optical character recognition and speech recognition. They also provide a really useful relay service that allows phones to communicate directly even though their IP addresses might be local to their operator carrier’s network.

It is free for students and academics, you only need to give your Windows Live ID to get a key and get started. You can download the SDK and have a play from here.

Hull Windows Phone Winners

Hot on the heels of the news of the competition comes news of the winners. Danny and Steve from our department have both won phones. And very nice they are apparently (front facing camera and all). Extra kudos to Danny for pitching a version of Evil Squash. Now we want to see your stuff in the Marketplace.

A Windows Phone for Christmas

If you are lucky enough to be a student you should head off pronto to the UK Student Blog and see about getting yourself a free Windows Phone. All you have to do is show the bods at Microsoft a screenshot of your application running in the emulator and then promise on your honour to put it onto the Windows Phone Marketplace in time for the Christmas rush. If they like the cut of your jib they’ll send you a phone, no strings attached (after all, that is how wireless phones work you know).

Any of our First Year students who have Evil Squash running on Windows Phone (and there are a few) should get into gear pronto and get themselves into the mix. I want Evil Squash in the marketplace before Christmas and I promise to buy a copy of every version. After all, I’ll need something to do at all the parties I get invited to….

Funky Kinect Camera Fun

So I’m playing around with the Kinect camera. What you see above is one of the more interesting effects you can get with it. I got this by mistake, but I’m so impressed with the effect that I’ve left it in the program. I think it shows off my sweater rather well..

B Grade Radio

so - what is it?

Bought a “B Grade” radio today. Turned out that the ‘B’ stood for “Broken” in this case. Fortunately they had another one in stock to swap it with, for which the B seems to stand for “basically the same thing but a lot cheaper”.

The Lego Advent Calendar

I’m now a Lego VIP. Perhaps the oldest one that they have. I’ve got a plastic card with a picture of a little Lego man on it and they send me frequent emails about bargain deals in plastic bricks.

Anyhoo, these are the first two day’s worth from the Lego Advent Calendar. Hope there is a Lego Death Star behind the door for the 24th….

VideoBash on December 12th

Christophe dropped into my first year lecture today to promote the upcoming Videobash at the university. It’s a co-production between ComSoc and the university film society. Movies, video games, fancy dress. Looks like fun. I think they still have some tickets left. You can buy them next week on the 7th, 8th and 9th in the union.

On a related note, you can get the Final Fantasy movie – The Spirits Within on Blu-ray for 6.49 on Amazon, which has got to be a bargain.

Nothing wrong with Cardiff

Somehow reed.co.uk seem to think I want another job. They keep sending me emails about jobs that “match” me. Today it is an “Assistant Manager in Cardiff”. Frankly I’m not convinced.

Nokia Lumia Colours

I’m a Windows Phone kind of guy, and so I was expecting to like my new Nokia Lumia 800. But I wasn’t expecting to like it quite as much as I do. There have been some mutterings about battery life on the device, and I must admit that the first few charges didn’t last as long as I would have liked. However, I followed the instructions on one blog post and turned off the “Notify me when new networks are found” option for WiFi.

I’m not sure whether this has reduced power consumption or whether the Nokia has just got used to the battery and learnt more about how much charge/discharge it can take. Either way I’m getting better battery life than I used to get with the Samsung Omnia 7 and a lovely user experience. And Kinectimals is a really cute game.

I’ve ordered up some of the multi-coloured cases (Red and Blue look good to me) as I’ve always fancied having a bright coloured phone. Not sure about the green though.

Evil Squash Week

If you show this picture to one of our First Year students they’ll probably start muttering under their breath. That’s because we’re entering the final week of “Evil Squash” coursework. This is my little board game which we are all trying to make workable versions of. You can find out more at www.evilsquash.com We we are going to put the best ones out there on Windows Phone. And there are some really good ones too.

Too Many Accounts

Today I bought something on the internet and paid extra so just to avoid having to register on yet another shopping site. I found a site selling the item for a tiny bit less but they wanted me to register and set up a username and password (and would presumably bombard me with emails and “offers” ever afterwards). I wish sites wouldn’t do this. Some places have an “order without setting up an account” button and I much prefer this. When I’m shopping on the internet I’m after the goods, not a relationship.

Pan Shopping

Been buying pans today. At one point I was checking them for heft and wieldability. I think that’s what comes of watching Tangled.

A Grate Day for Wit

Today I had three great ideas for Tweets in quick succession. I’m so pleased with them that I’m going to put them in the blog so that they don’t get lost. And no, I’m not sorry.

“Argos are having an "up to half price sale". Working out what this means is really hurting my head.”

“I was going to buy an e-reader but I think I'll wait until you can get ones that do the whole alphabet.”

“I'm going to make a stage out of empty, lid-less, ketchup bottles. It will be an Open Sauce Platform...”

..and here’s a bonus new one

“I’ve written a program that plots the location of every seat I’ve ever used. I call it my Sat Nav”

Imagine Cup

There are lots of things that you can do that will change your life. One of the best things you can do is enter the Imagine Cup. We will be putting Hull teams together soon. If you have an idea and team then get signed up here: http://www.imaginecup.com/

McCoys

If you are stuck for a nice place to have a coffee in the middle of Hull I can recommend McCoys. They are just opposite Princes Quay and they do a mean teacake. And they have a really nice roaring fire.

Return of the Windows Phone Rewards

Last year Hull students had a wonderful time with the Windows Phone Rewards program. Barely a week went by without someone winning something. If you want to get involved I’d strongly advise it. The idea is that if you publish Windows Phone apps you get into the running for prizes, some of which are pretty large You can sign up for free here.

Cottingham Lights 2011

Every November they turn on the Christmas lights in the village and I go and take pictures.So this evening we sallied forth.

This year I tried waving the camera around a bit.

.. and even left the shutter open for 30 seconds to see what happens.

I quite like this one too.

Been Better

Got a nasty cold. Or perhaps a nasty cold has got me. I hate it when I have a list of things to do and then find it hard to do any of them. The only upside is that apparently I have an even more deep and resonant voice.

But I don’t reckon it is worth it.

Nokia Lumia 800 For Free-ish

Very nice too

I only went into the Orange Shop to see what the phone looked like. I wasn’t really far enough into my contract to make it possible to do a upgrade right now. Except that the phone did look very nice. And I can probably find someone who will give me a few quid for my good condition Samsung Omnia 7 (which was until 30 seconds or so into the demonstration my favourite Windows Phone). But the deal clincher was a good one. Turns out that if you are an employee of the university you can get a 25% discount on your Orange phone bill if you take out a new contract. Which means that over a year I’ll save a goodly chunk of the upgrade price. So that was that. Where do I sign?

I’m now the very proud owner of a Nokia Lumina 800. The wheel has turned all the way round. I started out with Nokia phones all those years ago, with a lovely 7110 (the “Matrix” phone) and went through a number of Nokia devices before I jumped ship because the lure of writing programs for my phone just got too great.

And now I’m back with blue boxes. The packaging and presentation were excellent. The phone is a really, really well crafted object. It has quite a turn of speed compared with the Samsung (not that my old phone was ever much of a slouch). The camera is a step up too, and even takes reasonable flash pictures. I’ve got twice as much space for content and the screen is astonishing. It has the clarity of OLED but isn’t quite as “in your face” as the Sansung.

And it runs Cheese Lander.

Update on 2011-11-22 08:43 by Rob

The bloke in the phone shop had a Windows Phone as well, an HTC Mozard. He said he hadn't bothered adding the Mango update yet. I told him to go straight home and do the upgrade. Like having a new phone I reckon.