Driving Home and Hanging Blinds

Nothing like driving 225 miles and then hanging some vertical blinds when you arrive home.

Galaxy Trucker

This is my space truck. Didn’t win.

Galaxy Trucker is a really good board-game. We spent some time today finding out how it works, and what happens if you build a space ship with no engines.

.NET Gadgeteer Fun and Games

I love getting parcels in the post. Particularly if they contain things like a complete set of .NET Gadgeteer devices and interfaces. There are loads of interface devices, including touch screens, GPS sensors, barometers, thermometers, gyroscopes, moisture sensors and even a thing that which looks like it will measure my heartbeat.

The potential for fitting things together and doing great things with them is wonder, wonder, wonderful. I’m going to take them home for Christmas and see what we can build. I foresee a return of the Blog Controlled Christmas Lights.

Christmas Bash 2011

We had our Christmas Bash today. A bit near the end of the semester so it was a fairly select gathering, but fun none the less.  We did the usual Team Fortress 2 and Pizza

After 3 hours of solid effort Simon found all of the 78 words in the “Three Thing Game” Christmas Wordsearch. We had to give him a prize, but only after we’d checked the age rating of it.

Double barrelled cracker action. I think the blur adds atmosphere….

There are some more pictures on Flickr.You can find them here.

Mr Squeek’s Roller Coaster Ride

One of the student teams in our Three Thing Game this October ended up with “Fairground, mouse, jungle quest”. So they came up with Mr. Squeek’s Jungle Roller Coaster ride. It is now in Windows Phone Marketplace as a free download.

Not sure why it is called “grind”, but that is the best way to find it. Great fun.

Media Player and Marketplace Certification with Windows Phone

One of our students was having problems with Marketplace Certification for his XNA game. The game was failing certification because his game background music was playing over the top of any media that the phone user was listening to. There is a simple way to fix this, which is not to play your game music if the user is listening to something. You can do this by testing to see if the media player is stopped before playing your music:

if (MediaPlayer.State == MediaState.Stopped)
{
    // play your own music here
}

The MediaPlayer class lives in the System.XNA.Media namespace. If you are writing a Silverlight game you’ll have to import the XNA libraries.

Skydrive from Windows Phone Apps

The latest version of the Windows Live Connect APIs let Windows Phone 7 apps interact with the Skydrive storage of phone users. This makes it possible for us to write programs that authenticate users and store pictures and documents in the Cloud. I reckon this is a really significant development as it opens up lots of really interesting possibilities for connected applications.

Find out how to get started here.You can find a sample Windows Phone application that uploads pictures here.

Old Age Gadgets

I was up in the loft today getting down our Christmas tree and found a few things that I thought would be fun to photograph.

Remember this?

I think I’ll print a large version of this to stick on the wall.

My first mobile phone next to my present mobile phone.

Christmas Shopping on Oxford Street

We took a day trip to London today. Great fun. We were even brave enough to go down Oxford Street. To say it was busy would be a bit of an understatement. But it was nice.

Political Note: I don’t usually comment on politics on this blog. My opinion is that no matter how you vote The Government always seems to get in. But I feel I must apologise to the rest of the world about the behaviour of our Prime Minister with respect to the European Talks last week. When a previous Prime Minister was negotiating very important treaty stuff he hid a diplomat under the table who passed him notes with sensible things to say written on them. Apparently our Mr Cameron did the same, only he took Jeremy Clarkson.

Christmas Bash 2011

If you want to know where all the cool people are (and me) next Thursday, we'll be at the departmental Christmas Bash with games, a monster word search, pizza and all kinds of fun. If you are a student in the department you can come too. Tickets go on sale in the departmental office from 2:00 pm Monday 12th of December.

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.