Goodbye to SIGCSE 2012

Pat Yongpradit does his Kinect booth session at SIGCSE 2012.Very smooth work sir.

I said a farewell to the Microsoft crew at SIGCSE today. When I left they were still working hard manning their stands on the exhibition floor. I only went by to say cheerio but I ended up dishing out tickets for the booth prize draws and talking to folks until I had to rush out and grab my airport shuttle. Great fun these affairs. Nothing quite like talking shop with a bunch of like-minded people. Thanks to the Microsoft crew for inviting me over.

Just as I was leaving there was great excitement at the hotel. Michelle Obama was in the house. She was dropping by to meet with some military families in the area and then take part in a fundraising luncheon. The hotel was full of large blokes with big shoulders and earpieces plus a huge queue of audience members, all looking super smart and obviously looking forward to the event.

SIGCSE Fun

This was on the wall of the room that we used for the presentation today. Who knew tables and chairs could be so dangerous in large numbers?

Did my two sessions at SIGCSE today. And before them both I did a very shouty 15 minute booth session which was fun. And loud. Sorry if my booming voice was a bit noisy folks, I feel particularly bad about the chap standing in front of me who seemed to rise about six inches into the air when I went into “Town Crier” mode to promote the session...

These are some of the Kinect presentation audience at the start of the session, both audiences were great with some lovely questions. Thanks folks.

I promised that I’d make the slides and the demos available after the session. You can find them all here. Some other useful links that you might find, er, useful.

www.csharpcourse.com – my C# Yellow book and C# from Java Orange Book. Also some XNA content you might find useful.

Microsoft Faculty Connection – you can find the Kinect content by typing Kinect into the Search Curriculum Resources box and doing a search. You can also find my Windows Phone content here too.

Kinect for Windows – if you want to work with any of the Kinect content you will need to install the Kinect for Windows SDK.

Channel 9 Videos – these are videos of some of my stuff. There is a session on the Kinect (with working demos) and other stuff you might find interesting

Windows Phone in Rhyme – and why not..

After my talk I had a wander around the exhibition.

This is the Touch Develop team strutting their stuff at a booth talk. They’ve just released a free book about writing Windows Phone programs on Windows Phone. And they have some really exciting plans for the future. I plan to spend the flight back writing some code on my Lumia (in flight mode of course)

One way to stop folks wandering off with the pens…..

The Gadgeteer crew in action. They have some really nice stuff here including a scary powerful buggy.

Want one.

Out and About in Raleigh

Raleigh State Capitol Building

Lesson 1: Raleigh is properly pronounced “Raw-Lay” here. Lesson 2: It’s a very nice place. I had a quick wander around once I’d finished playing with my slide decks for tomorrow and sorting out emails and stuff. They have some lovely museums that I didn’t really have time to look round properly, but I did spend some time in the Museum Shop, which had some lovely stuff in it. And with it being Feb. 29th today they were offering 29% discount, which was very nice.

On the way back to the hotel I wandered past artspace. This was great. A large building has been given over to artists studios where you can view their work and even see them making it.

I had a quick wander round and even had a chat with some of the artists there. This chap, Kyle Highsmith, was even happy to have is picture taken. I loved his stuff, which you can see more of here. Unfortunately I don’t think any of his canvases would have fitted in my suitcase. There was a huge variety of work on show in Artspace with prices at all levels and anyone passing through Raleigh should seek it out.

If you need to find your way round the place….

If you are at SIGCSE and want to come along to my sessions tomorrow I’m doing two:

10:45 am–12:00 pm room 305A

Empowering Students: Teaching Software Development with Windows Phone

1:45–3:00 pm room 305A

Creative Uses for Kinect in Teaching—with Curriculum Materials

Flying to Raleigh

This is not Raleigh, this is Boston airport. It was pretty much dark when I arrived in Raleigh.

Flew out to Raleigh in North Carolina today to present some sessions about teaching with Windows Phone and Kinect. I’m speaking at SIGCSE 2012 and the thing that is worrying me most is that in my presenter bio I rather stupidly put “..and Rob knows a lot of jokes about cheese”. Snag is that at the moment I can only think of two…..

XNA Windows Phone Theme Library

Danny, one of our First Year students, is hard at work on his First Year programming coursework. This year the game is “Sweepy Cleaner”, an XNA game where you get to control a robot vacuum. I’ve even bought the domain name.

Danny made a version of Evil Squash last year for Windows Phone and he is now building a Sweepy Cleaner for the phone as well. And he has discovered that:

1. It is nice if a game has the same colour theme as the ones set for the phone by the user.
2. It is hard to get these colours from an XNA game

So he has written a little bit of code to get this information into a game, and released it as a dll that any XNA developer can use. Which is nice. You can find it here.

More HDR Fun

Yep. Think I’ll buy this program. This is Hull Holy Trinity Church by the way, think I’ll nip back there with a tripod next week and take some proper shots.

Saturday Open Day

Saturday open days are always busy, this is some of the audience from today. Thanks for being another great audience and laughing at my jokes (at least most of them).

Just to show I have no fear, I set up the Kinect sensor and showed some demos of that before the actual talk, and it worked a treat, which is nice. You can click through the picture to the full size image on Flickr and also a picture of today’s lucky prize winner.

High Dynamic Range Photography

I’ve been playing with High Dynamic Range photography. This is where you take a bunch of pictures of a scene at different exposures and then make a single shot which has a greater dynamic range. The picture above is just a snap I took last year. I didn’t have three different exposures, so I did some fiddling with the RAW file to fake the different exposure levels. I then used program called PhotoMatix to combine them and then tone map to get the grungy effect that you see above. If you look closely at the picture you’ll see that it has a Photomatix watermark which means I’ve not paid for the software yet. However, I’m very tempted to, as the results seem quite nice to me. Not particularly photorealistic in this shot, but definitely interesting.

If you are into photography you might find it fun to have a go. The only thing you really need is a tripod to keep your camera steady between the different exposures.

PS Vita Fun and Games

The picture doesn’t do justice to the 5 inch screen on the Vita, but it does show you just how large the device is.

I wasn’t going to buy a Vita until I saw one running a game. I’d been lulled by iPads and Smartphones into thinking that they were the ultimate in portable gaming.

They aren’t.

The Vita is a proper, high performance, gaming platform that you just happen to be able to fit into your jacket pocket. The games look like PS3 or Xbox 360 games. Playing Uncharted (as I have been doing) on the Vita is just like playing it on the PS3. What’s more, with twin joysticks in exactly the right places, the control is like using the PS3 gamepad as well. It should have at least three hours of battery life too, which is lot more than you will get from a Smartphone if you start playing 3D games with it.

I am very impressed with the gaming experience. I’m also impressed by the other programs on the device. The browser is perfectly serviceable and the on-screen keyboard is one of the best I’ve used. You can also use it for Skype, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr should you be the sociable type. If they put Amazon Kindle on it I’d be happy to leave the iPad at home and take the Vita with me on trips.

There are some niggles. The use of highly expensive, Sony proprietary, memory cards is a pain and the games are closer to console prices than I’d like. And the device itself is a bit pricey. although that might change over time.

If you are a “proper” gamer who wants to take a “proper” gaming experience with them on the bus then the Vita is a very attractive proposition.

Open Day

These are some of the open day attendees. I’ll settle for “Mostly Happy”.

We had another Open Day today. Good attendance for a mid-week session, which was nice. There was even a chap there who had got hold of my yellow book, written some games and made money out of them. Can’t be bad.

This is the winner of the prize draw, accepting her prize from Warren.

Micro Framework Robots at Tech Days

Straight after my complete “demo meltdown” last week I was greatly cheered by some robots that one of the chaps at Tech Days was showing off. He had taken a toy robot and make it properly useful by adding potentiometers to the joints so that the .NET Micro Framework controller could properly position the arm.

These are the GHI controller boards that he built up.

He even had a demo where the robot was controlled by someone in front of a Kinect sensor. And his worked…..

Reaching for XNA

We came across this issue in the lecture this afternoon. If you are using a machine which lacks really high performance graphics, perhaps because it has an on-board graphics display, you might get an error when you try to run an XNA program on it, because the graphics hardware can’t keep up.

If this happens you can try changing the Game Profile in the project settings for the game. If you set them to “Reach” this will reduce the demands that are made on the machine, and might make the game work.

It worked for me in the lecture….

Kinect and Windows Phone Demos

You can find all the Kinect demos and presentation materials on Skydrive here. I hope they work for you…

Imagine Cup Live Meetings

If you are thinking about entering the Imagine Cup (and you should be) then I’m hosting a couple of Live Meetings next week which will tell you all about the early stages:

Session 1 -  5:00 pm GMT  Tuesday 21st February

https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/zaaz1com/meet/FB7G74

Session 2 – 7:00 am GMT Wednesday 22nd February

 https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/zaaz1com/meet/D4Z68P

These are the times and the links to the Live Meetings themselves. Both meetings have the same content, come to the one that best fits your schedule.

If you have any interest in the competition then please come along. There’s still plenty of time to form a team and get cracking.

Final Tech Days Session Fun

This is the last shot of an audience for a while. Unless I decide to take a picture of the students at the C# lecture on Monday…

Did my final Windows Phone session today, just a few hours after I’d finished the Kinect one. I’d been assigned the “World Forum” theatre, which as you can see is pretty large. But there were enough folks there to make it look fairly full, and they were a great audience. A 75 minute session is quite a long time. I’ve been to shorter movies. Thank you all for paying attention and staying awake, in spite of the session being directly after lunch…

Every. Demo. Worked. (mostly)

Did my Kinect session first thing this morning, which was nice because it meant I had ages to set up. So I tested all the demos and they all worked. The only problem we had was with the “Kinect Kiss Detector”, which considering the audience demographic that you see above is not surprising.

Every. Demo. Failed.

A big audience to fail in front of….

What do you do when you present a session and every demonstration fails? I didn’t know this until today. The answer is that you reach the end and then you go and find out why.

I was doing a Kinect session for Geek Night today. This was kind of ambitious, what with carrying the sensor around all over the place. So I’d tested everything before I set off, and I was confident that it would all work on the night.

It didn’t.

I was very happy when the first demo worked, but I can’t take too much credit for that because it was the demonstration application that ships with the SDK. As soon as I moved onto my code that problems began. Programs that just worked suddenly locked up before my eyes. All of them.

It took me a while to figure out what had happened. As in the case of most big failures, it was a collection of little things that added up to make a catastrophe. First thing was that I was using my lovely little Alienware netbook rather than the “Big Ole Dell” that I usually use. The main reason I took the Alien was that it made room in the case for the Kinect sensor. That and the way the keyboard lights up. It is just powerful enough to run the demos, but just powerful enough is fine. Except today it wasn’t.

Something has mysteriously turned all my overclocking settings back down to normal. I turned them on ages ago when I got the device and forgot all about them. Today, after a lot of head scratching, I checked in the BIOS and there they all were. Back where they shouldn’t be.

A bit of tweakage and all is well. I’ve even tried flipping to the built in high performance graphics, which also helps (but also breaks the Windows Phone emulator – so I don’t usually use it).

I’m kicking myself for not testing the demos on site this afternoon when I had a bit of free time, but I assumed that since they worked before they’d work again.

Oh well. Everybody at the session seemed to have a good time. Except me.

Mega Student Sessions at TechDays

I like a big audience, but, blimey.

Did a couple of Student to Business sessions in TechDays today. Great fun. Above are the folks who turned up to the first one. Click to through to the larger Flickr image and try to find yourself on the picture (Note – only do this if you were actually at the session)

This is the slightly smaller audience at the second session. I think word must have got out by this point….

Tech Days is being held in a massive cinema complex near Brussels. They have some old projectors in the foyer, this is a close up of one of them.

Now on to the Netherlands and Geek Night.

Update on 2012-02-16 18:22 by Rob

I promised I'd post the slides and demos here. I'll do this soon. If you are in a hurry the decks and demos were very similar to the ones I delivered yesterday.

Tech Days Belgium

Another country, another audience…

Today it was up bright and early to fly to the Netherlands and take a train to Belgium for my sessions at TechDays. I’m giving sessions on Windows Phone and Kinect. I always wonder just why I do this kind of thing, particularly when I’m sat on a train watching unfamiliar countryside whizz past in the rain. Then the session starts and I remember why. Great fun. Great audience and a good response from all. I promised I’d put the slides and content on the interwebs and so here it is. Remember, if you make a fortune from anything based on it I’m in for 10%. It’s only fair…

This was my setup for the talk.

The only snag was that when I got back to the hotel I found that they’d run out of numbers for access to the hotel WIFI. Apparently a new system is being installed tomorrow and at the moment they have no network access. So this post is being made from the future.

Nokia in Sunshine

I took this picture yesterday, when the sun was shining. Apparently the Lumia has some fancy polarisation magic that it does to make the screen visible in bright sunlight. Seems to work too.