How to get more Blog Traffic

Danny Brown, one of our students, is celebrating his 10,000th blog reader. Well done sir. I tell all my students to start doing things, and get a blog out there about what they are doing. I seem to remember that Danny had a blog before he came here, but I note that quite a few Hull students are now active bloggers. You can find out what they are up to at http://hullcompsciblogs.com/ There are some really good blogs to follow up there covering everything from Raspberry Pi to video games to Gadgeteer.

I’ve been blogging for very many years and do it for fun. Although it is nice to get traffic as well. If you want some tips for a successful blog, well, here are some of mine.

Track your users. If your blogging site doesn’t provide tracking of hits then install something like Google Analytics. It costs nothing and it gives a great insight on how much activity you are getting. This can be quite depressing, but it is always useful to know when you have done something that attracts interest.

Make sure you have metadata that makes sense. I’m not going to suggest Search Engine Optimisation as such here, just common sense things to help people find you.

Integrate your blog with social media. I use Windows Live Writer (part of Windows Live Essentials) for creating blog posts. That provides plug-ins that I can use to tweet and post on Facebook when the blog is updated. You can use If This Then That (an amazing service that I must devote a proper blog post to later) to do this for you automatically. And remember that comments on your posts will not arrive on your blog posts, they will now often arrive as Likes on Facebook or Tweets.  This means that if you want to have a dialog with your readers you have to go out and look for their comments.

Some content gets a lot less interest that others. The absolute best content you can create is stuff that solves problems. If you make posts that tell people how to do things then you will get a lot of traffic as people find your answer and link through to it. You will also get traffic via search engines. Pick a subject you know a bit about, or are learning yourself, and put up blog posts with answers to the problems that you hit. One reason Danny has had so much success is that he has provided some neat technical answers (with all that a reader needs to solve the problem) along with the other content. Readers might not care about the place you went last week, or what you think about the current government, but they do like being able to solve problems. The only downside with useful content is that such readers are “fair weather friends” who will bump up your traffic for a day or so, before it drops back down again. The way to address this is to put plenty of stuff on your landing page that will encourage them to look around and find other things to read.

Enjoy your blogging, keep it regular and leave the readers thinking that you like talking to them. You don’t need to post every day. Only a fool would do that. But a regular blogging heartbeat is a good thing. If you take a break don’t worry, or feel like you have to “fill in the gaps”, just come back with a good post and it will be like you never went away.

Olympic Closing Ceremony–Wish You Were Here

I wasn’t at the Olympic Closing Ceremony. Wish I had been. I normally hate these kinds of things, seeing them as overblown feasts of self congratulation.

This one was different. It was great. Even the music was amazing. All of it. And when they started with the intro to “Wish you were here”, and then, at the end when the guy on the tight rope shook hands (see 70’s Pink Floyd album cover reference above), well, words fail me.

I’m pretty sure that there will be someone on Radio 4 tomorrow moaning about the way that the whole thing showed “nothing about what being British really means”. (actually I’m very sure, I’m writing this on Monday morning and I’ve just heard it).

What daft thing to say. To me the whole Olympics thing has been about Britain saying “Actually you know, we are pretty good at lots of things. Including putting on a darned good show.” Well done Team GB. At every level.

Bristol Balloon Festival

We went to the Bristol Balloon Festival today. It was probably advertised as “An Event for all the Family”, because all the families in Bristol seemed to have the same idea. My goodness it was busy. We had a bit of a queue to get into the car park, and then a bit of a trek to the balloon launching area. We’d heard on the way that, because of high winds, there was not going to actually be a balloon launch, but we’d already spent such a long time queuing at that point that we thought we’d stick with it and see what there was there.

The weather was great, we did get a glimpse of a balloon (see above) and it was a great evening.

Discount Kinect Start Here! with Moo Cards

It’s the other side of the card with the discount code which is the interesting bit….

I’ve always liked Moo cards. In fact I like them so much that ages ago I wrote a “Moo Card Splitter” program that takes images and makes them into a Moo Card jigsaw on Flickr. I’m not sure if it still works. Maybe I’ll make a Metro version that uses the Windows 8 Metro interface that looks like Metro nothing like anything else that doesn’t resemble a rather cool, Metro-esque interface using the Segoe font.

Anyhoo, Microsoft Press like Moo Cards too. Today I was sent a little box full of Moo cards about my new book. (I never get tired of saying “My new book”..). On the back of each card is a discount code that will get you 40% of the paper version of the book and 50% of the ebook. Now, of course, I’d prefer you to pay full price. The book is certainly worth it. But if you want a low cost way of getting hold of “the premier C# Kinect interfacing book written by a tall bloke with a name that rhymes with “Mob Riles” then I can recommend it. I’m carrying a few of the cards in my wallet, so feel free to ask me for your own personal card if you bump into me. Actually, I’d prefer it if you didn’t bump into me, just ask for the card.

Alternatively, email me with the title “I’ve just bumped into you” and I’ll send you a “Virtual Card” with the discount code on the back.

Update on 2012-08-13 10:36 by Rob

I've just discovered that Flickr has moved on since I wrote the application and now my Moo Splitter no longer works.

Sorry about that. I'll see about making it work properly.

Amazing Pulse Gadgeteer Device

Scarlet put me on to this amazing device that transforms internet data into a graph. It was made using six servos which are driven by a .NET Gadgeteer processor. You can use it to show you the weather forecast, how busy your Twitter feed is, or anything that you can pull from the web and make into numbers.

You can find out more about the Pulse device here.

C# Yellow Book Updates

Spent today working on the next version of the C# Yellow Book. I’ve removed the errors that folks have reported (thanks for that, and keep them coming) and I’m updating the section on Windows Forms interfaces to cover WPF and XAML. It should be available for free download at the start of September.

Tetris Lights

Number one daughter told me that I might like to get some of these lights. She’s right. They’re great. The bottom Tetris piece (the blue bar) is connected to a power source and the others then light up when you stack them above. I spent a happy ten minutes getting them into this vaguely plausible arrangement. I’m trying to get them stacked with the top flat… If you are a Tetris aficionado you might want to seek them out.

Scary Nexus 7

The Nexus is proving quite an impressive piece of hardware. Battery life is shaping up to be very good. I’ve found out how to make the screen brighter (turn on auto-brightness) and got auto-rotate to work (for some reason it is turned off by default). I’ve also found some useful applications, including one that provides access to my Skydrive storage amongst other things. I’ve loaded some films and music onto it and they work very well and look rather good. Then it did something that totally baffled me.

I took the Nexus 7 to work today. Left it in my bag. Didn’t bother connecting it to the campus network. After a while it beeped, so I got it out to take a look. It had received a new email message. Which was rather impressive, bearing in mind it didn’t have a network connection. Then I took a closer look at the WiFi settings. It knew all about the university network, along with a couple of networks at places it had never been to.

Strange.

Eventually I remembered, around a year ago I had a brief fling with a Nook Color, another Android powered tablet. I found the Nook great for reading books (that’s what Barnes and Noble made it for) but a bit slow for anything else. But I did take it to work and connect it to the campus network. And of course I’d registered the device using my Google username. Which means that the Nook had uploaded the WiFi settings to my part of the Google cloud which then made them available to any other Android device that I register.

I’m not sure whether to be impressed or frightened by this. On one hand it is very convenient for me not to have to mess around with SSIDs and passwords. On the other it is a bit scary that Google are holding all my (along with lots of other people’s) network credentials up in their cloud. One of the boxes that I ticked next to a page of licence agreements (does anybody actually read these) probably gave them permission to do this, but I now worry a bit that if I get a security breach on my Google account it also gives people access to my home network, should they choose to register their own device and then stand outside my house, browsing files the other side of my network firewall…

This is a reminder of just how clever and connected modern devices can be, and just how much you have to be aware of the dangers of all this cleverness.

Harry Bosch is the man

Sometimes you just want a good book to read. Not one that has won awards, just a good narrative and some strong characters. Michael Connelly writes crime novels which are just a great way to pass the time. One of his heroes, Harry Bosch, is a hard bitten and hard boiled detective, just the kind of guy you’d want to investigate your murder (although perhaps you’d be past caring by then). Harry works the mean streets of Los Angeles and has seen a lot of life. There are a number of books which chronicle his ups and downs, you can read them in order or how you like, as each is completely free standing. If courtroom drama is more your style there are also some books staring Mickey Haller, the attorney with a heart of gold and an interesting past. All good reads.

As an exercise, while I was washing the car today I had a go at putting together a Harry Bosch style narrative. There’s actually a serious point here – from a writing point of view it is often useful to have a go at using a particular style – do a blog post from a private eye, or a president, or a poet and see how you get on. Anyhoo, with apologies to Michael Connelly, and a note that his prose is definitely not played for laughs, here’s my attempt at a Harry Bosch story:

The Axe In The Head Affair

Bosch hit the man full in the face as hard as he could. The man went straight down onto the ground, as Bosch knew he would. Bosch stood over him, waiting for the man to get up so he could hit him again. The man looked up at him, with pain in his eyes.

‘Why did you do that Harry?’ he asked

‘This is a murder investigation, not a popularity contest’ Bosch rasped, breathing heavily.

‘But I’m your partner’ the man on the ground managed to say.

‘Listen’, Bosch replied, hoping the voice of experience would get through before anything else bad happened. ‘I get through partners the way some people get through underwear. And I often leave them in pretty much the same state. The sooner you learn that, the better. Next time, remember that it is black with no sugar, not any kind of fancy coffee pourings’. His partner looked at over at the frappachino with chocolate frosting on the top resting on the hood of the squad car and nodded. ‘I just thought you might fancy a change.’ he said, getting to his feet with difficultly.

‘Now to business’ said Bosh, walking towards the other car. He could tell at once there had been a murder there. The un-natural stillness around the vehicle, the faint, lingering, smell of fresh death, and the axe sticking out of the head of the man in the driver’s seat all pointed to homicide. He paused to open his briefcase and take out a fresh pair of blue crime scene gloves from the bulk pack he carried with him everywhere. “I really must stop wearing these around the house” he thought as he put them on and carefully opened the car door.

Somebody had wanted Harvey Putz to be very dead indeed. Only a small part of the axe blade was still visible, the rest was embedded in his temple. From the angle of the blow Bosh decided that it had been wielded by a left handed female with a club foot. Or perhaps that’s what they wanted him to think, he thought grimly, remembering that this was Los Angeles, where nothing was ever as it seemed, except perhaps the weather, and even that was sometimes changeable.

‘Send the car down to the lab’ he said eventually. ‘Let’s go and see Mrs. Putz and break the bad news to her’ If she didn’t already know he thought to himself grimly.

Mrs. Putz lived in a neighbourhood of fancy cars and even fancier houses. As they drove to her address Bosch looked at the neat suburban lawns, some with children playing in the warm spring sunshine. He wondered what dark secrets each house held, and speculated on the unhappiness that undoubtedly lurked behind each brightly painted door. Mrs. Putz took her time to answer the doorbell. When she did Bosch saw that she had once been truly beautiful. Before the city of Angels did its dirty work and brought her down to its level, before her dreams were crushed and buried by time. And before she painted herself bright blue.

‘Sorry about this’ she said, in lieu of introduction. ‘Smurf convention. How can I help’.

‘I’m afraid I have some bad news’ said Bosch, ‘Your husband has just been murdered’.

‘Have I?’ boomed a male voice from behind the woman. ‘I feel fine at the moment.’

Bosch looked at the address in his notebook. ‘Is this number 82?’ he asked finally.

‘Nope’ said the man, who was also painted the same disturbing shade of blue. ‘They’re next door’.

Bosch apologised and headed back to the car, wondering if he should punch his partner in the face again.

The real Mrs. Putz was much quicker to get to the door. Almost as if she had been expecting them to call by. Bosh told her that her he had some bad news about her husband and she instantly said something that aroused his suspicions. ‘Which one?’ she asked.

That was all it took as far as the investigation was concerned. Time to move things downtown to police headquarters and transfer the conversation an interview room. Bosh used all his experience to get the suspect in the mood to talk. He left her there for half an hour to give her time to stew, gave her a cup of triple strength coffee to loosen her tongue and then turned his chair the other way round when he sat down, like he had seen in the movies.

‘So what do you think happened?’ he asked eventually, trying to get comfortable on the seat.

She wrinkled as much as much of her brow as she could. She was definitely one of the Botox generation. ‘I don’t know’ she said finally. ‘I’ve had a tragic life. My first husband died of eating poisoned mushroom soup and then my second husband died, also from eating poisoned mushroom soup.’

‘Why do you think that your third husband was hit in the head with an axe?’ Bosh asked, moving in for the kill.

‘Well’ she said thoughtfully, ‘For one thing, he wouldn’t eat his soup.’

Bosh sighed, and started on the paperwork. When would people learn that crime doesn’t pay? Unless you write good books about it.

Google Nexus 7 Review

I think other folks have used the gag about needing three hands to work it, so I won’t

Warren told me that I’d get a Google Nexus 7. I protested. ‘There is no way I need one of those’ I said. But the one Adam had bought looked very nice. And the price is pretty amazing. And I was going to get number one wife a Kindle Touch for her birthday. And the Nexus will do a lot more than just read books. So there you are. We ended up with one each, mainly because I hate the idea of number one wife having better gadgets than me. And I have just been paid.

The device is very nice. Works a treat. Binds tightly to your Google account. Has this Google Now thing that is supposed to tell you all kinds of important stuff about your life. At the moment it is just telling me that it is 18 degrees in Cottingham, which is about right.

You get 15 pounds of credit in the Google Play store with the device. I’ve spent 70 pence on Real Racing, which is on offer at the moment. It runs very well and really shows off the power of the device. I also wanted to download BBC iPlayer (one of the best reasons for owning a device like this) but at the moment it doesn’t work, which is pretty terrible. I think this is because the Nexus is “Flash Free” and iPlayer needs that. Whatever it is, it needs to be sorted out soon. There are some other irritations in applications, some of them assume they are headed for a phone screen, and look wrong. Also, for some reason the default setting of the device is to lock in portrait mode, which is a bit of a pain. Number one wife was upset to find that you can’t get Scrabble for it if you are outside the USA, which is unfortunate.

You can rent (but I can see how to buy) movies on the device. You do get a free copy of the latest Transformers movie though. And a Jeffry Archer book. I’m looking forward to loading up the 16G of internal memory with some music and videos of my own. Battery life seems OK, I’ve not run it flat yet but 7 hours seems a reasonable amount. It has WiFi and Bluetooth, but not mobile data. For me this isn’t a problem, as I can us the Lumia as a hotspot if I need to. The 7 inch screen is bright and clear and the software is responsive, even if the UI seems a bit more complex than it needs to be – but then again I am used to Windows Phone on touch devices. There is no video out facility, but given the fairly limited internal space on the device I don’t think you ‘d be using it as a video library really.

All in all, you’d be bonkers to spend any more than the price of a Nexus on a tablet of this kind. The hardware is excellent and there’s no way they can be making much, if any, profit on it. This does of course mean that you are meant to be part of the product, and so you can expect all your actions on the device to be comprehensively mined for selling opportunities. Having said that, you can just use it and it will deliver a very good, and eminently portable tablet experience.

A Career in Windows Phone Programming

I’m not saying you can reach the dizzy heights of accomplishment reflected by a product such as Cheese Lander, but you can try….

Last week I got a tweet “i am electrical engineer and wanna start a career in windows phone programming. any advice ?! “.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and this is my advice, for what it is worth.

Get the Free Tools

Head over to http://create.msdn.com/ and grab the Windows Phone SDK. It is a free download and will give you everything you need to get started.

Get a Windows Phone

You can write programs without needing a real device, but for the proper experience you really need some hardware I’m afraid. The good news is that with all the shiny new Nokia devices coming along, lots of people are moving up in the Windows Phone world and so there is a good supply second hand devices at very good prices. As far as I’m aware, all of the older phones can be upgraded to the latest version of the software and so you can perform Windows Phone development on one of the first generation devices. If you can find a second hand Omnia 7 device that would be a good one to start with.

You might have noticed that Windows Phone 8 is just around the corner, and may be thinking about holding off for this. I’m not sure that this would be a good move though. Whatever you do, there is always another version coming along and the skills that you pick up on Windows 7 will transfer over to Windows 8 when the time comes.

Decide whether you are writing games or applications

If you want to write games you can think about using XNA. Unfortunately the future of this platform is a bit more hazy than I’d like, but as a quick way of getting into writing silly games (like Cheese Lander) then it is very hard to beat. If you are getting started and want to write some useful and fun stuff I think I’d go for the Silverlight approach at the moment. This will make it easy to move into the XAML based environments on Windows Metro and Windows Phone 8. It is also getting increasingly viable as a casual gaming platform.

Get the Free Documents

If you have never programmed before you could read my C# Yellow Book. This will give you a good grounding in programming.  You can find out about Windows Phone programming from my Windows Phone Blue Book, which is available from the same place. There is also a ton of free stuff on the http://create.msdn.com/ site that you can use.

Find a Problem to Solve

Coding in a vacuum is very hard. It is much easier to learn how to write a program if you have something specific to achieve. As your background is electronics I’d try to think of a simple problem (for example a resistor colour codes calculator) which you could write a program to solve and then have a go at coding that.

Use the Forums in the Right Way

There are lots of forums out there with people who are more than happy to help. However, they hate it when someone posts a problem like “I’ve got to do X. Where do I start?”. This kind of post sounds like someone is asking the forum to do some work for them. A much better post is something like “I’ve got to do X. Is Y a good approach to do this?” or even better “Why does this code not work?”. This shows that you have thought about the problem and done something before putting it out there. And as soon as you know something, start posting sensible replies to other post questions, so you give back to the system.

Blog what you do

I’m assuming that you are doing this as a way of getting employment. If this is the case (and even if it isn’t) you should start a blog about your progress. In the blog you can put what you learn (so you don’t forget it) and chart your progress. Potential employers are very impressed by people who are constructive and resilient. A regular blog will be something you can point them at to which will show how you have progressed. Keep the focus on the technology you have learned, and how you have applied it. You never know, you might find other people following what you do and learning from you. Regular blogging is also a great way to build your writing skills, which are also very useful for getting work.

Enjoy it

Learning to program is hard work. The most important thing about success is persistence.  Focus on getting little things to work and then building on them. Don’t have a huge, grand, idea and then get upset with yourself when you can’t realise it. This is the most common reason for people giving up on programming.

If you find yourself getting bogged down or stuck on a problem remember that you can always simplify your solution and just focus on one small part. With a bit of luck you will get a little buzz when you get something to work, and a bigger buzz when someone looks at your program and says “How did you do that?” and that will motivate you to do more. Good luck.

MonoGame Demo

Last week I discovered how MonoGame is making it possible to write XNA games for the Windows 8 Metro environment. And I managed to draw a blue screen, which was nice enough, but not much of a basis for a game. So today I thought I’d make a sample project that had all the bits that you need to make your own game, including art assets, using the touch panel, using the accelerometer, drawing text and making sounds.

I’ve made a single, one-stop, demo that does all these things. It also includes the source of the MonoGame code as part of the project. I’ve found this to be quite useful when working out how the XNA implementation works. If you download the zip archive you should have everything you need. Here is how to get started.

Pre-Requisites

You will need three things before you can move any further:

• Windows 8 Release Preview – this is where you run everything
• Visual Studio 2012 Release Candidate for Windows 8 – this is where you build your program
• Visual Studio 2010 for Windows Phone – this is where you create the XNA resources that you want to add to your game

Getting the Files

To get started just download the file from here. This is around 22MB. Before you unzip the file it is a good idea to Unblock it. This will stop Visual Studio from giving you warnings when you open any of the projects. To unblock the file you just have to right click on the file where you have download it, select Properties from the context menu and then click Unblock and then OK as shown in the badly highlighted screenshot below.

Then unzip the files. There are quite a lot of them. Once you have completed the download you will have the whole MonoGame framework and my little test project. Open the folder and find the Visual Studio Solution “MonoGame.Framework.Windows8” and open it. Make sure you open it with Visual Studio 2012 Release Candidate. If you double click the solution you will probably start up the wrong version of Visual Studio (I do) which doesn’t end well.

Running the Sample Program

The solution contains a project called Test Project which runs a port of a Windows Phone demo I wrote that lets you draw lines of dots on the screen using your finger. The dots that you draw will also fall down the screen in a way that is controlled by the accelerometer. You can clear the dots by double tapping on the screen, the game will make a “Ding” sound when you do this. The game also writes some text on the screen.

Resources and Fun

The MonoGame XNA part of things works very well, apart from content. At the moment there is no way of getting Visual Studio 2012 to pre-process XNA content for use in a game. We get around this by creating a Visual Studio 2010 XNA project and using it to produce the xmb files that are read by the content manager when the game runs. The content in the sample program came from existing XNA projects that I had around the place. If you are migrating an XNA game onto Metro you can do the same. The tricksy bit is where you put the xmb files for the game to use. I had no success adding them to the Visual Studio project, instead I had to put the xmb files in the specific directory read by the game when it runs.

Here you can see the path to the AppX\Content folder where I put the XMB files for the sample game. These include the two textures, the font and the ding sound file. If you want to add more content to your game, just drop your files here and then refer to them in the program as you would in any other resource:

protected override void LoadContent()
{
    // Create a new SpriteBatch, which can be used to draw textures.
    spriteBatch = new SpriteBatch(GraphicsDevice);
    demoTexture = Content.Load<Texture2D>("DemoArtwork");
    demoRectangle = new Rectangle(0,0,GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Width, 
    GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Height);
    smudgeTexture = Content.Load<Texture2D>("Smudge");
    font = Content.Load<SpriteFont>("MessageFont");
    dingSound = Content.Load<SoundEffect>("ding");
}

You should be able to use my TestProject as the basis of anything that you fancy making.

Windows 8 is a Mullet

 

Windows 8. No, really.

Some time back I was given a copy of Visual Aid: Stuff You've Forgotten, Things You Never Thought You Knew and Lessons You Didn't Quite Get Around to Learning. It is full of diagrams that tell you stuff, and is as much an object lesson in presenting data as it is a collection of quirky and interesting facts.

It had a page on haircuts, with an example of each. Including the Mullet. For those of you who don’t remember the 80’s, a mullet was a kind of crew cut front with an enormous length of hair behind. It was billed as the haircut that was “Business at the front, Party round the back”.

Just like Windows 8. I’ve been using Windows 8 for a few weeks now, and it really is an operating system of two halves. It is as if Microsoft have looked at the tablet experience and gone “There’s no way we can make a single system that does tablet and desktop at the same time”. So they have made a machine with works as well as Windows 7 for the desktop and has a Metro interface for the tablety stuff.

I reckon it works.  There are some irritations. The determination of Microsoft to hide the Start button has annoyed a few people, but I’ve now got used to pressing the Start key on the keyboard and then typing the first few letters of the program name to run it. I can get Visual Studio working in much shorter time than previously.

For me the biggest irritation is the way that some things are hard wired into the Metro full screen mechanic, whether you like it or not. For example, the good news is that Windows 8 has a built in viewer for PDF files. The bad news is that when you open it you get to view the document full screen or nothing. There is no way you can have small window open on your desktop, which is annoying.

I’m using a Samsung Slate as my primary computer now and it works a treat. I can dock it for proper work and then take it out and about with me. It would be nice if it had USB 3, so that I could access external disks a bit more quickly, but I can live with that.

I mentioned my “mullet theory” to a Microsoft Person on the Windows 8 team as the possible basis of a marketing push. She thought it mildly amusing, but I think it is unlikely we’ll get Nik Kershaw to sport his again I’m afraid.

Thunderbirds are Go

When I was a kid in the sixties (yes I am very old) a must view TV program was Thunderbirds. We first watched it on our old black and white telly which took ages to warm up. It wasn’t until we saw some magazines pictures that we actually found out the colours of the Thunderbird craft. I’ve never really understood why Thunderbird 2 is green, but I digress. The franchise has been round a few times since, with a major revival in the nineties. (At this point I shall gloss over the awful film from 2004).

Anyhoo, one of my birthday presents was a copy of the Hayes Thunderbirds Manual, which gives a detailed breakdown of the International Rescue organisation and their craft. I like this as much now as I would have done nearly fifty years ago. At first I thought it was a reprint of magazine articles of the time, but there is a lot more to it than that. The authors have made use of the wealth of resources gathered by Thunderbirds aficionados over the years and put them together into a very comprehensive and will written exposition of the Thunderbirds universe. There is even an episode guide right at the end of the book. If you have any interest in this fantastic series, then it is well worth a look.

Olympic Tennis at Wimbledon

We were lucky enough to snag some tickets for the tennis at the Olympics. This was held at Wimbledon, somewhere I’ve always fancied going to. So off we went. The trip across London was actually quite boring. After a media filled with dire warnings of travel chaos it was rather nice to just get on a sequence of trains and get there exactly on time.

The first match we saw was a ladies singles first round match and then we moved on to the highlight of the day for me, a second round match with Roger Federer.

Then, after a third match we headed for home.

There has been a lot of nattering about how London will have problems staging the Olympics and how the organisation and the infrastructure will not cope. This is rubbish. All the stops on the Tube were well highlighted and the trains were busy but very tolerable. They had folks lining the route from the station to the venue. The security check just took a few minutes and very person we saw, from the first chap at the traffic lights on the walk to Wimbledon to the cashier taking our money in the well organised souvenir shop, was polite and upbeat, asking if we had a good time and wishing us well. It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. With a bit of luck we’ll make it to some Paralympics events in September too.

Nintendo 3DS XL

The Nintendo 3DS is a nice little portable console. The 3D effect doesn’t do a great deal for me (apart from make me slightly queasy after a while) but there are some very good games for it. I rather like Pilot Wings, Street Fighter and Mario Kart 7.

Now Nintendo have released an XL version of the 3DS, like they released a full fat version of the DSi a while back. It works exactly like the 3DS, only with a bigger screen. I really like this. Although the device is a bit bigger to cart around, it is not prohibitively larger and I’ve got much better at games like Ridge Racer as I can now see further into the distance because the dots on the screen are larger.

However, the XL version does have a much less “premium” feel than the original 3DS. That came with a power supply and a docking station. The 3DS XL comes with, well, just a cardboard box. Not even a power supply. This is a bit of a problem if your business model for your upgrade involves selling the old 3DS. Fortunately I have a spare supply lying around from way back.

The original 3DS was made of expensive looking plastic of different colours and levels of shinyness. I don’t think that this added a great deal to the gaming experience, but it did make it feel a bit special. The 3DS XL is not badly made, but the plastics and the finish seem to have been built to meet a price, rather than to make an impression. The large 3D screen is very impressive, but not particularly 3D as far as I’m concerned.  Battery life is no worse than the original device and the transfer from one device to another is painless and fun to watch, as a horde of Pikmin characters carry the information from your old machine to your new one.

If you have a 3DS that you have to squint at, you will appreciate the improvement. I certainly have.

King of Tokyo

Number one son doesn’t like board games with lots of dice. He reckons that they remove the skill, and doesn’t like being beaten by blind chance. I, on the other hand, love lots of dice. I like to be able to point to an unlucky throw as the reason for my failure to win, rather than any lack of skill/intelligence on my part. I reckon that chess would be vastly improved by a bunch of dice and a spinner.

Having said all that, number one son rather likes the “King of Tokyo” game, even though it has lots of dice. I like it too. Each player is a monster trying to take over Tokyo, or be the last one standing. A turn is a bit like the Yahtzee game, where you repeatedly throw a bunch of dice to get a good set, and then decide what to do with it. You have to balance attacking, healing and buying power ups as you go along.

The games are fast and furious and fortunes can wax and wane on the throw of the dice. We got through a couple of games in an hour and they were great fun. Even though I didn’t win.

Pesky Dice.

Uggh Boots

Qn: When is an Ugg boot not an Ugg boot?
Ans: An Ugg boot is never an Ugg boot.

If this is confusing, welcome to the club. When we went to Australia one of the items on the agenda was the purchase of a pair of Ugg boots. Note that this was not my agenda.

Anyhoo, we found lots of shops selling “Genuine Australian Ugg boots”. So we bought a pair in Sydney. And they broke in Melbourne. So we took them to what we thought was the local Ugg shop. And we discovered that there is no such thing as “Genuine Australian Ugg Boots”.

We thought Ugg was like Nike, i.e. a particular manufacturer of shoes. Turns out that Ugg is a lot more like “sheepskin”. In other words, anyone who makes footwear out of bits of sheep can call them Ugg. The people in the shops aren’t exactly forthcoming with this information, which means that when you think you have bought a branded, supported product, you haven’t.

The only good news is that a search on the phone for Ugg Boot Repairs found someone just down the road who should be able to fix things.

XNA for Windows 8 Metro

One of the sad things about the move to the new Windows 8 Metro platform is the way that XNA seems to have been left by the wayside, with no way forward for the platform and no workable alternative from Microsoft. I see this as a bit of an own goal really, just when people like Sony are releasing a suite that makes it easy for C# developers to create and deploy applications, and when Microsoft are looking for a way to get developers on board with the Windows 8 way of doing things, they seem to have pulled the plug on the best way to do this.

However, it is not all bad news. The people at MonoGame are beavering away on a solution that will let you leverage your XNA experience and make games for Windows 8 Metro. Following the instructions in this blog post I managed to get a screen full of Cornflower Blue on my Windows 8 system. The familiar Update and Draw methods are present and correct, along with all the XNA types that you know and love. At the moment getting content (fonts, textures and sounds) into your game is a bit of a faff, in that you have to make a Visual Studio 2010 project and use that to prepare the content for use in your Metro program. Having said that, it does work and, thanks to the dedication of the Mono team it looks like we will have an XNA trajectory on Windows 8 Metro. It is just a shame that it is not coming from Microsoft.

Students’ Union of the Year

I saw this on the way into the department today. Well done folks.