One of the great things about going up town first thing in the morning to review the papers for Radio Humberside is that you can get some great pictures.
Just to the right of the centre of the frame you can see the BBC offices.
Hull centre Looking good.
I spent a big chunk of this evening writing poetry. Thanks to Carl for his donation, which gets him into the script.
As long as I can find something that rhymes with “Carl”.
If you want to sponsor me, and who doesn’t, then visit:
http://my.rednoseday.com/sponsor/robmiles
If we get more than 1,000 pounds then I will wear that tutu. You can find out more about my previous Red Nose Day triumphs here and here.
We will definitely video the lecture, and who knows, some of the students might try to live stream it too. Keep coming back here, and to my Red Nose Day sponsor page for news.
This is the upgraded “Door of Mystery”. It now takes you picture when you authenticate your tag and stores the photo on an internal SD card. Who knows what it will do tomorrow?
By the way, there is still time to sponsor me. Remember, if you reach 1,000 pounds I’ll wear a tutu when I give the lecture…
Sometimes a good idea can take away your entire Sunday.
“The Door of Mystery” is an unique fundraising idea that takes the old style, simple, raffle idea and turns it into a new, high-tech, complicated form. To take part all you have to do is buy one of our special “Red Nose Day” tags for two pounds and then take it to “The Door of Mystery” at my office in the Robert Blackburn building to find out your entry number. Then, at the presentation on Friday we will build a “Door of Mystery” machine of our own and then use it to pick the winner of the competition. The prize, courtesy of Microsoft Research Cambridge, is a Gadgeteer kit of your own.
The tags contain an RFID chip which is read by a Gadgeteer board inside the door unit. The unit contains an SD card with a list of RFID values which are mapped to entry numbers. Show your tag to the door and it will tell you your magic number.
This is the guts of the prototype device. I’ve cannibalised my Tweet Printer case to use for the project. I’m going to print a proper one later. If I get round to it.
I’ve got 100 RFID tags to sell for Comic Relief. Each one has been keyed to the system and you can buy them from the departmental office. Perhaps we’ll think of other uses for them over time..
You can sponsor the whole shebang over at: http://my.rednoseday.com/sponsor/robmiles
If you found something that you’d lost, but you had already mentally prepared yourself for buying a replacement, can you now spend that amount of money on some other gadget without any guilt problems?
After a few days of early rises, what better way to spend a weekend than getting up at 5:45 to catch a train, a bus, a train, the tube and the Dockland Light Railway (DLR) to go to Greenwich.
Glad I went though. Lovely place. As well as the Cutty Sark they also have the Royal Observatory and of course the meridian. The weather was as kind to us as we could have hoped for, in other words it didn’t rain, and there was even a rather nice show in the planetarium.
This is the final audience of my TechDays sessions as they arrived.
Today I did the last session for TechDays 2013 NL. We were making Windows Phone talk to us and make sense of what we were saying. Another splendid audience and another bunch of files that you can download with the presentation and all the source code. Heading home this evening, once I’ve spent the afternoon playing with my latest “Gadgeteer idea”. That rhymes, which is useful.
The audience for my “Gadgets Everywhere” session was even larger than the phone one. I think they came to watch the demos fail….
Did my final session of the day on the Gadgeteer at TechDays. A great audience, a whole bunch of demos that worked, and a whole bunch of superb questions including one which, again, I didn’t have a proper answer to. I do now though. The question concerned the availability of “watchdog” support for the .NET Micro Framework. At the time I said that I didn’t think that it was available. Turns out I was wrong. Watchdog support was introduced into Version 4.0 and you can use it to make sure that a system will automatically reset if the controlling program gets stuck for some reason.
A happy owner of a bright orange, Ultimaker printed, Lumia 820 cover.
During the talk I mentioned Una, my 3D printer, and how easy it is to use such a device to print cases for Gadgeteer devices. You can even get the designs for the Gadgeteer boards on CodePlex. I had some printed gadget cases, but I’d also brought along a bright orange Lumia 820 case that I printed last week from this design. I figured it might go down well in the Netherlands. And so it turned out.
Examining Gadgets
Camera Art
Thanks to another amazing audience. You can find the slides and the demos here.
Today I was up bright and early to fly out to the Netherlands for TechDays 2013. I’m doing some sessions on Windows Phone and Gadgeteer. I’ve been doing sessions in TechDays for quite a while, they have a great atmosphere at the conference and the audiences are always great.
Today was no exception. You can tell the quality of the audience by the questions that you get at the end, and in this session I got some really good ones. One of which I couldn’t answer at the time. The question concerned the behaviour of application created alerts. A Windows Phone program can create alerts which will appear at some point in the future. These are useful because you get them whether the application is running or not. When the alert fires the user can drop back to the application and do something. I made a program for timing eggs which causes an alert when the egg is ready. What the delegate wanted to know was what happened to the alert if the phone is displaying the lock screen, or powered off.
I’ve done some experiments , and now I think I know the answer. If the phone is locked the alert will appear on top of the lock screen, just like any other appointment would. If the phone is turned off, you don’t seem to get the alert displayed when it is powered back on though. Hope this helps.
You can find the slides and the sample code (including the egg timer) here.
We had a bunch of folks come to see us today for an admissions open day. Thanks for braving the fog folks, hope you have a good journey back home.
I forgot to bring my “proper” camera in to work today to take the picture, and used my Lumia instead. The phone seems to have come out quite well in spite of this.
Lindsay and David, standing against each other’s names.
Today a couple of ex-Hull bods came to see us. They now both work for Boss Alien down in Brighton and they came up to give a talk about working as a game developer.
Great talk guys. The thing that came out most strongly for me was that if you want to get into the game you must have a good portfolio of your work to show off. This should include not just coursework assignments that you’ve completed, but also things you have done of your own. Make sure that this is easy to find on your website or blog and keep adding to it. It looks like there is plenty of work out there for good developers, make sure that you do a good job of showing off your skills.
I’m doing it again. For more money. If you want to see a show that has laughter, tears and pathos (and that’s just the hardware demos) then you should come along.
You should also sponsor me at: http://my.rednoseday.com/sponsor/robmiles
I’ve set the target really high, at 1,000 pounds. But if I get that much I will do the entire lecture wearing a tutu.
And just to let you know, I have sooo got the legs for a tutu.
“Fog is how nature keeps the frame rate up”
Lindsay Cox is coming to see us on Wednesday 6th of March and give a Rather Useful Seminar. You might remember Lindsay from the odd Three Thing Game, in fact he and his teams produced some memorable stuff over the years. Lindsay is going to talk about his experiences since graduation. The seminar is at 2:30 pm on Wednesday 6th of March in Lecture Theatre D (LTD) in the Robert Blackburn Building.
Please note the slightly later start.
If you have been unlucky/daft enough to chip the paint on your lovely new Surface Pro then I have have some good news. Revell enamel paint “32109 Anthracite” (see here) is an absolutely perfect match for the paint on the Surface. I’ve put a tiny amount on the scratches (which, admittedly were pretty tiny to start with) and they have completely vanished.
And, bearing in mind no new scratches have appeared, I think the little tin above (price at one pounds sixty pence) is going to be a lifetime supply as far as I’m concerned.
Near Field Communications is fun. And sometimes even useful. The idea is that you bring your phone close to an NFC tag which contains an antenna and a tiny chip which can store data. The phone reads the data and does something. You can program an NFC tag to trigger one of a variety of different actions, from opening a web page, running a program to sending an email.
The Nokia NFC Writer program makes it very easy to program tags. I’ve got a tag in the car that starts the phone playing music. I could also use a tag to configure the phone and even send tweets, as James has done.
There are lots of styles and designs of tags out there. I got the Task Launcher Pack from rapidnfc.com above which provides a lot of fun for around 12 pounds. You can get custom printed tags and people like Moo are even planning business cards with tags in.
There is an API that you can use to allow your Windows Phone program to read and write tag information which has all kinds of possible applications. You can find out more from MSDN here and from Nokia here.
If you have an NFC capable phone (the Nokia 820 and 920 are) then you should have a go. Great fun.
Nokia NFC: It looks like some folks are having a problem finding this program via the link above. It works fine in the UK, I'm not sure what regions of the world have access to it. If the link doesn't work try searching your Marketplace for "nfc".
The chap at the Sweet Shop told me that there are three different faces on the Percy Pig sweets I seem to bee addicted to at the moment. Sad, happy and surprised. He’s right.
I’ve just released the first year coursework specification. We are going to be creating a system for a record shop which will track customer orders and suggest new records to buy. I think the only reason I went for a record shop was so I could call it “Vinyl Destination”, but that is by the by.
The program needs to be able to track huge numbers of records and customers, along with their orders. The problem is that, at the start, we don’t have any customers or orders, or anything. And anyone that thinks the way to solve this problem is to sit down and enter some details when the program has been built is very, very wrong.
I make the test data right at the start. I use a program to do it. All it takes is a few loops. Now, I could give the customers names like “Customer1”, “Customer2” and so on. But I can do better than that. All I need are some names to start with:
string [] firstNames = new string [] { "Rob", "Fred", "Jim", "Ethel", "Nigel", "Simon", "Gloria", "Evadne" }; string [] surnames = new string[] { "Bloggs", "Smith", "Jones", "Thompson", "Wooster", "Brown", "Acaster", "Berry", "Ackerman" };
Here we have two arrays, one of first names and the other of surnames. I can now make myself a whole bunch of reasonable looking customers:
foreach (string surname in surnames) { foreach (string firstname in firstNames) { Customer c = new Customer(firstname + " " + surname); result.Customers.Add(c); } }
This makes us a whole bunch of customers, from “Rob Bloggs” all the way to “Evadne Ackerman”. We can do something similar with the names for each of the recording artists:
string[] artist1 = new string[] { "Pink", "Flying", "Random", "Singing", "Uptown", "Family", "Floating" }; string[] artist2 = new string[] { "Chicken", "Circus", "Banana", "Kitchen", "Groats", "Monkey", "Collective", "Pyjamas" };
I can combine the words to make random artist names.
string artist = artist1[rand.Next(artist1.Length)] + " " + artist2[rand.Next(artist2.Length)];
This picks a random word from the first list and adds it to the second one (rand is just a random number generator that I use to make my test data). So I can have “Pink Pyjamas” and “Singing Groat”, among others. I do something similar for the track names, except that I have three parts. As you can see in the screenshot, this makes for some quite funny combinations, that liven up testing no end.
Criterion games are the studio behind Burnout and Need for Speed Most Wanted. They came up to Hull to see our gaming graduates today. They brought Matthew with them, one of our graduates from last year, who now works for them. They gave a talk about game development and then spent some time looking at what the students had made.
Some time back I was given this clock, which I’ve had in my office for a while. Unfortunately I’ve found it impossible to use on a regular basis. Can you tell why?
Anyhoo, before it makes me too late (or early) for everything I’ve replaced it with this one, that I got in the Daiso shop in Seattle for a dollar fifty.
Much better.
Actually Simon suggested the perfect solution to my clock problem. He reckons I should put the old clock on the wall behind me, and then view it via a mirror. I am so going to try that.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
