Despicable Me 2–Just Go and See It

It is not often these days that I find myself in a completely packed movie theatre. But we did today. I'm sure that some if it was to do with the "Orange Wednesday Two for One Deal" on tickets, but the rest had to be to do with the film.

I really enjoyed Despicable Me when it came out, and so I was well up for seeing the sequel. And Despicable Me 2  definitely delivers.  Good action sequences, nicely constructed story (not that it needed that much to be honest). And loads of minions.  Great fun. Go see.

Fun with Windows 8.1

I was expecting tough times when I started on the Windows 8.1 upgrade trail. Turns out to have been quite easy though (albeit a bit time consuming). The Surface RT upgraded itself from Windows Store, and I was pleased to discover that it had remembered all its previous settings and applications. The Surface Pro was a little bit trickier. For that I burned a DVD and did the upgrade from an external drive. But having said that,  the upgrade offered to keep all my programs and data, and was true to its word.

The only thing that us Brits need to know about the upgrade process is that it won't work if you don't have the US English language installed on the device. If you have a UK version of the devices you'll need to change that over before the upgrade will play ball.

The machines seem no slower, although I've yet to give them a proper workout. The Start Button is back, but what really interests me is changes to the display zooming over different displays.  With my Surface Pro I need to zoom the display because the pixels are too teeny tiny. But when the Surface Pro drives a monitor it zooms that display too, which is just what I don't want to happen. In Windows 8.1 they have apparently changed the way that displays are zoomed, so that the tablet display and the desktop display can be different, which is much better.

Another year as an MVP

I’ve been a Microsoft MVP for over ten years now. And now I’m going to be an MVP for another year. Which is lovely.

Raspberry Pi Hardware Notes

I’ve done some small tidying up of the notes that we used for our Raspberry Pi Hardware sessions a couple of weeks back. You can download them from here. If you do use them in any way, I’d love to know how you get on.

Open Day and Saying Cheese

To be honest the day didn’t get off to the best of starts. I was crammed into a photo booth in Cottingham Post Office taking a picture of myself for a Russian Visa. Turns out that photo booths, like lots of other things in my life, weren’t really designed for someone of my stature. So I was trying desperately to get all of my head into the right part of the picture, repeatedly re-taking the picture and failing to get all of my apparently enormous face into the frame.

After numerous retries the system gave up on me and printed the tenth or so attempt. Fortunately it looks OK, and so my passport, along with lots of accompanying documentation, is now on the way to London and visafication.

The reason I’m after a visa is that I’m helping with the judging of the Imagine Cup World Finals the week after next. They’ve got some amazing judges, including the chap who invented Tetris,  and they’ve got Matt Smith, of Dr. Who fame, hosting the awards presentation.

I’m really looking forward to going along and taking part. Visa permitting. With a bit of luck the visa should be sorted on Monday and I can start choosing which gadgets to take…

Once I’d posted my visa application I shot straight into the university for an Open Day.

I did two talks, this is the first audience.

This is outside the library, we had our American Football Team, along with the rowers to show the kinds of things we get up to. 

This is the second sitting for my Open Day talk. Another great audience.

During the talks I mentioned the “Yellow Book” that we use to teach C#. You can download a PDF of the book from here. There are also some other free documents there too. All in all a great day, hope that everyone who made the trip found it worth their while.

3D Printing in Windows 8.1

Now, I’m not particularly old. But I can remember when the very idea of having your own printer was the stuff of dreams. Printers were places you went to when you wanted to have something printed. And as for printing in colour, that was beyond dreaming.And then the first dot-matrix and daisy-wheel printers appeared, closely followed by laser printers and finally inkjets. And now everyone has a printer.

In the early days of printing, it was a bit of a nightmare. You had to have the right kind of printer, the right kind of software and the right kind of drivers to get anything sensible. And often the thing printed didn’t match the image on the screen, or was the wrong size or shape. Eventually things settled down. Standards were set and now you can buy a printer in the confidence that it will just plug in and work with your computer.

I reckon that 3D printing is following a similar trajectory. We are at the point where hardware is appearing and we need some standards so that it can be made available to the widest possible audience. My experience with the technology has left me thinking that a 3D printer is not yet an “appliance”, but that in the longer term the attractiveness of the technology means that pretty much everyone will want a device eventually.

That’s why I’m really pleased that Microsoft have announced support for 3D printing in Windows 8.1. This is really only a step on the road to widespread adoption, but it is a really good one.

The Case of the Broken Blog

I took this picture shortly after I arrived at the conference centre. Lovely sky.

Before I do a session I always test my demos. I’ve found that you really need to do this, as oddities in the network setup can sometimes catch you out. Anyhoo, I was happily (or rather non-happily) testing my file download demonstration and it got stuck. So I spent a painful while trying to get it to work, all to no avail. Then I found the problem.

My blog was broken. It was the source of the files that I was showing how to fetch, and it wasn’t there. Wah. So I re-wrote the demonstrations to use different servers (and local ones just in case everything broke again) and just as I’d finished this little exercise my blog came back again. Oh well.

The sessions themselves went nicely, and folks were polite enough to laugh at my jokes. You can find the Speech demos here and the Background Agents demos here.

 

These are some of the audience at my first session.

This is my demonstration setup. Note red rocket poised for lift off.

These are some of the audience for the second session. There are some more pictures on Flickr. Apologies if you arrived a bit later,, and aren’t on the pictures. Although then again you might not be that bothered…..

I love doing TechEd sessions, the audiences are always great, and today was no exception. Thanks folks.

Tomorrow I’m back on a play to head for home.

Update on 2013-07-01 08:58 by Rob

The irony of this happening just after I'd done a post about the imporantance of paying for services that you can rely on has not been lost on me.

All I can say is that they responded to my cries for help really quickly, and they've just sent me another survey to find out how they did.

Hello Madrid

After a day of travel I’m now installed in the hotel in Madrid, nervously checking my demos and making sure that I don’t forget any plastic rockets for the sessions tomorrow.

The journey here was fairly uneventful, except for the “experimental road works” on the M62 as I was driving to Manchester Airport. The road works seem to exist for the sole purpose of finding out what happens if you reduce a busy three lane motorway to one lane. (The answer, by the way, is that you make everyone 25 minutes late).

If you are at TechED EU I’d love to see you at my talks tomorrow. Come and see me in room N12 at 12:00 to 12:15 talking about Speech on Windows Phone and at 3:15 pm lots of fun and games based around background agents. And you might win a rocket. Can’t say fairer than that.

Achievement Unlocked: Resits Written

After a couple of days of solid work I’ve managed to write all my resit coursework and exams. So, if you are unlucky enough to have to come back for a resit later this summer, at least you’ll have something to do now.

Learning Computing with Cubelets

I’m always on the lookout for a neat gadget. And at the Gadget Show I found one. What you can see above are Cubelets from ModRobotics. The picture above shows a robot made of little, cooperating cubelets. Each is around an inch on each side, and each is fitted with a set of tiny magnets that allows cubelets to snap to each other and send data back and forth. And each cubelet does something. Above, from left to right you can see a battery cubelet, a distance cubelet and a light cubelet. Black cubelets are sense cubelets, transparent cubes perform some form of action. Coloured cubelets are “thinking” cubelets that do something with the data coming in.

A sense cubelet will send out out the value it “sees” to all the cubelets around it. The distance one sends a signal that gets stronger the closer it is to something. So above you can see the reaction to my camera.

This is a slightly more complicated device. The dark brown cubelet is a “think” one that outputs the larger of the two inputs that are going into it. The red cubelet is an “inverse” one that reverse the sense of the input. So, if something is close to my robot, or the knob is turned to the maximum, the light will grow dimmer.

This one is a bit simpler. The cubelets at each end are drive cubelets. They have little motorised rollers. This robot will run away if I bring my hand too close to the top.

“Programming” with cubelets isn’t really programming at all. They click together and organise themselves so neatly that you just pop them into arrangements to see what they do. They are toy certified for kids from 4 years old, and I reckon that is a place they will really shine. After a bit of fun and games you can get some very complicated behaviours, and start making robots that behave in a way that you want, for example things like line following.

This is my cubelet collection. I’ve no idea what it does, but it definitely does something…

And finally, as if this wasn’t enough, you can actually re-program the thinking cubes in C. The blue cube at the top left hand corner of my collection above is a Bluetooth cube that can talk to your PC.

This is the programming environment that you run inside a browser. It talks to Bluetooth cubelet and allows you to select cubelets in the network and reprogram them.

The whole thing is utterly charming. The programming in C aspect is a bit of a work in progress at the moment, although it does work and ModRobotics are very responsive if you have problems. The system is powered by tiny rechargeable lithium-ion cells in the battery cubelet that seem to last a long time and the cubelets themselves are beautifully made and look like they would stand up to a lot of hammer. The kits are not cheap, but they aren’t bonkers expensive either, and you can always get them “on instalments” by just purchasing a few at a time. Well worth a look if you have any interest in engaging children with computing.

Update on 2013-06-24 19:55 by Rob

The only place I've found in the UK where you can buy them is RoboSavvy:

http://robosavvy.com/store/product_info.php/products_id/3082

However, they are happy to ship worldwide, if you are happy to pay the gouging customs duty and VAT on the parcel....

Learn Things from Rob at TechEd EU

I’m doing some sessions at TechEd 2013. If you want to know how to make your Windows Phone use background agents to add value to your application, or respond to what you say, then I’m your man. I’m speaking at 10:00 am on Thursday about speech and 3:15 about background agents. And I’m going to be around at Ask the Experts too.

I had this brilliant plan for TechED US, where I’d give away 3D printed phone cases at my session. I even printed them and everything. Then I found out that the phone that I’d printed the cases for is not actually sold in the US. Which makes me an idiot.

So, instead, this time I’m giving away “I learned something from Rob” ceremonial plaques. These are completely unique, except in the sense that there are more than one of them in existence. I’ll also be giving away lovely 3D printed red rockets. So come along to my session, answer a question and you might be in the running to win.

Above you can see the 3D design for the plaque.

This is what the real thing looks like. With a bit of luck I might see you in Madrid, and give you one.

Problems in Pink

That could have gone better…

Peter is still working on his 3D printer. Today I had a go at printing another part for him. It did not end well. As you can see above, when the printer runs out of fibre to print, bad things happen.

I’ve mostly reached the point where failed prints are not as interesting as they used to be, but even so I’m tempted to hang on to this one. The problem came because I’m coming to the end of my lovely pink/magenta fibre and the last few metres are tightly wound around the inside of the spool. When they are fed into the printer the tight curves of the fibre cause more friction in the tube that pushes them into the print head. This gets harder to push, so the knurled bolt that is doing the pushing starts to slip against the fibre, eventually wearing it in two.

Then you get to strip down the feeder and extract the broken bit. Fortunately the print head wasn’t blocked, and so I was able to switch to red fibre (that little coil that looks like red hose is me forcing out the pink and sending in the red) and print all the bits with no problems.

I’m going to have to make something that straightens the pink fibre out so that I can use it.

Secret Agent Watch SDK now out

Well, the Kickstarter for the Secret Agent watch has now ended. They’ve finished up with over a million in backing. Good for them. I got my order in early, so in December I might realise another of my dreams, and have a watch I can actually program in C# and make talk to my phone.

I got quite close five years ago, when I got hold of a Microsoft Spot watch. That ran the .NET Microframework and could run C# programs, just not ones that I could write.

The Secret Agent Watch is different. The team have already released an SDK which you can download for free from their web site. This comes with an emulator so that we can begin making our programs now. With a Bluetooth link to a Windows Phone, the possibilities are very exciting.

Note: If you do download the SDK and install it you might find that the first time you try to create a new project in Visual Studio 2012 it hangs. I found that stopping Visual Studio, restarting it, opening an existing project and then making a new one sorted things out.

Now I’m really looking forward to December.

Go DuckDuckGo

I’ve gone on about DuckDuckGo before. But I think everyone should know about it.

Unlike other search provides it doesn’t bombard you with sponsored links, and unlike other providers it doesn’t feed into other pages so that you don’t end up being stalked by an oven.

It is also very good at providing the most apposite results. Quite a few times I’ve had a need for an answer that Google and Bing seemed unable to provide. DuckDuckGo got me what I wanted really quickly.

It is now my search engine of choice. Well worth a look.

Paying for Things can be Cool

One thing abut the internets that I really don’t like is the culture of “everything is free”. There is an expectation that if you want something, be it web hosting, email or a way of sharing with your friends a picture what you had for dinner then it seems like you can you can get it all for nothing.

There are a few things about this that I don’t like. Firstly, folks need to realise that lots of services are built on the back of this free stuff that may ultimately come back to haunt you. Secondly, companies that acquire market share by giving stuff away may not be around for the long haul. Finally, and this is the kicker for me, if something goes wrong you are completely stuck, as nobody has a financial motivation to make you happy.

I pay a small sum each month to Squarespace who in return host this wonderful blog. On Sunday I had what I thought was a problem, so I emailed support. They responded within the hour and as a result I found that it was actually something I was doing, not their fault. They’ve just sent me a feedback form I can use to rate the quality of their service. Great stuff. And almost certainly not what would have happened if their service was free.

Heading for London

Ian Livingstone playing the game that got us to London. He reckons we should set it in space, and I think he might just be onto something….

To start with, a bit of history. What seems like ages ago David, Simon, Lewis, David and me took part in Global Game Jam Hull. And we built a game. Then Microsoft offered a prize for the best Windows 8 game that came out of the Game Jam and made it into Windows Marketplace. So David and Simon took the game engine, made it marketplace ready and shipped it. And Heartotron won. At the time we weren’t sure just what we had won, but part of the prize turned out to be a trip to London to tour a game development studio and meet up with some of folks who made the game industry what it is. And so we found ourselves on a train at 8:00 am in the morning, speeding through the sunshine and looking forward to an interesting day.

Which we got in spades. It was great. First up was a look around Lift London, a shiny new Microsoft game studio with a focus on making games the Indy way. No big (or at least huge) teams, flexibility, appropriate technology and total commitment to the product are the order of the day. Lift London also sees incubating fledgling games developers such as Dlala as part of their remit, which is very interesting.

With people on the team who can say things like “..and then we went on to write Banjo-Kazooie…” or “..and then we did Singstar..” alongside folks who have grown up writing and pitching games any way they can I reckon we can look forward to some fun stuff in the future.

We got to look at some work in progress, which was fascinating for me. The transition from ideas to drawings to models on the screen was intriguing.. I get very jealous of people who can draw, and loved seeing these people in action, and how they can turn out lovely looking artwork with just a flourish of their Wacom pens. Most impressive.

Then it was time to move on to Modern Jago, a pop up venue in Shoreditch, for workshop with the gaming legends Ian Livingstone (Vice chairman of Ukie, Games Workshop founder, president at Eidos), Andy Payne (chairman of UKIE and CEO of Mastertronic) and Philip Oliver (TIGA board member and CEO of Blitz Games Studios).

Each had plenty of time to speak and plenty to say. Some things that I took away, in bullet form:

• There has never been a better time to be writing games. Cheap tools and an easy path to market give you amazing potential.
• There has never been a more competitive time to be writing games. The statement above is true for everybody.
• Put your monetisation in at the start. If you are going to sell your game, be up front about that (although recognise that very few people will part with cash to buy it). If you have a pay to play model, put that in the central game mechanic. It is impossible to add it later.
• Use metrics and feedback. Track downloads, watch for reviews and scores, use telemetry to be able to tell how far people get through the game, how long they play for, and when they give up. Phase your releases so that you get feedback from one part of the world (for some reason Canada and New Zealand are popular for this) before you go global.
• Look for the “soft” market. A big splash in a small pond with a future has more potential than trying to make an impression in a huge marketplace with scant resources.
• Get a following. Napoleon reckoned that with 1,000 followers you have an army of your own. He wasn’t on Twitter, but you can be. Give opinions and help to people out there and build a following of folks who like you. A crowd who like what you do and want to see what you do next are great to have around. Be loyal to them and they will replay you by supporting what you do.
• Get a job. You might plan to be a lone gunfighter releasing your fantastic stuff for the world to marvel at, but it much easier to do this with a roof over your head and a full stomach. One of the things you need to succeed is luck (everyone said this). Napoleon (him again) reckoned that he always preferred his lucky generals to his clever ones. If the luck isn’t there, and it may not be, you still need to eat. Make time for your development and go at it full tilt, but there’s nothing wrong with having a backup plan.
• Get some “skin in the game”. This kind of goes against the above but I still feel it is something to think about. If you feel that the stars are aligning and that this is “the one” then feel free to go for it every way you can. Living in a van for six months while you raise funds and build your product base might be the thing you have to do to achieve success. Worst case maybe your boss (see above) will have you back – particularly if you part on good terms.
• The three most important aspects of a game are playability, playability and playability. But graphics and high production values are a way to distinguish your product and get people in to discover just how good your game is. But this, of course, costs money and time. As does buying a place in the charts that gets you noticed, something else which might be a necessity.
• Put yourself out there. I was particularly pleased to hear this one, as it chimes with what I’ve thought for years. You need to be able to do the “front of house” stuff. This is really bad news for software developers, who tend not to be the most extrovert folks, but it is a necessary skill. Get yourself in front of people. Practise doing stand-up, meeting and greeting and networking. If you don’t have these skills other people will not compensate for your lack of them. They’ll just find someone else more interesting to talk to. Ian Livingstone himself said that this is one lesson he took a long time to learn. The great thing about computer folks is that they are used to picking up new tools and APIs. Treat this as just another thing you have to learn and get good at.
• Make a good story. The press is interested in you, but only if you are interesting to them. “I’ve made a fishing game” is not useful to them. But “I’ve made a fishing game that I wrote underwater whilst wrestling a Great White Shark on the Barrier Reef” is. Make sure that you have a good tale to tell. Use your followers (see above) to big you up and help you get noticed.
• If you are working as a team, set some ground rules (another favourite of mine). Have a plan for what to do if your lead developer gets a “proper” job and stops writing your game engine. Have a protocol and a policy for re-negotiating your arrangements when these events happen.
• You don’t need to be the best, or cleverest. Just there are the right time, in the right place, with the right thing. Try lots of things, in lots of places as frequently as you can. Don’t expect success to happen the first, second or perhaps even the third time. But as soon as you get a sniff of something that seems to be working, follow it, develop it and ride it, and you might be the next big thing.

All in all a fantastic day out. Thanks to Microsoft for setting it up.

Raspberry Pi fun and Games

The room just before we started.

Today we had a bunch of folks from a local school come and see us and play with our Raspberry Pi systems. To say we had loads of fun would be a bit of an understatement. Great stuff. With kids like these I can see why folks become teachers.

I said I’d put some links on the blog if you are thinking of getting a pi. You can get the Raspberry Pi, plus cases, power supplies, keyboards and mice (or a kit with all those) from CPC. Follow the link here. You can get the wiring kit that we used in the labs from SK Pang, here.

Simon and me with a couple of satisfied customers. We’ll post the notes for the labs once we’ve finished tidying them up a bit.

Simple Calendar for Windows Phone

The Windows Phone calendar tile is nice enough. But it could be better. It could be like the one from Simple Calendar. This gives you the date and day in a nice, funky, format, along with details of your next two appointments. I really like it. When you run the program you also get a view of your entire month with teeny tiny text showing the appointments which is surprisingly useable. I can’t show you an example of that because I’ve already given away two top secret appointments for tomorrow in the screenshot above, but there are some sample screenshots on the Windows Phone Store page.

The application is free, although if you want the fancy tile above it will cost you a little bit. I actually don’t mind this. I find that adverts in an application are distracting and I like the though of paying the author a reasonable sum for a useful program. Seems somehow fair. Just for fun (and because number one wife likes it) I’ve changed the background and foreground colours for my phone as well. My Lumia 920 has an IPS display, which means that displaying lots of white doesn’t actually cost me any battery life.

One little Windows Phone tip: If you like to read your emails as black text on a white background, but you are using the Dark theme you can select this from the mail settings page, which is nice.

Facebook Picture Fun and Games

While I was away last week I was stupid enough to try and log in to Facebook from my phone to respond to a message. Facebook saw that I had left Hull for a little while and went into a high security mode, locking my account. Thanks for that.

To recover things I had to go through and identify pictures of folks that I know, which is always a problem for me as I’ve got a terrible memory for faces. Not that it would have made much difference in the picture above.

Windows Phone Picture Workflow

Not too shabby for a phone camera, eh?

My plan was to spend today writing content for a Raspberry Pi course that we are doing next week. The idea of my session is that we connect a Raspberry Pi to a bunch of LEDs and switches and then have fun writing Python programs that read the switches and flash the LEDs. Of course, the content needs lots of pictures of the hardware and the wires. And of course this is the one day of the week I didn’t bring my camera to work. So I used the one in my Lumia 920 and the results were astonishingly good.

To make things even better, I could take the pictures on the phone and then, when they appeared on Skydrive a few seconds later I could cut out the images that I wanted and paste them into the document on my PC. This made for a really fabulous workflow. If I had been using a “proper” camera I’d have had to take the pictures, get the SD card out of the camera, plug it into the computer and then drag the pictures off one by and drop them into the document in the right order.

Mobile phone cameras are great for close up photography. This is mainly because the focal length of the lens in a mobile phone camera is very short, which means that it has good depth of field (near things are focused as sharply as far things). This is great when taking pictures which are very close to the lens, when it is hard to make sure that everything in the frame is the same distance from the sensor.

The bad news with mobile phone cameras is that tiny cameras make for tiny sensors, so that images can be grainy. But my Lovely Lumia doesn’t seem to have that problem and so I was able to get good quality pictures into my document much more quickly than if I’d remember to bring the camera in. I’m definitely going to work this way again, it might even be worth making a little macro stand for the phone.