What a great audience to get things wrong in front of….
I did the XNA Rather Useful Seminar today. Slightly enlivened by the fact that I finished the slide deck only a few minutes before the lecture itself. Oh well. Everything worked eventually…..
You might not know this (or perhaps even care) but I’m actually a member of a team taking part in Three Thing Game. I’m a part of the Spooky Elephant collective. I’m a sort of “sleeping partner” who doesn’t do much and then turns up to collect the prizes.
Works for me.
Anyhoo, David from our team was at the auction and managed to bag “walrus”, “custard” and “swimming” as the things we are going to have to make a game around. that sounds quite promising to me. But perhaps not as promising as “Team Bacon” who managed to get bread, cooking and,er, bacon. But you have to feel sorry for “The Elite Four” who managed to end up with “Rob Miles”, “Nuts” and “in a dress”. Who knows what they’ll come up with….
All the teams. All the things.
Sooooo. We had 41 teams and each of them needed Three Things. That’s well over 100 things to auction. In fifty minutes. And we did it.
By the end of the lecture we had a well oiled machine of David, Emily, Martin, Peter and myself who were clearing auction items at the rate of one every fifteen seconds. I’m not sure that everyone got all that they wanted but quite a few got some things. I was very pleased to see teams poring over the things for sale and strategizing before the auction. And the folks outside the lecture waiting to come in were amazed at what was going on.
For the teams, you now have three things. Make a game that involves them. It can be a new type of game, or a more traditional genre themed with the words that you have. Or just forget the things and make a space shooter. Anything goes.
I’m very pleased to be able to report that game developer Boss Alien will be sending some of their folks to take part in the event. They’ll be going round, looking at what is being built and giving helpful comments. They came along in June and enjoyed it so much they are coming back, which is great. They’ll be helping with the judging too.
Next date for your diaries is Wed. 30th NovemberOctober, at 1:15 pm. That’s when I’m doing an XNA overview which will cover how to get a game going and some things moving around the screen. It’s a Rather Useful Seminar and it’s in LTD as usual.
This is going to be so much fun.
Well, we’ve spent a sizeable chunk of the weekend printing and cutting out “Bank of Thingland” money, stuffing envelopes with notes, printing coloured things and generally getting ready for the Three Thing Game auction tomorrow that starts everything off. The auction is at 2:15 in Wilberforce Lecture Theatre 2 (WI-LT02). Should be fun.
This year, for a change, we are releasing some of the things that will be auctioned, so that you know what is coming up. You can find the list, along with the briefing document, here. If you find that I’ve spelt your name wrong in the team list (it happens) let me know and I’ll update the registration spread sheet.
Just bought a bunch of these to put things in. They are great big Lego bricks, around 25cm x 50cm which you can put things in. And they fit together just like normal sized ones. So you can build a fort with them.
From the look of the reviews on Amazon they are very popular. Particularly with five year olds. But I like them too.
Read. This. Book. It is not about computers (at least so far, I’m just past half way through). It is about medicine, race and human nature. Anyone proposing a work of fiction that followed the story in this book would be dismissed as being fanciful and having ideas that were just too far fetched. And yet it is all true.
It tells the story of how the death of one woman led to the establishment of a whole branch of science. It will also tell you how cells work, how they go wrong and how we found out about a lot of this, just because of Henrietta Lacks.
You can track down a copy from here. It is also available for Kindle at a very good price.
Andy points out his achievements, including coming up with the slogan “8 out of 10 cats…”
We are all surrounded by data which is harvested, refined and bought and sold just like any other cash crop. In the C4DI meeting tonight two excellent talks showed how this “big data” can be used to deliver useful outcomes, but how you also need to be aware of the human context behind the numbers.
First up was Andy Parkinson who now works for Kingston Communications as their Head of Insight and Analytics. He used to work for Hull City Council and gave a great description of how the council has been using the data it collects to refine and target services to make them more efficient. He showed how we can all be clustered into groups and how this helps to target resources. It seems that everybody is unique, but we all mange to be unique in a fairly structured way. And when you can characterise and map this, you can work out where you need to target what you are doing with your resources.
Having told us of the power of all this analysis, he then went on to mention that people can also behave in untoward and unpredictable ways that don’t fit their profile, or just act on “auto-pilot”. This reminded me a lot of my favourite maxim of the moment “Plans are useless, Planning is crucial”. By all means analyse your data and take actions based on it. But be well aware that you will always have to deal with some weirdness around the edges and behaviours that arrive “built in” to people. Of course, if you can harness these you can get some really big wins. So don’t be afraid to try stuff that targets the “automatic self”.
Next we had a talk from Nick Thompson who is Managing Director of Hull City and was formerly Director of Consumer Services with Kingston Communications. Nick took what Andy said and added an even stronger human dimension. By breaking down the Hull City fanbase into sections and analysing their motivations and actions he provided a lovely example of how data can tell you some useful things, but that you need to understand what drives the people in your numbers and how they behave.
It turns out that the spending habits of the fans seem to follow the well established “80 – 20” law, which in Hull City terms means that that 80% of the income of the club comes from around 20% of the fans. And these are not necessarily the most fanatical ones, who see their passion for the club transcending things like replica shirts and other merchandise. Very interesting.
Nick make the point that you can make decisions based on the data, but this must always be done in the light of the emotional attachments and drivers of the people themselves. What made it all the more striking was that Nick has obviously been a huge fan of the club for a very long time, and presumably fits himself into one of his categories as well.
The talks fitted together really well and made for a terrific evening.
This is a slightly processed picture of the audience. It seems that quite a few people have a taste for Pi.
We did another Rather Useful Seminar today. It was all about the Raspberry Pi. I covered what is, how you use it, a bit about hardware interfacing from Python and then we had a bit of time to look at my Pi Arcade table, which I’m keeping in the department for now.
This is the table, showing off its Pi credentials. Normally I run Mame on it. You can find out more about how I built it here.
Thanks to a great audience. You can find the slides here.
I’m only a bit sorry about the title. And the fact that the first program that we wrote was an “adder”. And yes, I do know that the language was named in honour of the TV show, not the snake.
Anyhoo, we had our first Python session for teachers tonight. A great bunch of folks turned up, wrote some Python, made it work and went home. If you are interested to find out what we got up to, you can find the slides and the lab notes here.
It’s not too late to sign up. If you are a teacher in the Hull area who would like to learn more about Python and has Tuesday evenings free then you can find out more here.
Students and Things of Old.
The World’s Premier Student Game Programming Competition involving Three Things is now ready for launching. We are going to have all the usual shenanigans with a Thing Auction next week (on Monday 28th at 2:15 in Wilberforce Lecture Theatre 2 since you asked) and more fun and games than you could shake a stick at. Even if you were a really good stick shaker.
If you want to enter (and you should) print out and fill in a registration form (which you can find here) and bring it to me along with your registration fee (which helps pay for the pizza). You can even suggest a thing which you might like to bid for on the registration form. Teams of up 4 can take part. Team members don't have to be Computer Science students, but they do have to be University of Hull students.
If you’ve never written a game before I’ll be doing a Rather Useful Seminar next week (on Wednesday 30th at 1:15 in Robert Blackburn Building LTD since you asked again) which will describe how to get started with game writing in C#. Don't worry if you are just learning to program. It turns out that spending a solid day working on a project is a very good way to build your skills. This is true whether or not you want to end up as a game developer.
We will start at 7:00 pm on the Friday night (1st November) and finish by 8:00 pm on Saturday evening (2nd November). So you can spend all day Sunday recovering. We even have some proper game developers coming along to join in the fun .
If you don't have a team, don't worry. We will be using the "Team-o-matic" to create teams for individuals who haven't got one. Just fill in a form for yourself and write "Team-o-matic" as the team name.
In July this year I took part in Hacked at the O2 in London. It was an absolutely brilliant hackathon, made all the better by the fact that I managed to win one of the competitions. My Difficultifier got People’s Choice Award, which was completely wonderful. What made it even better was finding out that part of the prize was four tickets to any show at the O2 Dome over the next year. Splendid.
I mentioned this to Number One daughter. “John Mayer’s playing the dome in October” she said. Done.
So, thanks to those wonderful O2 people, particularly Cristiano Betta and Kevin Prince, today we were sitting in seats up close to the stage, having just come from the O2 Lounge where we had been preparing for the performance with a couple of cocktails. As you do (or as had been laid on for us)
This is Gabrielle Aplin, who did a sterling job providing support and had an absolutely cracking backing band.
.. and this is the man himself, with some good advice for us all. He started early and gave us a two hour demonstration of why he is just so darned good. If you’ve not heard of John Mayer, then seek him out. Blues, rock, country, playing the guitar behind your back. The works. Just really, really good.
This is the fancy new roof over the courtyard of the British Museum. We’re here because we are having a couple of days in London and fancied seeing all the good stuff that our enterprising ancestors plundered from ancient civilisations far and wide.
I think that this is a very early prototype for the very first Simpsons episode. But I may be wrong.
We were looking at the mosaics and noting that the resolution was reasonable, but the frame rate seemed a bit slow. Great fun and probably even cultural.
I’ve decided to use the Tags of Fun at our 5:15 Friday lectures. Today I took along the latest incarnation, housed in an attractively designed black and white box that is just a bit too small to hold the batteries properly.
But it worked fine. Everyone who had hung on to their tags from the welcome party was able to sign in and win prizes, in this case plastic owls and some nougat from the fair. And most of the names were right too, which was nice.
I’m going to refine the design, week on week, to expand what the reader does, and maybe make a second one that will make signing up for prizes even easier.
Above you can see the Gadgeteer configuration of the device. The printer is plugged in when I need to make labels for tags, the Bluetooth lets the device talk to my Windows Phone. By Christmas it should be an amazing system. But that might be Christmas 2020……
Hull Fair is in town. We didn’t manage to make it last year, what with one thing and another and horrible weather. Today though we thought we’d go for it. I took the big camera and cunningly concealed it underneath my jacket, so that I looked like any other heavily pregnant middle aged tall bloke.
We just went on the big wheel to take pictures and then on Hook a Duck to win a teddy. Then we bought some nougat and headed off for a pie at Fudge just down the road.
Indeed.
We had a good audience for the first Rather Useful Seminar. Some of them were fresh from a first year lecture and must have been feeling a mite peckish. But they stayed to the end and I hope they enjoyed it. The talk was very similar to the one I did last year, but there was a twist at the end, when I printed the weather forecast as a plastic object. Again, I brought along Una the Ultimaker, and again she behaved herself very well.
I’ve become quite intrigued with the idea of generating objects from software, and it occurred to me that with the FreeCad tool having a Python interpreter in it, we should be able to do something interesting. I’d no idea how to use Python to read a weather forecast but fortunately Catalin George Festila has done it here. So I took his methods which use the Yahoo weather feed and prints it out and made a few changes.
def weather_for_zip(zip_code):
url = wurl % zip_code +'&u=c'
dom = minidom.parse(urllib.urlopen(url))
forecasts = []
for node in dom.getElementsByTagNameNS(wser, 'forecast'):
forecasts.append({
'date': node.getAttribute('date'),
'low': node.getAttribute('low'),
'high': node.getAttribute('high'),
'condition': node.getAttribute('text')
})
ycondition = dom.getElementsByTagNameNS(wser, 'condition')[0]
return {
'current_condition': ycondition.getAttribute('text'),
'current_temp': ycondition.getAttribute('temp'),
'forecasts': forecasts ,
'title': dom.getElementsByTagName('title')[0].firstChild.data
}
This is the code that he wrote that fetches the weather information from the Yahoo weather service and creates a list of objects that contain a forecast item for five days. The forecast information contains the highest temperature for each day, and that’s what I’m going to use to control the height of each of the columns that I print.
def main():
a=weather_for_zip("UKXX0476")
noOfReadings=5
# find range of temperatures
highest = float(a['forecasts'][0]['high'])
lowest = highest
for i in range(noOfReadings):
v = float(a['forecasts'][i]['high'])
if highest < v:
highest = v
if lowest > v:
lowest = v
# make some blocks
plinthThickness = 3.0
blockWidth=5.0
blockDepth=5.0
blockStartHeight = 5.0
heightRange = 20.0
rangeScale = heightRange / (highest - lowest)
x=0.0
y=0.0
plinth = Part.makeBox(blockWidth*noOfReadings,blockDepth, \
plinthThickness, Base.Vector(0,0,-plinthThickness))
for i in range(noOfReadings):
v = float(a['forecasts'][i]['high'])
blockHeight = blockStartHeight + rangeScale * (v - lowest)
block = Part.makeBox(blockWidth,blockDepth, \
blockHeight, Base.Vector(x,y,0))
plinth = plinth.fuse(block)
x = x + blockWidth
Part.show(plinth)
Gui.SendMsgToActiveView("ViewFit")
Gui.activeDocument().activeView().viewAxometric()
main()
The Yahoo zip code for Hull in the UK is UKXX0476. This code fetches the weather forecast data and then finds the largest and smallest temperature values (something which should be familiar to first year students). It then makes a row of five blocks, each of which has a height set by the temperature for that day. I’ve re-written it from the demonstrated code so that the coordinates make a bit more sense. The width and depth values map onto the x and y directions, with height being the z value. The code creates a little plinth and fuses a series of blocks onto the plinth. The length of each block is the temperature for that day.
This is the object that was produced by FreeCad. It represents the temperatures 12, 16,14, 17 and 16 degrees, which is the rather chilly forecast for the next few days. I sliced the design using Cura and then, after a bit of kerfuffle I managed to print out the temperature plot.
The weather forecast. And a tiny owl.
I printed it out really tiny (all of the dimension values above are in mm) but I reckon it came out quite well. I’ve since found a flaw though, in that you can’t tell which way round it is supposed to be read. Of course I could add an arrow or emboss some text to make it easier to use.
I must admit that I can’t see a huge demand for physical manifestations of the weather forecast, but I hope it brought home to folks how easy it is to grab information and turn it into something tangible. There is a lot of scope for random patterns and generating objects from mathematical formulae. And, as you can see above, it is very easy to do. I made an offer that if anyone uses Python to make an interesting object I’d be quite happy to print it out for them.
You can find the slide deck here. At the end Peter was kind enough to show some videos of his printer in action. You can find out all about the “Richmond” 3D printer at his blog here.
I’m pleased (and a bit surprised) to find that I now have over 3,000 followers on Twitter. I’ve been close to the magic number for a while now, but it seems that there have been a bit of un-following going on where I’m concerned (or perhaps some Twitter spam-bots have been shut down). All I can say is that this has caused my numbers to bounce around the magic figure for a few days, but now I really can say that I’ve made it past the magic number.
I wonder if I should tweet about it?
Apparently there are people who will believe that a software upgrade will make your phone waterproof. The “Preview for Developers” application for Windows Phone doesn’t actually turn your phone into a Tardis, but it does allow it download future versions of the Windows Phone operating system for testing. That way you can make your applications work with the latest versions of Windows Phone before they are released to the general public. It also means that you can use upcoming new features like Drive mode and application management.
You can now terminate applications from the the App-Management screen (hold down the Back key to open this). Although why anyone would want to terminate the wonderful VoiceMusic application is a mystery to me.
This year the university is making available an electronic version of the timetable for all staff and students. It is best described as “a work in progress” because that is what it is. Lots of wonderful things are promised for the future, including Outlook integration and proper, personalised timetables. But for now it is a bit unwieldy to use.
Which is not good enough for Tom, one of our students, who has built a Python program that reads the data and then lets you display your timetable and do all the things that you’d really want to do with it. You can find out about it here.
Incidentally, I found his blog post via http://hullcompsciblogs.com/
This has a bunch of good student blogs, and if you are from Hull and starting blogging you can ask them to add yours to the syndication.
First sitting
Second sitting
Up until now we’ve been very lucky with the weather for our open days. Not so today. The weather dial has flipped over to “horrible” and seems to be stuck there. However, we did have quite a few brave souls who made it through the wind and wet to come along to see us. I did a couple of presentations and showed off my Cubelets And why not.
Thanks to both bunch of folks for being great audiences, laughing at my jokes and even going “Wooo” when I uttered the immortal words “robmiles.com”.
If you are thinking of spending some money on a new camera, then welcome to the club. I’m always thinking of spending some money on a new camera. But before you buy a camera you might want to think about investing in some software to make the best of the camera you already have.
I’m a big fan of Photoshop Lightroom as a way of getting pictures out of the camera, tweaking them a bit and then managing where they are stored. It also has very good integration with Photoshop itself, along with lots of other plugins that can do lovely things with your pictures (for example Photomatix Pro for High Dynamic Range work).
Some time ago (in fact around a month and a day before a new version came out) I bought a copy of Photoshop. I’m proud to be able to say that I know what nearly a quarter of the buttons do now. But I really want the newest version, because that works best with the RAW files (images direct from the sensor) that my cameras produce.
Now you can’t really buy Photoshop any more. Instead you rent it by the month. Up until now I’ve not been that keen on that model, I much prefer owning things. However, in a world where (no – this is not a movie trailer) new versions of cameras and software come out at least once a year, renting makes quite good sense. Particularly as they have a deal at the moment where students and academics can get pretty much all of Adobe software for around fifteen pounds a month by signing up for a Creative Cloud subscription.
People spend more than that on cigarettes, and for your money you get access to the latest versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat Pro, Dreamweaver and lots of other things that would probably be useful if I knew what they did. The offer is open until the 27th of October. Well worth a look.
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.
