World of Blur

I woke up today with a head full of plans, schemes and great things to do. Then my glasses fell in half as I put them on.

Great.

Of course I was equal to this, eventually. Having turned the house upside down (not literally, that would be really hard to do – especially without my glasses on) and found some less than invisible tape to mend them with, I managed to get back into gear. The metal fitting in the frame has just broken in half. Serves me right for keeping them longer than two years I suppose. The hunt is now on for my older, but rather less broken, ones that I can use while I get these fixed.

I was wondering whether, from a style point of view, I should put tape around the other side for the sake of balance?

Acer W3-810 at a knockdown price

After I buy something technical one of two things usually happens:

• They stop making it
• It plummets in price

I think with the Acer W3-810 tablet it might be both of them. Although it has only been out around six months I reckon that there is a refresh due and the price has collapsed accordingly, to a very interesting 179 pounds from PC World. This is stonkingly good value for a full fat Windows 8 tablet. Mine is now my travelling companion of choice. Eminently portable, excellent battery life for watching movies on the go and the ability to run splendid little programs live Live Write so that I can blog about what I see when I get there.

Downsides? Well, the 8.1 inch screen is not optimal if you are the sharing type, as the range of viewing angles is not the best, and the Atom processor and 2G of RAM means that it chugs a bit when running larger programs. I had Photoshop Lightroom on it for a while and the best thing you can say is that it gets there in the end. Mind you, having said that Lightroom can pretty much bring any machine to its knees just by importing a few pictures. I’ve heard of one brave soul running Visual Studio on it. Apparently it is possible, but of course with it being based on the 32 bit x86 architecture you will not be running any Windows Phone emulators any time soon…

If you are in the market for something portable and useful you could get a lot worse. If you think about it, that’s actually less money than a Nexus 7, for a machine that is actually properly productive, with Microsoft Office and the ability to print things out.

Final Tags of Fun Lecture of 2013

This is the latest design for the “Tagomatic” box. Expect a smaller one for next year.

We had our last 5:15 pm lecture today. I can’t say that I’ll miss them, although this one was quite fun. I went through the exam paper for last year (you can’t get more fun than that) and gave away four owls, including a “Golden Christmas Owl” to someone who’s name I completely failed to pronounce properly. Oh well, perhaps the next version of the “Tagomatic” can have text to speech. For those that haven’t heard of it, the “Tagomatic” is a little Gageteer powered box that reads the RFID tags of folks at a lecture and then picks a random winner from the assembled multitude. I first used it for the welcome party, where we had it allocating the free drinks, and I’ve been using it in my Friday First Year lectures to make things a little more interesting.

People have seemed to engage very well with the project, bringing along their tags and scanning them for a chance to win small prizes. I even had someone get in touch asking where they can get a tag from…. Next year I’m planning to have multiple tag readers, spot prizes and Bluetooth networking back to my phone.

It almost makes me wish for another 5:15 lecture on Friday. Almost……

You Really Should Be Fiddling with Hardware

Find out what you can do with this, and how much it costs, at the session next week.

In an attempt to stop myself just buying components and start myself actually doing something with them, I’m doing a session at the next C4DI “You really should be..” event.

I’m going to be talking about the joys of making programs that talk to hardware, and just how easy and cheap it is to get started. Expect flashing lights.

The session starts at 6:00 pm on Thursday 12th of December. It’s at the C4DI in The Fruit Market. You can sign up here.

Black Marble 3D Printing Magic

 

These are most of the two groups,carefully stitched into almost successful panoramas, and with Una the Ultimaker in the foreground, as it should be.

I love doing talks like this. The folks above are all Sixth Formers from schools around Black Marble, who have invited them in for some computer based inspiration. They had talks about cloud computing, encryption, built some systems using Gadgeteer and then had a session from David and myself where we talked about university life and showed off some 3D printing.

I’d taken along Una the Ultimaker and, despite me nearly breaking her during the first session, she behaved in an exemplary fashion, printing out the weather forecast in 3D and then, during lunch, a couple of tiny owls.

I reckon that 3D printing is going to change the future and have a huge impact on the way we do things. I made the point that when I was the same age as the audience a printer was someone you gave things to have them printed for you. Nowadays everyone has ready access to high quality colour printing on cheap inkjet devices.

We are moving towards a world where cheap 3D printing is going to mean that physical objects can be customised and built on demand. There will be no reason why the things around you shouldn’t be just the way you like them, and completely unique to you. I told the audience that learning a bit of 3D design skills would be a good idea, along with some programming smarts so that you can write code that will build designs for you, and let you create objects from any kind of data that you like, including of course the weather forecast.

Thanks to all the folks at Black Marble for setting up the event and to David for doing the serious stuff.

I’ve put the slide deck here.

Pythons Duly Wrestled

We had our last “Wrestling with Python” session today. Simon, Robert, Warren, Mike and myself have been helping some teachers from local schools get to grips with the Python programming language. You can find the notes and exercises from the course here.

The six sessions have flown by (particularly the one that took place while I was in Seattle…) We gave out completion certificates and talked about continuing into the future. Everyone seemed keen to come back, which is nice.

The Python programming language is definitely growing on me. Of course my heart belongs to C#, but I do quite like writing Python programs. The C# language is a bit like your mum, always concerned with your welfare, fussing a bit but making sure that everything is just right. Python on the other hand is a bit like your crazy auntie who doesn’t make a scene if you forget to comb your hair and suggests going of and things like parachute jumps. She’s great fun to be around, but if you are actually looking to do something properly you’ll want to work with mum.

Actually I don’t have particularly strong opinions about programming languages. My concept of the “best” language is very simple. The best language is the one that they will pay you the most cash to write programs in. I will quite happily write JavaScript if the money is right. And I might even reprogram my keyboard to produce cash till sounds when I type so that I can remind myself why I’m doing it…..

With programming languages it is often a matter of “horses for courses” and I reckon that a proper programmer should have a good working knowledge of at least two or three, and be prepared to learn a new one if the occasion demands it.

Python is a great tool for learning, it is possible to “play” with Python code in a way that is rather fetching, and it was fun introducing the teachers to the business of programming. With a bit of luck we’ll do some more in the future. If you are a local teacher who wants to get involved in the next tranche of sessions, let me know and I’ll put you on the list.

Hyperspace Cheese Battle

Ask any of our First Year students what is occupying their minds just right now and they will probably give you the response “Hyperspace Cheese Battle”. This is the assessed coursework that they are grappling with for our C# programming course. Above you can see the lovingly drawn board. This is actually version 3 of the layout, after sharp eyed students spotted some tiny flaws in previous incarnations. Ho hum.

The game is a bit like the Space Cheese Battle game that we wrote last year, but this year we are playing in Hyperspace, which means that the directions of movement are given on each square, rather than everyone following the same route around the board. There are special “cheese squares” and you can shoot at other players and cause their engines to explode.

And our students have to make the game work in C#. Most folks seem to be doing OK. If you are having problems I would give you the same advice I give everyone who is working on coursework.

• Work on one part at a time, and don’t get deflected onto other bits until you’ve solved that part.
• Seek help as soon as you have problems. Send me emails, drop round to my office, use the lab demonstrators, go to Peer Assisted Student Support (PASS) sessions.
• And don’t worry.

Hungry Bear in Leeds

If you find yourself hungry in Leeds and fancy some fine food I can strongly recommend the Hungry Bear in Meanwood. We had lunch there today and the food was excellent. The burgers are very good value and for afters they serve a platter with a whole bunch of Yorkshire cheeses. They also have an interesting selection of locally brewed beer. You can’t get better than that.

PlayStation 4 vs. Xbox One - Fight

I’ve actually had a chance to play with both the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 now. As for which is better, they both are. I reckon the Xbox One has the better launch games and more potential, what with the ever-present Kinect and the HDMI pass through (which is not particularly useful outside the US at the moment). But the PlayStation 4 has slightly better hardware (although this is a bit up for discussion) , with a smaller, more stylish, box and no need for an external power supply.

Performance wise they are very, very, similar. Although we’ve not really seen software that will do them justice just yet. Forza on the Xbox One looks great, with car models looking lovely. Knack on the PlayStation 4 is good looking too, although this doesn’t jump out at you quite so much. The controllers are both excellent and the prices just about line up once you factor in the price of the camera for the PlayStation 4.

The magazine GamesMaster has a very good comparison of the two consoles. I felt kind of sorry for the folks who had to write this piece, if they either of them is the best they run the risk of annoying half of their audience.  I was reminded very strongly of camera magazines when they try to compare Nikon and Canon cameras. Both take excellent pictures and would make any photographer really happy. My take is that Canon are slightly more “consumer” whereas Nikon have a few more rough edges but probably have the edge in performance, but you really couldn’t go wrong choosing either one.

And so it is with the consoles. In a year or two there might be a stronger divergence but I reckon any good ideas had by one camp will be quickly taken up by the other one. The most important thing for gamers is that this on-going competition is going to drive standards even higher.

Oh, and Super Mario 3D on the Nintendo Wii U looks pretty good too…..

Evening Skies on a Lumia 1020

We do get some rather good night skies this time of year. I took a picture of this one using the Lumia 1020. It’s another HDR rendering of five different pictures, and I think it looks rather splendid.

How Woody Allen can improve your 3D printing

It’s actually quite easy. I’ve noticed that there are some irregularities in the output from the 3D printer. The output is actually pretty good now, but I’m getting some horizontal banding along the sides of objects.

Someone on the interwebs suggested that the banding is due to vibration of the base panel of the printer. This supports the print platform and if it is wobbling up and down this could cause some of the problems. So I put my copy of the Woody Allen book “Dread and Superficiality” on the base, along with a retro camera book I got last Christmas, and the vibrating seems to have been damped down a bit. I think I’ll make a proper damper out of some old floor tiles, and take a look at the fan that is causing most of the vibration.

I did some printing and things seem to have improved a bit, which is nice. I’ll know more when I’ve printed some straight sided objects. At the moment I’m mostly printing Tiny Owls for some reason….

Tom Talks Rather Useful Security

 
Tom keeps his nerve….

We had a student powered Rather Useful Seminar today. Tom Forbes is one of our third year students and he has a side-line in computer security. So a while back he offered to give a Rather Useful Seminar about his experiences making the web a more secure place. In fact he wanted to go beyond just talking, and actually set up a web site, just for the hacking of. So he did.

Tempting products, but woefully insecure.

We were actually able to connect to the site and do some injection and scripting attacks there and then. Great fun. You can find out more about the presentation on Tom’s blog, here.

I made the point that if any other students think they might have a seminar in them, we are always looking for volunteers. It is great practice. If you reckon you have a story to tell, get in touch and we can set something up.

Pro Wrestling

I love my shiny new Surface Pro 2 dearly. It is very, very, close to the perfect computer. It is useful in about any situation. It weighs next to nothing for a machine of this power. The screen makes movies look lovely. The battery lasts for a good while. There is enough disk and memory space to put all my work on it (I got the 256G disk version with 8G of ram) and the machine seems powerful enough to run just about everything I throw at it.

And yet it is not perfect.

The first problem I’m having is one shared by very many Surface Pro 2 (and perhaps Surface 2 owners). The machine is a bit like me first thing in the morning. It really doesn’t like to wake up. Putting the machine to sleep and then waking it up again is a terrible lottery. Sometimes it works. Other times it does a fresh reboot, killing any applications that were running. And now and again it does a really frightening thing involving “Automatic Repair” that doesn’t seem to result an any great data loss, but it does scare the bejesus out of you, and is just the thing you don’t want to see on the way to a lecture you are about to present from it. From the forums I notice that quite a few people are having the same problem. Some link it to the Type Cover 2, others to the WIFI adapter. I’ve tried a few of the suggested fixes, but the only one that really worked for me was to tell the machine not to sleep when you closed the cover, but to hibernate instead. This is the mode where the machine copies all of the memory to the hard disk and then shuts down, loading the memory back on restart. This is a tad slower than waking from sleep, but it does seem a lot more reliable.

The second problem I’m having is that the Wi-Fi adapter does not work reliably on the university network. At home fine. In Starbucks fine. On the Microsoft Campus fine. At the University I get around five minutes of operation followed by failure. The Wi-Fi hardware thinks it is connected but all applications that try to use the network beg to differ. This is very annoying. Initially I thought I was going mad, but then I found a post on the Surface forums describing these exact symptoms in another device.

I’m inclined to wonder if all this is an issue with the Hyper-V virtual machine feature. I’ve, rather unwillingly, had to turn this on so that I can develop for Windows Phone 8, but I’ve noticed on other computers that some device drivers really don’t work well in this mode. I also think that the power on problems are not restricted to the Surface platform, some other machines I’ve used seem startlingly bad at getting going.

I’m hopeful that these will be fixed by a firmware/driver update some time soon. Microsoft are maintaining a stoic silence in the face of these problems, which I hope means that they are working feverishly behind the scenes to fix them.

Cottingham Lights 2013

Every year around this time they turn on the Christmas Lights in Cottingham where we live. I go out and take some pictures. Some years I just leave the shutter open and wave the camera around a bit. This was one of these years.

They had some folks there selling flashing lights and stuff, which made for some great effects. Not sure if they are art or not. But I like them.

Rather Useful Seminar on Information Security

This Wednesday, 27th November, Tom Forbes, a student in the department will be giving a Rather Useful Seminar all about security on the internet. It looks like it is going to be, er, rather useful. It is at the usual time, 1:15 pm, in LTD in the Robert Blackburn Building.

Philadelphia Freedom

Flew back today from “The Best MVP Summit Ever”™. My flight was via Philadelphia, where they had a rather nice sunset (see above). I took the picture with my Lumia 1020 (actually I took 5 and then merged them together to get the rather pleasing result).  I think I’ll print out a really large version of this.

Another surreal favourite moment, hearing Elton John’s “Philadelphia Freedom” being played through the public address system while I was there. Awesome.

Free Windows Phone 8 Book

I’m very pleased to be able to report that my Windows Phone 8 Book (the Blue Book that is a companion to the Yellow Book) is now available for free download from Microsoft Faculty Connection. There are around 250 pages of developer goodness spread over 15 chapters, along with a over 50 demos.

This is the button that you use to download the content. Click on the word Download. You don’t need to be a member of the Faculty Connection to get the content, it should just arrive as one large zip archive with the Blue Book document and all the demos.

Here’s a quick overview:

• Getting Started with Windows Phone
  • The Windows Phone Platform
  • The Windows Phone Ecosystem
  • Windows Phone Program Execution
  • Windows Phone Application Development
• Making a User Interface with XAML
  • Program Design with XAML
  • Understanding XAML
  • Putting Program Code into an Application
• Visual Studio Solution Management
  • Getting Started with Projects and Solutions
  • Debugging Programs
  • Performance Tuning
• Constructing a Program with XAML
  • Improving the User Experience
  • Working with XAML text
  • Using the TextChanged Event
  • Managing Application Page Layout
• Advanced Application Development
  • Data Binding
  • Displaying Lists of Data
  • Pages and Navigation
  • Using ViewModel classes
• Isolated Storage on Windows Phone
  • Storing Data on Windows Phone
  • Copying Files into Isolated Storage
• Using Databases on Windows Phone
  • An Overview of Database Storage
  • Creating Data Relationships with LINQ
• Networking with Windows Phone
  • Windows Phone Network Support
  • Networking Overview
  • Addresses and Networks
  • Creating a User Datagram Protocol (UDP) Connection
  • Creating a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) Connection
  • Reading a Web Page
  • Using LINQ to Read from an XML Stream
• XNA Game Development
  • XNA in Context
  • Making an XNA 4.0 Program
  • Player Interaction in Games
  • Adding Sound to a Game
  • Managing Screen Dimensions and Orientation
  • Using MonoGame
  • Making a MonoGame XNA program
• Using Speech in Applications
  • Speech Synthesis
  • Controlling Applications using Speech
  • Simple speech input
  • Using grammars
• Maps and Location
  • Determining the geoposition of the phone
  • Using the Map component
• Using Bluetooth and Near Field Communications
  • Using Bluetooth
  • The Intercom Program
  • Using Near Field Communications
• How Applications Run
  • Background Processing
  • Adding a Live Tile to an Application
  • File Transfer Tasks
  • Scheduled Notifications
• Marketing Windows Phone Applications
  • The Windows Phone Icons and Splash Screens
  • Preparing an Application for Sale
  • Windows Phone Store
  • Making your Application Stand Out

Enjoy.

A Trip to the Space Needle

I made it to the top of the Space Needle ten minutes before sunset. It had been clear and bright all day (something of a rarity for Seattle) and I thought I might be able to grab some good pictures.

I was right.

I was there for quite a while taking pictures. It was very cold out on the observation deck, but there was a nice warm cafe where I could grab a coffee and wait until I could feel my fingers again.

This was a very fitting end to what has been one of the best MVP Summits I’ve ever attended. The depth of the content, the quality of the engagement and the scale of the developments coming down the tracks were all mightily impressive. I’m never quite sure just what I’ve done to deserve to get an inside track like this, but I’m very pleased that I have. Thanks to all at Microsoft for setting it all up.

Secret Agent Watch Secrets at the MVP Summit

Actually there are no secrets here really. It was rather nice to go to a session and hear the presenter say “You can blog all you want about this.”. So I am doing. Chris Walker, Founder of Secret Labs had come along to tell us about the new Secret Agent watch that his company launched on Kickstarter a while back. He’d brought along some hardware samples and the latest version of the software that lets you use the accelerometer in the device via a funky new emulator. I had a play with this and one of the demos shows how to make a big font watch face.

The code is very simple, each of the letters is a gif image that is just drawn on the watch screen.

If you fancy having a play with this you can download the software from the Agent Watches web site.Above you can see the emulator.The hardware looks very nice. Two processors, one a low power device, ground breaking power monitoring and new display technology. Great stuff.

This is the watch.

This is the hardware inside, with the display.

Chris was telling us that there have been some delays on the hardware (this is nothing particularly surprising when you are making stuff) but that it should be available after Christmas.

MVP Summit Day 2–Beer and Bicycles

Today was the time for more and more stuff. But then it was time for another in the series of World Famous MVP Summit pub crawls. Or in this case, pedal

This is the only bicycle with a bar that I’ve ever seen, let alone been on. The principles is simple enough..

It is a bicycle powered by MVPs. Powered by beer. We pedalled down the road to bar number one,

The first bar was great, although the duck shooting game was obviously broken as I was comprehensively beaten when we were playing it. /when moving on we switched to “stagger power” and went off to the next one.

The streets are very pretty round here

The second bar had a great name, amazing artwork inside (since it was for sale I’m not posting pictures)..

..and superb live music. And pizza. And beer.

And pretzels.

It was a great night. Thanks to Desiree and Sharon for setting up everything and making it such a wonderful occasion.