Finding out my "Hacked to Properly" Ratio

Spent quite a big chunk of this evening discovering that code you write during a GameJam is not actually the most solid of stuff. I've reached the point where I'm piling dirty hacks on top of horrible code to try and get something almost working. Oh well, it looks like the time for a total rewrite is here.

The good news is that I can take all the ideas and stuff over to the new design. The bad news is that I'm going to have to do it. Mind you, at the end I can probably work out my "Hack to Properly" ratio. This is the ratio of time it takes to hack something together vs the time to do a proper job. The code took around a day to write first time. Lets see how long it takes to write the new one.....

MVP Renewed

I'm really pleased that I've just been made an MVP again for another year. And this year there's been a change in that Windows Phone MVPs (which used to include me) have now been merged with the Windows Platform Development group.

So I guess that means I've finally made it onto the big screen......

Make a Photobook

If you've just had a wedding, christening or some other noteworthy event, then you might want to think about making a book about it. It's never been so easy to take pictures these days, most smartphones have pretty good cameras built in, but I rather miss the experience of seeing my work on paper. I can print out pictures if I want (and I do) but I'd never really thought about making a book.

However, last week I uploaded a bunch of shots to photobox, clicked a few buttons (a surprisingly small number) and paid a few quid for what has turned out to be a very nice souvenir of the occasion.

The book arrived today and I really like it. The printing quality is just like a "proper" publication, as is the heft and feel of the item itself. I paid a little bit extra for the "lay flat" spine, which means that we can use it in a proper "coffee table" role. The cost was not excessive. I judge the price of everything in video-games, and we managed to get two books printed and posted to Hull for less than the price of a game. 

If you have done something special, or interesting, then making a book about it is actually very easy. The company we used also has an amazing repertoire of pictures, posters, phone cases, mugs and the like which can be customised with artwork.

If you are a student who is not sure what to get mum for christmas, a personalised book that tells the story of your last semester might be a good plan. Although I'd not advise you to put every picture you take into it.....

Windows Phone, Wedding Lights and Bluetooth

Windows Phone connected Wedding Lights. Eight synchronized lights which can be controlled over Bluetooth. Each light contains an Arduino processor and a 16 NeoPixel ring.

I've finally finished it. I was going to write an article about my Windows Phone Controlled Wedding Lights. But instead I thought I'd do something different. So I fired up Adobe Premier and I made a video about them instead. It only lasts a couple of minutes, but boy was it complicated to make. Anyhoo, feel free to take a look and let me know what you think.

I've done something else I've not done before (and I feel a bit guilty about this one). I've put the Bluetooth code for Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 8.1 up on Codeplex. I'm ashamed to admit that this is the first code that I've ever posted there. I really should have been posting stuff up there earlier. I'm determined to post more stuff as I come up with it.  

You can find a sample project (my Bluetooth Printer) and the BluetoothManager class that I used to communicate with the embedded Bluetooth controller. There are also details of how to configure the Bluetooth device and send and receive data. 

Importing Autographer Videos into Adobe Premiere Pro

The title says it all really. If you don't want to know how to import time lapse videos you made with your Autographer into Adobe Premiere Pro then just admire the picture above and move on with your life. 

If you do want to know this, then your'e in luck. Turns out that the Adobe importer is a bit fussy about file formats and it decides a lot of things from the file extension. The Autographer writes files with an extension of mp4, which are rejected. If you just rename your file, from blah.mp4 to blah.mpg then the files are accepted. I used the command prompt to do this. 

Hull Pie, Parade and Classic Cars

Did something today that we've been meaning to do for ages. Had lunch in Hull Pie. The word on the street (love using that phrase, although I'm probably not of an age to be streetwise any more) was that the food was ace.

And it was. Good prices, amazing cuisine. I had chicken, ham and leek pie on mash and it was great. Number one wife had the quiche and salad. Both were thoroughly excellent. Yesterday was the Lord Mayor's Parade and Hull was packed. We missed the World War 2 Hurricane flypast (we were eating pie at the time) but we did see some of the celebrations.

Little Drummer Boy

Look at all those buttons and dials. Must be at least three of them...

Me and the Town Crier go way back. No, really.

They had a big parade, which was very big, and a collection of classic cars, one of which actually was a Ford Consul Classic.

This was the car that my dad really wanted to buy in the early 1960s. We had to make do with a Ford Cortina. If they'd had one of them at the show I'd have been in car heaven. 

The car we never had

How to be a Husband

I've been practicing being a husband for over thirty years. I think I'm reasonable at it, although apparently I'm not the one to judge this.

I must admit I regard Tim Dowling as something of a newcomer to the field, with only twenty or so years under his belt. However, he has written a very funny book about the art of husbandry (if that's what you call it). 

There are some genuine insights, a lot of laugh out loud moments and a few poignant parts as well. If you have enjoyed reading his column in the weekend Guardian over the years then you will know what you are getting and like it all the more. 

If you've not read his work before I'd say you were in for a treat. He is that most rare of species, a self deprecating American, and very, very good at it. Although of course I'm sure he would beg to differ.

You can find his book here. 

Amazon at C4DI

Tonight at the C4DI June Developer Meetup we welcomed Ian Massingham from Amazon Web Services, who gave a great talk about cloud based deployment of computing resource. Put that way it doesn't sound that interesting, but whey you go on to think that it allows computing infrastructure to change performance and scope with just a flick of a virtual switch you start to see just how compelling this model is.

Consider a situation where you have an idea for a product or service which, if it works, would be useful to millions of people. More than that, you might have an idea which only works properly if you have millions of users. How do you get started? Well, the answer is to put your system in the cloud. You don't have to buy anything at the start and you just pay for the computing power that you use. If things go well you use your revenue to pay for more processing. If things go badly you walk away and have another idea.

Ian talked about the way that the Amazon service is provisioned around the globe so that your data doesn't need to to leave your part of the world, and how clever management of the addressing of addresses means that your users will always be connected to the fastest servers in their neck of the woods. 

It's very clever stuff, and it lets you do things and play with things in a way that was just not possible in the past. Want to test out a new service for a while, need a high performance cluster for twenty minutes,  reduce the power of your end user platforms and do all your rendering off site? Cloud services can do this kind of thing and their power is going up and their prices going down all the time. 

When I met Ian I made some fairly silly comments about Python, a computer language that I've been playing with during the "Wrestling with Python" sessions we are doing for teachers. I made the point that for some applications, where security is right at the front of the things you are worrying about, I don't think that Python is the best choice (I'm going to have to write a complete blog post to get my feelings on this one properly set out).

However, for cloud type stuff Python is pretty much perfect. It provides the fastest way to get from idea to running code that I've found. A skilled Python coder can wrangle hugely complex systems together really quickly. I still prefer C# personally, but when you hear what developers can put together in Python in record time you can't help but be impressed.

Python is a perfect language for the "Move fast and break things" culture where companies survive by innovating faster than the other guy. If your new services are a bit fragile that's a price worth paying, and you can always iterate until you get solid systems.

All in all, a very thought provoking presentation, which ended with some hugely tempting AWS offers from Ian to members of C4DI and anyone thinking about their startup programme starting soon. 

Quadcopters over Hull

Adam passed me this still shot from the quadcopter. Not bad.

I've enjoyed playing with number one son's home made tricopter, but this week the "proper" flying camera arrived in the department.  It's a Phantom Quadcopter. We took it for a flight today, launching it carefully from the middle of a deserted playing field near the university. 

It is awesome. The camera stabilization is astonishing. The pictures are incredibly smooth and very high quality. The device uses global positioning to allow it to hover at one point above the ground. There was a fair bit of wind around, but the device was completely stable. Apparently it's very easy to control, although I lacked the nerve to have a go myself. And anyway, I was taking pictures. 

The battery is good for quite a long flight and there are also coloured lights. We took long a tiny toy quadcopter as well, as you do.

This was great fun to play around with, and you can even get one with a camera built in too.

Formation flying

The ground crew

Research at Hull

As it says on my departmental profile, I'm now a member of the Dependable Systems research group in the department. V. exciting. I've not done any "proper" research before.

My profile page also gives the impression, via my picture, that every now and then I wear somebody else's hair. Which is not true. But there are also links through to a couple of PhD projects that you might be interested in. 

Nokia Sensor Core Beta now available

Nokia make some fine APIs for Windows Phone. And now they've just released a couple more. Their Imaging API is great, and make it really easy to add image processing to your applications. It has just graduated from Beta to a formal release.

The Sensor Core API, just released as a beta, is a very interesting development. It takes Windows Phone into a domain it hasn't been before. Up until Sensor Core it was impossible to do things like track user activity and do things like count the number of steps walked by the phone user, find out where they had been etc etc. But Sensor Core provides the stuff to do all that for you. 

From my experience Nokia libraries are well written and beautifully documented. I'm going to get hold of them and have a play. If you are into Windows Phone, you should too. 

The Forbidden Corner Rocks

One of the many lovely gardens spread around the site. 

Today we headed off into the Yorkshire Dales to take a look around the Forbidden Corner. This is part theme-park, part country gardens, part awesome place to explore. We'd heard good things about it from numerous different sources and so we were expecting a good time.

We got one. The weather was kind to us and we had great fun wandering round. Admission is by pre-booked ticket only, which means that the place is never overwhelmed by visitors, and there are lots of things that scare, intrigue and amuse. Plus some things that squirt water at you or, better yet, the people with you.

There's a cafe with nice food and a gift shop with sensible prices and Yorkshire memorabilia. I enjoyed it at my age. If I'd been six I would never have wanted to leave. 

There is actually some blue sky in this picture. No. Really.

Dredgers and Docks

This is Orca the dredger. She'd make an awesome Lego model.....

Today we celebrate 100 years since the King George Dock was opened in Hull. To me this means a chance to go and take some pictures. We got the first bus out of Hull to the dockside and were there at the very very start. Which was nice because we got to go straight onto the boat and take a look around. I was trying out the ultra wide-angle lens.

I'm very proud of the fact that I didn't touch any of the buttons or levers....

The dredger was huge. It is basically a floating container that they take out into the estuary and fill with mud. Then they sail somewhere else and drop the mud off. The cabin was massive and had lots of interesting consoles and controls. I took pictures of all of them.

On the way out I did something by mistake that I plan to do again. I changed the colour temperature on the camera settings. This is the thing that makes colours look "right" in different lighting environments. Normally I leave it on automatic, but by pressing the wrong button I changed it to "incandescent". This is not really a problem, I can fix it later, but it does mean that you get neat colour effects sometimes.

Interesting. But wrong.

I'm not suggesting that you do this as a matter of course, but if you want to get a strange "other worldly" effect on your shots it is definitely worth a try every now and then.

We wandered into a massive warehouse that they'd set aside for exhibitions and bumped straight into Warren and the Seed crew. They were there to show off what Seed can do (which is quite a lot).

I'm not sure what Warren made of me, what with the Autgrapher pinned to my T-shirt and two cameras round my neck (actually, I am quite sure what he made of me - I just don't want to think about it) but it was nice to see them all there. At the time we turned up things were just getting going, so I think they were in for a busy time of it.

Waiting for the flood....

I had some lawns to mow and stuff to do at home (no - really) and so we had to head back to Hull. After a game of "hunt the bus" which went on for a bit longer than it really should have, we got to sit on the top deck at the front. Which was nice. 

3D Printerns

Mr Burns seems to like 3D printing....

The department is running a new initiative this year. We have a bunch of undergraduate students working as interns for a couple of months over summer. They are being paid to work on interesting projects "just to see where they go". The idea is that this will lead to research efforts and other interesting stuff.  The prospective interns were interviewed a few weeks back and they'll be starting in July. It's going to be fun. 

One area of interest is 3D printing, which is rather nice. It means that the departmental 3D printer (which doesn't have a name - yet unlike Una) will be getting even more use over summer. At the moment he/she/it (really must find a name) is busy printing out parts for our robot army (not sure if I should be talking about that). Perhaps we need another printer. Of course, we'll need another name then....

I really hope that the Summer Interns scheme becomes an annual thing. It provides a great way for students to explore just working with things to see what happens. 

Hull Devday a Roaring Success

I stole this picture from the Hull Devdays twitter tag. How many Hull folks can you spot in the crowd?

Oh to be young. And not to have to go to exam board meetings. But then again you don't read my blog to hear about my problems....

Lee from Microsoft was in town running the first ever Hull Devday. All the time I was in my meeting I was sneaking peeks at the folk who were all having a much better time than I was. I really hope they do it again, and I also hope that it doesn't clash with marking next time.....

Go See "Edge of Tomorrow"

Tom Cruise in good film shock horror. Yes, it is a genuinely splendid piece of Sci-Fi action with Tom in the starring role.

Groundhog Day meets the D-Day landings meets War of the Worlds. And a standout performance by Emily Blunt too. You really, really should go and see Edge of Tomorrow. Really.

You still here?

Wrestling with Pygame and Cheese

This pictures is entitled "Unsuccessful Cheese Movement Number 1"

The "Wrestling with Python" sessions on Pygame are progressing well. Today we got some cheese moving around the screen under keyboard control. Next week we will add some more sprites and get some proper game action going. You can see on of the first attempts at moving things above. Perhaps we should clear the background after each draw.....

It occurred to us (in a rather nervous-making way) that we are exactly four weeks away from the big event on campus when folks are going to come in and make and show off games. But everyone is learning stuff and having fun, so actually I'm quite looking forward to it. 

If you want to find out what we have been doing you can download the content from here. 

Fun with a Wide Angle Lens

I've always liked wide angle lenses. I've been playing with one and taking pictures around campus which turns out to be great fun. Places, like the area outside the Student's Union, suddenly look different and strange, and you can get some really interesting angles that you can't get any other way.

If you are interested (and why should you be) the lens I've been playing with is an 8mm focal length FishEye from Samyang. For such a bespoke piece of optics the price is very good, particularly if you get the cheaper silver one. The lens is completely manual, you have to set the focus and aperture by hand, but I rather like that and the cleverness in the camera seems to take this in its stride. The results are pin sharp in the centre of the frame and very good around the edges, particularly if you stop down to F8 or so. The colour rendition is good too, with hardly any fringing.

I'll certainly be taking it on my travels from now on,  it gives a very refreshing angle of view to familiar scenes so it should do amazing things with unfamiliar ones. 

Tricopter Flying over Cottingham

Yesterday we took number one son's home made tri-copter for another spin. Last time it flew very well, and so we thought we'd add a GoPro camera to see what kind of pictures we could get. We fitted the camera by the simple process of just sticking it on the front plate of the device. This seemed to work OK, although for the first few shots we had the battery wire in the frame.

Turned out that there was more than enough lift to take the camera into the air, although it is a tiny bit more wobbly than we'd have liked. The video came out pretty well, all things considered. 

Saturday Open Day with Added Stupidity

We had an Open Day at the University today. The place was nicely busy, and of course I took pictures of the folks that turned up. Except that for the first group I forgot to put a memory card in the camera. Which was not optimal. Sorry about that folks. I got you to smile and everything, and then took a picture that turns out not to exist.

Anyhoo, the talks went well (at least I thought so) and some of the Wedding Lights made a guest appearance. I hope you all enjoyed the trip. You can find the C# book (and a fair few other things) here.