Christmas Bash is Coming

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The Christmas Bash for 2014 is coming and it is going to be a corker. We are going to have Wii U Smash Bros 8 player, with amiibo prizes, Team Fortress 2, Xbox One, Playstation 4, board games, word searches, pizza, mince pies and a super bumper hyper mega wordsearch which might include the words super, bumper,hyper and mega.

Tickets will be on sale in the Departmental Office on the Third Floor of the Robert Blackburn Building from 2:30 pm on Monday 8th December. Numbers are strictly limited.

Flashing Lights and Drones at C4DI

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Today we had another of our hardware meetups at c4di. Great fun was had by all who attended. We had two activities, playing with coloured leds or creating a Larson Scanner. Ross had brought along a little quadcopter with a video camera and much fun was had with that too. I'm not saying you should get one, but if you fancy making an investment you can find it here.

Python Wrap

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Python wrap sounds like the kind of dish you don't pick off the menu, or perhaps a piece of music that you really don't want to hear. But in this context I'm talking about the last of our "Wrestling with Python" sessions for a while. They have been great fun to deliver, and it has been lovely to watch people come to terms with the artful business that is programming. 

This week we were making good on our promise of a "Soup to Nuts" implementation, going from problem description to working code.  And we added some File Handling, just to make it even more useful. You can find the slides and completed code here.

We'll be running more of these next year. 

Writing a Program is not a Fight

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Our First Year students are busy at the moment working on their Assessed Coursework. They are implementing computerised versions of Tactical Space Cheese Racer, a board game that we've invented just for this year. 

One student came to see me today and told me that he was having problems getting the code to work. Each line of his breathless report was prefaced with "And then it does this...." as if the code was some kind of malign being that he was fighting against. 

After listening for a while I had to remind him that he is not in a battle here. The program is something that that he created, and therefore he really should focus on the steps that it follows and why it does what it does. Just poking the beast by moving code around and adding and deleting statements will not actually tame it. What you have to do is focus on the sequence of operations it goes through when it does these bad things. 

We started going through the code and finding stuff here and there that could be fixed, and by the end he was referring to the thing as "my program", which I think is progress. 

James Croft talks Imagine Cup at our Rather Useful Seminar

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James Croft came to see us yesterday. He now works for Black Marble and they were kind enough to let him slip across from Leeds to give a Rather Useful Seminar all about the Microsoft Imagine Cup competition. I've been involved with the Imagine Cup as a mentor, judge and competition captain and I think it completely rocks. But I'm very old. I thought it would be more meaningful if someone who has actually taken part came along and said how good it is. Which is just what James did in a well put together presentation. 

Microsoft have done some neat things with your pathway into the competition so that you can build up your development, from pitch video to working software, over the weeks leading up to the finals and get credit, feedback and prizes at every stage. There are the usual three challenge areas, Game Development, App Development and World Citizenship. The World Final is in Seattle and involves trips to Microsoft Campus among other places. And the prizes are awesome. 

The bottom line is that if you're a student you really should engage with the competition. I say this not because I'm convinced you will win (although students from Hull have an enviable record) but because taking part adds hugely to your personal value as a developer and communicator and also sets you up with valuable industrial contacts who will give you feedback, advice, a reference and maybe even a job. It has happened. 

Anyone from Hull who is thinking about forming a team should come and see me so that we can start making plans. 

Thanks for coming and doing such a good job James. I took a video of the session but something strange has happened with the dimmed lighting in the room which has caused awful banding effects on the picture, making it hard to see. Never mind though, James will be doing a webcast of the presentation later on his YouTube channel. Follow him on Twitter and find out when it becomes available. 

Completely Mad Tuesday

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Today was completely mad. It started at 6:00, getting up to grab breakfast and zoom up town to review the newspapers with Radio Humberside. Which was fun. Then over to C4DI to chat with David Burns (again on Radio Humberside) about technology, Hull and the exciting things going on at the moment. And all against a fantastic sunrise which I managed to grab some snaps of.  You can find them here.

David Burns and Jon Moss of C4DI get the wide angle treatment. With a guest appearance of my knees.  

If you're quick you can get to hear the broadcast here.  I arrive around 20 minutes or so in...

Then it was back to the department to give a 10:15 First Year programming lecture in the nick of time. Then more lectures, labs, delivering chocolate brownies to a cake sale and finally a bit of Python Wrestling. 

By 7:15 pm I was wandering around the lab bouncing of walls and muttering "Today has been great, and busy, and all, but I'd quite like it to stop now...."

C# Yellow Book on Kindle

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A while back I put the C# Yellow Book on Kindle, just to see what would happen. Turns out that people quite like it, which is nice. You can get a free PDF here and of course if you are sensible enough to come and study at Hull we'll give you a free printed copy for your first year course.  Or you could buy a copy :)

I'm going to spend some time on the text over Christmas and bring out an updated version in the new year. Some of the text and program samples got a bit mangled in the transfer to the Kindle format and I want to make it a bit tidier.

But I'll be leaving the good jokes in there. Both of them. 

Next Gen Grand Theft Auto Rocks

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Grand Theft Auto 5 is a game about mostly horrible people doing horrible things. With guns, cars, planes and large ugly dogs. But I reckon it is a towering work of art too. And on the next-gen consoles it is even better.

I spent a happy afternoon watching number one son run through a few missions in the new First Person View and it really is disgustingly great. Even if you have played the previous versions on your PS3 or XBOX 360 I reckon you should get a copy for your next gen console too. 

Return of the .NET Micro Framework (Please)

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I love the .NET Micro Framework. We used it for years in our teaching of embedded systems. This year, with the robots and other components showing their age we moved onto the new fangled Arduino platform.  It's nice enough, and very popular at the moment. But I really miss being able to run (and debug) C# code inside a tiny embedded device. 

But how the Micro Framework might be roaring back. Colin Miller (the chap that wrote the foreward to the wonderful book above) recently wrote a blog post about new plans for the platform. With a bit of luck, and the rise of the Internet of Things (tm), it might be that the "little platform that could" might be returning. 

I certainly hope so. 

Python: Soup to Nuts

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I think I picked up the phrase "Soup to Nuts" when I was in the 'states a while back. I used it in a session today and all was confusion and hilarity. It simply means "all the way from the beginning to the end". 

We're doing some "Soup to Nuts" work at the moment in the Wrestling with Python sessions. I've put together something that looks a bit like the kind of assignments that are being used in schools in the UK and we are all going to work through it over the next few weeks.

If you fancy having a go you can find the assignment here.

Windows Phone and Pebble Watches

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One of the nice things about owning a Windows Phone is that, well, it's a Windows Phone. And lovely. One of the less nice things about it is that a few things are not available for the device just yet. One of the things you can't do is Smartwatch integration. 

Except that you can. Sort of. 

I've started using my Pebble watch that I got a while back. As a watch I rather like it. Some of the watch faces look really nice and I can make it talk with my Lovely Lumia using a program called Pebble Watch Pro that you can get from the Windows Store.

The program does the best that it can in difficult circumstances. It can show you tweets, and the weather, and let you control your music. It also lets you download and install watch faces, applications and firmware updates for the watch. If you run it under the lock screen it will work when you are not using the phone too. 

It's kind of got me sold on the idea of a watch as an extension of the phone, and I'm looking forward to getting proper integration at some point in the future. When my Lovely Lumia is running Windows 10 and allows background applications this will all get a lot easier.