HoloLens Experience at the MVP Summit

They wouldn't let me take a picture of the HoloLens device...

It wasn't quite a "Golden Ticket" in the Willy Wonka style, but it did open up a rather interesting new world. On Sunday night, at the party, I was given a ticket to a session at the rather grandly named "Holographic Academy" on the Microsoft Campus. Today was the day that I got to try the new augmented reality.

From what I can tell, the academy is a large room with a bunch of powerful PCs, some tables and couches, and of course some HoloLens devices. I initially thought that the PCs were there to perform the rendering for the headsets. I was wrong. The headsets are completely self-contained. They are also very well made and looked "production quality" to me. They even fitted over my rather large glasses.

The 3D augmentation effect that they produce is totally believable. I placed a virtual "cat" on a table, walked the length of the room and then went back to it. The cat was still in exactly the same place. I looked up and down, let and right and the virtual objects in the scene all moved exactly as they should have done with no discernable lag or flicker. The sound experience is worth mentioning too. I could place objects in 3D space with my eyes closed, just by listening. And if I turned my head the objects moved as well.

The only real issue is that the region of filled with the virtual objects is only about a third of your field of view. This is a limitation of the display technology they are using. Perhaps over time the field of view will improve, but even now it is good enough to give a very impressive experience.

After a few minutes I took my headset off and was intrigued by the spectacle of a whole bunch of people wearing the headsets and moving round the room looking at things which just were not there.  You could tell where they were looking, you just couldn't see what they were looking at.

A future with these devices in it is going to be a very interesting one indeed.

Using the US Surface Pro 4 Keyboard in the UK

I really like my Surface Pro 4 keyboard. Especially the fingerprint sensor bit, which makes unlocking my device very easy. Unfortunately the fingerprint sensor enabled version of the keyboard is not available in the UK. Fortunately I'm presently in the 'states and I've been able to get hold of one from the Microsoft Store here.

The bad news is that it is, of course, a keyboard with the US layout. The good news is that it is extremely easy to change keyboard layouts in Windows 10. The first thing you need to do is make sure that your machine has both languages installed. Go to Settings> Time and Language

If you're missing the USA language option just press the + and add English(United States). Then, whenever you call up the keyboard you can select the language to use by calling up the on-screen keyboard and  pressing the key in the bottom right. Then, pick your language. The change takes effect immediately and it means that I can swap between my docked keyboard (UK) and my Pro 4 keyboard (US).

The only snag is that of course some of the keys are in different places, but I'm getting better at adapting....

MVP Summit 2015 Day 1

These are the trees across from the hotel

Today was the first day of the MVP Summit proper. After getting up bright and early (it was kind of hard not to bearing in mind the time difference I'm working with) we headed off to the Microsoft Campus. The sessions at the summit are organised into tracks and this year I've decided to follow the "Internet of Things" track. I want to find out what the future holds in the embedded computing space from the Microsoft perspective.

The answer is; a lot. I've always liked making embedded gadgets, although I've been painfully aware of their limitations in the greater scheme of things. It's fine to make a balancing robot, or flashing lights or a Logo Blaster, but for me the true usefulness of embedded devices only comes when they are properly connected to each other and the internets. And by properly connected I mean behind industrial strength networking, loophole free operating systems and trustworthy authentication.

I don't think I'm giving much away when if I say that Microsoft seems to feel the same way too. For me the great stuff was not just the future of Windows 10 on embedded devices (although that is looking really interesting) but also the cloud elements that are going into place behind these tiny, cheap processing machines. Inspiring stuff.

When we arrived at the hotel and got off the bus after a day of fascinating content Doug turned to me and said "Careful that you don't sit down on the bed in your room, fall asleep and wake up at 10:00 pm". I assured him that I wouldn't do anything as silly as that, and that I'd see him at the MVP Summit Welcome Reception in an hour or so. Then I went upstairs to my room, sat down on the bed and........

Oh well.

I'm a bit cross with myself to be honest. Missed a party with free food and drink. Ho hum. At least I'll be nice nd fresh for tomorrow morning. At 3:00 am....

MVP Summit Party at the Living Computer Museum

Driving over the floating bridge to Seattle

One of the highlights of the MVP Summit is the party organised by Desiree and her team. I've been lucky enough to go on a few of these over the years, and there was much excitement tonight as we boarded the bus to "Who knows where" for the event this year.

The coach driver was sworn to secrecy but after a short journey from Bellevue to the Seattle outskirts we arrived at the party venue  The Living Computer Museum.  

Commodore Pet running my bubbles program

The key word in the name of the museum is "living". These machines are all in working order and you are allowed, even encouraged to play with them. I was able to relive some of the coding of my younger days and I went round putting my "bubbles" program on as many machines as I could find (and there were a lot of them):

10 PRINT SPC(RND(1)*40);"o":GOTO 10

This displays a rather nice rising bubble display. See if you can work out how it works.

I learnt to program on one of these

Once I'd had a play with all the microcomputers (and there were a lot of them) I spotted something that really made my heart jump. They had a card punch machine just like the one that I used when I was learning how to program. At the university we had a bunch of these and you would type your program onto punched cards that were fed into the machine two or three times a day, They even let me sit down and punch a card for old time's sake.

It's a very weird feeling to see something that you used to use (and which was at the cutting edge in it's day) turning up in a museum like this. When you think that the iPads and flat screen TVs that we think are state of the art now will be in a similar situation in forty years or so it gives you pause to think about technology and how fast it changes things.

A truly awesome place.  Not for all perhaps, but for Microsoft MVPs I can't really think of a better place to have a do. I'd be happy to have the party there every year. I'm certainly going back there under my own steam at some point in the future.

Seattle Trip

So, the plan for this morning was to catch the bus to Seattle, get on the monorail, go the Space Needle, go to the top and have a coffee. Or, in pictures:

Get a bus from the Bellevue transit centre

Grab the Monorail to the Space Needle

Go to the top and take some pictures

Grab a coffee

Hello Bellvue

So, here I am in one of my favourite places in all the world. For one of my favourite events of the year. I've been coming to the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional summit for a while now, and it is always fun. it is great to see a bunch of familiar faces and get to talk tech.

I flew in this afternoon on a geek-packed plane. The best way to get from Hull to anywhere is to nip down to Humberside airport, take a one hour flight to Schipol airport near Amsterdam and then fly anywhere; usually non-stop. So that's what I did.

The flight was great, although the last twenty five minutes were a bit more action packed than I was expecting. On some flights the captain says "Watch out for turbulence" and nothing much seems to happen. Well, this time we definitely got the bumpy ride that was promised.

After a bit of queuing at the airport we headed for the bus. A 2.50 dollar bus ride beats a 50 dollar cab ride every day. Once I'd unpacked I of course headed for the Bellevue mall and the Microsoft Store there. I wanted to have a look at the new Surface Book and see what other goodies they had in stock. The store was mad busy. Packed with people stacked up and waiting to buy stuff. It was so hectic at one point I had to go upstairs to the Apple store for some peace and quiet....

The Surface Book looks really nice and I was mentally setting aside the funds to get one but I've now really changed my mind. Thing is, it is rather expensive and probably scratches an itch that I haven't got. I don't need hairy graphics performance or all day battery life and so I reckon I can make do with my trusty Surface Pro 3. The other thing that I discovered is that the Surface Pro 4 Type Cover is awesome. Awesome, awesome, awesome. The keys are much better, the trackpad is proper and the hinge arrangement seems a lot stiffer, so it is much less "clacky" if you fold it back to angle the keyboard a bit. This keyboard is so good that I think it makes the Surface Pro a really viable laptop, without the need for the fancy book.

I'm typing this post on the new keyboard and it works really well. I managed to get one of ones with built in fingerprint reader (not available in the UK sadly) and It works wonderfully too. I'm going to have to live with slightly wrong keys here and there, but I reckon it is worth the trade off.

They also had some Microsoft Band 2 devices on sale. I quite liked my version 1 band, but it was never really as comfortable as I would have preferred. The new band addresses that, with much more flexible sides and a really premium feel that is streets ahead of the first version. I picked up one of them too (I figure that if I decided to get one any later they would have sold out) and I'll have a play with it later in the week. All I want to do at the moment is sleep....

Go see "The Martian"

The new Bond movie opened on Monday. So we went to see "The Martian" instead.

It. Is. Brilliant. Proper science, well told story, amazing special effects and even Sean Bean. What's not to love?

I read the book a while back and really enjoyed it, although I did wonder how they would manage to change something that was mostly internal dialogue into a proper film. The answer is: very well. The film has a very well told earthbound story that adds a lot to the whole affair.

It's a great film, go see.

When we got back from the film we fancied something to eat. I was going to have some cooked chicken and number one wife fancied a boiled egg. But we couldn't decided who should eat first.

Northen Stars at C4DI

A good sized audience

It would seem that the C4DI is taking up quite a large chunk of my life at the moment. Last week we had the awards ceremony, yesterday Jon Moss came and gave a Rather Useful Seminar and today I'm down at the Northern Stars. The idea behind the event was simple. Make a three minute pitch of your startup idea to an audience. Best one on the night wins an iPad. Twenty of the best pitches from events around the area win a slot in the grand final and a chance to go for top ten startups of the year. A great way to get your name out there and learn how to work an audience in 3 minutes.

Jon Polling pitches I'm In

Unfortunately I was in a student lab session when the event started (embedded development - great fun) so I didn't get to see all the presentations. I was sorry to miss the pitch from Arc Studios, especially when they told me that they had based the content on my Lectures in Rhyme. After pizza, and a really interesting discussion about technology and the area, the winner was announced as MrLista, the ultimate Wish List generator.

Now that's a good sign....

On the way out I spent some time trying to get a good picture of The Deep, which was looking very splendid in a high tide.

Carefully stitched....

There were a few of our First Year students amongst the crowd. I told them that I expected them to be pitching their ideas this time next year...

Jon Moss from C4DI at a Rather Useful Seminar

Jon Moss from C4DI came along today to give a Rather Useful Seminar. We had another great audience and I was really pleased to see so many First Year students turning up. I'd asked Jon to come and give some tips for success, and to talk about the new C4DI and what it means to our undergraduates.

Jon gave a fantastic talk, drawing on his experience of life to set out a really good agenda for success. I'm not going to steal the content of his entire talk (although it is tempting) but I did make notes of the ten important points that he made.  I hope you can read my handwriting.

The C4DI is entering a really exciting phase, with a new building and lots of local interest in startups and technology. It's going to provide a really great trajectory for students who want to stay in lovely Hull and build something great. The reason I can say that with confidence is that it has already done this.

Thanks again Jon for an excellent talk.

The University Bookshop Rocks

Bottom row on the left, if you are interested....

We are very lucky to have a bookshop right on the university campus. It's been through a number of names while I've been here. It started as Haigh and Hochland, then changed to Bowes and now it is Waterstones. I've not been in for a while, and I must admit to my eternal shame that I only dropped in last week out of vanity. Someone had mentioned that they still had a copy of my XNA book on sale, and it turned out to be true, which I found amazing. Now we just have to get someone to buy that copy and see if they restock....

Anyhoo, the bookshop is great. Like most bookshops it has branched out a ways, and along with course books there are is now a goodly selection of games and other bits and bobs. They've even got a copy of the awesome Cash and Guns board game. And a big shelf full of graphic novels that I don't remember seeing last time I was there.  And lots of other stuff that would make good presents if I ever find myself in the position of needing something to give away in a hurry.

If, like me, you've not been in for a while, go take a look. If you are new to the campus it's a very useful resource. Bookshops are taking a hammering thanks to scarily useful services like Amazon, but we really should support their business. Starting by buying my book.....

Failure is not a state, it's an event

I'm not a big fan of trite aphorisms. Today may be the first day of the rest of my life, but putting it that way doesn't really do much for me. But today in a presentation about teaching and learning I saw the phrase "Failure is not a state, it is an event". I didn't get time to jot down the attribution, and the best that the internets can come up with on the matter is this, but I do think that this is a crucial thing to remember.

Never think of yourself as a failure if something you try doesn't work. Just think of yourself as someone who has now got some valuable knowledge along the lines of: "I need to do that differently".

I think you learn more from your failures than your successes. And fear of failure is worse than failure itself. I now allow myself the luxury of trying things that might fail on the grounds that worst case I'll know more than I would by doing nothing. And it is always possible I might succeed.

Nice Flowers

I'm not sure if it is strange to have flowers still blooming this late in the year. But they photograph quite well.

Nice Light

We lose an hour of daylight tonight when the clocks go forward. But you do get some nice daylight at this time of year.

The Five Knows of Programming

I've been teaching programming for a very long time. I'm still waiting to get properly good at it. In the meantime I'm given to thinking about what it means to learn how to program. I've narrowed it down to five "knows".

1. Know what the computer does.
2. Know how to create a program.
3. Know how to automate a task that you yourself can perform.
4. Know how to think like a computer.
5. Know how to structure and manage your solutions.

I've been teaching the First Year course for the last few weeks and I reckon that we are at level 3 at the moment, moving on to level 4. This is a crucial time.

At "Know level three" you can take something you would be able to do yourself and write a program do perform that action. One example we do is deciding whether or not you can see a particular film. If your age is lower than the rating for that film, you can't go in. When you write the program you can imagine yourself selling tickets and deciding whether or not people can come in.

Level 4 is quite different. You have to let go of how you would do a task and try to think how you could make a computer do it. Sorting is a classic example of this. If you gave me 20 numbers to put in descending order I'd be able to do it, but I'd not really be able to tell you how I did it. To write a program to sort 20 numbers you would make it do the task in a way that a human never would (for example bubble sort). This is the hardest part of programming. Up until you hit level 4 you can think you are doing very well. Ifs and loops make sense, as do variables. And you've even written the odd program. And then wham, you suddenly find that you can't do it. And I mean really can't do it. This can be very painful and demoralising.

Today I did a tutorial with the students where we explored the transition from level 3 to 4. The best advice I have on this matter is not to stress if the penny doesn't drop first, second or third time. Don't think of it as a technical problem (I must re-read my notes so that I understand arrays better) but think of it as a "way of thinking problem".

Work with what you know a program can do (stash things in arrays, get them back, work through elements, compare values and do things with them etc) and then try to figure out how these abilities can be used to solve the problem.

Consider lots of related problems: find the biggest item in an array, find the smallest in an array, count how many times the value three appears in an array etc etc and notice how fundamental behaviours (working through the elements of the array in sequence) can be used to solve a whole class of problems. Don't worry if your answers seem complicated to you. You get better with practice, and some things are just tricky to do.

I learned to program a long time ago, but I still remember the worry of "What if I don't get this bit" every now and then. Your best bet is to start early, find friends to discus it with and keep the focus on what you are trying to do. And you'll be fine.

Hull and East Yorkshire Digital Awards at C4DI

Now, that's what I call a well set table....

I was very lucky to be invited along to the Hull and East Yorkshire Digital Awards tonight. Actually we went in mob-handed, with bunch of University folks and a whole heap of nominations for people who work in the same place I work.

Adam from Betajester on the big screen...

Adam from Betajester was up for one of the awards which was nice. He didn't quite end up winning it, kudos to him for making it to the glittering final though. We're well proud of you sir as we are of the folks from Lab on a Chip,  Seed Software, Arc software, Vertual and a host of others from the campus. You can find out more about the Hull University success here.

Rory Cellan-Jones announcing winners

We had the BBC Technical Correspondent along to run the show, accompanied by his boss, the chairman of the BBC, which was kind of awesome. It was unfortunate that Martha Lane-Stewart was unable to get to the event because she was unwell, it would have been lovely to have heard from her. But we had some great technical chat (favourite fun fact - a third of the optical fibre in England is in Hull - providing high speed data links to homes and businesses) a question and answer session and a quiz which our table very nearly won. If only I'd known that Linked-In was started before Myspace.....

Anyhoo, we staggered out into the night way past my bedtime and went home after an evening of good food and good company, awestruck but the new C4DI premises which hosted the event and were opened today.

I'm looking forward to taking a proper look around the new building sometime soon. In daylight. The future is going to be a very interesting place.

Arduino Kits Going Live

So a couple of weeks ago I got the go-ahead to buy some Arduino kits for our Second Year embedded course. We have been using the Arduino robots and they are nice enough, but a bit too closed for my liking. So I went on-line and tracked down a lovely little Sintron kit on ebay. Twenty Five pounds for loads of bits and bobs.

Tomorrow I'm dishing out the hardware along with a bunch of little plastic bags and a page of sticky labels. Job one will be to use the chart above to put all the components in labeled bags so that we can find stuff later. Job two will be to get some lights flashing and buttons being pressed.

Exciting times.  

Rob on the Road

Every now and then the department lets me go out on the road and do the odd talk. Perhaps I could have phrased that better.....

Anyhoo, I'll be treading the boards in a couple of conferences later this year. I'm not saying you have to go just because I'm presenting but......

On the 11th November I'm doing a session at Future Decoded in London. This will be all about my little programming framework called SNAPS. How I built it, what it does, and why it is such a wonderful companion to a Raspberry Pi running Windows 10.

SNAPS is a big part of my forthcoming new programming text (I just have to write the first three books first - ho ho) and I'm really looking forward to showing it off.

In December I'm heading over to Mons in Belgium to do a session at Dev Day 2015. Again the focus will be on SNAPS, but this time I'm going to take a peek under the hood and explain how you can use some SNAPS implementation magic to help make better Windows apps of your own. And there will be cheese. It's a promise.

Three Thing Game November 2015 is Coming

A date for your diaries folks. The game development part of the November Three Thing Game will be over the evening of Friday 13th and into Saturday the 14th of November. This is the second time this year we've run the competition on Friday 13th. Talk about tempting fate.

You can find out more here.

Games and Learning

On the face of it the video games Animal Crossing Happy Home Designer and Sunset Overdrive don't appear to have a lot in common. But in one respect they are quite similar. Both make complex demands of their players. Games now have to deal with the fact that rich, complicated gameplay makes it necessary for the player to know stuff.

When I played Sunset Overdrive a while back I was impressed with the design of the tutorial levels and the lengths that the game went to as it made sure you new what all the weapons did and how and where to use them. There was also a well managed introduction to the overall plot and the characters. Playing Happy Home Designer (a fun little title as it turns out) I had a very similar experience. As a player you have to learn how to work in the various design scenarios and this is very well introduced into the narrative.The game even has a cash based system that you can use to learn more things in order to unlock new abilities.

People have been going on about game based learning for years. It's interesting to see that the game makers are getting good at putting the learning into their games too.

Lego Dimensions Fun and Games

I'm a sucker for Lego stuff. I've got a Lego VIP card and everything. I've always liked their computer games too. I've got very fond memories of playing Lego Star Wars on the Xbox 360 with number one daughter. We worked through most of the campaign together and when we got to a difficult bit she'd unplug her controller so that her dad could take over and sort things out. Happy days.

When Lego Dimensions came out it was just a matter of time before I got a copy. The cynical part of me noted how clever it was for them to give you some Lego to build during the inevitable enormous download you have to perform whenever you install a new game these days, but we started playing while the update was being fetched and it worked fine. When the update was finished we just installed it and continued playing.

I've had a go with figure based games before. I had quite a bit of fun with the Disney offering a while back. But the Lego one has a few clever twists. For a start you have to build the character figures themselves which is always fun. There's a little platform that you plug into the console so that the game can tell which playing pieces you are using, but you can put more figures on this than you can with the other games. They've also incorporated the platform into the game in some rather neat ways. To solve some puzzles you have to move people and vehicles around a bit, which is rather neat.

We got the Portal add on as well, which is great fun although we weren't sure what we had to do to complete it.

If you like Lego games you'll like Lego Dimensions. The gameplay is as solid as previous versions with a similar mix of shooting, puzzles and building. The characterisation is great too. The voice acting for the characters is spot on and the script is very funny. There is some nice banter between Batman and Dr. Who in amongst the set pieces.

It looks like it could be a serious drain on the purse though. We kept finding things that we couldn't do because we lacked a character with the appropriate skills. We could of course solve this by going and buying the requisite person, but the sheer variety of items and people makes completeness a very expensive proposition.

But if you can stand the cost, I don't think you'll be disappointed.