I bought a domain name today. I do this every now and then. I say that getting a domain name is cheaper than getting a tattoo, and much easier to get rid of when you get bored with it.
I now have snaps.rocks (it was cheap) and at the moment it points to a holding page on these hallowed pages. The latest version, with the Snaps gaming framework built in, will be going live in a few days. Such excitements.
Tonight I headed off to the C4DI for a developer meetup. It was nice to see a few folks I'd not met up with in a while, and even nicer to see that a few of our students had made it along to the meetup. These are really good events to get along to. You get to mix with local developers, drink free beer and see what's going on in software development.
And you get to find out where the C4DI is, in a lovely and fast growing part of town.
The talk was from Glynn Bird, a Developer Advocate from IBM. He gave a lovely talk about the Internet of Things; starting with what constitutes an IoT device (a clue - it's not a clockwork gas meter) and moving on to future trends. Glynn reckoned that although IoT devices in the home sound fun- after all, who wouldn't want an internet connected kettle? - it is in the field of industry where they have the most potential.
We now have the ability to sprinkle connected sensors around any production process, from farming to nuclear power stations, and then use vast cloud based systems to crunch the resulting torrent of data. This should lead to huge improvements in the way that we do things as we use data that previously was either unavailable or discarded or just plain too hard to work with.
Glynn talked about MQTT (Message Queue Telemetry Transport), a lightweight mechanism for routing data from sensor to client and suggested some technology (node-red and CouchDB - along with CloudAnt) that look very interesting
Very thought provoking stuff, with some great discussion at the end. Glynn is a fascinating chap to listen to - and he has a very useful website too.
There are some very interesting meetups coming down the tracks. Anyone can go along, and everyone should. Sign up here.
Caitlin and Peter looking relaxed at the start
Caitlin and Peter, two of our students, gave a Rather Useful Seminar today all about Azure. I like it when students give seminars. There are a few good reasons for this:
Anyhoo, they showed us how easy it is to build a cloud based service that your program can then use, and that all this cloudy goodness is available for free via Microsoft DreamSpark.
At the end of their talk I asked for a show of hands for anyone interested in learning more, and perhaps taking part in an Azure jam session in one of our labs. Pretty much every hand in the room went up. Including mine.
So, in the next week or so we'll see about booking one of our labs for an hour or so and having a go at building a web application from scratch. Should be fun.
Thanks to Caitlin and Peter for putting Azure into context so nicely.
The department is trying something new this year. Each of our Final Year project students is being asked to give an interim demonstration of their project to their second supervisor at around the project mid-point. The students see a lot of their first supervisor, but they don't usually see the second supervisor until later in the project, when they are involved in the final viva and the assessment.
This year I'm getting to see all the projects for which I'm second supervisor. I wasn't convinced at the start, what with the nightmare of fitting a whole new bunch of meetings into an already crowded diary, but I must admit it has been really useful. I've seen some really great work, and some that could be made great by a strong focus on the important elements.
When considering things like this I'm much more impressed by an "end to end" demonstration of a working system with "n" features than a half-way demonstration of a system with "n*2" features. If you are making a game, it should be playable all the way to the end, with a high score table and a chance to play again. If you are making a product you should be able to run through an entire scenario of whatever transactional behaviours the product provides. If you are performing research you should have the theory, the things you are going to do to prove/disprove the theory and some outcomes to look at which drive the conclusions. And it is worth trimming the scope so that you can achieve this.
Writers have this thing where they talk about "killing your favourite children" which means that they have to discard a great piece of text out because it doesn't actually add anything to the work. The text might be funny, or poignant or interesting - but if it doesn't fit the context it has to go.
During the meetings we were encouraging students to take a look at their projects and do something similar. This isn't to say that they should not get credit for work that doesn't end up in the finished deliverable. My advice is to write these up in the report and then document the process by which you decide to leave them out in order to focus on the core of the work. In fact, I reckon that getting a handle on your project and dropping features that will make you fail is actually strong evidence of real professional ability. And in real life you can always save these for version 2.0 anyway.
Well, my suspicions were correct. Three minutes of unfocussed content does not a Famelab winner make. Even if you add a gadget.
I got the email today saying that I've not made the top six. I'm actually quite relieved about this. From what I saw of the entrants we have some proper science folks who are keen on presenting the subject that they are passionate about. The local final is in Hull soon. You can find out more here, and I'd advise you to go along if you can.
Alvin and Dexter are an add on for the wonderful Ticket to Ride board game.
You can use them with any version of the game. They are a thwarty type thing you can use to stop your opponents from building train lines to particular cities.
I was kind of excited to see how they work so we had a go with them today. And they were promptly used by everyone else to stop me from building anything and making sure that I came a really poor last place. (at least, that's what I'm telling myself)
Oh well. There's always next time...
I've been giving awards for the best performance in First Year labs and exams. Last week I gave awards to the top five or so exam scores. When it came to the practical work I had a bit of a problem, what with ten students getting 100% in the work - which is awesome by the way folks.
Anyhoo, it means that Una the 3D printer has been busy for a large chunk of today dropping out perfectly formed pieces of green cheese for next Monday's lecture....
Peter and I were talking about the Arduino and the wonderful ESP8266 chip that does WiFi, goes fast and costs nothing. "What we want" I said "is an Arduino compatible board with one of these devices on it". Within half an hour Peter came back with this.
Less than a fiver for a networked, embedded device that you can program with Arduino sketches?
I've ordered three.....
Yesterday, before the excitement of FameLab, we had our first Rather Useful Seminar of the new semester. It was all about research. The thinking behind seminar was that folks don't necessarily understand what research is all about at a university. So Darryl gave a talk about what you do. You can find his slides here.
Turns out that you can get started during your Final Year project, if you pick a project that is allied to our research efforts. Then you follow a trajectory into postgraduate study, finally emerging with a PhD. The system works, because lots of our PhD graduates are home grown Hull students.
Darryl did a great talk, but for me the best talk was the one that followed, when one of our PhD students, John, gave a session about his research into the effectiveness, or not, of telemedicine technology. For me the absolute best bit was the discussion at the end, where we had all levels of the department, from First Year students all the the way to Readers in the subject discussing the best way to analyse the data and what it really meant.
We should do more of these.
A not so secret weapon
Today was the day that I made my Three Minute Pitch for fame at FameLab. The idea is that you speak about something scientific for three minutes. No more. No less. No computers, no script. Just you and 180 seconds.
Of course I cheated.
Turns out that you are allowed props. The night before the talk I put together the little device you can see above. It uses LittleBits devices to create a timer. It uses two rows of lights that increase as the time goes by.The bottom row fills up over the three minute and the top row fills over the last thirty seconds. It was actually quite fun to make. I used the Arduino LittleBit to make it work. I'll post the program later.
The timer worked out fine, but I don't think I've made it to the final. Everyone else was doing hard core science stuff, you know, origins of the universe and serious stuff like that where I just did my piece about how Computer Science is the bestest ever subject. I think if I want to make it in this field I need to come up with some slightly more focussed content.
Anyhoo, the great thing for me was to see lots of enthusiastic people talking science in front of an appreciative audience. Great stuff.
These are called Nacreous clouds. Apparently we don't see them very often in the UK. The pretty effect is caused by light from the sun just below the horizon lighting the clouds from underneath and being diffracted by them. Or so it says here.
Mark put out a tweet along the lines of "come outside and look". I'm glad I did.
The students are back, and with them we have the return of the Rather Useful Seminar series. The first one is on Wednesday 3rd of Feb at 2:15 (usual time) in Lecture Theatre A on the ground floor of the Robert Blackburn building (one of the usual places).
The subject is "Research at University"; what it is, how to get started and how to create a Final Year Project that lines up with it. Darryl Davis will be talking about the business of research and then we'll have an actual research presentation from one of our PhD students, John Stamford will be talking about his research into Home Telemonitoring. We will be having more research seminars during the semester.
Next week (February 10th) we'll be having a seminar about Cloud Computing with Azure, and how you can get to do this for free.
Game Over
This is the weekend of the Global Game Jam. And I'm laying laminate flooring. This not how it was supposed to turn out, but these things happen I suppose. As I was cutting and laying the lengths of fibreboard I was thinking that you could probably make game out of this.
But trust me, nobody would want to play it.
A fine audience to start with - apologies to the person on the far right - I need to get a wider angle lens..
Our rounds of open days have started again. So at 1:00 pm prompt I was in position to give the first intro talk of 2016. A great audience, good fun. Thanks for coming. Hope you found the trip worthwhile.
Prize Pi.
We had our usual competition prize draw at the end and gave away a couple of Raspberry Pi kits including a sense hat, keyboard and all the bits and bobs you need to get started. I was very pleased to hear from Sebastian , one of our prize winners, who had got his machine working and even sent me a picture.
We had some great sessions, this is the presenter setup just after a group had left.
I did some sessions for Platform Expo today. I was taking about the joy of making things using the Arduino micro controller. Not a lot of people had heard of this amazing device before they arrived, but they sure had afterwards. I showed off a bunch of silly devices including my wedding lights, the Thingomatic, light panel, balancing robots and even did some programming. All in twenty minutes a session. Six times in a row.
The audiences were all wonderful. At one point I told everyone that an Arduino board can be bought for two pounds fifty, which is less than a McDonald's burger. And someone called out "Does that include the chips?". Well played sir, well played.
Arduino Bits and Bobs..
I've put some resources on my Arduino pages if you fancy getting started with this amazing device. You can find them here.
Josh Naylor is one of what I call our "Three Thing Game Alumni". These are graduates who, when they were students at Hull, took part in lots of Three Thing Game events. And he's doing rather well for himself. In fact he has secured a place in the "Thirty under Thirty" list published every year by Develop magazine. Well done sir.
Sandwiches and Networking
We had our first ever Games Networking event today. Games studios from up and down the country came up to Hull to talk to our students and discuss the state of the business. It was interesting the way that a composite viewpoint emerged with each successive speaker. These are the main points that were made
You can find more details of the event and, if you are a Hull student sign up for the next one in February, here.
Oh, and Adam really, really, wants you to sign up for Global GameJam this weekend.
Tom in 2013 at a Rather Useful Seminar
Tom Forbes graduated from us a little while back. He did a Rather Useful Seminar about security in 2013 and now works in, wait for it, security at Context Information Security.
Tom got in touch asking if we had any graduates with Python experience as they are after someone with that skill set. If you got Python chops (there's a phrase you don't hear every day) or fancy a career in Information Security (a very interesting and fast moving field) then Tom has passed me his contact details: tom.forbes(at-goes-here-please)contextis.co.uk if you want to contact him for more details.
And now I'm going to try and entice Tom back to give another seminar......
Global Game Jam is this weekend. Don't forget to sign up. Unfortunately I'm not sure how much time I'll have to get involved; I'm giving sessions at Platform Expo on Friday and we have a University Admissions Day on Saturday, but I hope to get down to the Horncastle Buildings at Hull College to take a look at what is going on.
If you are in any way serious about getting into game development you should take part in as many Game jams as you can. They give you things to talk about at interview, intense game development practice and, sometimes, ideas that you can take forward to full blown products.
And they are huge fun. The signup is only a fiver for the 48 hour event, so if you work out the cost per hour it's tiny. Sign up here.
If you've not heard much about Snaps (my library that's designed to make it easy to learn to program C# which I'm using in a forthcoming book) then that's because I've been too busy writing the book (and the Snaps) to tell anyone about it. But today I built some Snaps that I'm really quite proud of. I've now got a tiny sprite library and a gamepad which you can use to make 2D games. I'm going to use it in the chapter where we talk about class hierarchies.
It's not a particularly fancy engine really. It runs inside a Windows 10 Universal application and uses all the XAML display elements. Having said that, I can get reasonable performance on my machine which has no graphics acceleration and it even runs on a Raspberry Pi.
For learning to program (and of course for Cheese Lander) it's absolutely perfect.
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.
