Now we're really in trouble....

Oh dear.....

Hyper Busy Open Day

If you want to see a higher quality version of the picture, and find yourself on it, you can click though the image to the version on Flickr

Another hyper-busy open day today. Thank you all so much for coming to see us, hope that it was worth the trip. Everybody left clutching their free copy of the "Bananas" edition of the C# Yellow Book that we are using with the First Year at the moment. On the right you can see an exclusive image of the latest printing of the book, with the hyper-realistic 3D rendered cover art. 

Theme Park God

One of the fantastic things about this job is the capacity of students to surprise you with the things that they do. Yesterday, in the First Year Labs, Michael asked me if I wanted to have a look at the game he'd been working on for a little while.

It's really nice.

It's a Theme Park simulation written in Scratch. You can have a go here. Quite a few thousand people already have.  I told Michael that he must promise to start writing a blog about the game and how he made it, and I really hope he does. 

.. and we're back

Cottingham station at 6:30 am. Looks more model than real. 

Monday was not a great day. I staggered home after my last lecture and went straight to bed. And stayed there. Mostly. Yesterday I found out that the same thing had happened to number one son. And we'd both eaten at the same burger place on Saturday. 

Oh well. 

I'm back at work now, which is nice, frantically trying to catch up with two days of this'n'that. 

Turns out I'm still ill

But getting better. 

Turns out I'm ill

Oh yes. 

Raspberry Pi 3 - Most Interesting

The first Raspberry Pi was a nice device. At the time it was ground breaking. The Raspberry Pi 3 looks at least as ground breaking. It's faster, of course, but it also has WiFi and Bluetooth built into it, which makes it a ready to roll, fully connected Internet of Things device. Previously you'd have to use a physical  network cable and then directly connect your Pi to the device you wanted to talk to. Now you can do it all without wires.  

You can get the Windows 10 Insider Preview that works on the Pi 3 from here. 

I've ordered mine. 

Fingerlights for robots and photographs

These look useful. Particularly if you happen to want to attach them to a robot so that another robot can see it and charge towards it. As you do. 

They might work well for light painting too. I saw them at the Science Museum yesterday in their gift shop. They are a set of battery powered coloured lights that you are supposed to attach to your fingers. You can find them on eBay (search for finger lights) at really stupid prices. I'm tempted to spend a tenner on 40 or so sets and go nuts with them. 

I wonder how long the batteries last?

Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age at the Science Museum London

Just go. Go now. It has a little while to run. You can book tickets and find out more here. We went today. It is a breathtaking exhibition. They've got some stunning things to see, including the actual capsule used by the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova. It looks more like a wrecking ball than a spacecraft, covered with insulating material and with a hole where you get in and out.

There are things I wasn't sure were still even around, prototypes of satellites and lunar landers and some completely awesome artwork and drawings. I'm just about old enough to remember some of this when it was happening and I find it amazing that all these years later we can go and see the actual stuff. The only snag (for me) is that you aren't allowed to take pictures. But you'll bring back a whole bunch of great memories. 

(and a few postcards and T shirts - which are half price at the moment)

Space Rockets in Space

I've been working on some games to go into my programming book. My tiny game engine is coming along nicely and I'm building up a fun l little space shooter This is a screenshot of a work in progress. 

It's really hard to draw convincing aliens.

Strange Technology..

We're selling an old Singer hand cranked sewing machine. I got it out to take some pictures for eBay. t's rather strange to come across a technology from the past which I know nothing about. 

I can figure out what the screwdriver and the bobbins are for, but everything else leaves me baffled. 

Careers Networking Event

Never underestimate the attractiveness of free food....

We had our third Careers and Networking Event today. We had six companies presenting and it was standing room only in the lecture theatre during the presentations. I think we'll find a larger venue for next time. 

There were lots of interesting tales of local companies doing world beating things, but for me the most impressive thing was that most of the companies that came to see us had hired (and even brought along) ex-Hull graduates who now worked with them. 

This was a follow on from our Games event a few weeks ago. We'll be doing it all again in a year's time. If not sooner. 

Plant Pictures

I've no idea what this plant is. But it looks nice in the early morning sunlight

Begin to Code with C# is coming soon

Oooh. Get your orders in now. 

Begin to Code with C#

By Rob Miles

Jupiter and Static Class Members

I put some of my lectures up on YouTube last week and it was great to get a comment on one of them. Kostas was wondering why I spend so much time explaining how static works, and even dragging the Planet Jupiter into the explanation, when a memory diagram would do the job much more efficiently. 

Well, yes and no.

The problem with diagrams like these is that people think that they just have to learn the diagram to pass the exam and therefore pass the course. But I don't want them to do that. I want them to know what "static" means, and when to use it in a program.

I use Jupiter as a context because it might stick in the memory. It turns out that the planet puts out a lot of radio static and that static on the radio is kind of like an echo of the big bang. So it has always been here. Just like static members of a class. They don't need instances to exist. As long as the class exists, the static members exist. So you can use static methods to perform tasks without needing to make an instance (for example data validation) and you can use static properties to hold values that need to be stored once only for the class. 

My idea is that folks can go from Jupiter, to static, to always here, to methods and properties and they'll have a handle on what it all means and how to use it. Which I think is better than a diagram.

Wet and Windy Open Day

You can view a larger version of this image on Flickr by clicking through it

We had another open day today. Truly, 'tis the season for visits and tours. Another big turnout, which was great, and some properly good discussion during the day. Hope you all felt that the trip was worth it, even though the weather wasn't showing Hull at its best. 

A Windows 10 Tablet for 35 pounds? Yes please.

I was in the embedded labs last week and the conversation turned to computers. As it is wont to do. One chap mentioned a 7inch Windows tablet they'd just picked up from ebuyer for the princely sum of thirty five quid. I was intrigued. Of course I bought one. It came in the less than deluxe packaging you can see above, but it seems to be dead ringer for the Linx tablet that I got a while back for twice that. It has 1G of RAM And 32 G of internal storage, plus an SD card slot and an HDMI output. 

For the price it is astonishing. Much is made of the amazing value offered by the Raspberry Pi, which gives you the internals of a computer for around 25 quid. This gives you the internals, plus a power supply, screen, WiFi connection and battery for only ten pounds more. It works very well too.

My plan is to use it on a robot and link it via Bluetooth to the motors and sensors. Should be fun. As I write this the tablet is happily downloading Windows 10 for its upgrade from Windows 8. If you are after an ultra-cheap but useful tablet you could do a lot worse.

Update: I apologise to anyone who doesn't use the proper coins of the realm and mistook the title of this post to refer to the weight of the tablet. Fear not. It isn't made of granite and can be lifted easily by one hand.

BJSS at Hull

BJSS are a great bunch of folks. I can say that because I've met quite a few of them. They came over to Hull from Leeds to run a programming challenge event type thing in our computer labs. With free pizza and drinks. It was excellent. They posed an interesting task and the students who came along set about solving it. Then they wandered around giving comments and advice on coding and having chats about CVs etc. 

It was great to have a professional perspective on problem solving. I even had a little go myself, until my natural laziness took over and I reverted to chatting with the BJSS folks about board games and stuff.  As you do. 

The students that came along had a great time, and any time BJSS want to come by it would be lovely to see them again. 

Careers Event Next Wednesday

Don't forget that if you are a Hull student we are having our second careers networking event next week on the 24th of Feb. You can sign up here. If you already signed up for the Games event we had earlier there's no need to sign up again.  

Programming 2 Stealth Videos

I've started recording some of the first year lectures as screencasts, Just to see how it turns out. I joked with the class that I'd only tell the people that came to the lectures where the videos are, but this is probably not very helpful. Anyhoo, you can find the first one here and I've set up a channel here for the rest.  They're a bit rough and ready, being recorded straight from the Surface using Camtasia and the built in microphone, but they might be of interest to C# students at Hull. 

I'll keep posting them for the rest of this semester. The only slight snag for me is that it takes around four hours to render each captured session so I've got to create a workflow that I can use to do this.