We had our final Saturday applicant day of the year today. Thanks for coming folks. Some had driven mighty long ways to sample the delights of Hull. I hope we made the trip worth while.
As usual, you can click through the picture above to find the Flickr version where you can see yourself in "slightly larger vision.."
Tone mapping bananas....
Sometimes I write blog posts to remind myself how to fix problems that I hit. In a couple of years I'll search for this problem and find this post. And then fix the problem again.
It's happened before.
I love Photomatix Pro. I use it to make my pictures a bit more interesting, and to create HDR shots. It works very well. Except that for the last week it's been crashing out when I try to save the image. Turns out to be my external plug-in memory card reader. If that is connected it gives what Photomatix thinks is a drive D: that doesn't actually exist. This does not end well, but if I unplug the reader it all just works. Yay.
For the past couple of days John has been at GDC showing off our Disruption game with its novel, pluggable, controller. We've had some reports back that things are going well. We won a place in the Alt.Ctrl.GDC novel controllers exhibit. There's a nice write-up of what we did here.
We've re-engineered the controller for the new event. We've gone for a larger box and nice, chunky cables to replace the thin ones that we used last time. It works rather well, which is nice.
By all accounts the event is going well. Looking forward to finding out more about how he got on when he gets back next week.
Two or three time a week I do a bit of rowing. And I've managed to "loop" the distance counter on the rowing machine, so that I've now rowed over a thousand kilometres.
Quite literally, go me.
If you've not watched Brooklyn Nine-Nine yet I envy you. It means you have a whole bunch of fun coming your way that you don't know about. It is quite simply the funniest thing I've seen in ages. Go. Watch. Laugh.
Spent today mostly writing stuff, which meant that nothing happened which is worthy of blogging. But I did find a nice picture for the day though.
While we're on the subject of code improvement (we were the day before yesterday) I reckon these points are all good and well made.
Went to York today. Took a picture. Apparently.
This is an interesting read. I particularly like number 4, I'm going to have to change some notes to accommodate that one.
...Melbourne is nice too....
Just been going through some of the pictures I took last year. I really want to go back to Japan again some time.
For bonus points, can you spot Godzilla?
This is not an assignment about graphic design - obviously...
Kevin and I are just putting the finishing touches to the assignment for Programming 2 for this year. We always set two different scenarios, one a game and the other a line of business app. For the game we are doing "Cross Country Ski Race". For the line of business app we are doing "Cross Country Ski Race Manager". Almost like we have planned it.
.it might not be one about UI design either..
For the game, players have to steer their player down an increasingly tortuous ski run, avoiding the deadly, and somewhat improbable, "horizontal avalanche" that seems to have erupted. Fortunately an explosion at a nearby cheese mine has left their path littered with life giving cheese which they can use to recover their strength.
For the manager application they have to track competitors, generate reports and produce a fully tested solution. Should be fun.
Simon and I had a top level meeting today. Well, we were on third floor. We decided that the next Three Thing Game will be over the night of 15-16th of April.
Registrations will open on Monday 4th April at www.threethinggame.com
I think we'll use the "Thingomatic" for this one.....
Oh dear.....
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.
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.
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.
But getting better.
Oh yes.
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.
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.
