Wrestling with Python

I’m only a bit sorry about the title. And the fact that the first program that we wrote was an “adder”. And yes, I do know that the language was named in honour of the TV show, not the snake.

Anyhoo, we had our first Python session for teachers tonight. A great bunch of folks turned up, wrote some Python, made it work and went home. If you are interested to find out what we got up to, you can find the slides and the lab notes here.

It’s not too late to sign up. If you are a teacher in the Hull area who would like to learn more about Python and has Tuesday evenings free then you can find out more here.

Stand Well Back–Three Thing Game is Launching….

Students and Things of Old.

The World’s Premier Student Game Programming Competition involving Three Things is now ready for launching. We are going to have all the usual shenanigans with a Thing Auction next week (on Monday 28th at 2:15 in Wilberforce Lecture Theatre 2 since you asked) and more fun and games than you could shake a stick at. Even if you were a really good stick shaker.

If you want to enter (and you should) print out and fill in a registration form (which you can find here) and bring it to me along with your registration fee (which helps pay for the pizza).  You can even suggest a thing which you might like to bid for on the registration form. Teams of up 4 can take part. Team members don't have to be Computer Science students, but they do have to be University of Hull students.

If you’ve never written a game before I’ll be doing a Rather Useful Seminar next week (on Wednesday 30th at 1:15 in Robert Blackburn Building LTD since you asked again) which will describe how to get started with game writing in C#. Don't worry if you are just learning to program. It turns out that spending a solid day working on a project is a very good way to build your skills. This is true whether or not you want to end up as a game developer.

We will start at 7:00 pm on the Friday night (1st November) and finish by 8:00 pm on Saturday evening (2nd November). So you can spend all day Sunday recovering. We even have some proper game developers coming along to join in the fun .

If you don't have a team, don't worry. We will be using the "Team-o-matic" to create teams for individuals who haven't got one. Just fill in a form for yourself and write "Team-o-matic" as the team name.

John Mayer at the O2–thanks to Hacked

In July this year I took part in Hacked at the O2 in London. It was an absolutely brilliant hackathon, made all the better by the fact that I managed to win one of the competitions. My Difficultifier got People’s Choice Award, which was completely wonderful. What made it even better was finding out that part of the prize was four tickets to any show at the O2 Dome over the next year. Splendid.

I mentioned this to Number One daughter. “John Mayer’s playing the dome in October” she said. Done.

So, thanks to those wonderful O2 people, particularly Cristiano Betta and Kevin Prince, today we were sitting in seats up close to the stage, having just come from the O2 Lounge where we had been preparing for the performance with a couple of cocktails. As you do (or as had been laid on for us)

This is Gabrielle Aplin, who did a sterling job providing support and had an absolutely cracking backing band.

.. and this is the man himself, with some good advice for us all. He started early and gave us a two hour demonstration of why he is just so darned good. If you’ve not heard of John Mayer, then seek him out. Blues, rock, country, playing the guitar behind your back.  The works.  Just really, really good.

A Trip to London

This is the fancy new roof over the courtyard of the British Museum. We’re here because we are having a couple of days in London and fancied seeing all the good stuff that our enterprising ancestors plundered from ancient civilisations far and wide.

I think that this is a very early prototype for the very first Simpsons episode. But I may be wrong.

We were looking at the mosaics and noting that the resolution was reasonable, but the frame rate seemed a bit slow. Great fun and probably even cultural.

Winning Prizes with Tags of Fun

I’ve decided to use the Tags of Fun at our 5:15 Friday lectures. Today I took along the latest incarnation, housed in an attractively designed black and white box that is just a bit too small to hold the batteries properly.

But it worked fine. Everyone who had hung on to their tags from the welcome party was able to sign in and win prizes, in this case plastic owls and some nougat from the fair. And most of the names were right too, which was nice.

I’m going to refine the design, week on week, to expand what the reader does, and maybe make a second one that will make signing up for prizes even easier.

Above you can see the Gadgeteer configuration of the device. The printer is plugged in when I need to make labels for tags, the Bluetooth lets the device talk to my Windows Phone. By Christmas it should be an amazing system. But that might be Christmas 2020……