Fun with MineSweeper

I spent some of today working on the coursework for our First Year programming course. Every year we get our students to create a simple game. Last year it was Battleships. This year it is MineSweeper, a game with a long and honourable history, having been shipped with every version of Windows right up to Windows 7.

One of my rules is that I don’t ask the students to do something that I can’t. At least not in the First Year…

So I spent a happy afternoon putting together a simple version of the game and writing the notes to go with it. I’m so pleased with what I ended up with that I might make a version for the Zune. It is a really nice platform for that kind of thing.

The first part of the lab goes live next week and should be great fun.

TechEd 2009 Test Firing

I’m doing a session at TechEd 2009 in Berlin:

DEV08-IS Writing Games and Exploring the Microsoft Zune HD in XNA 3.1

Wed 11/11 | 17:30-18:45 | Interactive Theatre 2 - Orange

I got that information off the TechEd schedule builder. So it must be true.

As part of the preparation I delivered my first pass of the session this afternoon at Hull to a bunch of students and staff who were nice enough to turn up. Thanks for coming along folks. I’ll put the slides and sample code up on my blog after TechEd.

Idiot

Last week I wanted to take the Tosh tablet home to do some work preparing it for TechEd. But it wouldn’t come off the docking station I keep in my office. The lever kept jamming when I tried to remove the machine.

I cursed this for a while, concocted a theory where something inside had got stuck and put the whole thing, laptop, docking station and all, into a carrier bag and took it all home for repair. I reasoned that I just had to pop the back off, release the offending catch by hand and then all would be well.

The back of the docking station is held on by twelve screws. I undid ten of them and noticed that the back would not come off. So I laboriously refitted all ten and, as I was tightening the last screw, I noticed the remaining two. So I took all the screws out and then discovered that to get the back off the docking station you have to also undo some fittings on the top of it. Which was presently stuck underneath the laptop, which was still securely fixed on.

So I cursed some more and had a cup of tea. As I was taking a sip I noticed a little lever on the side of the docking station that I hadn’t seen before. It had a little padlock drawn next to it.  I moved the lever to the other setting, unlocking the tablet and allowing it to be easily removed.

Idiot.

Monday Picture

What a nice view to start the week with.

Another Reality Fault

I love Windows Media Center. I’ve used it for a couple of years, ever since I got rid of my Sky box.

A couple of weeks back the Freeview system was “upgraded”. I got loads of difficult to remove messages on the TV telling me that I would have to re-scan and find all the channels again. What the message didn’t say was that after the “upgrade” pretty much nothing would work any more. All my TV channels are broken apart from Five.

Now I quite like CSI and Flash Forward, but there are actually other things I fancy watching as well. But I can’t. Kind of ironic really. An upgrade to improve the reception of Five has broken everything else.

Of course all my other digital tellies work fine, it is only the Media PC that is broken. Initially put it down to the TV tuner cards I’m using as they are a bit old.  So I tried playing around a bit. I managed to get the Sony PlayTV that I normally use with to the PS3 to talk to the computer and that duly found all the channels. But it would only show me channel Five. Wah.

This is very, very strange. If it wasn’t for the fact that it was happening I would say it was impossible. There is some muttering on the interwebs about changes to multiplexes and signal strengths, but nobody has reported the same problem I’ve got.

I call this kind of thing a “Reality Fault”, in that everything is working fine, it is just that reality around it is broken. Oh well.  If I can find a cheap enough TV card I’ll put that in and rebuild everything I suppose.

Don’t you just love progress?