Saturday, September 5, 2009 at 07:30PM And so to the holidays. Packing up the cameras and the computers so we can go and live for a week without broadband.
Maybe we could be in for some good weather, which would make a nice change.
Friday, September 4, 2009 at 10:22AM If you have been wondering about what all the “Today I have Been Mostly Writing” posts last month were all about you can find out as the courseware is now available on Microsoft Faculty Connection:
This is a complete programming course which is designed to be taught over 10 weeks at a rate of 6 sessions a week (although you can pull individual sections out and use them if you wish). There is a course matrix that sets out how to sequence this.
The course teaches programming from first principles, using XNA games as the basis of all the sample code. There are extensive tutor notes on the slide decks and a sequence of step-through labs for students to follow. There are even revision tests for each section. It is based on the chapters in my textbook, which is the first link in the above list.
You can download the material without signing in, by selecting the “Skip this Step” option on the download page.
If you are going to use the material in any way I’d love to hear how you got on.
Thursday, September 3, 2009 at 07:50PM I’m really pleased to find out that there is now a Digital Community in Hull:
They are organising a live event in October which has some interesting speakers:
I’ve persuaded my boss to pay for a ticket, and I’m really looking forward to it. I’m pleased to find that they do student pricing for the event (which seems to me quite reasonable) and with a bit of luck we can involve some of our students in their events in the future.
One of the most important things about computing is that the field is constantly changing and professional development is something you really need to work at if you want to keep your skills up to date. Hull Digital looks like it will be a neat way of doing this.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009 at 09:45PM Spent lots of today driving a big van. It was time to move number one daughter to her new pad in London, and so it was up with the lark and off in the big tin box on wheels that I’d hired for the day.
I like van driving. Everything in a van cab has been carefully designed to do a job. There was even a little clip in the dashboard into which you could put your delivery notes and a big area under the windscreen for your copy of “The Sun” and empty MacDonald's boxes. They also have monster (and completely un-burstable) engines and sound systems. And other people get out of your way. I’ve even figured out how to reverse them. Great stuff.
Life Tuesday, September 1, 2009 at 09:24PM One of the problems with ultra high resolution screens is that they often display text in ultra low sizes. My little Toshiba tablet is a case in point. It has a lovely display with loads of dots that I can't read. If you have a similar problem you might be interested in a Windows 7 feature that is rather nice. In the screen resolution dialogue box there is an option to "Make text and other items larger or smaller". If you select this you can enlarge most of the hard to read things on the screen by 125 and 150 percent.
It doesn't work for everything, programs that insist on rendering their own dialog boxes for no good reason (step forward Adobe Photoshop Elements) will still be hard to read, but it beats the alternative, which was to set the resolution to a value that didn't really fit the display and then have everything slightly blurry.
Windows 7 