Ho for Northumbria

I’m now officially an External Examiner. I’ve even been to an exam board meeting and said stuff. An external examiner does just what it says on the tin (although we don’t actually arrive in a tin). We go into other institutions and make sure that what they are doing is OK. We look at coursework and exams, check the marking and make sure that the students are being treated correctly. At Hull we have several external examiners, one for each of our courses, and I’ve watched them in action, and worked with them over the years.

Northumbria University invited me to be the external on their Games courses and I went over there today to take part in their exam board. I decided to drive over there, and hired a car for the trip. The car that turned up was a lot posher than I expected, a huge VW Passat. It even had electrically heated seats. I found this out when I turned them on by mistake, that was a genuinely scary experience.

The drive up to Newcastle was very smooth though. I reckon that whatever else you say about the human race, we have got very good at making cars. This might turn out to be our undoing of course, but it did make the journey very comfortable.

The exam meeting was fine. I never thought I’d say that, but it turns out that other people’s exam board meetings are much more interesting than your own. It is always nice to see a room full of professionals working hard to make sure that they do right by the students, and that is exactly what I saw. Well done folks, and I’m looking forward to seeing you all again.

Then it was into the shiny car and back home.

Going for my Jabs

I’m off to Egypt in a couple of weeks for the Imagine Cup World Finals. I’m really looking forward to it, but before I start to pack my bags I have to make sure that I’m up to date with all the injections that I’ll need.

Today I wandered over to the Health Centre and filled in a form saying where I’m going and what I’m doing, and they’ve called me back on Friday for some injections. If I see a tanker parked outside the surgery when I turn up, I’m not going in…

XNA Videos in Thirteen 1

I’ve been doing some videos to try and teach XNA development. They are being put out by those nice people at Thirteen 1 magazine.

I’ve just finished recording one tonight, it took me three goes because the microphone made me sound like I was on a boat in a stormy sea. If you want to view the first one you can find it here. Just turn over to the next page and there I am.

Using the Canon T1i/500D with Photoshop Elements

If you have a Canon T1i/500D you have a lovely camera, but it gets less lovely if you want to import the raw image files it produces into your copy of Photoshop Elements. The problem is that the camera has a new sensor design, which means that the CR2 files that it produces are not compatible with the Raw importer that Adobe supply.

They have recently released a Release Candidate for version 5.4 of the filter, but rather annoyingly they’ve only supplied the installer for the big, expensive, versions of Photoshop. Which I don’t have.

Turns out though, that you can extract the required filter from the distribution that they do send out, and it works a treat.

• Go to http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Camera_Raw_5.4 and download the plug-in from the link.
• Open the zip file and find your way to:

cameraraw_5-4_rc_win_052109.zip\extensions\AdobeCameraRaw5.0All-190509032617\Assets

• Copy the file 1003 onto your desktop from this directory in the archive, and then rename it to camera.raw.8bi. This is the new version of the filter.
• On your computer, find your way to:

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop Elements 7.0\Plug-Ins\File Formats

• If you are using Photoshop Elements 6.0 there is a directory in an analogous place for that.
• Move your new file into this directory, overwriting the existing camera.raw file (you might want to make a copy of this file first, in case there are any problems later)
• Now you can open the raw files.

Updating your raw importer is actually a good idea whatever kind of camera you have. Adobe keep adding new features to this tool.

Hull Marina

Lovely weather today, so we went for a walk around the marina in the middle of Hull. I took the big camera.

Jolly Boating Weather

No, it wasn’t a catamaran.