De Nutty Professor Rob Miles

I'm going to be presenting at DevDays09 in Holland later this year (28/29 of May to be precise).

I'm doing two sessions during the conference, one on the .NET Micro Framework and another on XNA. I'm also doing a session at Geek Night. I did one last year, and it was great. This time I'm talking about "Ruling the World with the .NET Micro Framework". I'm going to show how you can achieve greatness by programming tiny devices. It is going to be fun, on the site at the moment they refer to me as "Rob Miles, de nutty professor uit Hull". Works for me.

Reading Twitter Feeds with LINQ

LINQ (Language Integrated Query) is a really neat feature of .NET which makes it very easy to work with structured data. I’d always thought this meant things like databases and stuff, but it also works with XML. This CodeProject article shows how you can use LINQ to read information out of Twitter feeds.

http://www.codeproject.com/articles/35668/How-to-Read-Twitter-Feeds-With-LINQ-to-XML.aspx

Very clever. It took me around five minutes to make a simple Twitter Viewer application based on the code given:

http://www.robmiles.com/storage/TwitterViewer.zip

Monsters vs Aliens

Went to see this film last night. I’m a sucker for computer animated movies, and this one has been quite well reviewed.

I enjoyed it. We saw it in 3D, which meant funny glasses and a slightly dimmer picture than normal. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to this part, the last 3D movie that we saw, Bolt, was OK but the 3D effects weren’t that noticeable and not worth the hassle in my opinion. Not so with this film. I got the feeling that they really went for the 3D angle with the direction, there were lots of scenes where things were pointed at you, or flew past your head. Great fun and worth the trip.

Wookieepedia

Geoff sent me this. Brilliant.

http://www.wookieepedia.org/

Evil Socks

Fixed the washing machine. Turns out that socks are not always your friends. One of them had managed to get inside the water outlet underneath the drum and blocked it. The reason that we had such poor drainage was that all our washing water was being “sock filtered for extra purity” before being sent into the drain.

Note: You are not allowed to steal this by-line and use it sell bottled water.

I’ve no idea how the sock managed to get there. And I’ve also no idea where the other one is. Perhaps it is up in the loft loosening my ball valves even as I write this.

Evil Sock