Silverlight at Black Marble

Straight after Grahams ceremony it was time to head off to Bradford and Black Marble. They have a program of community events and we try to get along if we can. I filled a mini-bus with students and we set off in search of enlightenment and free food and drink

The "Black Marble Posse" striking a pose.

Today it was all about SilverLight, XNA and a famous game from way back, Manic Miner.

Richard Costall & Pete McGann have created a version of this venerable game which you can play in your browser and Richard had come over to talk about it. The talk was wide ranging and interesting, ranging from the difficulties of the playing the original game all the way to the fun you can have trying to create pixel perfect collision detection within a Sliverlight application.

All really good stuff. Everyone had a good time, and the food was excellent (and there was plenty too - even by student standards).

Thanks to Black Marble for inviting us along, and Richard for giving such a good talk. I'm going to do a Silverlight talk at Hull, having been inspired by what I've seen.

Goodbye Graham

Today we said goodbye to Graham Brookes, one of our professors who has been in Hull for a very long time and given great service to the university, as head of the Computer Science Department and also as Dean of Faculty.

Thinking of the next line...

I first met Graham many years ago, when as a young, fresh faced, programmer in the Computer Centre I was asked to show him around the department on his first visit to Hull. Unbeknownst to me the building had undergone some changes and things had moved around a bit since I graduated and so when I proudly opened the door to "Our main computing resource" we were all greeted with the sight of a mop and a couple of buckets in what was now the cleaner's cupboard. Ever since then I have been trying, perhaps vainly, to convince Graham that I am not in fact an idiot.

The good news is that in spite of this display of stupidity at Hull he managed to overcome any reservations that he might have had, and come to work with us anyway. Today, at a nice ceremony in Staff House we said our formal goodbyes and Graham gave a little speech peppered with dry wit and common sense, as is his style.

I'm sure he is going to keep involvement with the business at some level, Graham is active in the British Computer Society and I don't expect him to stop wanting to achieve things. He took the Computer Science Department at Hull and put it firmly on the track it is following today, and for that we owe him a huge debt of gratitude.

C# Pop Quiz

This little exercise comes out of a First Year lecture last week. Given the code:

short i;
for (i = 0; i < 10; i--)
{
    Console.WriteLine("i is: " + i);
}

What would it do?

(For those of you that haven't seen it before, the i-- part of the for loop has the effect if reducing the value of i by 1. It is a shorthand version of "i = i - 1")

Zero Marks

Ever tried to explain arrays, subscripts and addressing in a C# programming lecture where somebody seems to have swiped all the marker pens for the whiteboard?

I have. It is really hard. Never mind. At least I got a blog post out of it. (as I said I would...)

Wonderful Monday and Preparing for PDC 2008

There is quite simply no better way to start a working week than by delivering a 9:15 lecture on Visual Basic. Follow this up with a 1:15 lecture on C# and a 5:15 session on UML design (with a few gripping meetings and a tutorial in between) and you can probably understand why I've been hitting the Strawberry Milkshake (no - really) rather hard tonight.

The good news is that I'm presently preparing for a trip to PDC 2008 in LA. I told the second year that I would be going away and the response was "Wot, again..". The way I see it, if I further my knowledge about technology and gadgets and stuff this will all feed into my teaching and make my lectures even more better than they already are. Oh yes.

I actually feel terrible about leaving all my students in the lurch like this. Rest assured that all lectures have been re-allocated so no study time is to be lost. And I will be checking forum posts and responding to email. (probably faster than ever since I will have nothing else to do when I'm wide awake at 2:00 am) Also bear in mind that the trip will involve me cramming into an economy aircraft seat with my knees above my ears for around 12 hours on the trip out and back.

I'm deep into preparation for the trip. I've activated my emergency credit card and I'm presently packing gadgets, power supplies, cables, cameras and memory cards. Oh, and perhaps a few clothes. I'll be blogging and posting pictures of my misadventures and I'll keep you posted on any interesting new developments. The way I see it, you have a lecturer who doesn't just go the extra mile. He goes 5,500....