Cheesy Music

I'm doing a session at Dev Days next week in their Geek Night slot. It is on XNA, and so I thought I'd have a play with "Hot Salad Death with Cheese" and get it running on the Zune.

Took 30 minutes.

Took another 20 to make the game play a random music track and display a spectrum analyzer as the music plays. Great stuff. I'm really looking forward to the talk now..

Hot salad death with music and cheese.

Buy My Book (please)

I was overjoyed to find last week that Waterstones bookshop in Hull had a copy of my book in stock.

I was less overjoyed to discover this week that the copy is still there. Now I'm fretting as to why nobody has bought it. Of course, they might have sold hundreds and kept refilling the shelf.

But I doubt it.

I got a royalty cheque yesterday and so there must be some copies selling somewhere, but I'd love for the one in my home town (so to speak) to sell as well.

Nearly Perfect

I've got the Mac just about how I want it. Everything works, I've got four versions of Visual Studio on it and most of the data that I need. Except for one thing.

The icon for iTunes is broken. It just displays the standard folder one, rather than the proper picture.  I've rebuilt the icon cache and spent much too long (i.e. more than five minutes) trying to fix it.

Oh well, according to some religions anything perfect is an offence to God. So I guess that makes my machine as perfect is it could be.

Fun Beyond Imagining

Today is the day that the Imagine Cup entries are due in. Cue much panic, tweaking of software and poster preparation.

..and a five minute trip around the campus to get a picture of Team X in their natural habitat. You think writing software is hard? Try getting these three to all smile at the same time.

Anyhoo, the entry deadline is midnight tonight. I reckon they'll make it with minutes to spare. Minutes...

Iron Man

Went to see Iron Man tonight. Good film. It's a superhero movie with a beating electric heart. Having a proper actor in the lead works very well, Robert Downey Jr. is excellent in the role. And it is nice to see no implausible "super powers" and completely broken laws of physics and instead some very nice looking, but vaguely fallible, technology.

The story was good, the climax was proper, there's a "will they-won't me" romance storyline in the works. I'll be there to see the sequel and the one after that.