Don’t Forget the Sanity Check

I sent out a bunch of emails today with the details of the lab demonstrations for the First Year programming course. Last time I did this I managed to make the final part of the schedule repeat, so that I had some students down for multiple sessions. At the time I remember thinking “Better not do that again”.

Of course I did though. I had all the sessions spread over four days, which is a long time. Too long. If I’d done a simple Sanity Check – e.g. “If we can mark 66 students in one day, how long does it take to do 170 or so?” then I’d have figured out that something was wrong. But I didn’t. I just blindly copied down the slots and pasted them into the timetable document. Idiot me.

This illustrates an important point. Just before you press send, or submit the file, or do whatever it is that sends your work off, you should do a quick “Sanity Check”. Just make sure that there is nothing obviously wrong. Quite often you’ll focus on all the small bits (like I did) and not check the big picture. See if you can come up with some simple test that you can use to make sure that nothing is stupidly wrong – like creating 240 slots for 170 students…..

Kinect Manager available for download

You’d think I’d look more pleased that it is working…..

Today I finished all the chapters for my upcoming book about the Kinect SDK. As part of the book I’ve made a wrapper class that makes it a little easier to use the classes in the Kinect for Windows SDK. You can use it to start a Kinect running and then bind to events that driver generates when new frames are available. The frame events are processed on a “round robin” basis so that the driver will not get new data from the sensor until it has been processed by your application. This makes it work well even on low performance machines that might not be able to keep up with the events generated by the Kinect sensor. The manager also generates status messages.

You can download the class, along with a program that demonstrates it, from here. For it to work you must have installed the Kinect for Windows SDK from here. And of course you’ll need a Kinect sensor – either the Xbox 360 one or the Windows one will work fine.

Everybody’s Golf for PS Vita

I think I’ve bought Everybody’s Golf on pretty much every Sony game platform I’ve ever owned. I like golf games, but I don’t like to be too fanatical about them.

The great thing about Everybody’s Golf is that underneath the cutesy graphics and wealth of options there is a rock solid golf simulation with some impressive course design. On the PS Vita it looks really spiffy, with very nice graphics and animation.

If you are after a high quality portable golf experience, you need look no further.

Sony PlayStation Suite Available

Looks interesting, in spite of those scary heads.

The Sony PlayStation Suite is now in “Open Beta”. This means that you can download the SDK and start writing games and applications which you might eventually sell via the PlayStation Store. The way I see it (although I’ve not tried yet) you should also be able to get programs running on your own PS Vita using this kit and the PlayStation Suite Development Assistant. The path to market looks like it will be very similar to the App Store or Windows Phone Marketplace, with developers paying an annual retainer (the traditional 99 dollars) to allow them to unlock devices for testing and to sell their wares.

The good news is that the development language is C# and the way that it all works is not a million miles away from XNA. In fact it works so well that we had quite a few teams in our Three Thing Game end up making games using it.

Gadgets Going

It looks like a couple of my gadgets are going the way of all things. My Chumby, which I got for myself a couple of Christmases ago may shortly turn into a paperweight rather than the Flash Powered internet connected appliance that I’ve had on my desk at home for the last couple of years. This illustrates a flaw in the business model of companies that sell these devices. Once you’ve had the initial hit of profit from the customer buying your product you are then committed to a lifetime of support for it. Advertising doesn’t always work in these situations and so once your funding runs out it is time to shut down those servers. And all your customers become paperweight owners. It’s not all doom and gloom I suppose. The servers are staying up at the moment and there is always a chance that some enterprising folks will stop in and provide their own solutions, but I think that would require some “unlocking” of the devices themselves that might not come to pass.

Then I find out that Alienware are discontinuing the M11x range of high performance gaming netbooks. I got one of these last year, mainly because a student had one and I loved the way the keyboard lit up. I’ve carried it around the world on trips and it has never failed to turn heads. It is a genuinely nice machine, that benefitted greatly from the solid state drive I dropped into it to speed things up a bit. Battery life is good and you can play games on it too. Having said that, I think it might be a laptop too many for me just at the moment. I can get by on my little “twisty top” machine most of the time. So if anyone wants to make me an offer…..