Open Day and Holy Trinity HDR

I took this in Hull Holy Trinity Church this morning while I was up town shopping. It is an HDR picture made from five original images. I’m quite pleased with how it turned out.

Then, this afternoon we had our last Saturday open day of the season. As usual I took a shot of the audience:

Another good turnout. And of course we had a lucky (!?) winner of my XNA book.

After the open day it was back home to vacuum round the house (what  lifestyle I have) and spend some more time playing with HDR pictures.

I quite like this one too. Next time I’m going back with a proper tripod. Balancing the camera against bits of the furniture doesn’t always make for the best compositions.

If you live in Hull and you haven’t had a look around Hull Holy Trinity church then you are missing out. It has an interior that would put quite a few Minsters to shame.

Three Thing Game Funny Money

Spent a few minutes this afternoon making some money for the Three Thing Game auction on Monday. Teams will each be given a wad of cash each to bid for “Things” they can use in their games. 1:15 pm in Lecture Theatre A, Robert Blackburn Building. Should be fun.

(James just asked me how it is going to work. Actually, at the moment I have really no idea….)

Hull Digital March Meetup

This evening I went off to the Hull Digital March Meetup. We had a talk from Steve Bell of Kingston Communications about the upcoming fibre optic developments in the city. It looks like we are going to get some seriously fast networking around the place, I’m looking forward to getting it where I live. Then we had a talk from Gareth Hanson and Dave Foy who run 'Woof', an on-line marketing consultancy based in Hull. They were talking about Google Analytics. I use it on this site to carefully track all my visitors and analyse the effect of changes to the content so that I can relentlessly tune the material to increase the number of visitors and make them stay longer.

Actually I don’t. Because my blog is not really a business as such. I have Google Analytics enabled, and every now and then I go and look at which way the curves are going, but I don’t really do much with the information. But the important thing is that I could. Gareth and Dave made the point that by proper configuration of the analytic content in your pages you can find out where readers “bounce” from the site and the effectiveness of each step of your transactions. The bottom line is that if you are serious about making the most of your web presence, and finding out which of your pages are working hardest for you, you should look into this technology.

The Muppets

I’ve enjoyed The Muppets since first seeing their TV shows way back when. And A Muppet Christmas Carol is one of the best films ever made. Tonight we went to see the latest Muppet Film. Well worth a visit, although you’ll be humming the songs long after you have left the cinema.

Make TouchDevelop apps and put them in Windows Phone Marketplace

One of the many neat things that I saw at SIGCSE last week was TouchDevelop. This lets you write Windows Phone programs on your Windows Phone. The programming language and the user interface have been carefully crafted to work on a small handheld platform. If you have done a bit of programming already you should have no problem creating simple scripts to do all manner of interesting things. There’s even a simple sprite engine with physics support for game creation. There’s a free book about it that you can download.

It’s early days yet, but the developers of the environment have just taken a massive step towards making the platform into a genuinely useful place to create things. They’ve made it possible to publish your TouchDevelop scripts in the Windows Phone Marketplace. Up until now you could spread your scripts around to other phone owners, but only via the TouchDevelop phone application. Now you can distribute your TouchDevelop applications and games to the entire Windows Phone owning world. This means you could get on a bus with nothing but your Windows Phone and a good idea. And then get off the bus three hours later with a completed application which is ready for sale. Amazing stuff.

Find out more here.