A Slice of History

I was up in the loft again today and I happened across something of great historical interest. I found a Computer Science Departmental Prospectus from 1978, the year that I graduated. I’d kept it because, ahem, I’m in it.

This is the cover. Any idea which language this is?

..and this is the money shot. I think I’ve probably still got those shoes somewhere. And that hairstyle….

The computer in the corner (yes, that is a computer) was a Prime machine and myself and the other chap (another prize for naming him) were allowed special access to it for our Final Year Projects. We then went onto create an unbeatable version of the “Fox and Hounds” board game that was so good that nobody wanted to play it.

Good times.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Went to see the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo today. I read the book some time back and enjoyed it. Then I read the sequel and enjoyed it somewhat less. Then I read the third book in the series and finished it because I’d paid for it and I wasn’t going to lose out on the deal.The first story is a good “Locked Room” mystery. The second, “The Girl Who Played with Fire” goes a bit nuts and the final volume “The Girl who Kicked over the Hornet’s Nest” told me a lot more about Swedish government history than I really wanted to know.

The film sticks very closely to the plot of the first book and is none the worse for it. Daniel Craig, with his Bond charisma turned down a couple of notches, is convincing as the journalist hero that no woman can resist. Rooney Mara is astonishing as the eponymous lady of the title. The book has some pretty gritty stuff in it, along with some raunchy bits as well. The film doesn’t flinch from these, although I did a bit.

If you enjoyed the book you will not feel short changed by the film. I’m not sure if I’ll watch the next two though.

1000 Downloads of TipLight

Some time last year I had a silly idea for a program where you could control the colour of your phone screen by just tipping it around. I spent around an hour making the code and adding some averaging so that the colour didn’t flicker too much when you moved the phone and then I forgot all about it.

Last year, just before Christmas I thought I’d get some more applications in Windows Phone Marketplace. (this has nothing to do with wanting to pick up some more points for the Windows Phone Rewards programme of course).

Anyhoo, just had my thousandth download of what is the silliest of all the programs that I’ve made. If you want a copy for your phone, you can get it here.

If you liked the program then you might like this one too (which is quite fun but could probably do with a bit of work on the difficultly levels )

The Red Nose game was great fun to write and you can get it for free here.

A Computer that talks to itself…

I’m still working on the Kinect voice controlled human painting program. First thing I need is a shorter name…

Today I added a feature I thought would be really cool. Voice response is one thing, but I also wanted the computer to talk back when I issued a command. Adding voice output to a C# program is a doddle.

First you add the System.Speech library to the references in your solution.

Then you add the speech synthesis namespace:

using System.Speech.Synthesis;

Now you can make your program speak:

SpeechSynthesizer speaker;

void setupSpeechOutput()
{
    speaker = new SpeechSynthesizer();
    speaker.Speak("Ready to Go");
}

This is the setup method for my speech output. Whenever you want your program to say something, just call the Speak method on the variable speaker. If you are worried about slowing things down you can use an asynchronous call to speak in the background while your program runs on. Works very well. In fact too well.

I had the program repeating the commands aloud and it worked wonderfully. I would say “Red” to select the red colour and the program would say “Red” back. Then commands started repeating, with the computer saying “Red” time after time. Took me a minute to figure out what was happening. Turns out that the computer is really good at recognizing computer speech. It would hear itself say the confirmation message and echo it, and so on. I added a timeout so that it ignores things for a second after a command and all is well now.

Kinect Skeleton Drawing Fun

I drew these pictures myself. With myself. This is the first ever picture from my Kinect Drawing program. This lets you use your arm to draw on the screen by waving it around.. You can use voice commands to select the colour you want to draw with or you can have the random rainbow effect that you see above.

All this Kinect fun and games is in aid of a book that I’m writing, “Start Here! – Learn the Kinect API”. It should be in the shops later this year.