Cowboys and Aliens

Went to see Cowboys and Aliens today. The title of the film is wrong. It should really be Cowboys vs Aliens. But that wouldn’t have sounded half as cool. The first 20 minutes of the film are pure western, with a lone gunslinger finding his way into a town out way out west and bringing trouble with him. Then things take a more other-worldly turn when the aliens turn up. I’m not giving much away when I tell you that these ones are much, much nastier than the ones in Super 8 (although they look broadly similar). The action is well done and the acting is great, particularly Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford, who gets the lion’s share of the best lines.

Go see it.

Oh, and if it seems as if I like every film I see, here are a couple I think you should avoid. I’ve sat through these films on airplanes, just so you don’t have to.

The Other Guys. This is awful. I watched it all the way through waiting for something nice or amusing to happen. Nothing did. The lead characters are pretty unpleasant, the plot is done by numbers and the whole thing just reeks.

The Green Hornet. Cameron Diaz has been in some stinkers, and this is one of them. A bad reworking of an un-remarkable “super” hero. No characters you can really warm to and a plot twist that might as well have been written in the sky in large letters.

A Job With Rob

One of the great things that the university does is Knowledge Transfer Partnerships. These are set up to do two things. Get students into good jobs and spread expertise into business. We are presently setting one up and I’m one of the academics at Hull University who is involved with managing the work. It is a very interesting project in a nice part of the world (not Hull actually) with good pay. If you are a recent graduate who wants to get started in the business you could do a lot worse than apply. Even though you might end up in meetings with me….

There are lots of KTPs out there. The one I’m talking about is here. You can find lots more, including some others from the university here.

Installing the Windows Phone SDK on Alienware Laptops

I love my little Alienware MI1x notebook. It has oodles of power, a good battery life and a keyboard that lights up with different colours. That’s a keyboard that lights up with different colours, always the first thing I look for in a laptop.

Anyhoo, while putting the latest version of the Windows Phone SDK on it I hit a snag. Although it seemed to have finished, if I tried to run the emulator I got silly messages about the emulator already running. Worse still, after a reboot of the machine (always the weapon of first resort) the Windows Phone emulator came up with a “Windows Phone Emulator is doing a complete OS boot”. For ever.

Not good. A quick search of the interwebs through up various solutions, none of which worked. Until I found one that mentioned the dual graphics cards in these laptops, and the problems that they can cause. The Alienware has two graphics cards inside. A “Clark Kent” one that us used for meek and mild applications and good battery life and a “Superman” one for high performance games and stuff. For some reason (perhaps because I’d been fiddling) this had got itself set to “high performance”, and this was breaking the installation,and subsequent use, of the emulator.  If you are having problems installing the Windows Phone SDK on your laptop I’d advise you drop it into “Clark Kent” or low performance mode and see if that fixes it. Worked for me.

A Floor in the Plan

Spent some of today looking at kitchens and tiles. Great fun. No, really. Very useful to have a phone with a good camera. Whenever we saw something we wanted to remember we just took a picture. No messing around writing down names and numbers, just a quick click and there you are. These pictures are then dutifully uploaded by the phone to SkyDrive where they will probably stay for ever…

Windows Phone Breakout Game

I seem to doing PR for all the Windows Phone games written by Hull Students. I don’t have a problem with this. If you are Hull student just send me an email with the deep link to your program and I’ll give it a mention. Michael sent me an email and here is his breakout game. Looks fun. You can get a free copy here:

http://windowsphone.com/s?appid=04db085e-d301-4cb9-8f0e-92d78229766e