Resources from Rob

A couple of new resource postings you might have missed:

• Find out how to load images into your Flash/Chumby programs here.
• Find out how to reset your TinyCLR Micro Framework device if it has got stuck here.

I’ve just about got my JSON serialiser working to send and receive JSON structured messages between the Micro Framework robot and another machine. When I’ve got the whole thing sorted I’ll post all the source. It lets you create message frameworks and then push status information between two systems.

Windows 7 Tablet Madness

I think I’m on a quest to find the smallest and slowest computers around and then put Windows 7 on them. Latest contender is my venerable old Fujitsu Stylistic Tablet PC. One of the first tablet PCs ever, this boasts a mighty 800MHz processor and 512MBytes of ram.  I had this idea that, in the absence of the iPad any time soon, it might be a useful handheld device that I could use to sit around and read Safari books on.

And it mostly works. I had a bit of fun when I installed the “proper” graphics drivers. For some reason it didn’t register the installation properly, and so I ended up with a machine with three or four graphics devices, which didn’t end well. And every now and then the display would go black because these drivers didn’t support the correct version of Direct X. I solved these problems by using the original Microsoft drivers, which means I can’t rotate the screen, but it works fine in landscape.

..and it works!

All the hardware apart from the tablet buttons works properly, even the WIFI card works perfectly. Performance could be better, but browsing is just peachy and I’m even thinking about putting Office on there so I can look at documents. I might even upgrade the RAM to a massive 768MBytes to get even more speed. I guess the lesson here is that you really can bring dead machines back to life with the magic of Windows 7.

York Laptop Shopping

Went to York to do some shopping today. The weather was great for photographs. I took a quick bunch of the Minster and then stitched them together. The above isn’t perfect, there are some rather strange shadows here and there, but I’m still quite pleased with the result.

And we bought a laptop. We managed to get quite a powerful beast for dad with 4G of RAM, 500G hard disk and Windows 7 64 bit edition. All for less than 400 pounds. Which got me to thinking. This is the entry level price for the Apple iPad when it comes out in 60 days and 60 nights or so. Why would you want to buy something small and shiny when you could get something much more useful for less money?

I remember coming up with a similar argument against the iPhone when that came out. For the same money, I reasoned, you you could get a really nice little 3G SkypePhone, and an eePC.  (You still can).  Much more sensible. And yet the iPhone was a roaring success and I’m expecting the iPad to do just as well. People are going to use it and fall in love with it. A whole section of users (those who don’t really aspire to an all powerful computer) is going to appear and, having had what the iPhone offers, buy the same on a bigger platform.  And number one wife quite fancies one too. Case closed.

Hull Graduation Congregation

I did the warmup for today’s graduation day for students from our faculty. Thanks for being a great Congregation. It was a really good occasion and we had a lovely speech from our honorary graduate. I’m sorry that some of the pictures I took from the stage came out a bit more blurred than I would have liked, but you should be able to recognise yourself. There are much larger versions in Flickr. Click on the images to find your way to the pictures on there.

…to the right..

Left of stage

Right of stage.

Hull Students on the Road

Earlier this week a bunch of our students went off on a road trip to visit some game companies, including Black Rock and CodeMasters. 

These are students on our game development courses, and it will be interesting for them because they will be meeting up with ex-Hull students who now work in the game development business.

I’ve just received this picture back from Alexander, along with a bunch of others. It looks like things are going well..