Andy Sithers from Microsoft Coming to Hull

Andy Sithers from Microsoft (the one in the front with the biggest brush) is coming up from Reading to see us next week.

He will be giving a presentation on Microsoft Technologies and talking about the Imagine Cup. And he might dish out a few freebies.

The presentation will take place on Wed. 3rd Feb at 2:15 pm in LTA in the Robert Blackburn Building. If you are up in Hull it is well worth the trip.

FEZ Robot, now with extra bustle

I’ve added a bustle to the back of my Fez robot. I’ve used the extra bits and bobs that they provide to allow to fit your own components. I’m going to fit a receiver for the infra-red remote control and also an XBee so that the robot can talk back to the computer. With a bit of luck I’ll have some sample code this time tomorrow.

.NET Micro Framework and the Fez Robot

Robot in Red

My robot arrived today. It is from TinyCLR, who are (I think) part of  GHI Electronics.  They have released a whole new set of boards based on Version 4.0 of the .NET Micro Framework. The boards are branded as FEZ (Short for "Freakin' Easy!") and there is even a picture of a Fez on the board itself. There are two FEZ boards, the FEZ Domino which is pin compatible with an Arduino and the FEZ Mini which is compatible with the Basic Stamp device.  Both of these new devices use a single chip implementation of the Micro Framework.

I’ve been saying for ages is that what we need is a set of boards and components that use the .NET Micro Framework, are sensibly priced and well supported. It seems that GHI agree, since that is what they have done. They’ve also produced a free book which you can download to find out how to use the framework. This is a nice introduction to the technology and to the Fez platform.  I’ve not had time to do much with the new hardware just yet. But I did manage to assemble the robot and make it try to jump off the desk. 

Robot in Blue

In the future I’m going to start putting some projects up on my Micro Framework pages as I play more with this lovely system.

Such Excitement

 

I think it was a great man that once said “Happy is the man who has a robot in the post”.

Or perhaps it’s just me.

Lion King in London

Went to London today to see the Lion King show. This meant getting up at 5:45, but as you all know I’m prepared to suffer for art, and so this wasn’t a problem.

We had lunch at the Masala Zone restaurant in Covent Garden. Masala Zone is a small chain of Indian Restaurants in London, each of which is decorated in a characteristic way, the one we went to has loads of puppets hanging from the ceiling, depicting the guests arriving at a particularly posh wedding.

The food was great. Really tasty, and very nicely priced.

If you want a place to eat in London that won’t break the bank, but will deliver a really good dining experience, then I strongly recommend it.

Then it was on to the theatre.

I’m not that big on musicals. I reckon that if the story is going to be interrupted by a song it had better be a darned good one.  However, the songs, sets, costumes and style of the whole performance worked for me.

I think I rather annoyed number one daughter when I said (somewhat tongue in cheek) “It’s good, but it’s no Avatar”. Actually it is far better than the movie. Avatar is highly polished, with incredible attention having been focused on getting everything to look as real as possible. Lion King takes the approach that since it is impossible to get the whole of the jungle into a theatre we will concentrate on giving you the impression of what it is is like there.  And it works a treat.

Avatar is like watching a really good computer game being played by an expert technician. Lion King is like having a beautiful story told by a bunch of people right in front of you.  If you want to see how far you can get with imagination and just plain cleverness, then go and see the show. Great stuff.