Question of Time

So…. What time does the clock say?

Project Tuva – Richard Feynman Lectures

If you’ve not heard of Richard Feynman then you are very lucky. It means that you can have the experience of finding out all about him for the first time.

Richard Feynman was a Nobel Prize winning, safe cracking, bongo drum playing, beautiful women painting, atom bomb making genius.  Go and read Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman! to discover more.

And now you can get to see the man in action delivering a set of lectures about physics that have been put in the internets by Microsoft at their Project Tuva site. This lets you view the presentations with annotations and additional linkable content. A great way to spend a lunch hour or two.

Dollhouse Sunday

By gum, it really rained today. Far too wet for gardening. Much more sensible to stay indoors, play with the Zune software and watch a couple of episodes of Dollhouse, the new show from the pen of Jos Whedon, who created Buffy.

I’m starting to really like the program a lot. Some people reckoned that the early episodes were a bit weak, but I enjoyed them and it is starting to get very interesting as the characters develop.

The program itself is a sort of cross between Joe 90 and Probe.  “Dolls” or “actives” have their brains filled with the person they need to be to do their assigned job, be it escort, private eye or assassin (but never pool cleaner – or at least not yet). They are then sent out into the field to fulfil their task and then hauled back to be wiped and reused. 

When not at work they live in the Dollhouse of the title as amiable blank slates. Of course things don’t always work quite right, and so there are back stories of NSA investigations and rogue actives and the whole setup has a moral ambiguity which means you are never sure whether or not the Dollhouse itself is a force for good or evil.

The series aired on the Science Fiction channel in the UK, but I don’t think it made it to terrestrial, which is a shame. Fortunately you can pick up season one at a reasonable price,  and I reckon it is well worth the investment.

London Trip

Off to London today. In a brand new train. So new they didn’t have any  cups to dish out the free coffee for the posh people in First Class. Heh heh.

Millennium Bridge Handrail

View from Tate Modern.

We went off to Foyles, best bookshop in the world:

The bad news is that the Computer part of the shop is now the Cookery part of the shop. Then again, perhaps more people need to eat than need to write programs…

The good news is that they had three copies of my book. Go me!

Album Shaker for Zune HD

I’ve been playing with the Zune HD and seeing what you can make it do. The answer would seem to be lots. I’ve just finished a little demo that is an alternative way to find your music. Since XNA gives you access to all your album artwork I thought it would be nice if all the album pictures bounced around the screen and you just touch the one you want to play. Turns out that XNA is a great thing to write this in:

This is going to be one of my TechEd demos now, it really does work well.

A prize for anyone who manages to name all the artist and track details.