Wednesday, February 13, 2008 at 07:50PM If you came to see us today during our Admissions Event, thank you for coming. I mentioned a couple of things that you might find interesting and promised I'd put the links up. Here they are:
The phone screen questions that you ask an aspiring software engineer are here and the story of the Hull student who is now working in the games industry is here.
Life Tuesday, February 12, 2008 at 07:47PM I still like my eeePC. It works very well and I'm using it for presentations at work. The small size and great battery life really hits the spot. It really is the most useful computer you can get for the price.
The only really irritations have been the behaviour of the Open Office applications, so that my slide decks don't always come up correctly, and the fact that I'm having to track down Linux versions of programs that I've been using on my PC under Windows for donkey's years.
Today Jon in our first year (I think it was Jon) showed me his eeePC. He has slapped in another 512M of ram, so that it now has 1G of memory, and installed Windows XP. He showed me Visual Studio 2005 running on it, and it looked really neat. He reckons that the performance is adequate and so I'm going to make the change I reckon. With 8GB SD cards now coming in at less than 17 pounds, I can get me a really useful device that is like being back home.
Monday, February 11, 2008 at 08:39PM I had lots of things to do today. At one point I thought that I'd put some things in a beaker full of water and see how much liquid came out over the top.
But then I decided that this would just be a displacement activity.
Sunday, February 10, 2008 at 06:46PM Today I did something I've not done for a very long time. I played a game on my Windows PC. I picked up a cheap copy of World in Conflict yesterday and loaded it onto the notebook. I stopped playing games on my PC a while back because that's what I buy consoles for, and anyway they clutter up the hard disk and get in the way. That's changed slightly now, since I can install games on an external USB drive and Vista seems to manage game installation a lot better. There was no footling around looking for different versions of DirectX or putting the game in some strange place on the hard disk. It installed with a minimum of fuss and pretty soon I was in the thick of battle.
It worked really well. The game can get pretty complex, and it would be really difficult to control everything using a gamepad, you really need to keyboard and the mouse to keep on top of what is going on. And, thanks to the fairly meaty graphics support in the notebook, I was able to work at a resolution much higher than you normally get from console games, even the newer ones. It was great fun.
We are working on setting up one of our labs as a games room, where students and staff can play these games. We are just sorting out licenses and access at the moment. And I'm getting a bit of practice in.....
Life Saturday, February 9, 2008 at 10:36PM Went up to Durham today to see Number One Son. All seems to be going OK. I took the big camera and lens, in search of happy snaps.
Birds on the roof
Against the light
Durham Indoor Market
On the way back we stopped off to see Number One Daughter in York...
Lovely sunset
