Busy Sabbath

I know you aren't really supposed to work on Sunday, but I'm afraid I must add this to my, already long, list of sins (which I am most definitely not going to blog about).

I'm writing the material for the XNA Launch talk I'm doing on Wednesday next week. For some insane reason I've decided that, because I'm speaking after lunch, I need to make sure that nobody falls asleep during the talk.

The answer, I've decided, is clipart. If I put a piece of witty and amusing clip art on every slide people will be so agog that they will forget to drift off to sleep. Problem is, I now have to find around thirty pieces of witty and amusing clipart. So there goes Sunday...

I've seen a PlayStation 3!

I have! There's one in a shop in the Prospect Centre in the middle of Hull. Very big and very shiny. It is not for sale (just as well) but it is definitely a PS/3. They were even letting people have a go on it. I watched someone playing a driving game, probably Ridge Racer. The car was shiny, the road and the landscape were detailed and things moved along very smoothy.

The kid at the controls had obviously played driving games before. He drove round the twisty highway with a miniumum of fuss and the occasional powerslide. It was hard to tell whether he was impressed or not.

And there's the rub. Wind back the clock 24 hours to the kids having a go on the Wii. They were waving, clapping and cheering. At the moment it seems to me that the PS/3 gives you a very high quality "same again" whereas the Wii gives you something totally different.

Even allowing for the fact that perhaps folks behave differently in shops, I reckon that this underlines the validity of the Nintendo approach. Perhaps over time the PS/3 will catch up and truly new forms of game will emerge as developers get the hang of its enormous power. But until then, I'm going to be in front of my Wii, waving the controller around like a mad thing.... 

I took the camera up town too:

Shiny building

This was in the art gallery. It is made entirely of seeds and flowers and should last around a week. Very clever.

The Day of the Wii

What a day. I'm exhausted. I was up really early after the bus trip yesterday, and zoomed up town to try and get hold of a Nintendo Wii console, which launched today in the UK. This was mildly important since today is our special Wii Open Day and a whole bunch of people are coming to see them. We have one running in our open area.

But we want more.

I had everything carefully planned down to the last minute. Into Game, grab the console and then back to the university in time to set it up. And then I saw the queue in the shop.  At 9:20 I was in the middle of paying for the console. And the first group were due to arrive at 10:00....

Fortunately it all went wonderfully well. Even better than that. Dr. Paul Chapman (who was in the paper and on the local TV yesterday demonstrating the worlds first paraglider trainer that he's just built at Hull) was able to show how is system works, and some of guests even got to have a go at flying. And we showed off the Hive setup. And we did some programming using XNA to take a look underneath the bonnet of a video game. And there was a lot of Wii time.

Then, after lunch, we did it all again. And followed it up with a student run quiz computer games quiz and further Wii play. For just about the whole day you could here howls of laughter and enjoyment as the little console worked it's magic.I took a whole bunch of happy snaps...

Getting Started

Letting fly with the controllers

Damian shows how to box in pink.....

In the USA people have been crashing into their tellys. I can see why.

Boxing was very popular for some reason

Remember to guard...

...and then punch

Jon congratulates the Wii winner on the day. And stands in the way of the projector . He  won't do that again...

Quiz Prizes

The end of a balanced meal

"Everybody say Wiiiiiiii!"

Second prize quiz winners

And the winners, who showed a deeply scary level of knowledge about computer games.....

Ed Gibson is "The Man"

Today we went up to Bradford for a rather special talk. The folks at Black Marble arrange seminars for IT professionals (you'll never guess who's giving the next one) and today they had managed to get Ed Gibson over to talk about Computer Security. Ed is quite a chap, an ex FBI guy who is now Microsoft UK's chief security advisor.  So a bunch of students and myself boarded a magic bus to Bradford.

We were lucky enough to meet up with Ed. before the talk. Thanks to my super advanced planning I managed to get everyone to the venue around 90 minutes early, and so we had plenty of time to sit around a roaring fire in the hotel bar and chat. Ed turned up and the first thing he did was buy everyone a drink. My kind of guy.

Then, after some superb sandwiches courtesy of Black Marble it was time to get down to the serious business of the evening. And it is serious. Ed has been there, done that, and told us some truly scary stories. For me the most interesting thing that emerged from his talk is that the computer fraudsters don't want your bank details. They want your bandwidth. If they can get enough machines on the net under their control they can pretty much take down any server, anywhere. Unless you pay them big money.

At some point we will have laws that extend far enough to catch the perpetrators and enough systems out there hard enough to resist the attacks that can turn your home PC into an agent of the bad guys. However,  until then the rule has got to be keep your system up to date. Don't think of computer crime as a "soft" crime with no real victims. The people who do it are in there for the cash, very organized and totally ruthless.

Ed made some good points on a broad canvas. The speaker that followed him zoomed right down into the low level detail. He showed how breathtakingly easy it is to attack a system. One of my programming rules is "build yourself a nice place to work". What I means is make sure that it is very easy to create, build and test the systems that you are writing. It never really occurred to me that hackers would do the same.

We were shown a tool which used SQL injection (basically a way of putting database commands into the text you feed into a web page) to stripmine entire company databases. I knew about the technique, but I never thought there would be such advanced tools for this kind of thing. The next thing that we were shown fair took my breath away. It involved changing the way that the .NET Framework itself works.

Imagine that a developer has got some permissions set on a program. And they want to stop users from pressing certain buttons on certain screens. The Forms library that ships with Windows will do this for you. With a simple property change you can disable a button. If the button is disabled it turns grey and the user can't press it. Job done.

Unless someone changes the guts of .NET so that this property change no longer works. By just changing one particular byte in the right library file a nasty person who has access to your machine can make every single button work all the time. So simple, sooo scary.

Admittedly you'd have to do something rather stupid to let someone else run their program on your machine in the first place, but the result of this is that even securely written code can now be totally banjaxed by being hosted on a corrupted system. Amazing stuff. Simple yet brilliant. And a very worthy follow on to the talk from Ed.

This was a superb evening. Kudos to Black Marble, Ed and his associate (who's name I've forgotten I'm afraid). All the students had a great time, with some pretty deep conversations on the bus on the way back. This was the first Black Marble event I've been to. It will not be the last...

And with that, I'm just going to update my virus scanner...

Blanked

We had the first of our new season of open days today. If you came along, thanks for coming, it was nice to see you.

I did the opening talk and it seemed to go OK, then I sat down to run the little question and answer session afterwards. I was introducing our staff and I got to Helen Wright, one of our lecturers. As I was starting to announce her name to the group another part of my brain was thinking how terrible it would be if I forgot her surname. So I did. So she was introduced as "Helen, our Quality Officer". Forgetting the name of the person in charge of quality. Way to go Rob.

It is probably the kind of thing which is supposed to happen when you get old, but it has been happening to me for absolutely ages (which might mean I'm very old, but I'm putting it down as an endearing character trait of mine).

Anyhoo, I think it went OK apart from that slipup, and the name did come back to me, and I did apologise.

For me the best part was when all the parents of the candidates took over the Nintendo Wii system we have on loan and showed the young'uns how to play Tennis. Great fun.