Read all about it

Sometimes you come accross something which is so interesting that you just have to tell everyone else about it as soon as you can.  For example PressDisplay. This site has a wonderful interface that lets you read just about any newspaper from around the world. If you sign up for a demo you can get the papers free onto your PC for a week, after that it is around ten dollars a month for up to 31 issues, which is pretty good value if you are after reading the news from around the world. An interesting take on the way that electronic media is going.

Thunder and Lightning

We had something of a storm last night. A few days after I get my shiny new TV aerial on top of the house we have one of the biggest thunderstorms for ages. Most impressive. All the lights and all the sound effects. I couldn't do the old "count the time between the flash and the boom to find out how far away it is" because there were so many flashes and booms that I couldn't pair them up.

I didn't know whether to hide under the bed or go out and take photographs.  In the end I did nothing, which strikes me as a wise choice.

Guitar Hero Quite Literally Rocks

One other birthday present that I was lucky enough to receive was a copy of the PS2 game "Guitar Hero". The first thing you notice about this game is the the controller. It is a plastic guitar, around three quarters the size of a real one, but still plenty big enough for posing.  On the fret board are six colour coded buttons, there is a plastic tag that you "strum" and a "whammy" lever for vibrato.

The basis of the game is the old "press the right button at the right place in the song" routine beloved of dance mats and bongo drums. But this time you are playing in a band and it is up to you to get the important riffs down.  Best of all, if you get the timing wrong there are a variety of "bum note" sounds which come out. Do this too often and the watching crowd gets restless. Do it too much and you get booed off the stage.  As things get more complex you have to play chords. And you get a special "Rock Star" mode where you can hold the guitar upright and really show off.

The game disk has all the rock standards you'd be expecting. Smoke on the water, More than a feeling, Killer Queen, etc etc. Not the originals, but well good enough.

We set it up at the party and it was in pretty much continuous use. Great stuff. You can even get a second guitar controller so that you can duke it out musically with a rival axemeister.

Strongly recommended. Oh yeah.

Broadcasting to a waiting world

I did my last webcast tonight. I've been cranking these out at a rate of one per week for the last few weeks, and today was the last one. It was all about mobile game development using Direct3D on mobile devices.

I'm going to miss doing them, they were fun.  If you came along and took part, good on you and I hope you found them useful. If you missed out, you can download them and enjoy them at your convenience (or some other small room in the house).

You can get hold of the resources, and find links to the recordings, here.

Adobe Updater needs your attention

I got another new toy today. Seems to be the season for deliveries and new toys. It is a Motion tablet PC and it is a tiny wonder. I'm going to use it in the labs for marking assessed work with handwritten comments and then uploading them back to Class Server. This is on the back of a Teaching Fellowship which I was awarded last year. (I'm going to set up a blog section all about it when I get round to it).

Anyhoo, the manuals are all on the machine itself, so I fire it up to read them. Of course they are in PDF format. I hate PDFs. Not because the format is a bad one, but because you have to use the Adobe reader to read the documents. This has one of the most malignant update managers I have ever seen. If it fancies doing an update one of its favourite tricks used to be to hide a dialogue box behind all the other programs asking about this, and then cause Internet Explorer to freeze until you realised what had happened and searched the thing out, or reset the machine out of sheer frustration.

Now it has a new trick. Because my machine is shiny new, the reader has two updates to perform. So it installs the first update, calls for a reset of the machine. And then installs the second update. Which also resets the machine.  People, this is a document reader. Not a security manager, missile launch code keeper, or deadly virus which if given free reign would destroy civilisation. Even windows update is nowadays quite reticent about rebooting your machine. And I'm kind of OK about windows doing reboots. It is an operating system. That's its job. But not a dratted document reader.

The good news is that eventually the updates completed and I was able to actually use the machine to read how the machine works.