Favourite Error Message of the Day

Now lets all give a round of applause the University Room Booking System….

Update on Tuesday, February 5, 2013 at 12:42PM by Rob

I've been racking my brains as to why you would have a need for such a message. And I think I've found it.

Suppose that you were only allowed to book a particular number of rooms each year. And each time you cancelled a room booking it was taken off your tally for the year. One neat trick would be to cancel the bookings that you have made in the past to reduce your tally and become able to book more rooms than other folks who weren't quite as cunning as you....

If anyone has any better ideas I'd love to hear them.

Rather Useful Seminar on PEGI Game Ratings

We will be having the first in the Semester 2 series of Rather Useful Seminars on Wednesday 6th of February in the usual place (LTD in the Robert Blackburn Building) at the usual time (1:15 pm)

The subject will be of interest to anyone who is distributing creating games that they have made. PEGI (Pan European Game Information) will be here to talk about game ratings and how they are derived. If you are putting games out there for people to play then you should know what content fits into what rating category, and this session will show you how the process works.

3D Printing on Sunday

Peter is building a  3D printer.He fancies a Rostock configuration. He has been doing some design work using OpenScad. Today he brought some designs round and we had a go at printing them. Lessons learnt, rounded corners are hard work. The printer builds objects layer by layer and if the edges are curved it seemed to make it harder to just print the outer layers. Peter was able to rearrange the drawing really easily and we had a go at printing again. The output looks like it might prove the basis of a print head. The next thing to do is print some of the side struts and the carriages that go up and down the pillars.

Password Panic

Seems like my Twitter password, along with 250,000 others has been stolen. Well, not the password as such, but the encrypted version that Twitter store. This is probably not a huge problem for me. When I give my password to Twitter they pass it through a “one way” algorithm that turns it into meaningless gibberish. The idea is that it is very hard (or hopefully impossible) to take the gibberish and turn it back into the super secret phrase that I dreamt up all that time ago.

For me the biggest problem now is that I have to think up a new password. I’ve found that the best way to invent passwords is to think about them a long way away from the computer, maybe when you are doing the vacuuming, and then type them in later. If you can’t remember the password that you thought up a little while ago when doing the living room carpet it is probably not a good choice after all. My present approach, which works for me when a site will let me do it, is to run a bunch of words together. Perhaps “runabunchofwordstogether” would actually make quite a good password. Perhaps not. Anyhoo, I’ve changed my password and can now resume life.

The thing that really worries me about password breaches like this is that they provide a good context for these nasty “Your account has been compromised” emails that spammers send out to try and trick you into logging in to fix your account. Then again, that might be why the steal the names in the first place.

Ex NA

Things you might not know about me. I’m fluent in Algol 68. I know the George III Operating System (and its amazing editor) really well. If you ever need a VMS System Manager, I’m your man. I can write Modular II and Coral 66 programs, use Forth and Turbo Pascal with aplomb and and perform low level programming of the 6522 PIA (Programmable Interface Adapter chip) in 6502 machine code, should you ever need someone to do that.

Of course these skills are pretty much useless these days, as the above technologies are well past their sell by date. The good news, for me at least, is that all of these skills translate into useful ones using today’s technology. I know about operating systems, programming languages and low level interfacing. And although the relentless march of change has forced me to pick up new skills over the years, I’ve never lost sight of the fact that working with computers is just taking a machine that can do stuff and making it useful.

Today Microsoft formally started to pull the shutters on XNA. I was there at the start and I’ve followed the technology ever since. I’ve loved making games with it, and loved what other people have made with it. When Version 4.0 came out I remember thinking that they had put so much into it that the only way was down. My big concern was that they would keep on adding things until it became too complex and cumbersome to be useful.

XNA has done great things for programming and we’ve used it to good effect at Hull for many years. In reality it is not going away, it will still be possible to make XNA programs and distribute them, and the folks at MonoGame will take the XNA torch and carry it on to great things. However XNA will no longer have the seal of Microsoft support. It’s sad that Microsoft have moved on, but I think it was kind of inevitable. From a business point of view I never really understood how it could make a profit for the company, and in these tough times that probably spelt the end for the technology as a Microsoft product.

However, I don’t think that anyone who has built up a skill set in XNA has wasted their time. All games work in fundamentally the same way and all game developers need to address the same problems irrespective of the platform they are using. You just need to take a leaf out of my book (which I’ve had a while) and move the things you have learnt into a shiny new context. Take a look at Unity for some very interesting new directions. And find out more about MonoGame, which I think is wonderful.