Saturday, October 30, 2010 at 08:54PM 
The light today was so good that I could have quite happily spent the entire day taking photographs.
I’ve finally found a camera/lens combination that does justice to the windows in Hull Holy Trinity Church.
pictures Friday, October 29, 2010 at 10:53PM
Harry Overs, one of our second year students, has taken the version of Pong that he wrote for coursework in his first year and made it into a Windows phone game. It is now on the Marketplace for anyone to download. Harry got a free Marketplace membership from Dreamspark.com (any student can do this) and submitted the app a little while back. He did the bulk of the development on the emulator and then just popped into my office and tried the game on my device to make sure that the touch and tilt elements were properly calibrated.
Well done Harry. If you want to check out the game you can find it by searching the Marketplace for Pong HD. Any other Hull students out there with games they want to try on a real device, just drop round to my office and we’ll fire them up.
Note: This doesn’t include the two First Year students who bought the first two HTC HD7 devices in Hull, and stopped me from getting one….
XNA Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 09:58PM I’ve got lots more like these…
Today I finally got around to claiming money for some work that I did ages ago. (Actually, the results of the work have just been published here) . As part of the claims process Microsoft, not unreasonably, likes to see receipts of all the things I bought, including food and bits and bobs. So, I did what I usually do, which is make up a zip archive of all the relevant paperwork and put it on SkyDrive for Microsoft to read. This is not particularly confidential, so I just made a folder, dropped the file into it, emailed the link and thought nothing more of it.
Turns out this was really stupid. I forgot that lots of things out there are watching what I do and then sharing that information with lots of other people, including folks on Facebook. I got a message last night that the file was visible and that Facebook had told all my friends about it. I changed the protection so nobody could see it any more, but of course there are by now thousands of copies of the file out there on the web, and probably even a video on YouTube.
There’s nothing in the file that anyone couldn’t find out about me by doing a simple search of my name (apart from some aspects of my eating habits I guess) but I guess this is a salutary lesson to anyone who uses the cloud on a regular basis that if you want to keep thinks private, you should mark them private. Security through obscurity was never really an option, and with this kind of “auto publicity” it is now even less of one.
Rob
Turns out that this is easy to fix:
No more updates about saved files.
Life Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 09:42PM 
I didn’t actually shout out “Look ‘Thoughtful’ Folks”, but it looks as if I might have done….
Had a great time at the Hull Digital Group meeting tonight. The topic for the night was mobile development. First up was John Connolly who gave a smashing talk on the pitfalls and potential of mobile development.
Then there was me. I gave a “Biased Overview of Windows Phone 7” where I extolled the virtues of the platform and very nearly showed my Windows Phone Twitter reader working. The audience was great, with some lovely discussion and very thoughtful questions at the end. You can find the presentation and code files (including a version of that video game grate “Cheese Lander”) here.
Windows Phone, XNA, development Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 07:57PM 
I’ve spent the day working from home. I got a lot done, but I don’t really recommend it much. There isn’t anyone to talk to. Not that I could have said much if there was. I’ve had this bad throat for a couple of weeks now, and my theory is that if talk a bit less it might get better. We shall see.
Life 
