Monday 28 January 2008

Inspiration Tour Online

So as everyone is probably aware Microsoft's Inspiration Tour is taking the country by storm, giving some great student focused tech talks all across the country.


Now, for all of those you who were unfortunate enough not to have the Inspiration Tour stop by at your uni or those who couldn't make it to your local event the Inspiration Tour has been recorded and is avaliable to watch online at Channel 8.





Microsoft Inspiration Tour; Part 1 – Introduction to new Technology



I found this great link via the Ed Dunhill's Blog, which is always a great place to pick up information relevent to students and academics.

Imagine Cup Round 2

Resolve, Evolve, Solve have just recived the following email:

Dear Software Design competitor,

The judging has happened and we are very pleased to confirm you have been successful in getting through to the next stage of the Software Design category of the Imagine Cup!


The email comes after weeks of hard work and dedication from Ben Nunney, Matt Duffin and myself on our Imagine Cup entry, and brings a great sense of pride to recive achnowledgement that we have got through to the next round.

Round 2 of the UK Software Design Invitational is the Innovation Accelorator, whereby our team will venture down to Microsoft Reading for a day full of training and coding to get the entry up and running.
As RES is made up of highly motivated and dedicated students we are trying to work on our entry continually up until the Innovation Accelorator so that we can at least have an idea of the direction we need to be heading and the topics we need to focus working on.

As always the ability to go and hang out in my old stamping ground of Reading is always well recived and with the added benifit of some great training from MS I cannot wait.

Ok, so this news is a little overdue but with the crazy university schedule I've had no chance to post many blogs at all.

Fishticuffs

When reading through a back log of blogs on my RSS feed I found this great game on Mike Taulty's Blog.

The game is called Fishticuffs and allows you do what you always wanted to do ... slap your mates around with a fish.

Fishticuffs is a Live Messenger based game and allows you to turn any of your online contacts into fish bait. Simply load up the games web page http://www.fishticuffs.co.uk/ and click play. This give a list of your online contact and bam ready for some fighting!

Whats really cool is that you can also add a Fisticuffs app. to your facebook page, allowing you not only to slap around your mates but rub their noses in the fact that your better than them!

Check it out: http://www.fishticuffs.co.uk/

P.S.

Did you hear about the fight at the chippy?

Well a fish got battered!!!! (LMAO)

Thursday 24 January 2008

Inspiration Tour

Last year the Inspiration Tour kicked off and the first stop on tour was Manchester, however this initial outing was a little rocky due to some technical difficulties.


However the Inspiration Tour come back to Manchester Met with Ben Coley as the one man whilwind, presenting, gaming and coding after he has lost his wingman Ed Dunhil to sickness.





The Inspiration Tour covered Microsofts latest and greatest technologies ranging from the brower busting Silverlight, Windows Embedded, Popfly and the gamers fravourite XNA .



Starting out Ben showed why many are heralding Silverlight as "the Flash Killer", delivering HD video through the browser, quickly cooking up an app using Blend, and giving us an insight into your fravourite "Silverlight Airlines".

Silverlight is a great technology and with forthcoming release of Silverlight 2.0 (formerly 1.1) later in the year what better time than to start learning. Silverlight 2.0 will allow the development with .NET code within Silverlight along with the eagerly awaited control which will make creating a great app that much easier.



Windows Embedded went on to showcase that Windows is not just a PC OS but can be used on a number of different platforms and even in your parents washing machine. Using the Embedded development platform Ben showed us how easy it was to create an application for your Windows mobile phone. If I had on of these new fangled phones I would be pimping it out with a range of home made applications.



Popfly, a development enviroment for your mum, Ben showed off how simple it is to create a Flicker/Virtual Earth mashup creating a usable application in around 6 clicks of his Microsoft mouse.

Popfly is such a user friendly IDE that no programming knowledge is required, just use the provided blocks to wow other with your sophisticated apps. This block structure makes learning a sites API a thing of the past, now what would of taken you days to create can simply be done in a matter of seconds (bar the having to register with Flickr).



The grand finalae of the event was XNA, with a bevvy of brilliant but somewhat disturbing games demenstrating the power some of the great games that have bee developed using XNA. Not to mention the 1-on-1 shoot out between two spaceships,



Overall MMU's Inspiration Tour was an excellent event, some excellent content leaving me wising I had more time on my hands to learn all this great stuff.

MSP Live Meeting

Last night the world held it's breath as it basked in the glory of the first UK MSP Live Meeting!!

The Live Meeting was some what chaotic to start with multiple people signing in and the ocasional confused call of " ... hello? .... Can you hear me? ...." Which always seem to make me laugh as if nobody could hear you how would they respond?

The meeting was brilliant, it was good seeing Mo, Anna-Liza and Mark via video call and provided a good chance to catch up with all of the MSPs. As part of the Live Meeting various topics were discussed concerning what the MSPs will be doing in the coming months, some of which is still a bit hush hush so I can't be telling all. :-D

However the official Launch of Visual Studio 2008 will be high on the priority list for this term, and events will be based around this launch in March. Check out the heroes comunity for more info on the launch and events surrounding it.

Another aspect of the meeting was overcoming the phantom typist, who must be setting a new world record for the force at which any mortal can hammer on a keyboard! The Phatom continually typed over the meeting and I must admit got a little annoying. Apart from that the usual meeting banter happened, phonecalls, road noises, disconnections, reconnections and my fravourite moment when Ben Nunney and myself hijacked the meeting to broadcast our very own pirate propoganda messages. (all in the name of good old fashioned fun) :p

After the events of the meeting Mark found this video which totally sums up the Live Meeting experience.


Video: Conference Calls

I think someone should draw up some Live Meeting eticete, so that such situations are avoided.

Tuesday 15 January 2008

Xbox live gamertag

I have recently got an Xbox 360, and have decided to add my gamertag to my blog. This can be seen in the right side of the page and displays my gamer statistics and games played.

To display your own gamertag in your blog or web page just simply include the following code:

<iframe src="http://gamercard.xbox.com/REPLACE-THIS-WITH-YOUR-GAMERTAG.card" scrolling="no" frameBorder="0" height="140" width="204">Put your gamertag here too.</iframe>

Where your gamertag is put in at the obvious places.

Revolve Evolve Solve

Resolve Evolve Solve, is a distributed team of students consisting of Ben Nunney, Matt Duffin and myself who are working together on an Imagine Cup entry.
We have this past week completed and submitted our first round entry and are eagerly awaiting to see wheter our hard work has paid off.
So what better thing to do whilst we wait than develope a web site for our team and entry!!

Much of the site is still under construction at this time, however go check it out and get a feel of the creative genious that is Resolve Evolve Solve.