While i haven't been the most avid of bloggers here i've decided to try out spaces for my personal blog and see what it's like.

Which you can find: http://spaces.msn.com/asterland/

Enjoy!

Well it’s been a busy week, spent the last two days in London for job interviews. O, what joys – 8 hours of travelling to be grilled for a day. To be fair the interview was good, in fact it was the best I had so far. Not in terms of how I did but how it was setup. I got interviewed by technical people, woot! So no silly HR questions like “Give an example of how you have responded to change”. The interview seemed to go ok but I could of done miles better on the C++ questions but alas my C++ is not that good I’m such a .NET peep. Apart from that things have just been busy but at least while I was in London I had the somewhat dubious pleasure of experiencing a fire alarm in a hotel, luckily not too late.

 

But I am left pondering the why the first thought that went through my head when I heard the alarm was “O, god have I done something wrong?”.

I should *really* blog more, perhaps I just need a more interesting life! Well fortunately my life just got much more interesting.

 

Myself, Tom Randell and James Lissiak entered this years Imagine Cup Software Design Challenge as team Three Pair with an idea to help people in hospitals. Which was inspired after a meeting with a fantastic man; Dr Paul Dark who lectures in medicine and helps out on the ICU wards. It was an experience seeing ICU and getting a tiny bit of understanding about the patients and the healing process they go through, but what was really inspiring was all the ideas Paul had for ways in which technology could help the patients and how he felt so much more could be done. So we went away and toyed with the idea and wrote it up knocked up some prototypes and presented back to him where we got some great feedback which we incorporated into our idea. I still can’t believe how different real medicine is from what you see on TV, mind due computers are just as badly portrayed – so maybe TV portrays nothing accurately!

 

So we submitted our entry to the IC with fingers crossed and were fortunate enough to be chosen to go through to the final along with 9 others to present out poster to the judges. So fast forward to last Friday we were all milling around waiting for our term and after talking to some people at the expo about our idea it bevcame clear that our finely ;) rehearsed presentation wouldn’t cut it. So we rejigged it and decided to play it as it goes…

 

It paid off!

 

We got through to the final 3 teams J

 

Now we had an hour to prepare for the 10min long presentation, so off we scurried off to our room and rehased the presentation we had chopped bits around and final decided to go for it.

 

As we were up first I was a bit nervous – hoping the judges would remember us! So all mic’ed up we went to present, it’s always hard to say how presentations go when your part of them but I gotta say James & Tom did a kick ass job. From Tom banging his head on the table before hand to delvering a very relaxed pitch to James delvering a pitch we hcanged not 10 mins before. J.

 

So….

 

Where did we come…

 

There’s no easy way to say this….

 

We came first!

 

Woot!!!!!

 

Still can’t believe it.

 

Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve blogged. Truth be told I’m just one these people who lack the will power to do pretty much anything regularly unless I have a deadline or someone beating a drum..

Anyhow, a lot’s changed since TechEd, i've left Microsoft and I’m now back at Uni doing my final year and helping out with this MSP (Microsoft Student Partner) madness, but I’ll leave others to blog about that  (if you’re interested check out RobMiles or TJRandell blogs).

The burning question on my mind is: What next?

Do I go get a job and face reality or do I hang around academia till I’m old an cynical?

Any way more in the next post – short & sweet for now I think.

Well it's a Friday and in the scary world i find myself back in Amsterdam at TechEd Europe  just as i was this time last year - no I’m not here to spend time looking at red lights and shop windows. Nor am i here to present in front of more people then you could conceivable shake a stick out. Nope instead I’m backstage working away (or at the moment desperately trying to consume enough caffeine to sustain me).

So why am i here? Well i thought it be a great experience working with the team that set up a huge network (5,000 odd users 1,200 fixed PCs) so I’m spending my time with the wireless team here who have about 1,200 concurrent users during the day and upteen 1,000 unique devices over the week.

It's been fun from setting up and learning how to deploy such a complicated gig with over a 100 access points to chasing down people with viruses on their PCs who promptly get blocked from network and chased down and helped. Scared a few people so far after all big guys with radios looking at you with intent can't be a nice feeling.

One thing though, I’m still convinced it's all one big experiment in sleep deprivation my average day goes like:
06:50- Wake Up
07:20 - Time to head to the venue
07:35 - Breakfast
08:00 - Work Starts 
(which varies from sitting around watching the monitoring stations to running around in a blind semi structured radio fuelled panic)
13:00 - Lunch
13:30 - Back to Work
19:00 - Tea
19:30 - Back to work
20:30-11:00 Any time between there is a good time to finish
11:00-02:00 - Party Time! :-)

Well, it's over - at least this part is.

For those that don't know me and read my blog (?) my team run the UK part of the Imagine Cup which is  worldwide software development student competition (www.imaginecup.co.uk) myself and Mark Johnston have spent the last few months working with the teams trying to motivate and support them into building some apps that really deliver on their ideas.

And man has it been a great experience it's amazing too see how much effort goes into the applications, even at 4:00 in the morning :-).

So, the UK finals were held last Tuesday in the BT tower in London, man there are some fantastic views from the 34th floor almost as interesting as the contestant apps ;-). After a long morning of judging the winners were announced team BitShifters (BBC article: http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4118422.stm). Needless to say that had some serious competition with Genesys coming 2nd and mSpace 3rd all of which had some slick looking apps - still can't get over mSpace's "fish eye lens" effect or Genesys rather cool video. The sad part and why the blog has a :-( in the title is that all the teams that got to the final 8 deserve recognition they all did some amazing work - even if it kept me up till 4:00 in the morning the night (rather morning) before. So now I’m going to be all teary eyed that the UK part is over.

I just hope that all the teams take on their ideas and run with them, there is still some fantastic opportunities out there.

But, once again congratulations too all the teams on doing a fantastic job, now to find some pictures from the party to blog about ;-).

And yes i know it looks almost corporate to start blogging here again, i got led astray by the MSN Messenger integration of MSN Spaces, so now to a future of cross blogging... :-)

It seems I’ve yet to blog about Red Nose day in Hull.

Well firstly the mammoth treck to Hull was not only to meet some of the (many) Hull Imagine Cup teams but also for a good cause - Red Nose Day (which is essentially a huge nationwide charity appeal) so being a good corporate citizen Microsoft donated some software to be auctioned off for charity during Rob Miles somewhat legendry lecture in rhyme - which is quite a spectacle and always results in hysterics! Hopefully a video will be uploaded so you can see Rob in action! In the end we managed to raise over £500 for charity thanks to all the people who donated!

I should write more but I’m just getting back into the swing of blogging.

Well, i've had a busy few weeks on the road crusing up & down the UK visiting Universities, one thing that i've really learnt this year is just how in the back end of no where Hull is, trains take forever to get here and there is no flighrts to anywhere near here - it really is the back end of no where.

Anyhow,

Had a busy time going over the Imagine Cup overview documents for the software desgin challenge in the UK, and i can say this now: we are going to give some of the other countires a run for their money :-)

Ah well back to Reading tommorow - will  be strage haven't been the office for almost two weeks.

Will find ometing interesting to blog about next time!

It's been a long time coming, but it;s finally here......

A embedded chip that runs the .net CLR!!

Woot!

Now i can make cool embedded apps in C# :-)

Which to me is pretty damn sweet!  Yes i'm one of those sad mobile/embedded geeks!

If only it wasn't North America only!! D'oh!

o check it out here.

Am seeing if i can find out how i can get a dev board mmmm drool.

Well it’s been a long time since I’ve bloged, too long in fact.

 

So now as if to pay penance I am going to shamelessly embarrass myself in front of the whole internet and post probably the best amateur video since Blair Witch ;) well almost.

 

Assembled from a caste of fine evangelists who in the name of team building were armed with a digital camera and a mission to create Lord of the Rings for people with a very, very short attention span.

 

If I haven’t scared you off already you can download the video here.

Well had some great news :-). I've managed to get a short article published in the UK MSDN Flash (MSDN (UK) Flash is a news letter sent out from Microsoft to about 45,000 developers) the article was about an app i wrote that allows you to search amazon for prices of books, dvds, music etc from a smartphone. So now everyone can check the prices of a book while there in a high street shop and not suffer endless scrolling! :-)Just so you can supress the urge to spend money when you can save online (most of the time anyway). Anyhow you can sign up for the UK MSDN flash here it's a great newsletter with loads of usefull tips and links for all your dev needs.

If anyone is looking for the source code or exe for the app its here. Please note that it is still a beta'esque app and isn't supported and is very much something i did in my spare time so it isn't code signed at all :-) But i'll be happy to answer questions. Enjoy!

 PS: It isn't going out to monday (25/10)!

[Edit]
Should apologise for the code some more, it's a small app and didn't take long to write (3hrs) so forgive it, it also includes my amazon dev id which is free and anyone can apply for it so i didn't go to any extreme lengths to hide it.

Guess i should blog really!

Begining to think i have a serious lack of will power when it comes to blogging.

Anyhow to get back on track.

Been busy coding a one-click hosting solution for Project Hurricane (Still!). Should be up by the end of the week :-). If i don't destroy the server while deploying it!

Went up to Hull last week, to give a talk on Web Services and meet with faculty. (un)Luckly i had only the demo to do for the presnetation. Unfortunatley we had only just decided what the demo would be on 10mins before hand! And i managed to make a mistake returning a simple string array, D'oh!!!!!

Ah well.

On to finding some Computer Socities. So if your'e in the UK and at University with a ComSoc drop us a line/comment!

Well it’s been an amazing last few weeks for me I’ve been insanely busy helping to organise and deliver labs on C# as well my normal dev work, which for me is fantastic :-) afterall if I wasn’t busy I’d bored!

 

So to skip out most of the last few weeks and move onto last Wednesday when I went up to Microsoft Research in Cambridge to attend a two-day workshop on CE 5.0 and XPEmbedded both run by Mike Hall (great guy & great lab, read his blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/mikehall)  both these OS’s are embedded and do some pretty funky things considering their footprint, but for me though seeing Win CE in action and building simple device drivers was just amazing and the tools that come with Platform Builder & EmbeddedC++ are just amazing all the theory I’d done on processor architecture and low level work became clear like crystal by using the remote monitoring tools and watching the kernel load process and how interrupts were actually handled, as opposed to how it is taught, was a damn good learning experience – now how geekish is that!! Was a great insight writing applications and then tracing back into the OS source code (CE source code ships with the product) and tracking errors. We also wrote a quick scribbling application both in Embedded C++ & C#, of course the C# took a *lot* less time to write! But it was good to see how little performance loss there is using C# the biggest hit being the 1.5mb Compact Framework foot print. All round a two days well spent in fact this kinda thing is what i had hoped i would learn in Univeristy.

 

 

Been a while since i last blogged, hmm becoming a habbit that!

Anyhow, not really much to talk about, work is going well nothing exciting, well nothing i should post in a public blog any how. Suffice to say the Imagine Cup UK build-up is under way for this year, though the compo itself is a while off! Will be a great one this year since the motto always seems to be bigger n better than the year before! (Though it's interesting to see how you can keep that up for say 20 years!).

Work on a project hurricane expansion, that frankly kicks ass, is now under way with the first milestone set for this friday! (eek).

N is it me or has the weather around here gone mad? It even cut off our power for a night, o the fun to be had sitting in the dark...

Well thought since this is meant to be a technology blog, i might as well blog about tech!

So today were going to talk about one of my pet hates in Word; Version markup, that's when word keeps track of all the changes you've or others have made so that you can see how the document has been altered. This is a great feature when used how it's meant to be i.e when your editing the document. When it comes to publishing it thu, and this is my pet hate, you should scrub those revision info!!! Why? Because as part of the reading view in Word you get to see all those lovely mistakes you made and corrected it doesn't look good at all, and it can be rather embarssing! So go download a meta tag scrubber from here tis free and looks good! (i think there is one in office but i've not used it)