Jez

Playing with RC1

I've managed to install Vista RC1 on my laptop and it has been running quite well. Within a few days, I've got it set up just as I had it with XP. The power load on the battery appears to be no different to Windows XP. I’m loving the quick searching, especially in outlook. Initially I did have some trouble with the public folders when I copied over all my documents. Copying them over the network was fine, but when I went to copy from public folders to my documents folder it would take forever. Also, in the first few days there appeared to be a lot of unnecessary disk activity, which I assume was Vista indexing everything.

Final Presentations at Vic (Darryl + Nathan)

We were quite lucky to be able to get two great speakers in from Microsoft in one week. First Nathan Mercer came in to talk to students about Windows Vista. He gave quite a nice overview for anyone who hadn't seen Vista before. One of my favourite features that I previously saw Nathan demo at MS Student Day was Vista's voice recognition. The following day Darryl Burling came to talk about the future of web development. These were great presentations to be a part of, and I hope next year's Student Partner + students will get similar opportunities.

Job Hunting

If you've heard of Google's summer of code, then you know the sort of job I'm going for this summer. A Wellington company CreativeHQ is a 'company incubator' that helps start-up companies work together to share knowledge. They have 5-7 positions available at some of the companies there. It looks to be the perfect opportunity to fast track my skills and learning about industry. Paid too. :)

XBOX
I think this new newbie developers kit for XBOX360 will be great. I'll definately be having a go of that one when (and if) I get my hands on a 360. It will definitely get people coming up with some great stuff, which I think will in turn help boost the 360's game quality and number of developers:

Quote (PaulLo)

How cool! Develop your own games for XBOX360

Starting this month Microsoft is offering a professional tool to develop games and share with others online via XBOX Live. It is called XNA Game Studio Express which will run on Vista (XP also) and costs around USD$99.00 for an annual subscription. How cool!

Check out more at - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4789809.stm

I recently went to the Wellington connect06 Vista and Office Technical demonstration day at the Intercontinental hotel. It was cool being able to understand a bit better than last time.

Jeremy Boyd showcased some Vista stuff that I had not seen before, and showed off some impressive WinFX technology. I may be doing a presentation on WinFX later in the year.

Xiangs Atlas/Vista presentation went quite well. There wasn’t a very huge turnout, and the huge lecture theatre made it seem like even less. Next time I’ll make sure we get a smaller room. I gave some administrative information, and then introduced her. Towards the end students started to catch on that if they asked questions, they would get a prize

Wow, this is my first time programming in a group. We have had a meeting, where we managed to tackle the core of the game that we are creating. We also set up a forum to share ideas and info over the net. The game is an adventure game, where each room is viewable from four different angles. We’ve decided to model our world in blender3d and create renders from four angles in each room. There was a bit of conflict about how to set out the rooms. The original prevailing idea was that each room would connect in a linked object structure. I couldn’t part with my idea of having the entire map inside a 2d array, with ‘null’ rooms where you couldn’t go to. This meant that there would be less effort in the connecting of rooms and creating maps. So we went with the 2d array idea. Fun J.

We will be using Subversion to bring all of our work together, just as soon as our repository is set up.

This week is a busy and exciting week, with the Office+Vista technical training sessions on Thursday, then there’s Xiang’s presentation on Friday, also the usual assignments etc. I’ve also agreed to drum for my mate for a talent quest, that has heats on Saturday, so will be having at least one practice this week for that too.

The Microsoft guys did a great job with the presentations at Victoria last week. There were good turnouts at all the sessions. I had a lot of student showing interest in the MSDNAA program and am still getting people asking. It's good that students are finding out about the program and taking advantage of it.

I am enjoying having a laptop. It's great for using on the train, and anywhere there's a bit of time to do some work [I'm actually typing this on the train]. Woosh internet should be good once we get it. I've found the university's wireless connection to be quite unreliable.

I'm quite excited about the launch of the xbox360. I've had a few goes of the console in the Gamesman store. There was also a dvd playing of an upcoming title, Elder Scrolls IV : Oblivian, and the graphics look phenomenal.  One thing that I thought was specifically stunning is they way the vast forests are procedurally generated...and these forests are rich and amazing. Ah, such a geek :p.

http://www.paparra.net/imatges/posts/oblivion2.jpg

A bit about my subjects at university:

Comp203 is probably my hardest subject at the moment. It focuses on low level operations of the computer. How the cpu works, all about assembly language, registers etc etc. I think if I just stay on top of / one step ahead in this subject, then I'll be fine.

Comp205 is about object orientated programming and design. I just handed in my first assignment today. It wasn't too hard, just the UML sequence diagrams.

Info241 focuses on databases using SQL and Microsoft Access. It's been fairly simple so far, but is gradually getting better. I'd say my computer science background has been a big help in this subject.