Paul Foster

My robot life comes full circle

Paulfo — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 20:24:05 GMT

27 years ago (or there abouts) as a young lad, I desperately saved to buy a Heathkit Hero Jr. Hero Jr was the little brother of the Hero 1 (which featured in an American TV serious and got me hooked on robotics). By the time I had enough money to phone Maplin and order a Hero Jr they had discontinued them :-(. This was a major blow to my robotic dreams. I managed a few lowly robots after this, religiously purchased the various early robot magazines but never managed to build a robot with all the features of the Hero range.

27 years later, I saw the White Box Robotics 914 PC Bot. It was still in proto-type and they were looking for 'pioneers' to order the first batch. A risk but also an opportunity. I immediately placed my order.

During the following 12 + months I kept the faith and waited patiently, lapping up any little nugget of information on the device. During this time, the EU passed the RoHS directive, the 914 was assembled in Canada - North American doesn't have similar laws. So even while my 914 was ready for delivery I had to engage the government to find out the detail - could I import my 914 without RoHS certification. After a short delay the response was positive - a personal import was fine.

And now to yesterdays announcement (13th). Heathkit producers of the original Hero 1 and White Box Robotics are in a multi-year strategic agreement under which 'Heathkit will produce, manufacture and distribute an educational version of the robot to be known as the HE-RObot'!!

So full circle, I missed my Hero Jr, got my 914 PC Bot, and now so have Heathkit :-) Wow, the children of our time are going to have some fun.

Read more at Heathkit and White box robotics.

Technorati Tags: Paul Foster, White Box Robotics, 914 PC Bot, Heathkit, Hero 1

Free Play Lounge, GameCity07

Paulfo — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 18:08:00 GMT

We had a great night over in Nottingham at the Bluu bar as part of the Nottingham's GameCity07 festival of gaming. George, Nick and the gang from Rare had done a top job finding the venue and equipping it with over 12 - networked - Xbox 360/Elites for a night of competition gaming - transforming it into the 'Free Play Lounge'.

As soon as we opened the floor we were packed out! It was splendid to see plenty of girls attending too - gaming is not just for blokes you know! Well done to Clare who won herself an Xbox Elite.

Kit and Jam from the UK Fragdolls also joined us for the event and competed in the Perfect Dark Zero team competition.

Shout outs to the three amigos (you know who you are!), Trent Uni Computing Society and the Paladin thief catchers of Derby University!

Cross channel charity swim - update!

Paulfo — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 17:14:00 GMT

Technorati Tags: Cross Channel, Alpha Micro, UK, Air Ambulance

Congratulations to the Microsoft UK Cross Channel Charity swim team. Six brave individuals from Microsoft UK had been training hard for a cross channel swim (Dover to Calais) to raise money for the Thames Valley and Chiltern Air Ambulance Trust.

Well, while I was sleeping in Seattle the intrepid team have successfully completed the swim!

The channel is approx. 18 nautical miles wide but with the swimmers having to go with the current the actual distance swam will be longer. If you look at the map I don't think they could have made it much longer!!

The swimmers were tracked in real-time using a solution by ALPHA MICRO Systems who stepped up to support the team. You can review the team's swim at http://www.amslivetrac.com/ Using Microsoft Virtual Earth to display the action, the Alpha Micro solution accurately captured the time and geographic data plus photos which were delivered to flickr.

Well done to the team and to Alpha Micro Systems for their support. If you haven't yet pledged support for these amazing people, now is the time to do so!

PAVE on MSRS makes DARPA Grand Challenge

Paulfo — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 11:18:05 GMT

Are you watching the DARPA Grand Challenge progress? If not you should be. This is the cutting edge of autonomous vehicle development. There are plenty of exotic tools and technologies coming into play - although more off the shelf parts are now available compared to the first 2004 Grand Challenge when teams had to fabricate so much more.

The DARPA Grand Challenge has been getting tougher and tougher each year. In 2004 it was completing a 142 mile desert course, 2005, a 132 mile desert course in under 10 hours. In 2007 the autonomous vehicles must now demonstrate that they can drive in the urban environment, integrating with the flow of traffic and avoiding obstacles.

There are many really cool things about the Princeton University Urban Challenge Team, not only have they made it as one of the 36 semi-final teams, not only are they all undergraduates, but they are also using Microsoft Robots Studio as their development and execution platform.

Running across their five dual-core servers, 25 MSRS services are controlling the vehicles sensors, actuators and decision logic. This is the largest public demonstration of the MSRS platform I have seen and demonstrates the awesome potential of MSRS which spans Lego robots to autonomous vehicles leading R&D.

The team have a great website here with two videos of their most recent run.

The challenge semi-final - called the Urban Challenge National Qualification Event (NQE) - takes place at Victorville, California on the 26-31 October 2007.

I'm certainly supporting these guys and will be watching them compete in October. Go Princeton!

Yomping for young ones

Paulfo — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 16:15:00 GMT

My On10 blog is getting a bit rusty so I thought I'd better tell you want I did this weekend. I yomped 52 miles. 'Yomped'? Yeah, British Army term for walking over difficult terrain or with a heavy load. Ok so, the terrain I walked wasn't that difficult and I was only carrying a day pack - but I did cover 52 miles in two days walking for 19 hours in total.

Why? To raise money for a local pre-school.

Why is this relevant to a tech site? Because I wrote a nice little app for my Windows Mobile 6 Smart phone that automated the taking of pictures, geo-tagging them from Bluetooth GPS, posted them to my site and displayed them using Virtual Earth on my blog.

The app worked well, the GPRS/EDGE service worked just as well, and the GPS near perfectly. Shame the phone batteries weren't made for the task. I had to manually activate the Phone's GPS comms in the end because keeping the Bluetooth channel open sucked the batteries almost dry in the first 4 hours, and my solar powered Free Loader just couldn't source enough power to recharge my phone.

But, the people at home could watch my progress on my site, and I have a great record of my walk.

We're also on route to raise nearly £4000 for the local pre-school, which is well worth my sore and swollen feet.

Its beta time!

Paulfo — Wed, 30 May 2007 21:01:32 GMT

Three beta announcements today covering Windows Live Writer V2.0 Beta, Windows Live Messenger 8.5 beta and Windows Live Mail beta.

Windows Live Writer has been available since last August as an early beta providing a powerful Windows client for bloggers - but supporting US English only. The Windows Live Writer 2.0 beta includes a stack of new capabilities and improvements based on feedback from the Live discussion forums and support for 8 more languages: UK, Spain, France, Germany, Japanese and Chinese. Taking particular note of support for the Queen's English - so the spell checker now works correctly ;-)

Windows Live Writer is a great Windows client tool with its broad blog server support making the writing of blog entries a breeze even if you are offline. You can have many blog server accounts set up and switch to your target one even when half-way through creating an entry.

A quick list of new features:

New Authoring Capabilities

· Inline spell checking

· Table editing

· Ability to add categories

· Page authoring for WordPress and TypePad

· Support for excerpts and extended entries

· Improved hyperlinking and image insertion

· Paste Special

Tables and spell checking

Adding categories

Integration and Compatibility

· SharePoint 2007 support

· New APIs enabling custom extensions by weblog providers

· Automatic synchronization of local and online edits

· Integration with Windows Live Gallery

· Support for Blogger Labels

Page authoring

Plus...

· New look and feel

· Available in 9 languages

· Improved accessibility and keyboard support

· Many other frequently requested enhancements!

Download it here.

Windows Live Messenger 8.5 gets a new look and feel and some more emoticons plus integration with Windows Live OneCare to provide family safety:

You can set it up so that your techno offspring:
1. Cannot use Messenger -- in the offline world imagine this as not allowing your child to be outside and playing with others unless you are there right beside them at all times.

2. Can use Messenger with no restrictions and you have the ability to monitor the contact list -- in the offline world imagine this as allowing your child to go to the park across the road and you can see who they are playing with by looking out your window.

3. Can use Messenger with some restrictions and can only communicate with the contacts that you approve -- in the offline world imagine this as allowing your child to play in the garden where you control who can join in.

Finally, Windows Live Mail beta. Windows Live Mail is the replacement for Outlook Express, Windows Mail and Windows Live Mail desktop providing a superset of features.

Features include:

Windows Live Hotmail account aggregation.
Additional account aggregation for POP and IMAP mail accounts
RSS feed aggregation
More advanced photo-sharing capabilities
More advanced search via integration with Desktop Search
Additional safety (anti-virus scanning, anti-phishing, anti-spam protection across aggregated accounts for customers who do not have an anti-virus product)
Additional integration with Windows Live services including Spaces

So you have plenty of new stuff to get playing with!

More details here.

Technorati tags: Microsoft, Live, Live Writer

Our bit for Madeleine

Paulfo — Tue, 22 May 2007 19:33:29 GMT

Madeleine McCann disappeared on the 3rd May. The latest Police call is for holidaymakers who were at the resort a few weeks before Madeleine disappeared, to upload their holiday pictures that contain strangers to the web site http://www.madeleine.ceopupload.com. The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre will use face recognition software to search these pictures for known paedophiles - processing about 1000 an hour.

I'm proud to say that four of my colleagues working with Microsoft Partners Lynx Technology and FastHosts built this website literally over this last weekend. My awesome colleagues are William Coleman, Kevin McDaniel, Paul Murphy and Mark Johnston.

Gentlemen I salute you!

Lets hope this effort contributes to Madeleine's safe return to her loving family.

Technorati tags: UK, Madeleine McCann, Microsoft

Competitions galore!

Paulfo — Mon, 21 May 2007 08:42:06 GMT

The XNA UK user group have just launched their first competition! There are three categories one for each of the key skill sets required by modern games: Artist, Musician, Game Dev.

There is a fantastic prize fund of £5000 worth of software and hardware including the latest graphics cards, tablets, XBOX 360s, and specialised products like Sonar 6 and SoftImage XSI - all of which are built to exploit Windows Vista features. Open to UK residents only.

The theme for this years competition is Ocean Odessey. If you are missing one of the key skill sets you can sign up to the user groups 'lonely hearts' forum to advertise your skills or request the skills you need. All part of the user groups goal of bringing the skills to make great games together.

Garage Games XNA development tools and engine are also available for 30 days free trial if you need that 'drag and drop' games development experience to help you enter!!!

To find out more go here.

Digital Lifestyles also report on the Xbox Soundtracks Competition. Here you can download a game trailer, fit your own musical composition to it and up load it again to the site. The gaming public can then vote for the trailer they like the most. See here for more detail.

Technorati tags: Competition, Music, XNA+Games+Studio+Express, Microsoft, Gaming

Robots in the Arctic Circle

Paulfo — Mon, 21 May 2007 08:04:49 GMT

This last week I have been following the adventure of four UK teams taking part in the First LEGO League Open European Championship in Bodo, Norway. It wasn't until I was flicking through the in-fight magazine on my SAS flight that I realised Bodo is inside the Arctic Circle! I could have packed more appropriately :-)

However, the competition was hot, boiling with the enthusiasm of the teams and their supporters. As part of the challenge teams have to build a robot based on the LEGO Mindstorms RCX or NXT kit to complete 8 missions, scoring points for completeness and level of autonomous operation.

The event has been a terrific success with 66 teams from 25 countries taking part. Some of the teams have been able to refine their robot so that they can actually complete the missions 100% almost every time. This is some feat to pull off; I've built the eight mission challenges and will be building my own RCX robot to complete them to experience the challenge for myself, and I can tell you to complete the challenges accurately requires serious thought and creative robot design and programming!

The winning team for the robot competition was Compass from China.

The UK was also well presented in the awards with Widcombe Wrobotiers collecting the Innovative Design Award and the Presentation Award. Awesome stuff team!

Best team name had to be the USA's Super Hyper Quantum Kanagroos followed by China's The Son of the Wind.

You can see pictures and my event blog at http://firsthandtechnology.org.uk

You can also see my robot news and projects at http://www.paulfoster.eu

***First Lego League,Where:Norway,WHO:Paul Foster***

A-GPS SIM - GPS for any cellphone!

Paulfo — Thu, 03 May 2007 11:55:30 GMT

A UK company - BlueSky Positioning - have announced their A-GPS SIM product. This is an assisted GPS product meaning that some level of processing the GPS data is performed off the device, like on a server in the mobile phone operators network. The most amazing thing is that they have the GPS technology including the aerial all shrunk down to fit in a SIM. They claim this means that any legacy GSM and 3G handsets will be able to gain GPS functionality. So no need to upgrade your handset just get a new SIM from your operator.

The product is still in development with a planned July availability for test products. Clearly the device will have to enter mobile operator testing before it will be made available to consumers, but given the combination of low cost effective upgrade to provide the required E-211 and E-911 services plus location based services (LBS) and the off device computing requirement - which presumably will incur mobile operator data rates - means that this is a very attractive way forward for mobile operators. I wish I'd thought of it!

Droid development

Paulfo — Thu, 03 May 2007 08:42:44 GMT

One of my geeky home projects is the development of my PC Bot 914 I call A1-DW. There are a growing number of us around the world that have 914s and we're all working away to enrich them with functionality so they become a must have assistant in this high tech world. A1's project site is here and 914 community site is here but today I wanted to show you one my fellow roboteer's development. Dave Evans has TWO 914s called Samantha and Lily. Samantha is getting all the attention at the moment as Dave is making some great modifications. Below he shows off his latest - the rotating head:

Robotic Speech control

Paulfo — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 08:19:21 GMT

Zeddy, a Microsoft Academic Developer Evangelist in Indonesia, has a nice demo of using Windows speech recognition to remotely control a robot. The application is running on a laptop which controls the bot wirelessly. The voice recognition happens on the PC and the instructions are translated into commands for the robot to execute. The math commands are executed entirely on the laptop.

Video: Zeddy demo's Windows Vista speech recognition to control robot

It is still very hard to achieve remote voice control were an open microphone or array of microphones can pickup voice commands given in the normal domestic or work place. Windows Vista has support for microphone arrays built in, but the focus of this support is for the type of microphone array to be built into laptops.

One of the tremendous benefits of working at Microsoft for a hobbyist like me (see my robotics blog here) , is that I get to discuss my project dreams with people that really know the reality. I was able to ask Ivan Tashev - software architect at MS - about his development of the Windows Vista microphone array technology. Ivan says 'Windows Vista supported microphone arrays work in the zone of +/-50 degrees, while for the robot will be better to have 360 degrees listening zone – something like this.' It was this Microsoft Research (MSR) picture that got me thinking I could do remote voice recognition with A1.

So onto my plan B which is to use a form of wireless headset such as a bluetooth or DECT directly against A1, but again success will depend completely on the quality of the voice transmission. If I can't make this work satisfactorily, plan C is to do the same as Zeddy. Using MSRS you can easily have distributed services aggregated to a single application. So A1 could have all it's drive and sensor services locally, but make use of a remote voice recognition service run from a laptop or PC. My plan C would be to have a UMPC running my voice recognition MSRS service which is aggregated into A1 via the wireless network. This would enable all the voice commands to be processed on the UMPC and just the code commands pushed to A1.

Still, I have navigation to implement before I get here, but I like Zeddy's demo - cool stuff!! Remember voice recognition and speech synthesis are all there in Windows Vista waiting for you :-)

Rocking the world

Paulfo — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 14:54:29 GMT

On my UK blog I have been really upset lately by the poor specification of PC Laptops - specifically the graphics capability. Basically, PC laptops are spec'ed in the main for business use and price is paramount in this world. So the graphics capabilities of these machines are pretty low. Well, how much do you need for email and a spreadsheet?

The truth of the matter, and the reason I'm so worked up about it, is that firstly the PC laptop manufacturers in general, aren't very good at telling consumers how good their products really are. For example, Windows Vista has a feature called the Windows Experience Index which will rate a PC's capabilities across five categories and give the PC the overall score of the lowest category. No PC manufacturer displays the WEI figure for their machines - as far as I've seen. In fact, some of the trendest PC laptop manufacturers don't even publish the graphical spec of their machines - you have to really dig around in their reseller channel material to find them. I think that really sucks, and when Apple are producing MacBook Pro's with the ATI X1600 built in( and clearly showing the spec), it all adds up to suggest my beloved PC platform isn't up to the job. Well actually, Windows Vista is really up for it, its just the PC laptop manufacturers are in the main stuck in the rut of supporting the business world, all dull suits and boring process.

However, I've discovered the PC laptop world isn't as bad as it looks and does have a dedicated crew who really do know how to build laptops. Following a tipoff from a friend I contacted Rock - makers of the Xtreme CTX Pro - and asked what the Windows Experience Index was on such a machine. They pack the Nvidia GeForce Go 7950 GTX with 512Mb of dedicated graphics RAM into this beast so my hopes were high this would be the laptop to rock my world!

And I am not disappointed. As you can see below the Xtreme CTX Pro simply blows the majority (and I mean 99.9%) of PC laptops off the face of this earth! Delivering the highest Windows Experience Index graphics performances I've seen in a laptop to date. Coupled with the Intel Core 2 Duo T7200 @ 2.0 Ghz this machine should be standard issue to all mobile PC enthusiasts.

The best bit - this isn't even the top spec for the Xtreme CTX Pro. There are two more faster processor options available taking you right up to the T7600 @ 2.33Ghz plus the ability to get 3GB of DDR 667MHz RAM.

Without a doubt, this machine with Windows Vista Ultimate is a Mac Book Pro killer. I wish I'd had one when I was working with UK software houses developing Windows Presentation Foundation applications last year rather than the scanky box I'm still lumbered with. Well, I'm definitely over due a machine upgrade and I know which one I'm going to push for. The Xtreme CTX pro (with 3Gb, T7600 and the hi-res WUXGA+ screen upgrade.)

Awesome.

Technorati tags: Rock, Nvidia, Laptop, windows Experience Index, Windows Vista

Animated PhoneThemes

Paulfo — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 11:26:00 GMT

Several years ago I worked with Jim Hunt of PhoneThemes supporting his development of the PhoneThemes Media Player. This allows short video clips or animations to play in a continuous loop, in conjunction with the devices current theme or skin setup.

Now there is quite a library of PhoneThemes to choose from, plus a PhoneThemes Studio toolkit to enable you to create and publish your own themes.

The themes are easily installed on your device. Once you've purchased and downloaded the theme - contained in a CAB file - this is easily installed on the device (you run the 'cab'). Then you switch your device desktop image to the theme and activate the animation. PhoneThemes player connects via GPRS to servers on the Internet to validate the purchase. This is one place where DRM works seemlessly. The PhoneThemes player is included in each theme download in case you don't have it - so one simple download to get it all.

The PhoneThemes player is very well written reacting to the power state changes of your device - so when your backlight goes off it stops playing and using battery.

Robotics final sees teams go international

Paulfo — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 05:39:00 GMT

The UK final for the 2006 First Lego League competition completed recently. The competition is an excellant way for young people to get involved with technology; from researching the technical theme to building and programming a lego robot to complete tasks against the clock.
The teams can be of up to 10 young people aged 9 to 16. As well as competing with their robot the teams have to address three different judging panels on their research project results, teamworking and the experience of building and programming their robot.
Take a look at some of the fantastic robots built by the UK finalists. I love the hammer action 'terminator'!
Find out more about the competition at http://www.firstlegoleague.org/default.aspx?pid=690
And some of the team sites:
Team: Nano Mania http://www.nanomania.org
Team: Gecko Geeks http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/news/2006/FLL_Winners/
Team: Next Generation www.thenxtgeneration.co.uk

ReadyBoost - the song

Paulfo — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 21:18:00 GMT

Video: The NxtGenUG Vista ReadyBoost Song by Dave McMahon

The NextGen user group, in Coventry, UK, had their own celebration for the launch of Windows Vista, 2007 Office System and Exchange 2007. During which members had two minutes to 'sell' to their peers features from these products. Play money was distributed to enable members to 'vote' for their favourite feature. In the attached video, NextGenUG founder Dave McMahon sings a pleasant ditty about Windows Vista's ReadyBoost. See more of their fun here.

Windows Vista Speech Recognition ROCKS!

Paulfo — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 14:32:36 GMT

I just found these little video nuggets (one and two) on the NextGen user groups site. If you want to see a demonstration of Windows Vista's speech recognition in action have a watch, they are each 3mins in length. In the first, Richard uses the speech recognition to write text in Notepad, play Solitaire and surf the web. In the second, he uses the speech recognition to drive Microsoft's Visual Studio development tool to write a simple 'Hello World' application. The second video is interesting because it shows the mouse grid technique for zeroing in on the screen element you want to click.

Can someone tell me - can you do this on a Mac?

U Music gadget

Paulfo — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 21:14:00 GMT

Universal Music have a Windows Vista Sidebar gadget to make it easy for you to listen to your music collection, watch brand new videos and receive up to the minute music news for free! Go here to download the gadget.

Sits nicely like this. Expands to to this >>>>>

***WHO:Universal Music,Where:UK,Gadget,Windows Vista***

British Library's Turning Pages

Paulfo — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 00:57:00 GMT

The launch of a new OS always brings cool applications to demonstrate its capability. For Windows Vista one of the most impressive applications to be demo'ed at the UK launch event was the British Library's Turning Pages application. An application exploiting Windows Presentation Foundation for impressive graphics and animations, and delivered 'through the web' to run directly on your PC. If you have .Net Framework 3.0 installed on XP or are already running Windows Vista, you can go here to run the application on your own machine.

The application makes available books from many hundreds of years ago. Allowing you to browse at leisure Leonardo Da Vini's Codex Arundel, and Codex Leicester together with 14 other books including the original Alice's Adventures Under Ground by Lewis Carroll, and the Northumbria, Anglo-Saxon masterpiece The Lindisfarne Gospels.

Satellite search and rescue: Jim Gray missing at sea

Paulfo — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 14:47:00 GMT

I picked this up via TechCrunch. Jim Gray - famous computer scientist who led research into transaction processing and database development - is missing at sea. The US coast guard has searched for days but gave up after finding no sign of his 40-foot yacht. Amazingly, the DigitalGlobe satellite did a scan of the area producing thousands of images. Amazon has posted these images on it's Amazon Mechanical Turk.

All the images need reviewing - and you can help. See the detail in Mike Arrington's entry. The images are vast and the size of the boat in them is tiny.

Jim always reminded me of Bigfoot from the film 'Bigfoot and the Hendersons'; his warm friendly manner, angular jaw and height fitting with the caring bigfoot character. Hope seems to be fading but as a hobbyist sailor myself, I'm hoping he is still out there.

Layman’s guide to getting Windows Vista

Paulfo — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 22:21:00 GMT

The purpose of this video is to explain Windows Vista to my Mum and Dad, and help them (and others like them) upgrade or buy a new PC with confidence.

The Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor can be found here.

Be warned this is another of my experimental videos :-)

Rare tour and XNA workshop

Paulfo — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 06:02:00 GMT

As part of the UK launch of XNA Games Studio Express, Microsoft Games Studio company Rare ran a series of XNA workshops for academia at the Rare offices. I tagged along to get the tour of Rare and discuss game development with workshop organiser and Rare software engineer Nick Burton.

I've had some fun in this video, tell me what you think. Also, to be clear Grant Kirkhope did most of the music for Viva Pinata with Steve Burke providing supplemental music. To hear Steve Burke’s fantastic music to Kameo, and see the story behind it, visit www.kameosoundtrack.com.

New toys!!

Paulfo — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 16:46:10 GMT

Sorry for the lack of entries over the last couple of weeks. Life is really busy at the moment what with Windows Vista general availability launch activities and NEW TOYS!

Yes more new toys for the Foster household. After over a year of waiting A1-DW my PC-Bot 914 was delivered and after a couple of evenings work over the last few days is now trundling around the Foster home - under remote control at the moment. Autonomous wandering will have to wait for a bit more dev!

I'm blogging about my A1-DW project in a specific blog here

Secondly, and more for work purposes I had some funky new software delivered today. The software is Ultra 2 and has been out for a while. The company that wrote it really deserved its name 'Serious Magic'. It is a shame that they have been snapped up Adobe. Lets hope Adobe invest in them - the technology of Ultra coupled with Adobe Premiere and After Effects will make some great video tools!.

Oops, sorry - what is Ultra 2 you ask? Ultra 2 is a chromakey by software package which means you get awesome Chromakey effects in your videos without the expensive hardware. The software technique also delivers more quality more easily than the hardware solution. The key thing is that another Broadcast technology is made a commodity by the power of software. The hardware solution costs thousands, but Ultra only costs a few hundred.

I splashed out via the VideoGuys web site in the US, paid import duty etc, to get Ultra 2 and the first two of four Virtual Set libraries. These sets are awesome and enable you to place yourself (or your 'talent') in a variety of interesting places.

So, last week I recorded some video of me in front of a green screen (in the hall at home) and today, well hey, I'm in a super high tech control room complete with animated plasmas. :-) super cool. The only prob is I'm still writing the scripts, filming, acting and editing so it all takes some time and well, my scripts are a tad cheesy too. But I think it all adds to the splendor of it.

Look out On10 here I come.

I'm currently finishing a number of video entries I promised from last year - the Rare XNA Workshop and tour among others. I apologise in advanced for the various awesome virtual locations and cheesy scripts!

XNA Games Studio Express UK Launch

Paulfo — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 17:26:00 GMT

Fancy being an Xbox 360 games developer?
A new era of garage computer games development begins with the launch of XNA Games Studio Express. Games for Windows and Xbox 360 can now be built by anyone. The power of the XNA framework and the tools provided is amazing! I attended the UK launch event and caught up with games developer group general manager at Microsoft, Chris Satchell. Chris tells of all the samples to help you get started and the type of games that can now be built plus his dream of a 'YouTube' of community games built using XNA. Developers from Microsoft Games Studio company Rare (developers of Viva Pinata), supported the UK launch with sessions and workshops.
Following the launch event I was lucky enough to attend an XNA workshop held at Rare. A video of my awesome day at Rare to follow shortly.

Le Web 3 blogger's conference gone sour

Paulfo — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 15:55:40 GMT

So yesterday and the first part of today was a good conference experience. Not all the sessions were great (to much self marketing going on) but there were several interesting, thought provoking sessions - Hans Rosling, Ipsos, and Shimon Peres.

Shimon Peres had a great vision for how blogging and the Internet community will change the world, but in attending the conference he made the conference a legitimate target for the French political marketing machine and the conference organisers seemed only to happy to let the conference be exploited.

Since Mr Peres session this morning the conference organisers have allowed two French politicians from different parties to 'present' to the session. And for a conference audience made up form 37 different countries the switch of language preference from the common denominator of English to French was a serious blocker; at least for the second politician they had a translation service to help.

However, most non-french attendees are peeved and feel 'done-over' by the subversion of the conference. In fact, when a very animated games discussion panelist stated this fact the audience cheered! The organisers were so proud of last years bloggers' comments on the conference. Will there be a Le Web 4? Do bloggers care now?