Community: January 2008 Archives

This morning we had a three hour logistic planning meeting for Robocode 08 and XNA 08 and Schoolbots 08 which will take place in Tipperary Institute on March 13th 2008. It is our 5th year running Robocode, our second year running Schoolbots and our first year running XNA. I reckon that if I ever retire from this job I will setup an event management company and specilaise in organising Rock Concerts and Tech conferences :-) I will have to take some people from some of the other depts with me, who help us out every year.

Every year we try to up the ante and introduce something new, this year is no exception. We are looking forward to the arrival of ten secondary schools to compete in School Bots as well as most of the third levels who will take part in either Robocode, XNA or both.

I am looking forward to the event and hopefully all the frantic email and phone calls that are taking place now will make the day an enjoyable experience for all attendees.

I have developed several tutorials for the 2nd robocode schoolbots challenge. Three of these tutorials are in pdf format..

Lesson 1 - How to build a robot
Lesson 2 - How to improve the robots targeting
Lesson 3 - How to improve the robots movement

There are also several youtube clips online that discuss tactics and strategy. They can be found here

The following is one of the clips I developed.

If you received a mobile phone as a christmas gift and it was bought in the carphone warehouse, you have until Jan 31st 2008 to claim up to 20 euros of a trade in voucher.

You will need to bring the receipt the old phone, its charger and its manual. We attempted to do this yesterday and it took over 1 hour for carphone warehouse to carry out this process. The first 55 minutes was spent trying to convince the staff in the Thurles branch and head office that this offer existed.

We knew that we saw the offer in one of their supplements before christmas but the staff in both Thurles and head office knew nothing about it. We eventually tracked down the offer which is on page 13 of the christmas supplement guide. Head office refused to believe the Thurles office as head office did not have this supplement. The Thurles office had to fax the page to head office before head office would issue my wife the 20 euro trade in voucher.

We received no apology.

So please request your trade in voucher as it may remind the carphone warehouse that the customer comes first. You have until Jan 31st 2008.

2008 has started with an enormous workload between BT young scientist, robocode schoolbots and XNA we are going to be run of our feet in Tipperary Institute in both Thurles and Clonmel. I have already increased by caffeine intake.

I am however looking forward to these events and working with schools, startup companies and research centres.