Carl's Blog

On Thursday 10th May, I was asked to present a small talk on android development. I have not been coding android for very long, but I had learned enough to get background services working and activities not popping up where they should be. The slides won’t be as complete without my talk, but they should get the idea across.

The following is a very light overview of the tools at your disposal:

I’ve been slowly writing up a skills bank for the Lancaster Award and while finding something for organisation I came across the old working documents for a viral marketing campaign I ran in my first intro week as president of the Computing Society.

I was trying to attract more people to the academic side so I made a simple challenge that went up on posters around campus. The poster that was put up can be found here.

This led to a landing page which sadly is no longer available at the original URL as I no longer control the domain, however I have put it back up here (for those who wish to give the challenge a go, change the domain for http://cslu.co.uk to http://109.74.204.44).

I think overall we had 5 people email in and solve it, which wasn’t very many – but I remember there was a lot of talk wondering what the posters were about, and as they had our logo on them a fair amount of people turned up to the first meeting.

I think if I was to do it again, I wouldn’t say which society it was (there is still a lot of social stigma attached to computing societies) but would just put the date, time, and venue of the first meeting. A few different levels of challenge with prizes would be better too. The challenge was very easy and would fall very quickly when put up against the internet, but a university has a different make-up of population and not everyone who could easily solve mental challenges may want to do so at intro week.

It was quite exciting seeing the posters scattered everywhere though.

The solution to the Fountain code challenge is up on my Github page at https://github.com/carl-ellis/Fountain .

Thank to all who attempted the challenge!

C