Between the Ears

Well, another nail in the HD DVD coffin... Best Buy announced their preference for Blu-Ray; they're not totally dropping HD DVD, but they are advocating Blu Ray to consumers. Also, Netflix dropped HD DVD support (i'll have to drop my subscription, i guess, to show dissatisfaction with their choice, even if temporarily...) in favor of Blu-Ray.

What can i say... I'm quite disappointed that it's going this route, and only hope Microsoft releases a Blu-Ray add-on drive for Xbox 360 soon!

GRRRR 2.

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February 02

High-Dev DVD - a real GRRRRR

Aside from wanting to give Sony Blu-Ray royalties, why would anyone back BR DVDs? I guess i'll have to go do some more research, but it seems silly to back a format that requires a complete revamp of current manufacturing processes, have a more expensive licensing scheme, and have dubious technological advantage (say, 50GB vs 45GB)? I'm guessing this has more to do w/ knee-jerk reaction to all the craziness around DRM (and music/video downloads), since Sony's BR DRM apparently includes more copy-protection than HD-DVD...

Needless to say, i'm quite upset that Warner Bros decided to drop HDDVD support altogether in favor of Blu-Ray. Seems like some serious strongarming has been happening behind the scenes... I'm just glad the Matrix trilogy is out on HD DVD already.

Anyway, i hope all content producers support both formats for the next few years, until all those who have invested in one technology or the other will have gotten some value out of their acquisitions.

And yes, i will buy a Blu-Ray player at some point; sooner than later, if Xbox 360 gets one as an accessry...

Grrrrr.

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November 09

Office Live frustrations

I've been working with Microsoft Office Live a bit - trying to, anyhow - and have discovered there are a couple of areas that, while sounding great on the surface, have some limiting "gotchas" that make them much less interesting than they otherwise should be:

Sounds Great!	Gotcha:
Share data between private site (business back-end) and public site (front end for visitors)	Can only share if you're using the built-in page editor (no 3rd party editor can use this feature, to my knowledge) Only one view of a data list can be shared (a view can define a filter of the items in the list, for example, or sort things in a particular way, and so on) No front-end filtering of data views, so you're stuck with what you define on the back-end (and you can have only one filter of the list, remember) the whole sharing model is pretty clumsy at this point. MS admits that it's a "v1" release, so we'll see if it improves in the future. Ideally, sharing should have a Basic (as it's currently implemented) and Advanced (doesn't exist yet) modes. Advanced mode could simply specify "Anonymous" access to a list, and let the developer figure out what to do with that.
Use your own web design tool to create your site	If you want to use FrontPage or SharePoint Designer, using Microsoft Office Live isn't really an advangate as there are no FrontPage extensions enabled on the public web site. FPEs make it very easy to design fairly complicated sites using web components and the like, so without it, you're limited to basic HTML (bleh ) and JavaScript (that's cool, but not for beginners). This makes it impossible to migrate existing FP-based sites into the MOL environment without major rework. No server-side code. I understand the rationale behind this, but it's a pretty limiting thing and makes the offering less attractive to partners who would like to use MOL as a platform, for example... Front-end site and back-end sites are on different domains, making client-side XmlHttpRequest calls to the back-end (as a workaround to the first issue) impossible. In a typical WSS hosting scenario, this is not a problem!

I'm curious to see how Microsoft Office Live evolves, because while on their own the public site and the private back-end are interesting enough, the integration between the two is what could turn it into something exceptional...

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November 07

Automate Web Site Publishing to Office Live from Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2007

According to Microsoft, Office Live does not support automated publishing of web content from Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2007 - once you activate the "Third Party Web Editor" feature, you get a web folder link on your Office Live site, into which, once opened, you're supposed to drag-and-drop your site files. Not that big of a deal, but less than ideal since it adds an extra step... While this might not be a great mystery, i did find a way to automate the publishing process from Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2007 (the same process should work from FrontPage also):

Open your local site
Go to Remote Site Properties
Select File System
Enter the following in the Remote Site location field:
- \\[yourlivedomainname.tld]@SSL\DavWWWRoot\[site location]
- (replace [yourlivedomainname.tld] with your domain name, and [site location] with the subfolder where you want your files published)
Click on OK

You should be prompted for a sign in (use your OL sign in), and the remote web site should open up! all you have to do now is click Publish Web Site to copy your site files... sweet.

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August 02

A Robot in every home

Nice article on Microsoft Robotics Studio & the effort in general:

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/aug07/5391

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June 09

BBC story: Wireless energy promise powers up

Another one of those "Future" technologies that'll take us to the next level...

** Wireless energy promise powers up **
US researchers demonstrate a system to transfer energy to devices without the need for wires.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/2/hi/technology/6725955.stm

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June 01

Rock on: Microsoft Milan - i hope Pottery Barn's listening, 'cause i want my coffee table to be just like that

Ok, so this is related to previous post, and is the actual implementation of the concepts provided in the MS Research document. It is very, very, very, very - did i mention very? - cool. If Pottery Barn comes out with one of these in their Espresso finish, i'll be buying one.

Can you just imagine, for example, a completely new type of games that blend the physical (trains, for example, or cars) and the virtual (sets, people, stories)? or a game of chess, Star Wars style? I'm sure there's other more 'PC-like' (or as the Mac-fans prefer to say 'boring') features out there that will totally blow someone away, but i'm just excited that i could probably use it to auto-order more beer right @ the coffee table

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/hardware/soa/Microsoft-hopes-Milan-table-PC-has-magic-touch/0,130061702,339277977,00.htm

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Play chess like they did in Star Wars? You know, the holo- pieces and all?

This is pretty cool - if you can get through the boring stuff... I only skimmed it, but it looks like the Future is slowly getting here...

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http://research.microsoft.com/~awilson/papers/Wilson%20PlayAnywhere%20UIST%202005.pdf

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May 14

Talking about Report: Microsoft says open source violates 235 patents | Tech News on ZDNet

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Report: Microsoft says open source violates 235 patents | Tech News on ZDNet

This indirectly supports what i said about Open Source in an earlier blog - specifically, it's interesting that the companies that do provide some rights (rather than enforcing patents) are the same ones that stand to profit the most from commoditization of software.

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April 18

B# .NET Blog : Killing a Windows Service that seems to hang on "Stopping"

This is one of those things that make me go "damn, i should have known that!". But, i didn't. At least i didn't think far enough....

Anyway, the link below will take you to a very useful tip on how to end a misbehaving Windows Service. Great if you're running beta software, creating your own services, or run into a situation where rebooting a machine because of a Windows Service is just not an option...

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