Teknologika

I use a GPS when I go sailing to record and analyse my performance. It’s a cheap as chips Garmin eTrex, and to download the tracks I use the GPS Track Download application created by Microsoft research for the World Wide Media exchange project.

I recently reinstalled Vista on my new machine and trying to down load the GPS track-log, the application kept crashing. To solve this problem I turned to process monitor. Process monitor replaced file monitor and quickly showed that the app tries to download to a default, hard coded directory c:\My Documents that didn’t exist then boom, no error was shown and the application crashed. A classic Severity 1 issue.

To stop the application crashing you simply need to create this directory, but it also shows that when writing an application you should never hard-code file paths. The application should have prompted if it’s default directory was not found and ask for the user to specify one.

Windows Media Center has been our primary method of recording TV for a while. We finally decided to bite the bullet and build a custom machine instead of using my laptop all the time here are the ingredients:

1. An existing HD TV that supports optical and HDMI inputs.
2. A Mac Mini. The small form factor makes it ideal for placement in the lounge room. Now that Leopard has shipped, it comes with boot camp installed which allows me to easily dual boot. Buy at www.apple.com.au. I went with the more expensive one, so I could burn DVD’s.
3. A Lacie Mini Hard drive and hub 500GB in capacity. http://www.lacie.com/au/products/product.htm?pid=10727 (A cheaper option would be to replace the internal drive with a larger one)
4. A copy of Vista Home Premium or Ultimate.
5. A DVI to HDMI cable. I got mine at Myer for $89, JB Hifi sell one as well, but there’s was $100+. (A cheaper option is to use the mini’s S-video out)
6. A mini to Toslink optical cable - http://www.musicway.com.au/catalogue/musicway_listcatalogue_exec.asp?pid=20369 JB Hifi for less than $30. Harvey Norman had a similar one for $170 so it pays to shop around for your cables.
7. A Microsoft Windows Media remote and keyboard. I got these as a combo from AusPC Market
8. For the tuner I already have a Fusion HDTV nano which works a treat.

The external drive serves as the recording storage for the media centre. For the EPG I use EpgStream which works a treat 99% of the time. It will look like this:

So now I just need to wait for all the bits to be delivered and put it together.

After updating my phone two weeks ago, I had a need to be able to easily convert files recorded on my Windows Media Center to my iPhone. I didn’t like anything out there, so I decided to “roll my own”.

You can get it from http://www.codeplex.com/iPodConverter. It is definitely an alpha release, and it doesn’t support batch modes, or have any progress indicator (yet), but hey. It’s free.

Windows Vista has shipped, been released to manufacturing, the horse has bolted, the gene is out of the bottle, the submarine has sufaced, etc etc. If you have a windows application, you should have already completed your testing and have any required patches available, now. Not next week, not next year, now. Even though the general retail release may be a few months away, the techical early adopters, i.e. the ones that decide where IT budgets get spent, are already using it.

So test, test, test, test, test and test some more, then ship those patches. Because people like me are looking for them now.

Well Santa did come early. The WPF/E devcenter is now live. You can download the Windows CTP here, and the Mac CTP here.

Well Frank blogged that WPF/E is finally coming. Frank linked to a blog post by David Boschman, a MSDN developer center and a public CTP available for download.

Frank asked the question “Do my eyes decieve me?” Well the blog post has been deleted, the developer center is blank, and the download link returns “The download you requested is unavailable.” message. So it appears the answer, for now is Yes.

Let’s see if Santa comes early.

Scott Hanselman has blogged about his tolerence for vista induced pain. I am running Vista RC1 on the Sony Vaio that I use day-to-day and, and although I have had my share of pain, specifically around USB induced blue screens, my overall impression is quite positive. One key difference I think is that the Vaio was only purchased a couple of months ago.

On reading scott’s post however my reaction was, how cool is the reliability monitor! This is something that every appicaiton needs.



If you are trying to find it, it is part of computer management.

Whilst researching a solution to get WatiN running under Vista RC1 with UAC enabled as discussed in a earlier post, I came across Daniel Moth’s blog. Daniel is a Microsoft UK Developer Evangelist who is focusing on the new stuff in Vista. He has two good posts that I would consider required reading:

Vista: User Account Control; this post covers what you need to do programmatically for your application to take advantage of

Well it looks like Vista is going to be BIG. Looking at my log’s yesterday, the top user agent was Windows-RSS-Platform/1.0 (MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.2), and it hasn’t even shipped yet!

Coverflow is a really cool application for Mac OS X, that allows you to browse through all your albums stored in iTunes.

Coverflow is a great example of how an application can take advantage of the new features provided by OS X and Vista to provide a great user experience that would have been impossible, or extremely hard to do previously.

And no, there isn’t a single rotating button anywhere to be seen …