http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/headline/features/3112640
I hope you got the chance to see him live. He was one of the best ever.
I'm really impressed with the way Fox is being so transparent about the upcoming season of Family Guy. If you go to their website at
http://fox.com/familyguy/ (it's basically a blog), you can even watch clips from the script readings (a la Channel 9). And yes, they have an RSS feed :-)
I just got a Media Center and it's pretty cool. Unfortunately, I can't seem to figure out how to watch TV (live or recorded) from my laptop over the network. Obviously I can share the folder on the MCE and navigate to it over the network, but that only works for recorded shows (and is network intensive). Does anyone know of an extender or workaround I can use so I can watch TV via the laptop? Ideally it would be something that can trim down the size of network transfer--even at lowest quality it's still 1GB/hr.
Also, I'd like to cut down the screen size of the recorded video. I only plan on watching the TV on my laptop, so I can get away with very low resolution, which will save a lot of space. If anyone has done this, please let me know.
Can anyone recommend an RTSP component? I was going to implement the spec, but if there's something that just works it'll be a lot cheaper. I specifically need to be able to download a stream, so I don't care about server-side stuff. If there's a source version available, that's cool too. This is for testing purposes, so it doesn't need to be perfect.
There's a great story over at http://www.pacifict.com/Story/ (via Slashdot). My favorite quote:
"The secret to programming is not intelligence, though of course that helps. It is not hard work or experience, though they help, too. The secret to programming is having smart friends."
Very much why the developer community is so important for Microsoft.
I’ve been working on a project that involves developing a custom power on password for Pocket PC. To do this, you build a DLL as a control panel applet and point a registry key at it so that the device will use your DLL instead of the default password applet when it’s powered on (or booted). There are also a few APIs you need to hook into, but I can’t find the whitepaper so you’ll have to trust me.
Anyway, this particular password doesn’t use a text input, so the only way to unlock the OS under the covers is to perform the right series of operations (which is greatly simplified at this point), after which the password DLL will call the underlying APIs to unlock the device. This is actually a neat way to lock the device down—just have your applet never call those underlying APIs to unlock the device and you can limit the user's actions to whatever's in your DLL.
During the dev process, I managed to lock the device with a password I couldn’t recreate from the password applet UI. To get around this, I connected the device via ActiveSync, which let me type in the password by hand. I then used ceregedit to turn off the power on password (there’s a documented key somewhere on MSDN), which disabled the power on password. A soft reboot took out the password protection.
However—and I didn’t understand why at the time—my applet had been copied into the StartUp folder, meaning that it would always be started when the device booted. Since the applet would never be able to be closed (it would never get a successful response from the underlying password APIs) I was in a bind. Fortunately, it was just acting like any other app—after all, it wasn’t given the instructions to guard the front door (since power on password had been turned off). As a result I was still able to use the device because the Start menu and shell were all working, except that I had this annoying dialog I couldn’t minimize, and it didn’t show up as an app you could kill via the Memory pane on the control panel.
So then I tried to delete it from the StartUp folder, but since the module was actively loaded, I couldn’t do anything. At this point I copied down jshell.exe, which is a neat little tool that lets you view and kill processes. From the jshell command line I ran “gi mod” to determine the module that had the DLL (actually, a .CPL) loaded, and was able to track down the process, which can be killed with “kp 22” where 22 was the process ID. After that, I was able to delete the password applet from the StartUp directory.
The moral of this story—if there is one—is to be careful about how you secure devices. For example, if you’re going to lock down a device by using a power on password that never yields (where the login screen is actually the whole app) then don’t give the end users the password or else they can get around the system.
The tools I referred to here are available as part of the Mobile Application Development Toolkit at http://msdn.microsoft.com/mobility/thekit/.
I really like .Text, but I know there are quite a few engines out there. Does anyone have a recommendation for a personal site? As context, I've been given the advice to move my blog to a personal site from a Microsoft-funded site because "I don't want you to be surprised like you were this time with us." The advice wasn't given in a threatening tone, but sometimes you need to read between the lines.
I'd also like to apologize for implying that Robert Scoble got me cut from being syndicated at MSDN. It's probably not true and I shouldn't have assumed the most obvious explanation was the correct one.
Eventually I'll be moving to http://www.sharplogic.com/blogs/ed. It's just too bad I won't have any readers left by then :-)
My blog is no longer syndicated through MSDN. I'm sure there's no correlation. Officially it's because I'm no longer an employee, but we'll see if it applies to the other former employees too...
If I get mysteriously cut from weblogs.asp.net I'll end up somewhere on the sharplogic.com domain (there will be much fanfare).
For context, look at the first few comments to this post: http://weblogs.asp.net/edkaim/archive/2004/12/20/327583.aspx.
Talk about being defensive!
Come on Robert! This is all conversational marketing! I'm challenging you to be a better blogger. I thought criticism in a public forum was how you liked things to be done? Are you saying that perhaps contacting you directly with feedback would make you feel less defensive? Oh well, I have an opinion and a Post button and don't have to think things through! Yippeeeee!
Of course I'm just kidding with you--but you should take what I'm saying to heart because it won't come from someone inside Microsoft where people do fear your blog. While your readership does give you visibility that can't be bought cheaply, it is possible that you may lose out on honest criticism and respect from the people you're trying to help. At times it seems like you may act in a very selfish manner by slamming the teams around you in order to raise your own status in the online community.
If I didn't care, I'd keep my mouth shut--kind of like almost everyone else does. Then again, maybe it would be better off that way.
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