My money is already spent. I'll have this thing launch day, and I will be taking my customary week off to play.

The trailer is out.

I've gotten some emails about my recent rounds with Windows Media Center with various suggestions and concerns and it made me realize that I may not have been clear about what I'm trying to accomplish with the media center. As such, here's what I'm trying to achieve:

• On-demand style access to my large selection of DVDs. I would like to be able to browse through the set, select one to watch, and watch it. Better still would be the ability to search for a particular genre, actor, or title if I'm thinking about one of those things to help me in finding something to watch. I have come to discover that several folks don't actually re-watch DVDs, or aren't interested in that sort of thing. I do re-watch my movies and enjoy them, hence my investment, but as the collection has grown, the convenience of finding the movie I'm looking for and getting things all set up has become lacking - it's a pain, so we find ourselves not making as much use of them as I'd like.
• Ease of use. Whatever the solution is, I'd like it to be an easy thing to use. The whole problem right now is that finding the DVD to watch is cumbersome; this shouldn't be just as cumbersome or we won't use it.
• Ease of setup/maintenance. I don't want to have to spend my life trying to set the thing up and tweak and tweak and tweak to get it to go. This sort of rules out many of the Linux-based solutions I've seen. (Granted, this is somewhat colored by my experience level with various OS setup/troubleshooting - I'm a Windows guy, and I can probably manage with the simplified UI of MacOS, but I'm not eager to get into what I feel is an overly-complex console interface. And, yes, this is a personal thing - some folks might feel the Windows solution would be more cumbersome. This isn't a point for debate.)
• Use this system as a backup for my DVDs. My dad has had discs go bad and I'm sure I've got some, too. I'd like to be able to re-create the movies as needed should the disc go bad.
• No lost features/quality. I paid for the whole DVD. I don't want to watch movies in a lower quality (re-encoded/compressed) than they appear on the DVD. I also paid for the extra features - deleted scenes, etc. I want access to those. Note that I can give a little on this if there is at least a path to get from the lower-quality/lower-access solution to the complete solution.
• Extensibility. If I need more storage, if I want to add access to the collection from a different room... I want the system to be extensible. This is a fairly all-inclusive general statement.
• Cost. I don't want it to cost a lot. If it looks like it's going to be, I'd like to be able to add to the system in increments rather than having a large up-front investment.

I am specifically not concerned with recording TV, streaming audio, or really any other features of the Media Center. If they're there, so much the better. If not, it's not a deal-breaker.

That's what I'm aiming for. Next stop - actual hardware!

I'm not a high-fashion guy. I don't get the whole avant-garde fashion thing, I don't follow trends, and I'm not paying $300 for a shirt. That said, I know what I like, and what I like generally tends towards what I guess could be considered "simple classics." I generally stick to the Ralph Lauren area in the store because I can't deal with the unkempt "thug" look they try to sell me in the juniors and I'm not going to wear the golf pants they try to sell me in the "adult" section. I have an even more particular taste with what I find attractive in women's clothing - IMHO, a simple black dress will beat out some crazy, extravagant number any day. With that in mind...

Jenn and I went shopping at Macy's on Saturday. I was thinking about getting a new shirt or two and she just wanted to see what's new for the season. When we walked in, though, I really felt like I was caught in some sort of time warp. It was the 70's meets the 80's with a touch of 60's thrown in for good measure. All of the colors were muted browns, greens, and oranges like you see in pictures from the 70's. The dresses all looked either like something you'd need to wear gogo boots with or like something that might go great with some stirrup pants underneath. Patterns were big, blocky, and geometric - they gave me a headache just looking at them.

I started feeling like I was listening to an orchestra perpetually tuning up. Everything was dischord and no notes stood out whatsoever. Every color on every garment was flat - not quite red, but not quite orange and not really yellow, either. It seemed like the aim was for a sort of haute couture jazz to emerge from the noise, but I wasn't hearing it.

In the end, I didn't find anything I liked (the stock seemed to be sort of between-seasons; I don't need a bulky sweater, but I'm not looking for an unimpressive standard button-up shirt, either) and Jenn came out with a pair of pants and a dress that look great on her and did their best to separate themselves from the visual onslaught on the racks. Here's hoping they snap out of it soon.

Friday night I picked up one of the Xbox 360 HD DVD players, an Xbox Live Vision camera, and a copy of GRAW 2. I am uber-stoked for all of these things.

The setup was pretty simple, though I think for folks less familiar with technology it may have been frustrating. See, I have the wireless network adapter for the Xbox 360 and that takes up the one USB port on the back of the unit. I'm sort of reluctant to jam a bunch of stuff into the front ports on the thing because, well, it's ugly, and I really want those for other things (like my DDR dance mat). The wireless adapter, the camera, and the HD DVD player are all USB devices. Luckily, the HD DVD player has two USB ports on the back you can use to extend the Xbox with. So here's how it looks now:

The HD DVD player plugs into the Xbox 360. The wireless network adapter and the camera plug into the HD DVD player. Everything is plugged in behind-the-scenes, so I don't have any cords hanging out in front of the device.

So why was that confusing? A couple of reasons, actually.

First, the instructions for the camera tell you to plug it in "directly to the Xbox 360." There's even a picture of it plugging into one of the front USB ports on the Xbox. No, thank you. Even that wouldn't have been as confusing except for...

Second, there's some installation overhead to getting these things up and running and it doesn't all just magically come up. Before you can hook up the HD DVD player, you have to put this DVD into the Xbox 360 that presumedly has some drivers it needs to install. Once it's got that installed, you can plug in the HD DVD player. That said, it won't actually recognize that the player is there until you turn the Xbox off and back on again. Is it plugged into the wrong port? Do I need to plug it into the front like in the instructions? No, but that isn't immediately clear.

Once you've "rebooted," the HD DVD player comes up, the network adapter comes up, and all is well... except it, for some reason, still hasn't recognized the Xbox Live Vision camera. For that, you need to reboot again. On the second reboot, everything should be up and running. When it gets there, it's really sweet, but getting there is the issue. (Note I did try hooking the camera up to the Xbox directly but it didn't matter - it still took two reboots to get it going. Yes, that does mean I rebooted four - or more - times as I experimented with the setup, but the magic number does seem to be two.)

Now, I've only had the thing a couple of days, but here's something I ran into: I decided to move the camera to a better location and zip-tie up some of the cables for the HD DVD player so they were a little cleaner and more managed. To do that, I had to unplug the HD DVD player and the camera, do the clean-up, move the camera, and plug it all back in. After I was done, I fired up the Xbox and it took another two-reboot cycle to get the HD DVD and camera recognized again. I'm wondering if there's some sort of memory the console has that recognizes which ports things were plugged into and gets confused if you move things or disconnect the power.

Like I said, though, once you get it all running, it's cool. Some of the stuff I didn't know (because it's either not terribly well advertised or I just haven't seen it):

You can take a picture using the camera and use that as your "personal" picture - the one that only friends see. That said, I don't seem to be able to find it anywhere online, even if I go to my profile on the Xbox web site, so it must just be a Live feature. Regardless, it's pretty cool. Even my dad (who also picked up a camera) has one, and went to a lot of work to make it.

When you have the camera plugged in, the Xbox 360 dashboard has a sort of "watery reflection" playing in a light overlay of whatever the camera is seeing. You don't really notice it at first, then you're scrolling through a menu going, "Hey, what is that... holy crap, I'm on the screen!" Once you notice it, it's pretty cool. It ripples based on how much movement the camera detects, too.

The HD DVD player makes it so the eject button on the Xbox 360 dashboard is split in half - the top half controls the Xbox console drive (allowing you to select, for example, "Play Game" or "Open Tray") and the bottom half controls the HD DVD player ("Play HD DVD Movie"). This is actually a great way to tell if the Xbox has "recognized" the HD DVD player or not (so you know whether you need to reboot).

All in all, I'm really digging it. It came with King Kong in HD, which isn't my favorite movie by any means but is a decent demonstration of how much clearer movies are in HD and really makes you never want to buy another standard DVD. It also has some of the little HD features you can expect like "picture-in-picture" storyboards and behind-the-scenes interviews, which is cool because that way you don't have to leave the movie to see what they're talking about.

Anyway, it's awesome, and now I have a renewed interest not only in continuing my Media Center integration effort, but also updating some select pictures to HD. I'm totally ordering Serenity.

I got my Windows XP Media Center 2005 virtual machine to stream a movie stored in VIDEO_TS format to my Xbox 360 last night. The picture was sort of choppy due to the virtual machine overhead and limitations, but I saw it work, proving the concept.

Here's what I had to do:

1. Install Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005.
2. Activate Windows XP. You have to do this to get all the updates you need.
3. Hit Microsoft Update to get all the available patches.
4. Install .NET 1.1 and SP1.
5. Install MCE 2005 Update 2. (You might be able to get this from Windows Update; I got it from a separate download.)
6. Install My Movies.
7. Install Transcode360.
8. Hit Microsoft Update again to make sure all the patches are in place. (I did this twice because the first time I missed getting Windows Media Player 11 - I might have been able to skip it had I done everything the first time. I also had tried to avoid activating my MSDN copy of media center because I knew I'd only need it for a few days... but you have to be activated to get everything up to date.)
9. Start up Windows Media Player and configure it.
10. Install FFDShow to get the MPEG2 codec. Set it to be the default decoder for MPEG2. (I'm given to understand that if you install some DVD player software you don't need to do this. I was looking to do a proof of concept for free, so I went this route; I think if I do it for real I'll get TheaterTek.)
11. Install DVD Decrypter for the movie ripping.
12. Rip a DVD to a known location. (I ended up ripping on a different machine and transferring the files to the virtual machine - there was some weirdness getting the ripping to work inside the VM.)
13. Run the My Movies collection editor and add the ripped movie to the collection.
14. Start Windows Media Center.
15. Turn on the Xbox 360. Navigate to the "Media" tab and select the "Media Center" option. After you read a couple of screens, you'll be given an eight-digit number that you need to write down.
16. Windows Media Center automatically detects the Xbox 360 and asks you to connect to it.
17. Follow the Windows Media Center extender setup on the Windows Media Center. It will ask you to install some software to allow streaming to extenders.
18. When the extender setup is done, it'll finally ask you for that eight digit number. Enter that, and you'll be connected.
19. On the Xbox 360, you'll be in a Media Center screen once the connection is complete. Navigate to the My Movies section, select the movie, and select the "Watch Stream" option. Transcode360 will do its job and transcode the VIDEO_TS directly to your Xbox 360.

The downside to this is that you don't get the option of setting up sound or other options. If you have foreign language movies, you won't get the ability to decide whether you watch it overdubbed or in the original language (or whether you see subtitles). You also don't get to choose which feature you watch, so if you have, say, an episodic TV DVD, you'll only really be able to watch the first episode on the disc. But for the 80% case, you should be set.

Now I have some decisions to make. It turns out my wife isn't quite as hot on the media center idea as I am, but since she only saw the proof of concept and it was jumpy and sort of sucked, I don't think she's fully realized the coolness (sort of how the coolness of DVR is still setting in - we still end up watching "appointment TV" even though we know things are getting recorded). That means I need to be super frugal about how I go about this.

I can start getting storage together and using the standard Windows XP UPnP file sharing deal to get movies to my Xbox, storing two copies - the VIDEO_TS and a compressed Xbox version. Not optimal, but it would get us in the habit of using the Xbox for movies and would be a cheap way to see if we like it.

If we do like it, the question will be whether we have a single media center and several extenders or whether we have a network attached storage/file server setup with several full media centers. I think that, too, will have to be in stages. I'll be getting a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate from MIX and I could upgrade our existing PC to use that and be a more "central" media center to stream to extenders. It doesn't have a TV-out on it, so it wouldn't do for a full media center. If we get to a point where we want the full menus or the streaming just isn't enough, we can get a cheap media center PC for the living room and have it get movies over the network.

Anyway, I'm glad to see it works. Time to determine next steps.

I went to my local comic shop to pick up some back issues I was missing and noticed the selection wasn't quite what it used to be. I'm not normally picking up a lot of back issues, so I talked to the clerk about it and it turns out that back issues (unless they're rare/expensive) really don't get a lot of business. The best value-per-square-foot-of-floor-space they can get is on new merchandise, so they reduced their stock of back issues to make room.

Not wanting the inconsistency of price, selection, and quality that is generally offered at eBay, I chose instead to take my search to some of the online suppliers. To that end, I bring you the Comic Back Issue Showdown: Midtown Comics vs. Mile High Comics!

Criteria	Midtown Comics	Mile High Comics	Verdict
Web Site - Search, checkout, and overall usability.	Looks like many other online storefronts and the checkout process was fairly simple. Was harder to find back issues by title than it was to find a specific numbered issue. Search results can be difficult/overwhelming to navigate.	Very cluttered. I had a difficult time figuring out what had been added to my shopping cart and determining how to check out. Really could stand some UI help. Decent search, and results get grouped by title/volume before breaking down into issue, which was helpful in browsing. Unfortunately, my frustration with the cluttered UI overshadowed my enjoyment of the search feature.	Midtown
Price - Comparison of pricing on several random issues in stock in both places.	Seems to have a decent, low everyday price on items. Not sure how often things go on sale.	Higher everyday prices, but a distinct reliance on sale pricing to bring things down to a more competitive range. I've been told there's a mailing list you can join that sends out frequent sale codes. I'm not sure I like having to join a mailing list or wait for a sale for low prices.	Midtown
Selection - Comparison of what's in stock for randomly selected popular titles.	Recent back issues are usually in stock and in good quality. Older back issues aren't as available. Much of this seems to depend on the popularity of the comic as well.	Both recent and older back issues are in stock. Doesn't seem to be based on comic popularity or how old the issue is.	Mile High
In-Process Order Information - How much information you're given as your order gets processed.	When you place your order you get an email notification it's been received. When it ships, you get a notification of the shipment. You can check order status on the web site.	You get an email when you place the order, when it's received by the store, when they start fulfilling it, when it's packaged, and when it's shipped. You can get additional order status by emailing them.	Mile High
Shipping - Methods of getting your package to you.	UPS	UPS	Tie
Packaging - How the comics arrive at your door.	Package arrives in a large, flat cardboard envelope. Inside the envelope your comics are in a Midtown paper bag and each one is bagged and boarded. There is an additional board inside the bag for added reinforcement. The invoice is nicely printed and easy to read. Comics were not damaged.	Package arrives in a thin cardboard box that exactly fits the size of the order. All comics are bagged but not boarded. The invoice is itemized, but printed on a line printer and not the most appealing. Comics were not damaged.	Midtown
Overall	I really like the web site, the packaging and the prices. I wish they had a little bigger selection, but what they do have is good and complements the Mile High selection. The packaging on my order was great. The search could use a little help, but generally this was a pleasant experience.	Aside from the search, I can't stand the web site. I can't tell you how much this irritated me. I talked to a friend of mine who has also used the site and he knew exactly what I was talking about with all the little "gotchas" and quirks in the ordering process. Awesome selection, but the pricing... not thrilled with having to wait for a sale. Also wasn't as impressed with the packaging - I'd have felt better about it if each comic was both bagged and boarded.	Midtown

I think my virtual machine trials for Windows Media Center may be coming to an end. The reason? I'm running into unfortunate limitations due to the video RAM that Virtual PC 2007 gives me. Virtual PC emulates an S3 Trio 64 video card with 8MB of video RAM - apparently not enough to get a DVD to play, at least for me.

See, I installed Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 on a Virtual PC yesterday and while I got a bit further than I did with Vista Ultimate (My Movies installed correctly, for example), I'm still unable to actually play a DVD in the virtual machine because there's not enough video memory. Of course, that's not the error I get - it's usually something about files or drivers not working or some crap like that, but since I've got actual physical machines running Windows XP that can play DVDs fine, I have to blame it on the video RAM because everything else seems to be just fine.

Hmmm... unless it's the whole virtualized video card that's the problem. Eh. Regardless, there's trouble in video town.

I can see why people go with VMware for anything beyond the most basic virtualization needs. Virtual PC is great if you're throwing together a quick server-based, non-UI-intensive thing, but when you get to trying something like a virtual media center, it falls flat on its face. (Granted, I haven't tried this in VMware, so it, too, might fall flat. But since I don't have VMware and it's not free, I can't really do much to test that theory.)

I did get DVD Decrypter installed on the Windows XP VM, but it kept coming across errors when I tried to rip a movie. I'm guessing that, too, is virutalization problems having to do with the drive or something.

My last ditch effort with both of these VMs: I'm going to rip a movie on a non-virtual machine. I'll transfer the movie over to each virtual machine, making the assumption that if these were on real hardware we wouldn't be running into the ripping issues. I'll then try to get my Xbox 360 to communicate with each virtual machine and see how that goes. Technically speaking, if it works, I won't really be playing movies directly on the media server anyway, so I'll just make the assumption that everything works as far as the ripped movie is concerned and see if the media server can at least serve it up to the extender.

If I can get that to work, it'll at least give me hope that allocating actual hardware to the effort is worth it. Assuming it works, I'll see if I can dredge up some sort of low-end spare computer from someone and try it on actual hardware.

My last-ditch e

I had this weird dream last night involving super heroes, magic, and Scarlett Johansson. I think that's what I get for playing a lot of Marvel: Ultimate Alliance and then watching The Prestige right before bed.

Friday night Jenn and I tried out a new Mexican restaurant called Costa Vida. It's [yet another] one of those build-your-burrito-to-order places, but they have this sweet pork that's just fantastic, especially when coupled with their mango salsa. I'll definitely be having that again.

Saturday we went to my parents' house to watch Borat. They hadn't seen it yet and somehow thought it would be, I dunno, less crazy or something if I was there. We laughed, we screamed. Good times.

Oh, my dad got his Xbox Live router configuration issues under wraps and picked up a copy of GRAW 2, so now I'm going to have to get that so I can trounce him. Not that I'm very good, I'm just better than him. And isn't that what matters? Hehehe. He's promised to devote at least an hour a week to get used to the controls and stuff so he can play without having to call "time out" and ask how you shoot guns or ride in vehicles or whatever.

Saturday night we went to Jenn's friend Kristi's 30th birthday party. It was a pretty cool party and was at Kristi's mom's house, which is super huge and really nice, so we not only got to attend the party but also get some home improvement ideas. (Kristi's mom is an interior designer.)

Kristi has this really cool huge dog that's part Chow and part Saint Bernard or horse or cow or something. I'm not a dog person, but this dog was really mellow and pretty cool. I sort of wanted to ride him around the house. Yes, he was that big.

Sunday the kitties were nice enough to let us sleep in a bit and not cry outside the door, so we woke up reasonably late (9:00a is super late for the kitties to not be crying wanting love). We intended the day to be a "preparing for Spring" day since it was supposed to be nice, so I was going to get the awning on our back deck ready (plug it in, unpin the winter cover on it, clean it, etc.). Of course, just as I got started the rain kicked in so I didn't get much done. I think we're going to need a pressure washer anyway because the moisture rolled up in the awning molded over the winter and now it needs a good scrubbing.

While I was outside, I noticed that over by our air conditioner there's this hole through one of the vents under the house where the A/C pipes go in and connect to the central distribution system or whatever. Anyway, there was a piece of sheet metal that was sort of jimmied in there to make sure no animals can get under the house. "Was" is the operative word - that piece of metal wasn't really "in place" so much when I looked.

Now, every so often - maybe once a month - we'd get this really strong pee smell going through the house. We didn't know if it was outside, or maybe just the smell of one of the kitties not burying their business very well in the litter box, but every so often, it'd accost you and take a couple of hours to go away.

Okay, so flash forward to Sunday. I started thinking about this pee smell and realized maybe some animal was getting in there and peeing, so I put the sheet metal back in place.

It occurred to me a couple hours later that the next smell may not be "pee," it might be "dead animal."

I didn't get under the house to look. Just what I need is to be bitten by some rabid squirrel or some crap. There may well not be anything under there. I guess we'll find out in a couple of weeks, won't we?

...and in a continued run on the home theater PC thread...

The Mac Mini HTPC site has some great entries about a guy setting up a Mac Mini for his home theater. He's using distantDVD as his front end, allowing him to connect to any drive on the network - including Windows shares - to get to movies. There's this odd "plays up to 950 movies" restriction on it and it seems to be something systemic, like it can't physically index more than that or something.

There's even a podcast about how to set up a Mac Mini based home theater PC. I may have to look a little further down this avenue. You can get a Mac Mini for like $600. That's something I could afford.

I've been locked into a way of thinking - that for my media center solution I need to get a Windows Media Center with some network attached storage and connect all of that up so I can use the Xbox 360 as a Media Center Extender to watch movies.

I'm starting to think maybe I've been barking up the wrong tree and it's time to re-examine my requirements and assumptions.

There are a lot of limitations to Media Center Extender technology, not the least of which is that they don't support playback of movies ripped in either ISO or VIDEO_TS format, which is one of my primary goals. I not only want easy access to my movies, but I want no quality lost when I put them on the server, I want no features lost (extras, audio tracks, etc.), and I want to be able to re-create a watchable DVD from it should my original die.

So I need to open myself to new possible solutions:

• Would it be better to have a dedicated home theater PC for each room where I want to access the movies? I could just have each one talk to the network attached storage device.
• Is Windows Media Center really the answer? Is there some other Windows product that might do the job like MediaPortal?
• If I just go for a dedicated home theater PC, am I limiting myself with Windows? Would Mac and Front Row or iTheater be a better solution?
• Is there some sort of hardware device that just works that I don't already know about?

I'll continue to search, but I think I'm going to broaden the scope. Unfortunately, I don't have a Mac that I can try this stuff out on, so I'm going to have to do a lot of reading. I might try out MediaPortal on a virtual machine to see how that goes. If anyone knows of any other devices I should look at, let me know in comments.

I decided to continue my research into getting my DVDs into a network storage format for play by a home theater PC, this time by getting a Windows Vista Ultimate system up and running to try out My Movies and see how it worked. I also wanted to find out how difficult it was to get movies playing on my Xbox 360 using the Media Center Extender functionality. (Yes, I could have tried Windows Vista Home Premium, too, but figured, why not Ultimate?)

The problem is, I don't have a system I can just flatten and dedicate to this, especially seeing as how I just wanted to try it out really quick without actually activating it, so it'd be up and running for less than 30 days. I decided this was the perfect opportunity to use Virtual PC 2007 to create a Vista Ultimate virtual machine and do all my work there - in a totally throw-away environment.

I didn't get far.

Vista itself installed reasonably well. It was simple and straightforward, though it wasn't super quick. I suppose you can't really blame it for being slow since it was installing from an ISO image that was stored on the same physical drive as the VPC software and the VM image. So the disk churned a lot, and I recognize that as a vastly non-optimal setup, but I also figured I didn't need it to be super fast, I just needed to see it basically function.

The next step I took was to try installing My Movies 2.20. Unfortunately, it wouldn't install since it requires .NET 1.1 SP1 and Vista Ultimate only comes with 2.0 and 3.0 pre-installed. Downloaded and installed .NET 1.1 as well as SP1, then got My Movies installed. Cool. Time to fire up Windows Media Center.

Media Center started and after a few setup steps, I was into the menus. I didn't see the My Movies options, but it turns out there's a known defect in 2.20 that My Movies doesn't properly add itself to the menus in Media Center. Luckily there's a "My Movies" icon that gets installed in the Start menu and if you start Media Center from that, you go straight into My Movies. But we'll get there in a second.

Not seeing the My Movies options anywhere in the menus, I decided to poke around Media Center a little. This is where I started seriously noticing the Virtual PC issues. Menus were slow to redraw, there was no animation to anything, the mouse cursor sometimes just disappeared... it was pretty horrible. I tried watching one of the sample videos that get installed with Vista and got a message about how some files weren't working correctly or something. Turns out Vista really seems to want 64MB of video RAM and the max that Virtual PC will give it is 8MB. Exiting Media Center and trying the videos directly from Windows Media Player was successful (though very jumpy with several frames getting skipped at a time). I'm thinking Media Center had used up all my whopping 8MB of virtual video RAM and that was that. No more worky.

But I wasn't going to get mired by that! There was still more to do! I figured since I wouldn't be actually playing the movies on the VM - I'd only be streaming them to my Xbox 360 to play - that it didn't really matter if I couldn't get things playing right there.

Following some tips in the My Movies forums, I enabled the DVD Gallery feature in Media Center using a KB article at Microsoft. I figured this would be helpful to troubleshoot differences between how Media Center handles movies directly and how My Movies handles movies. Regardless, I didn't figure it hurt anything, so there we go.

I downloaded and installed Transcode360 in preparation for the connection to my Xbox 360. In order to get it to work properly, I had to right-click the shortcut in the Start menu and modify the properties to tell it to Run as Administrator. If you have User Access Control enabled and you don't do that, you only get exceptions when you try to start it up. (That's not documented anywhere; I had to figure that out myself.)

OK! I had Vista Ultimate, My Movies, and Transcode360. Time to get a movie ripped and try this bad boy out!

I brought a DVD in today, fired up the VPC, fired up My Movies, and inserted the DVD into the drive. I told the VPC to capture the physical DVD drive as the VM drive so I could access the DVD...

...and this is where my fun ended. Media Center instantly became entirely unresponsive. Like, full seconds between putting your mouse cursor over a menu option and having the menu option highlight in preparation to be clicked. Removed the DVD from the drive and things became mildly responsive again.

To test things out, I exited Media Center and put the disc back in the drive. I wanted to see if the performance death had anything to do with Media Center. Turns out it didn't - I inserted the DVD and got a few options on the Autoplay menu - I could install a DVD player from the disc, play the DVD with Windows Media Player, or play the DVD with Windows Media Center. I chose Windows Media Player. The player came up... and sat there doing nothing. I left it for several minutes and it never responded. I think this is, again, the video RAM issue coming back to bite me.

Regardless, I think my test of Vista Ultimate in a VPC environment is done. I believe several issues I fought with were due to the limitations of the VPC environment, but I also think there was some odd stuff going on with My Movies that needs to be fixed before I can get back into it.

In my web-based travels trying to find solutions, I found out about a lot of limitations to Media Center Extender technology (including the codecs that are supported, which is why Transcode360 is required) that make me wonder if using the Xbox 360 as an extender really is the best way to go or if maybe just getting a dedicated home theater PC might be a better idea and use some network attached storage so if I need to add more stations, I can put a PC in each room and just connect to the central storage.

Every once in a while I'll be reading a blog entry and I'll come across a place where someone has inserted a block of code. On the blog site, it looks like this:



But in the RSS reader, it looks like this:



Not so great. I mean, the code is reasonably legible, but the style sheet renders literally in the reader. I shouldn't see that CSS - it should be formatting the code, not appearing in the view window.

I also see RSS feeds that do display a nicely formatted block of code:



At first I thought it was a bug in my reader, so I tried some other readers and got the same result.

So what's the difference?

The one that appears with the styles displayed literally in the feed uses an inline style sheet to do the formatting. Something like this:

<pre class="csharpcode">
<span class="kwrd">virtual</span> BOOL Paint(<span class="kwrd">int</span> button) = 0;
</pre>
<style type="text/css">
.csharpcode, .csharpcode pre
{
font-size: small;
color: black;
font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace;
background-color: #ffffff;
}
.csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; }
</style>

While that sort of thing works well on a web site, it turns out that most RSS readers today don't support inline style sheets.

The ones that look correct on the web site and in RSS use code like this:

<pre style="background-color:#FFFFB9;;overflow: auto;"><div><span style="color: #000000; ">@Test
</span><span style="color: #0000FF; ">public</span><span style="color: #000000; "> </span><span style="color: #0000FF; ">void</span><span style="color: #000000; "> emptyTest() {
 assertTrue(foo);
}</span></div></pre>

Notice how the styles applied are actually inline on the tags, not styles from a style sheet. This sort of local style application is fairly widely supported in RSS readers. The drawback to this sort of style application is that not only is the HTML huge and horrible (usually it's generated, and we all know how bad generated HTML gets), but if you want to change the look of the code on your site or in your RSS feed, there's no simple way to do it.

Two recommendations for folks posting inline code snippets who want formatting and a good looking RSS feed:

If you're going with a style sheet and not inline styles, move the style sheet to somewhere outside the actual entry being syndicated. Include it with a <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://url/to/your.css" /> line in the <head /> section of your site. By pulling it out of the entry proper, folks visiting your site will see the nice formatting, and at the very least the syndicated version will be legible and won't include a bunch of clutter. On the other hand, it won't look as pretty in RSS as it does on your site.

If you want people to see nicely formatted code on your site and in RSS, you'll need to switch to the inline styles applied directly to tags. The Actipro CodeHighlighter control for ASP.NET does this (and there's a Windows Live Writer plugin that uses it, so you don't have to set it up on your site if you want to post through Windows Live Writer instead). The GeSHi (Generic Syntax Highlighter) project is a good PHP highlighter that can do either inline styles or use a style sheet. Check into a solution for your chosen platform that will let you apply the styles inline directly to tags.

Due to the stupid server down issue I had a bit ago, I got moved to a new server but it seems that not all my settings made it, so anyone who had sent mail to any address at paraesthesia.com wasn't getting through to me.

I just figured it out, and it's only been since, oh, February 27, so I've only got about 1400 emails to manually filter through and deal with. But I've got everything fixed again so it should be working fine. If you sent me something that I should have responded to but didn't, re-send and I'll answer. ARGH!

Saturday Jenn and I spent the majority of the day at pyrotechnics training, an annual class put on by Western Display Fireworks. Western is the company we work for on the Fourth of July when we head up to Clatskanie and do the fireworks show. You have to attend a training class within the three years prior to your license expiring, and since our license expire next year, we figured this would be a good opportunity. Always good to refresh yourself on the laws and safety regulations.

Saturday night on the way back from pyro class we stopped by my parents' place to visit. Mom picked me up a Lego Imperial Star Destroyer for a song at a sale she found so I got that from her. She also found this cool CSI Facial Reconstruction Kit, so she passed that along. Fun!

Sunday was chore day. We got up reasonably early and I went around the house to all the windows and re-caulked everywhere that the caulking had split due to the house settling. That meant all four corners to most of the windows and many spots along the top of each window, necessitating the removal of the blinds. It was a heck of a job and took close to four hours to hit every window in the place, but I got it done and it's looking good again. Took a tube and a half of caulk, which is a personal record for maximum caulk use at a given time. Heh.

I had planned on watching The Empire Strikes Back and putting together the Lego Imperial Star Destroyer in the afternoon, but since I had run out of caulk (I only bought one tube), we had to run out to the store and while we were out we ended up getting Dance Dance Revolution Universe for Xbox 360 with a Target gift card we had left over from Christmas...

...which, of course, led to my evening consisting of the finishing up of tasks and an hour and a half of DDR, effectively routing my ability to also watch the movie and play Legos. I will have to commence Star-Wars-ing this evening when I get home.

DDR on Xbox 360 is a welcome addition to our home, though. Jenn and I were just talking about how we don't go to the gym because we're lazy and it's boring, and we realized that the one time we did end up losing weight, we were doing an awful lot of DDR. The problem up until now was that, frankly, I'm a Gamerpoint Whore so not getting achievements while I game became patently unacceptable, regardless of the fact we have like three different DDRs for PS2. Now I can have my cake and eat it, too - DDR on Xbox 360 gives me my DDR fix as well as the ability to get Gamerpoints.

In a similar vein, the purchase of DDR was my impetus to pull the receiver out and rewire things so the Xbox 360 now goes through it, finally giving me digital surround in games and media. (Yes, I now realize what I was missing by not having this hooked up and it makes me want to go back and play all the games I've already played because it's that much better.) It was going to have to happen anyway if I ever get off my butt and make the media server I want to, but having to get back there and futz around with the wiring just wasn't on the top of my list of fun things to do. As it is, my receiver is at its limit with inputs, so the Xbox 360 is now plugged into the CD player optical-in jack and the CD player has been moved to the last remaining input - the "video auxiliary," which is on the front of the receiver and only offers a standard RCA stereo-in connection. It means I don't get the digital clarity when I listen to CDs anymore, but that's not to big of a deal since I don't listen to CDs very much. Plus, if it's killing me that much, I can always listen to them through the DVD player rather than the CD player and I'll get that digital quality back. What does bug me is that it looks hokey - the wires run from the back of the CD player, down the back of the cabinet, and along the shelf next to the receiver to plug into the front of the thing. Not much I can do about that, but it doesn't overwhelm me with elegance. It does make me think about what I'm going to want in my next receiver, though, and the number one determining factor is going to be quantity of inputs.

At some point over the course of the weekend I put a nice gouge in the right lens of my glasses. Not really sure how it happened or when, but when I was cleaning them last night, there it was. It's not in my direct line of sight so it's not bugging me too bad, but if I look through the bottom half of the lens, there's a bit of blur because of it. It's probably time to get new lenses anyway.

I updated my RSS feed to go through FeedBurner, so if you want all the coolness that gives you, update your subscription to point here.

A minor follow-up to my FizzBuzz response - In that post I said:

[T]he answer to questions like "What is the maximum amount of memory any single process on Windows can address?" is "Google." It's trivia.

I'm feeling justified, at least in that particular case, by Raymond Chen's post today:

If you have to ask about various operating system limits, you're probably doing something wrong.