November 2003 Blog Posts
I've been experimenting with DVD ripping and finally hit upon a simple little way of keeping a DVD video library on my computer. In DVD Decrypter you can choose ISO Read mode which then rips a DVD directly to an ISO image removing all protection. The image is just one big file of several gigabytes. Then to play it, you just load the image directly into a virtual DVD drive. I'm using Nero ImageDrive but a very good free one is available from DAEMON Tools. Once loaded, Windows Media Player kicks in and plays it.
I tried ripping to individual VOB files...
Another discovery. Interesting reading if you've got the time. Great weblog history article. I'm still checking out how other bloggers design their websites and surveying the tools most commonly used.
Useful site for UK bloggers. I just submitted my site. Also take note of the UK Bloggers Christmas Party next Saturday in London. There's also UK Blogger Mailing Lists.
I've spent most of the evening surfing around the Internet looking into what I can do to move the design of this blog forward. There's a lot of really impressive blog sites out there. I think I have blog envy *sigh*. I found that quite a few people seem to move from Radio Userland (what I'm using) over to Movable Type. It's very tempting. There's lots of great scripts and components for Moveable Type and much better CSS support. But it involves moving to hosting the weblog data in MySQL and diving into Perl. They're fine technologies but just not my...
Twice a year this website publishes the sites of the 500 most powerful computers. Find out what they do with 35.86 TFlops from 640 8-way nodes! Very cool. But note that this site doesn't cover massively distributed computation like SETI which has over 54 TFlops.
I heard through the grapevine that Mike Sinneck is leaving Microsoft. He joined two years ago coming from IBM Global Services to take the position of VP of Worldwide Services Organisation. It's an interesting development in that he led a huge effort to restructure and "professionalise" the Microsoft Services Organisation (MSO). It's often been joked that it should be called Microsoft Global Services since it has adopted the IBM service model hook line and sinker. Is the job done? Or is this a fallout from a change in strategy?
What I do know is that MSO isn't as happy a place...
Someone asked me about Object Relational Mapping last week and I replied with a long email. I've massaged that email into a short article and posted it here. Let me know if you think I've got the wrong end of the stick and why.
Of all the Open Source projects out there, the Mono Project has got to be one of the most interesting and worthy. The goal is to create an open source version of Microsoft's .Net Common Language Infrastructure (CLI or runtime to you and me) along with compatible class libraries and a C# and VB .Net compiler.
I think it will be fantastic if they succeed. For one, it will legitimize the .Net programming model to a wider developer audience and make it more pervasive. I still believe .Net is one of the best technologies out there and I'd love to see the...
I downloaded Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 from MSDN and installed it. Looks pretty much the same as Virtual PC 5.2. It ran the Mandrake Linux image ok. The new features according to the Microsoft website are:
"...support for as many as four network adapters per virtual machine, all through the graphical user interface; Extensible Markup Language (XML) file-based configuration of virtual machines to ease the copying of a virtual machine to another computer; and support for up to 4 GB of memory."
A couple of people pointed out Macromedia Central to me as an alternative platform for developing rich apps. I spent some time just reading docs up on the website and I tried the demo. Looks quite good. Very straightforward API with good support for web services and a stateful UI. Check out the reference poster and architecture description. It even has the concept of program manifests. (Hmm, where have I heard that term before? :-)
ActionScript 2.0 looks like a variant of JavaScript that's adopted more Java constructs. It would be pretty comfortable to work with.
The cross-application integration seems rudimentary and you don't seem...
Check it out. I've got Mandrake Linux 9.2 installed in Virtual PC. Whoo Hoo! Coming from Microsoft-land it almost feels like blasphemy but - there - I've done it! And it only cost £6.98 to buy the magazine with a 4Gb DVD. I've decided it's time I take a closer look at Linux and Open Source software. There's certainly a lot of interesting Open Source projects out there.
I read up on all the different distributions of Linux and decided Mandrake was good enough to start with. It's aimed at newbies and that's fine for me. I haven't used Unix since...
I finally got around to installing Virtual PC 5.2. Microsoft bought the company that sold it (Connectix) and has just annouced that Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 has RTM'ed. It was a bit of a struggle but I finally installed a copy of Windows XP into an instance of a virtual PC (called a guest PC). The trick was to just get a real bootable CD of Windows XP and give up on my MSDN disks and iso images.
Anyway, it works great and with the extra integration features installed, the mouse now works seamlessly between the host PC and the guest PC. I plan...
Last week I installed Office 2003. I really don't have much idea about what all the new features are and I don't really care. I'm sure I'm like most people and use a tiny fraction of all the functionality that Office has. However, I do care about Outlook and the new Outlook 2003 is very nice. Again, I can't tell you any of the new features except for the obvious visual ones but I'm sure I'll slowly discover them.
I've written up my attempts to make a quieter PC in this article. This week I've installed a Seasonic Super Tornado 300 Power Supply and a Zalman CNPS7000-AlCu which have certainly helped but the battle isn't over...
Superb visualization for Windows Media Player or Winamp. You can download lots of different dancing stick figures or even make your own. The coolest part is you can make your own from a photograph. I ought to do one of the kids. I love the political ones. Check out the dancing President Bush.
Good article analysing the Microsoft strategy behind Longhorn. Seems accurate to me. The Gates quote put it in a nutshell:
"The personal computer in less than three years will be a pretty phenomenal device," Gates said. "Exploiting the client, delivering data in the form of XML to the client and then having local rich rendering while still being able to have mapping to HTML for reach--that's something we're making very simple."
A return to the rich client is critical for the survival of Windows and to demonstrate it's value over and above Linux. To enable this, it is conquering the deployment problem...
Sad but not surprising. I've seen many of these big projects go bad. I'm convinced it boils down to people, process and skill risks more than anything to do with technology. The guilty parties in this case are Fujitsu and ICL but it could have been any of the big consulting firms.
The MPs' report found: "The department... ran a poor competition, attracting only one bidder, and it failed to take decisive action when ICL did not deliver what was required. For its part, ICL did not understand the department's requirements, took on excessive risk and underpriced its bid."
Of course...
Cool website and publication. So much more interesting than business software! I've applied for a free subscription.
Here's some of the things I've been drooling over lately.
I've been considering getting a film scanner so I can digitize all our old 35mm negatives and we could then go around to our parents and get copies of old family pictures. The best product at the moment to do a project like this seems to be the Minolta DiMage Scan Elite 5400. You need at least 4000dpi so there's a few scanners on the market that don't cost the earth and would do the job. Lots of talk up on photo.net.
All those photographs are going to take a lot of space. I really like the...
Check out these DVD players by KiSS that Scan stocks. Some of the features of the DP-558:
record and play programs from an 80Gb hard disk
play numerous formats including DivX, Xvid, Ogg Vorbis, CD+-RW
play Internet Radio via a broadband connection
stream music, pictures or video directly from a file server
This is the direction of home entertainment along with a massive media server sitting in a closet somewhere. Cool. Xbox and Sony will eventually need to catch-up to small companies doing these kinds of boxes.
Very clever. Someone has come up with a way of sharing Outlook PST files. Looks like they did it by writing a new client/server MAPI provider to take care of all the shared locking. Great solution for small businesses that don't want to run a full-blown Microsoft Exchange Server. Jenny and I have this exact problem since we have a single PST file that we use for addresses and family calendar but only one of us can have it open at any one time. It hasn't got annoying enough yet to start running Exchange. A two client license plus server...