December 2004 Blog Posts
Arrgghhh! I'm getting weird behaviour from Windows Media Player 9. If I play a video, I have to keep the mouse near the top left of the player's window. If I move it down to the bottom right, the video is offset to the point I can't see it. So basically, if I move the mouse down, the movie slides upward; if I move the mouse to the right, it slides to the left. Weird! It's like the window relative mouse position is getting subtracted from the video draw offset.
My wife and I finished playing Halo 2 in co-operative mode last week. Overall, it lived up to my expectations of a sequel. The cinematics and storyline were particularly good. Graphics and gameplay were excellent. However, I was disappointed with the ending. It wasn't as much of a climax as I was expecting and wasn't nearly as difficult as the end of Halo 1. Just a few more years to wait now for Halo 3.
Went on a two day course last weekend spending 12 hours learning Macromedia flash. With only two students for the one instructor, Alun Ward, we were able to progress through the material very quickly. It was a perfect way to learn. I can certainly claim to have acquired basic competence with Flash. Now that I can work my way around the Flash MX 2004, I need to figure out how some of the more advanced UI's are done and play around with it more. Fun stuff.
I would highly recommend OFVM up in Oxford and hope to take some more of their...
If you look up "sender" at Dabs you can find a Dabsvalue Video/Audio Sender 2.4Ghz for £30. It's far cheaper than other A/V Senders I could find so I crossed my fingers and ordered it.
It turns out to be the "Medion Wireless RF Transmission System". Even on the Medion website, the same product is listed for £50. The one I got from Dabs is the same product (product code MD 9048) but is styled differently. It's oval and silver compared to the black box on Medion's website.
It arrived this morning and was a snap to setup; just plug all the...
Found this analysis of the Microsoft stock price. Bottom line is that the current share price is reasonable if an earning per share growth rate of 6.7% or above can be maintained.
Yep, you can now get a Swiss Army Knife complete with USB storage. It's on my Christmas list! Might be a bit heavy if you hang it off the back of a PC.
Interesting article on using Windows XP to do RAID-5 in software. I'm now using Windows XP to do RAID-0 and it's working nicely. I always thought it would be nice have an external RAID-5 box that connected using firewire so that it could be moved easily and connected directly to different machines. However, the problem with a hardware-based RAID-5 system is that if the controller dies, it's unlikely you can successfully transfer the array, intact, to another hardware-based controller. With Windows XP, it turns out to be simple to move the RAID-5 array to another machine.
So taking a quick look...
Nice implementation of the "donate your PC time" theme.
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