Mix06 - Sleep?

Great. Checked-in. Unpacked. Go to sleep? Why not, it's only 3 am my time? No way, it's only 12 am Nevada time. Besides, I don't have any idea as to where I'm supposed to be going. I should venture out in the bright-lights and see what all the fuss is about.

Mix06 - Vegas, baby! Vegas

Arrived in Sunny Las Vegas, Sin City, City that never sleeps, 2:30 in the morning. Despite the late hour, the city is still a-buzz. Perhaps the most surprising of all is how close the airport is to the strip. Coming into the gate, you can see it all! Pyramids, New York, Paris -- feels just like a CSI fly-by sequence.

Managed to find my luggage and the taxi line up. As luck would have it, a few gentlemen were chatting with some of their seat-mates, and I overheard that they were headed to the Venetian -- the location of my event. I was pretty lucky with the travel arrangements; although I couldn't get the discounted rate at the Venetian, they managed to get me into Harrahs, which is next door.

I was able to pool together and take a cab with these guys to the Venetian, and then I had to find my way to Harrahs. I had to skirt through a parking garage, cross the street at an unlikely intersection and then pulled my travel luggage into the valet parking area.

Mix06 - Start

Off to Mix06 -- Microsoft's event where they'll be showcasing Internet Explorer 7, Windows Vista, Avalon, Atlas, etc. Should be pretty cool, as it's in Las Vegas. Bill Gates is giving the keynote, so all in all, an exciting time to be had.

My flight pulls out of Pearson at 8:35 Sunday night, which means I'll get there late...

Recorded Media Center Programs Meet Pocket PC: Part II

A few posts back, I was lamenting about trying to get my Windows Media Center recorded TV programs onto My Pocket PC. After upgrading to PocketPC 2003, the native support for Windows Media 9 has made transcoding MS-DVR files into WMV painless:

In the morning, I transcode my TV show while I'm in the shower. I plop my 2 GB SD card into the media-drive on my Media Center and drag-n-drop 60Mb worth of Stephen Colbert's Colbert Report for viewing while on the TTC.

And... I'm happy to report, that I've suddenly found my PDA useful again.

Screen Capture for Invisible Windows

I was recently tinkering around in an admin tool that is used to build web-sites, and found myself wondering if it was possible to create a "preview" of the web-site as an image. The idea being, I want to show a list of pages in the website with thumbnails of page previews; thus the site administrator can see the entire site on a single page and would be able to know what they were editing before they opened the page configuration.

If you're like me, these kinds of problems drive me crazy. I ear mark them as "nifty ideas" and I slowly mull them over in my head when my head has idle time. (What, you don't have head idle time? Between 3-4 in the morning when I change sleeping positions, I have to force myself not to address my mental challenge To-do list. I recently discovered that our brains solve a lot of problems after only a few hours of sleep.)

So although I haven't actually cracked the code open to tackle this problem, here's what I envision the implementation to be:

1. Use the .NET Process object to launch a window to the web page.
2. Grab the handle of the Process and pass it to the GDI+ to convert into an image. This CodeProject article gives a really good overview of doing just that.

I'm hoping that if the .NET Process is launched with the ProcessWindowStyle set to "Hidden" that it still has a valid device context used to paint onto the screen. If that's true, there should be no reason why I couldn't convert the hidden window's content into a Bitmap.

Few other things to consider, such as when to determine that the browser has fully loaded the requested page? I might have to consider using the WebBrowser control to load the webpage and wait until the document onload event or page status changes....

Yet another task to play with...

Shell extensions in C#

I work with a lot of Xml files, where the filenames are random GUIDs. Since all the documents have the same structure, I wonder if it would be possible to create a shell extension for Windows Explorer that could add a column to the details tab.

This CodeProject article, Explorer column handler shell extension in C# - The Code Project - C# Programming, looks like a good starting point.

Update 06/07/2008: I've written a few shell extensions following this example.  Although they work, they can seize a lot of memory if you need to spawn a debugger.

Recorded Media Center programs, meet Pocket PC

Dang!

Recently I bought a 2 GB SD card cheap from Future Shop ($99 CAN) so that I could start to take some of my recorded Media Center TV shows onto my Pocket PC. This has proven to be a bit difficult task...

First off, it's takes a lot of time to find a convenient way to transform Microsoft's dvr-ms files into something less... massive. One hour of recorded TV is roughly 2.5 GB. And -- everyone has got a piece of software to do the job for a price. I've test-driven several freeware applications, but you've got to be really frikkin patient to try some of these things out.

DVR 2 WMV has proven to be the quickest way to convert into Windows Media Format, where 1 hour of video takes about 20 minutes. Initially I had some problems getting the application to work, but after I turned on Compatibility mode, things seemed to work fine. (I've also got my eye on using the MSDVR Toolkit to automatically strip out commercials and convert into various formats, but it's not as straight forward as DVR 2 WMV)

The next big challenge is actually my PocketPC. I have an iPaq 3870 which was released back in 2002 as a Compaq product before the big HP merger. At that time, the 203Mhz, TFT screen, 64Mb internal memory, SD Card slot and built in Bluetooth was HOT. It was crazy expensive compared to some of the units available today. (Yet another pioneering effort on my part. You do realize that me buying this stuff at the early-adopter stage is what it makes it affordable for you people? You're welcome)

Although I've used my PDA fairly frequently, I even wrote some applications in Compact .NET framework, it's become more of a second-class peripheral on my cluttered desk. I use it mainly to display my calendar for the day, and since my Laptop has Bluetooth, I don't even have to worry about hooking it up in the morning.

Sadly, it's also only running PocketPC 2002 which has Window Media Player 8.5 for Pocket PC. Guess what format DVR 2 WMV uses? If you guessed Windows Media 9 you would be absolutely correct. Enjoy a coke on me.

So, at long last, I finally found a reason to download and install The Core Pocket Media Player, an opensource media player for pretty much any portable device. It can play most media formats, including divX. But I was shutout again! It looks like the Windows Media Support for TCPMP is based on the windows media codecs installed on the device. Back to square one, either find a way to acquire the codecs, or look at finding another tool to encode the DVR-MS files.

Although I wasn't able to find the codecs as a separate download, the real killer is that you can't just download Windows Media 9 for Pocket PCs -- you have to upgrade your OS, which is... sub-optimal. Turns out you can't just walk into a store and buy a copy of PocketPC 2003, it can only be upgraded through the manufacturer of the device. Specifically, the ROM has to be reprogrammed. Do you think HP is going to have a ROM for a 4 year old Compaq device available for purchase on their site? Rhetoric question answerers may drink another coke for answering no.

Then, on a whim, I tried E-Bay. I was pleasantly surprised to find the ROM for only $2.99 US, free shipping. Skip the afternoon $2 coffee, have that sucker shipped to my office, pronto. So, we'll see what an upgrade brings. Maybe I'll find myself with a renewed interest in my Pocket PC. Or, as a late-adopter, I'll break down and buy an iPod like the rest of you (thank you for making that stuff affordable)

SubInACL

Pretty powerful ACL tool for windows.

Markdown.NET

A recent project at work, our content management system converts the raw text into HTML and persists the translated values as part of an XML document.

However, Markdown.NET would appear to be an interesting alternative. MarkDown, which started off in perl has been ported to php, phyton and others. I'd be interested to see how it would fit into our solution framework.

DVD-Decryptor is dead, now what?

I'm really interested in taking DVD content and ripping it into a format for my portable media player, but I came late to the game -- the fan favourite DVD-Decryptor is out of business, simply because their application could break copyright encryption.

But ShrinkTo5 may stand as the next successor to DVD-Decryptor. I've heard rave reviews about this tool, and I need to find some time to play with it.

The big difference: it doesn't break CSS encryption. Well, at least not on it's own.

A popular DeCSS encryption dll, "machinist.dll" can decrypt the CSS... if this dll was included in the same folder as ShrinkTo5, it'll load the decryption algorithm and decrypt on the fly.

A quick google and I was able to find a location that posts the machinist.dll for download. Remember, decrypting is not illegal in all countries.

....set the building on fire....

I can understand why Milton Adams (Stephen Root) of Office Space would be up in arms about his Red Swingline stapler gone missing. My brother-in-law bought me the stapler for christmas as a joke. But make no mistake, this heavy-duty diecast metal stapler is all business. I'm able to punch documents that would make normal staplers roll over and die.

Google Sightseeing

Google's social influence meets world tourist.

Get Geolocation stats for your web site, for free...

gVisit.com has provided a simple tool that collects the last 20 visitors to your site and then correlates and displays this information on a google-map. Yet another example of how everything is becoming more ubiquitos and coadjuvant.

CodeProject: Server-side handling for css and js

This post on CodeProject talks about creating a custom handler for css and js files, so that relative paths can be resolved. The ability to specify relative paths to your application root is clearly an advantage if your application root is a virtual directory or sub-folder from the web root. But I think this solution could go one further: II6 supports wildcard mapping, so that all requests can be funelled through the asp.net runtime, an advantage if you want to use virtual URLs for both folders and files. I believe that dotText is using wildcard mapping in this manner, and I think they have implemented a very decent handler for static files, such as js, css, images, etc. I wonder if the dotText controls can be extended to support this type of ~ (AppDomainAppVirtualPath) mapping.

Hot Keys and Quick Launch groups

I've been watching too much G4Tech TV recently, specifically "Call For Help". While maybe the context of the show is geared towards computer-newbies, they do seem to cover a wide range of stuff.

A segment of the show includes a "download of the day". A few days ago they featured PS Hot Launch, a lightweight tool quick-launch toolbar for the applications that you use frequently. What makes it unique is that you can group them together and assign hotkeys to the group. You can configure to show a quick-launch menu for the hot-key or to launch all applications in a group -- perfect if you have tasks where you need an IDE, command-line, nunit, and browser!

Microsoft Google Search

I don't know how many times I've tried to weed out what I was looking for in a search result. Turns out, Google has probably noticed that I (ok, and the rest of the planet) have done a lot of Microsoft related searches.

In the Advanced Search of Google, they've provided customized search pages for common searches, including:

• Apple
• Macintosh
• BSD
• Unix
• Linux
• Microsoft
• and others

Even better -- you can add the Microsoft search to Firefox as a Search Engine Plugin

Simplified Database Unit testing using Enterprise Services

Simplified Database Unit testing using Enterprise Services Clever.

Classic Computer Magazine Archive

How old school is this? Fond memories.

Das Keyboard

Ya, you typing.

UltraMon

I've been running a laptop and a flat-screen monitor for a few months now and stumbled upon UltraMon. It's a commercial product but it provides a trial version. After reading it's specs, I'm definately going to check it out.