For all of those users out there that are getting this error:
Optus have pulled the usage data text feed that the gadget, and many other third party tools used today with no real warning (certainly no email fyi).
I will endeavour to find a workaround over the weekend and release an update.
More info can be seen over on this Whirlpool thread.
A while back I wrote a post about how to get XVIDs / DIVX’s to play through Windows Media Centre using a technique called Transcoding and using the Transcoder 360 software. Since writing that post I had moved over to watching those kind of files though the 360’s dashboard directly as it was incredibly simple.
On Saturday morning I was playing around with the new media centre functionality in Windows 7 and discovered that the Win7 Media Centre can now play divx / avi’s directly without the need for transcoding!
Now if I want to watch a xvid / divx / avi file, I can watch it directly from within the Media Centre without having to drop out to the 360 dashboard by navigating to the Video Library and clicking on it. For me, this makes the 360 + Windows 7 nearly perfect. Given the current price point of 360’s at the moment, it is a very compelling deal.
On Thursday night I took the plunge and installed Windows 7 Beta 1 onto my ‘production’ PC at home. Gutsy move I know, but in my previous experience with operating system beta’s (95, 98, 98 SE, ME, XP and Vista) you need to use it in anger to find the real issues.
The install was painless and only needed a small amount of interaction from me, which was great because I got to watch Iron Man that Father Christmas got me for Christmas 
. Once it was installed my first impression was WOW. Not because I am a Microsoft fanboy (I am), but because it was quick and responsive. For what is supposed to be Beta 1, it is behaving like Beta 2 or something that is way further along in the development cycle.
There are some things that immediately caught my eye:
With no sidebar to dock the gadgets in, there are some subtle changes to how they work which I will post about later. From a beta testing perspective, Windows 7 Beta 1 is a bad build, the quality bar is so high it makes it damn hard to find bug which is why we are testing it. It does on the other hand make it a joy to use, and I am certainly looking forward to diving into the depths of what it has to offer.
Well 5 days into the year I have finally gotten off my arse to right a blog post. I was going to do one of those blog post reviews of the past year and setting goals for the next year, but Andy and the Wookie seem to have nailed that already. In fact, Andrew has also beaten me too.
At the moment I am enjoying a nice three week break from work and spending some amazing time with my family. We went up to the Gold Coast last week and took the kids to enjoy the sun, beaches and Wiggles World. Thanks to a suggestion by a colleague we stayed in Broadbeach and it was awesome, the place had a great family buzz, was well located and had a fantastic pool (well four in fact). Whilst travelling with young kids can be difficult it is also very rewarding. Seeing our youngest run up and hug the life size version of the dinosaur he uses as a teddy was fantastic. I have certainly come to appreciate how lucky I am to have such a fantastic wife and children.
As I write I have one week left before I return to work and am starting to ease back into all things nerdy (like Twitter and Google Reader) and eagerly awaiting the Windows 7 beta to kick off in the next week or so.
I am expecting 2009 to be a very big year personally and professionally and whilst I said I wasn’t going to set goals in a blog post, I have indeed set some, which will make 2009 very very exciting.
As some of you may know I used to work for a company called SDM. Whilst there I learnt about a number of technologies and products I had never really come across before including SharePoint, Project Server and CRM. There were a number of things I loved about the company, the people; the projects; the ‘can do’ attitude, the fun.
SDM was taken over by another company in January 2008 which should have been a great partnership. If the company had been smart they would have left SDM to do it’s own thing and backed them to become bigger and better. But they didn’t. They changed things and the fun, the attitude and the people began to leave.
Why am I telling you all this? Well the 30th November marks the last day that the SDM brand exists. As of the 1st December the brand will be no more.
I will always look back on my time at SDM with a great fondness, I made some excellent friends, learnt a lot, and most of all enjoyed going to work there, one day I hope I will be lucky enough to work at a similar company again.
Ok, sorry about the Tag Team reference. A couple of weeks ago I installed some new software from Microsoft called Oomph . Oomph is a Microformats toolkit. What is a Microformat you might ask, well Microformat.org says they are:
Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards
I say they are:
A way to tag data in a common format allowing it to be consumed
There are a heap of different Microformats covering things like names and addresses, through to lists,outlines and events.
Now enter Oomph, it is a set of tools that assist in the Consumption, Display and Creation of Microformats.
Consumption
The best part of the Oomph toolkit in my opinion is the Internet Explorer Add On that parses each web page and will alert the user if Microformat data has been found in the page by flashing up an icon in the top left hand corner of the browser.
Clicking on the icon reveals a cross browser overlay that shows the Microformat and allows you to consume the data in a number of ways. In the case of the hCard microformat it will allow you to save it to your email contact store.
Display
In addition to providing a way of consuming the data, the Oomph toolkit also includes a number of CSS styles to present microformat information:
Creation
The final component of the toolkit is an add-on for Windows Live Writer that enables you to create hCard microformat information automatically with you blog post.
At the moment the Oomph toolkit provides a glimpse at what you can do with Microformats. Certainly the ability to have something identify a Microformat exists on a web page and allow that information to be subsequently consumed without having to manually transcribe it is incredibly useful. I know Microformats have been around for a long time, but hopefully with Microsoft now pushing them a bit more, we can look forward to seeing more innovation with them.
So the PDC is over and there were a heap of product announcements, some of them really well done and received (Windows 7) some of them not so well done or understood (Azure). Personally I think Azure is going to be huge, and I am really interested to see how people are going to start using it in the real world, specifically how it’s going to impact the partner and enterprise ecosystems.
Anyway, I wanted to go back and look at my Canberra Airport Crystal ball and see what came true or what the Crystal ball was too damn foggy to see clearly.
Live
Lots and lots of Mesh news. As expected, a developers preview of Mesh was released built on the new Azure Services platform, one of Microsoft’s big announcements for PDC. The SDK / framework was released in a limited beta. Yes there was a new Mesh build dropped, moving Mesh from Tech Preview to Beta and introducing a number of new features. The Mac and Mobile clients were released, and I have to admit I am loving using the mobile client to push photos from my phone through to my other machines.
Windows
PDC had lots and lots of Windows 7 news. There were some really interesting demonstrations showing off the new feature of Windows 7 including HomeGroups, new Taskbar, Libraries, Aero improvements etc. As predicated there was a build given out to the attendees which everyone is commenting on how stable and snappy it is. Unfortunately in typical MS style, the builds shown did not necessarily reflect the build given to the attendees, but WithinWindows has worked out how to address that to a certain extent. I am not waiting for the Windows 7 beta to start so I can get my hands on it.
Office
The biggest surprise to me was that there wasn’t much in the way of Office announcements at PDC. I had fully expected some demo’s of the Office 14 suite, but maybe it’s too early in the development cycle to see it. What was announced was Office Web Applications, a set of web based applications including Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote that include a vast majority of the functionality of the desktop clients blowing the current implementation of Google Apps out of the water. There is a pretty snazzy demo on Channel 9 showing the integration between client and web that is an interesting watch. I have to admit, these apps got me thinking as to some of the scenarios that they could be used in, think Excel Services. Wouldn’t it be awesome to not need any client applications at all and to do everything within SharePoint 14? I am not quite sure when we are going to see more Office 14 related news, stay tuned.
All in all, PDC 2008 delivered a lot of news, a lot of it as predicted from my Canberra Airport crystal ball. Of those items I am particularly interested in Windows 7 (heh I have always been an operating system wh0re) and how people are going to start using the Live Framework in their application. It is certainly going to be a wild ride ahead.
For a while now CatchOfTheDay.com.au (COTD) has been advertising a birthday bash where they were going to offer up a number of items at huge discounts. Sounds too good to be true? It is.
From 12:00pm today the site has been running like a dog, frequently down and unresponsive. Tonight, I finally managed to get the page to load, and to see something I was interested in buying. So I clicked on Buy Now. After entering my credit card details and confirming the purchase I was confronted by this:
Notice the sold out at the bottom. After providing my credit card details which were accepted the site went on to say that it had sold out.
I along with several hundred other potential customers of COTD are extremely unhappy. COTD management, there are some important lessons to learn here:
Oh and one final thing, I had better not be charged for the item on my credit card or I am going to be REALLY REALLY unhappy.
As some of you may have noticed, the Freeway Time gadget stopped working on Monday. Unfortunately VicRoads do not provide a feed of times information for public consumption, so the gadget relied on scraping the information it needed from the Vicroads traffic site. On Monday VicRoads rolled out a new swish version of the Traffic times website that broke the screen scraping.
Unfortunately the new version seems to have taken the complexity to a new level calling SQL via JQuery and using Ajax to update the screen. Why am I telling you this? Well it’s going to take a bit of time to see if its possible to consume the new data source (my gut feeling is no).
Luckily I am on a couple of weeks leave, whilst waiting to start my new job on the 15th October, so I’ll see what I can do.
