The XBOX 360 as a Media Center Extender

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Number one son has been playing with an XBOX 360 as a Media Centre extender. He's also been using the latest version of Vista. Lucky fellow.

Anyhoo, turns out that an XBOX makes a very good extender. And it worked with Vista right out of the box. The experience is pretty much as if you were sat at the real computer, picking music, looking at pictures and watching live or recorded TV.

The network lights up like a christmas tree when you use it (although we are using a slow old style yellow wire one for some bits) but the pictures that come out of the other end are pretty darned good.

However, this is not helping my case to get a Media PC downstairs in the living room.....

Oblivion with Cars

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One of the wonderful things about the XBOX 360 is the way that you can download demos of games. Actually, this is probably not wonderful, more like expensive. I've already bought a couple of games on the back of this "feature". Darn it.

In the old days I had to wait until a magazine with a coverdisk came out. Nowadays I just leave the machine chugging for a couple of hours whilst the next potential wallet buster comes down the wires.

And so, I downloaded the demo of Test Drive Unlimited. This is a driving game. Actually, game is probably a bit of an understatement. It is more like a better version of life. You start off with a massive house in Hawii and a few cars in the garage. You look a lot cooler than you really do (at least in my case), and you seem to have a lot more spare time.

So you go for a drive. You can drive anywhere on the island. Happen you'll meet up with another driver, who may or may not be a real person. Happen you'll have a race. Happen you'll go the wrong way round the track, get hopelessly lost and embarras yourself. Or you might be more lucky than me. Anyway, if you win, money changes hands and you can save up for a new, even shinier car.

And so it goes on. The weather changes, the time of day changes. The road goes on, seemingly for ever. There are no loading screens. There is no slowdown. You can use your GPS to find things of interest and you can also meet up with your chums for races. When you sit in the car, you sit in the car. You can even make the windows go up and down.  

The car handling is realistic enough to be annoying. You can crash into things and do damage to them, but not apparently to yourself. If you are sufficiently naughty the police might want to take you to task. If you are feeling brave you can get on a motorbike instead.

When I first played Oblivion, the massive XBOX 360 roleplaying game, I was impressed by the way that the world was totally believable, and massive. Test Drive Unlimited is like that, but with cars and no loading delays at all. Folks, this is proper next generation gaming. Not a flashier version of an existing game, but a whole new immersive experience. If you have an XBOX 360 you should at least get hold of the demo of this game. Then, like me, you can start saving for the real thing...

Prepare for Icon Attack!

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I've been playing with the new XNA Express stuff which lets you write games using XNA. Great fun. I'm presently creating a little 2D shooting game which is provisionally titled "Icon Attack", where you fly "My Computer" into battle against massed hordes of Windows Icons, running in fear from the "Recycle Bin of Doom".

I've just got the first bit working, which is the moving icon starfield that will provide the backdrop. I'll keep you posted (quite literally) about how the development goes. Eventually I'll put the source up for you to marvel at.....

What a company!

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I bought a CD from a web based store yesterday. Today I got the shipping note. I'm reproducing it here because I think it is wonderful.

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over
the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money
can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party
marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of
Portland waved 'Bon Voyage!' to your package, on its way to you, in
our private CD Baby jet on this day, Wednesday, August 30th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did.
Your picture is on our wall as 'Customer of the Year'. We're all
exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

I'm very tempted to buy something else, just to see if I get a different message.

Live Writer Flickr Inkifier now available

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I've finished writing the code for the latest Live Writer plugin. It lets you grab images from Flickr, annotate them with ink and then post them back. It also has a few image processing feature, including a "wild" thing which is quite fun. You can find out more here.

Partycrasher

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Ever held one of those parties where folks turn up uninvited, drink all your booze, trash the place and then stay around for months afterwards 'cos they figure you want them around?

Well, I haven't, but they sound terrible.

I had something similar though when I installed my new camera software. Normally I avoid installing programs that come with things like cameras. I've got my own image processing software (Microsoft Digital Imaging Suite since you asked) and it works fine thank you very much. Normally a camera is recognised by Windows as a storage device, and I've found that things go pretty smoothly even if you ignore the draconian "Install software before placing camera within a 1000 metre radius of the USB socket on your computer" warnings that they come with.

However, the new camera that I've bought has a RAW mode, where it captures the image information directly off the sensor and passes it to the computer for processing. This is great if you want the ultimate in quality, but it means that you need software to unpick the picture when it arrives. This is usually tied to a particular camera range. So I figure I have to install the software.

Which does the digital equivalent of drinking all my booze, trashing the place and then refusing to leave. It installs yet another icon in my full to bursting system tray. It gets in the way of any other cameras that I might dare to plug in. And when I remove the darned thing, it stops the system automatically recognising other USB devices.

Pesky driver software.

I've heard that Windows Vista is a lot less accommodating to newly arrived drivers from hell. I hope so.

Roman Holiday

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Last week I bought a new camera. I really shouldn't have. But this was a real bargain and so I liquidated all my ebay assets and sallied forth to Currys to make the purchase. I wanted the camera because it has a very long zoom lens.

So today we went off to Sewerby Park, where they were doing some Roman re-enactments. And out came the camera...

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Sewerby House looking good

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A local parrot

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They do have some superb gardens here.

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Bridlington Bay

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And looking the other way..

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Apparently it is rather hard to shoot an arrow from horseback.

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Testing the troops

It's always the social issues that get you...

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I've been playing more with my Flickr inkifier and it is now nearly ready for release into the wild. By that I mean that I've solved all the technical problems, but now I have to deal with the "social" ones.

These are the ones which give you the most grief as a developer because there are no hard and fast answers. When I wanted to add my plugin to Live Writer this was easy. Copy the example, read the documentation and away you go. But now I have to deal with users.

To post a picture to Flickr you have to login to the service. Fair enough. There is a lovely mechanism for this in Flickr which means that once a user has authorised my plugin with them they never have to do it again. But the plugin also has to remember some stuff about the login. So questions start to arise; "Where to I store the information?", "What do I store?", "How will the user interact with it?", "Do I store the data on a per user basis?". Ugh.  

 So, wrestling with all these issues has slowed me down a bit. That and marking all the programming resit exams and coursework. Double ugh.

Inky Posts

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03ducks Inky

I really shouldn't be doing this. I have much more important things to get on with. Then again, I never take all my holiday and this is a form of recreation. Anyhoo, I'm in the process of improving my Flickr plugin so that you can annotate your pictures with ink.

When you pull the picture out of Flickr you are given the option to "inkify" it and then it stores a new version of the picture back up on Flickr with the ink on top. Above is the first ever inkified picture.

You can see how useful this is going to be.....

Spider Bite Confusion

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I was reading the paper over breakfast this morning and there was a rather amusing article about all the horrible things that there are around the world which can make bad things happen to unwary travelers. Just the thing to read when you are safely back home from  a trip away.

In amongst descriptions of various ticks, snakes and jellyfish was an item about the Australian Black Funnel Web Spider. This is a truly nasty piece of work which has no fear of humans (but then why should it) and really poisonous venom. If you get bitten by this baby you can look forward to turning blue, foaming at the mouth, your hair standing on end and, mysteriously, depression.

I'm a bit unsure as to why they added depression to the list. It implies that of all the bad things on the page that could happen to you, a bite from the spider is the only one that would make you unhappy. Or that there are are spiders which make you happy when they bite you.

I'm confused.

Imagine that Live Writer Plugin

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I've just made a plugin for Windows Live Writer which lets me easily post my Flickr pictures. There is a proper plugin available as well as mine, but mine does exactly what I want, which is quickly find the images and then add them to the post in the correct size. And anyway, I wanted to write my own to see how easy it is. So there.

One thing that I have learnt from the exercise is just how darned easy it is to string things together these days. Figuring out how to write the plugin wasn't too hard, and writing a .NET program to pull pictures off Flickr turned out to be much easier than I expected. So, without further ado, lets import some snaps:

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This is one of the dancers at the Imagine Cup party in Agra

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This is outside the hotel lobby. I just love those white cars

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And this is your room, after the room tidying faries have been round..