SteveX Compiled

Windows Media Center Edition records video to files with the extension DVR-MS.  It’s disappointing to see that Windows Media Player 11 in Vista can’t play a DVR-MS file.  

I installed Vista Beta 2 on my wife’s computer last night.  What a mistake. First off, Vista really needs some sort of administrative mode or something that says “I hereby authorize myself to do frikkin’ everything, so stop bugging me”.  I must have typed in my credentials 100 times last night, just doing the usual [...]

I had a very simple “Country of the Week” webpage a while ago, and I really liked the idea but the implementation wasn’t all that great, and during some recent moving around of servers and the like, it broke. I recently developed an interest in Ruby, and used a Country of the Week 2.0 as [...]

Microsoft has announced an HD DVD drive for the XBox 360. I’ve got mixed feelings about this. Being an external drive, and therefore not a core peripheral, games can’t depend on it being there. In fact, I believe Microsoft has stated that games will *not* use the HD DVD drive. I wouldn’t be surprised if [...]

At E3, Microsoft announced HD DVD support for the XBox 360 in the form of an external peripheral drive that you’ll be able to buy and hook up to the XBox 360′s USB port. I took a look at the the Blu-Ray and HD DVD formats a while ago, and at the time, concluded that [...]

I just discovered another special query that Google uses to return specific information, rather than just general search results:  Release Date. Search for Photoshop CS2 Release Date and Google will clearly tell you that the release date was April 28, 2005.  Windows XP Release Date gets you October 10th, 2005. I use the movie:Pirates of [...]

Google called Microsoft a “convicted monopolist” this week, when talking about how they’re going to fight to prevent Microsoft from abusing their monopoly power when it comes to the default search engine in IE7. This is a bad sign for Google. For one thing, does it really seem anti-competitive for a company to use their [...]

Seriously, who decided that MFC’s CRegKey::QueryStringValue should return a LONG instead of a CString?  It’s an MFC class.  MFC has a string class.  The purpose of this function is to query a string.  Why do I have to pass in a buffer and a buffer size?  Why can’t it just return me a string? I [...]

I just sat through an hour of Sony’s press conference at E3. They showed a funky eyetoy / image recognition system that lets you play cards and have the system recognize the card you played and interact with it. They showed demos of a bunch of games that looked about equal to the XBox 360 [...]

Just a quick pointer for anyone living in Canada – the Roomba Discovery (2.1) is on sale for $299 at Canadian Tire. This is a great price for the Roomba Discovery, which is an update to the original Roomba that adds quite a few improvements. The ones that affect me are easier to clean brushes [...]