SteveX Compiled

They’ve pushed the Fall 2006 dashboard update out the consoles; mine updated itself this morning.
Not a single new feature that’s really interesting to me.  It’s mostly refinements of what’s already there, and support for a new video mode that my TV doesn’t support.
I wanted a web browser; I wanted the ability to stream MPG [...]

The PS3 launches next month, and with it, Sony’s next generation online component – which they’ve decided not to brand separately from the console.  This makes it difficult to refer to directly, so I’ll call it the PS3 Online here for clarity.
Sony has had an online component for the PS2 for years, but there’s [...]

53 new messages in my Inbox this morning, and only 6 of them are not spam.  This is ridiculous.  Here’s the body of one of them (with a bit of editing):
babes amazing big boobs get a good tit f**kingblonde teen sucking and f**king in the kitchen

How can Google not think this is spam?
I want a [...]

So you’re working in Flex, and you’ve got a DataGrid.  The grid’s showing some data you’ve bound it to, and you want to have a button in a row that, when you click it, does something to one of the properties of the row.
Easy.  In the click event for your button, the ‘data’ property is [...]

I wonder what this error really means.
XBox Live is currently sorta-down, and it’s been in a sorta-down state for the last two days.  Games mostly work, the forums on xbox.com are down, and XBox Live has just been flaky.  Sometimes I can’t connect, but when I can, trying to download the new Lumines game gives [...]

I was working on some Flex stuff this morning, and got hung up on a data binding problem. 
Data binding is one of Flex’s strongest features.  It lets you simply say “this value is bound to that”, so you can do something like have a label’s text be bound to a field in your data [...]

I’ve created a tool, RatingMerge, that lets you merge iTunes ratings from multiple music libraries. Check it out.

There’s a demo of  Sega’s new MMO, Phantasy Star Universe, on XBox Live Marketplace.  It’s a beta, but the game is scheduled to be in stores in about two weeks, so I doubt much is going to happen between now and final release.
There were some glitches with the game, mainly frequent server disconnects, but those [...]

It’s really hard to take Microsoft’s .NET strategy seriously when they make boneheaded moves like this.
Okay, so the framework needs to be modularized.  Do it.  You’re one big company, surely you can make it happen.
This shows either a lack of committment to Vista Server Core, or a lack of committment to .NET.  Which is it?

One subtle way to encourage users to buy a new version of your software, is to make the old version feel old. 
If the only difference between the previous version and the current version is features, and the previous version has all the features that the user needs, then what incentive is there to upgrade?
The [...]