Archive for December, 2005

XBox Back in Business

Tuesday, December 27th, 2005

I had the three flashing red lights on the ring of light problem yesterday, and in searching around on the ‘Net, I found one or two posts that said that hitting the console actually helped. Since mine was going back to the store anyway, I figured I’d give it a try. Turns out a sharp […]

Broken XBox 360

Sunday, December 25th, 2005

My XBox 360 decided to start blinking red lights at me on Christmas Day. This is an XBox that’s seen a lot of use and never had a problem for the last month, but suddenly, after a short road trip, now it’s unhappy. I was playing a game when the screen went to a mess […]

Does GoogleBot run JavaScript?

Saturday, December 24th, 2005

I’ve been looking at a friend’s turtle site recently and thinking about search engine optimization. It’s always been said that Google needs to see what’s on your site to index it, but now that JavaScript (and especially AJAX) are becoming more prevalent, I wonder.. does Google run the JavaScript code on my site? I could […]

Sneaking Past the Hypervisor

Saturday, December 24th, 2005

Hackers are working on figuring out the guts of the XBox 360, and so far it doesn’t seem like there’s been much real progress. Lots of discovery of what’s in there, and finding where the walls are, but the walls don’t seem to be in any danger. The XBox 360 uses a hypervisor architecture. My […]

FrameCopy

Saturday, December 24th, 2005

We bought a Centrios 7” Digital Photo Frame for someone (can’t say who.. dunno who’s reading) for Christmas.  It’s not an expensive photo frame, but it has some quirks.. one of which is that it uses the wrong aspect ratio to display images.  Pretty strange for a digital photo product, but there you have it.  […]

BackgroundWorker

Thursday, December 22nd, 2005

I just had my first opportunity to use the BackgroundWorker object, and I must say I’m very impressed. Part of creating a user interface is separating the work from the UI thread, so that the UI can remain responsive and report progress while a long operation is running.  This isn’t rocket science, but it is […]

Steve Wozniak

Wednesday, December 21st, 2005

I listed to TWiT this morning, and Steve Wozniak was a guest.  It was an excellent show. A biography of Steve Wozniak that I read when I was 18 or so had a big effect on me.  I loved that he was portrayed as this sort of techno-wiz prankster; the story in the book that […]

DreamWeaver

Tuesday, December 20th, 2005

I left a note to myself to try creating blog posts with images using DreamWeaver.  Turns out you can’t just paste a bitmap from the clipboard into DreamWeaver, so I guess FrontPage has the advantage there. Looks like a powerful tool though – I have access to it through Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia.  I’ve always heard […]

Mainstream Bloggers vs Random Sampling

Monday, December 19th, 2005

Reading blogs via the Long Tail is an interesting contrast to the usual blogs I read.  The sheer mindlessness of most posts aside, the what I’m used to reading is mostly people linking to interesting things and then commenting on them.  They’re aggregators.  Scoble, for example, or Scripting News. The reason the aggregator bloggers are […]

Posting Entries with Images

Monday, December 19th, 2005

By the way, if you’re looking for an efficient workflow for creating blog posts with snippets of your desktop or window screenshots, here’s the secret. Create your posts using FrontPage.  You can paste an image into FrontPage and it will automatically generate a filename and save it to disk for you.  You can create and […]