May 2007 - Posts
According to the Windows Vista team blog post over here there are some new betas available. The most important for me is the Windows Live Writer Beta 2 which now features the ability to add categories and a special new paste method. As my tool of preference I can't wait to try it out.
Windows Live Messenger 8.5 adds a new look and feel thats more suitable for Windows Vista and the Windows Live Mail is the successor to Windows Mail on Windows Vista and Outlook Express on Windows XP. I've been running a beta of it for a while to with Windows Live Hotmail and I must say it beats going to the web interface all the time.
Update: It seems that the download pages don't work from outside the US but I found a blog post with direct links.
Yesterday Microsoft unveiled a new technology aptly named Microsoft Surface and occasionally referred to as Microsoft Surface Computing. What is it? Simply put its a 30-inch tabletop display whose unique abilities allow for several people to work independently or simultaneously without a mouse or keyboard. Basically you control the user experience with your finger and from the demo videos it can recognise other objects like cellphones and credit cards as well. Personally I don't know how it can recognise your credit card unless perhaps it has a built-in scanner - maybe it does? Whether this concept will succeed remains to be seen as long as the price isn't too high.
For a quick intro into the technology thats due to launch in November 2007 take a look at the official site including videos here and an On10.net video of it actually working here.
Zoopy they said, I was wondering if they were going a bit loopy in the head but apparently South Africa has its very own YouTube meets Flickr site and its called Zoopy. Its run by a local company called Full House Technologies whose goal it is to make the world a smaller place that's far more fun to live in.
The site is pretty straight forward to use and there is even a Java-based Zoopy Mobile client for your mobile phone so you can upload those random pictures easily while out in the field. So for the average Joe Blogs this site is way cool, however I tried to upload a whole bunch of photos from the recent 27 Dinner and I got rather irritated with the cumbersome method of uploading only a single file at a time. I have already e-mailed them with my batch upload feature suggestion as well as a recommendation to read the description and other info from the Exif information contained in most camera originating photos these days.
I'm sure the site will become one of the most popular local photo and video sharing sites.
So last night I went to my first 27 Dinner and it was really worth it. I must thank Andre for telling me about the one he attended in May as I would never have known about it otherwise. For those who don't know what a 27 Dinner is well the site describes it best as:
27 is a get together, held on the 27th day of each month for geeks, marketers, entrepreneurs, writers, media practitioners, speakers - well, just about anybody who is keen - to share ideas and news and opinions over food and drink. Alternating monthly between Jozi and Cape Town, 27 is open to anyone who wants to attend (and/or contribute).
The topics presented last night included an interesting talk by Colin Daniels about Bullardgate and the upcoming new daily publication from The Times followed by an inspiring talk by Erik Hersman on endless possibilities for innovation through integration of existing technologies with mobile platforms. The final speaker was Vinny Lingham who demonstated his "Dreamweaver 2.0" free web building application called Synthasite. It looks cool and hopefully will become the web-based site builder of the year. Considering its free to use and includes free hosting with opt-in advertisiting, I think its going to rock the cheapskate South African's pocket.
I must express thanks to Stormhoek who provided an ample supply of vino. It was my first time trying out their wine range and I must say that I particularly enjoyed the red I was drinking; pity I didn't catch the name and vintage. Anyone know what it was and how to order a case?
It was great to meet so many new like-minded people and I'm definitely looking forward to the next Jozi 27 Dinner and to catch-up and meet more fresh faces. I'll hopefully be putting up the numerous photos I took on the Zoopy channel once I've gone through all the voice memos and tagged the photos with names.
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27 Dinner
The Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 redistributable has been failing to deploy through Windows Update (with the error code 0x643) on my work Windows XP machine for quite some time now and I was just not bothered enough by it to find out exactly why. I had tried all workarounds as suggested on the MSDN forums as well as using the pre-release uninstall utility recommended by the release notes to no avail. So I decided to take a deeper look and downloaded the redistributable manually and analysed the output.
First thing I noticed was that the file %TEMP%\dd_dotnetfx3error.txt contained the following error message:
Windows Presentation Foundation: [2] Error: Installation failed for component Windows Presentation Foundation. MSI returned error code 1603
Upon further hunting I found the %TEMP%\dd_wpf_*.txt files and they all contained the same error message:
Product: Windows Presentation Foundation -- Error 1402. Could not open key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\.xps\PersistentHandler. System error 5. Verify that you have sufficient access to that key, or contact your support personnel.
So obviously I had some XPS file viewer installed that wasn't detected by the pre-release uninstall utility. And yes there it was, Microsoft XML Paper Specification Essentials Pack 1.0.5714 was installed. I believe it was actually beta 2 of the product and not version 1.0. Removing it solved the installation problem and the .NET Framework 3.0 installed perfectly.
Its not often that my work PC (running Windows XP service pack 2) starts to misbehave, but recently I've noticed that when I unlock my workstation in the morning its very sluggish and its been swapping out to disk a lot lately. I thought it was just Internet Explorer 7.0 freaking out about being open with a tab open to GMail - I've noticed that this causes a memory leak under Windows Vista. So I decided to investigate this further yesterday and found the culprit to be a little process known only as svchost.exe in Task Manager. It was chewing up horrendous amounts of working set memory - anything from 200 MB through to a whopping 1.2 GB this morning.
Knowing that svchost.exe is really a generic host process for Win32 services, I fired up a copy of the wonderful Sysinternals Process Explorer utility to see what really was happening. After a bit of investigations and Googling I isolated the Automatic Updates client (wuauclt.exe) into its own svchost.exe process through some clever registry hacking. And lo and behold, the memory kept on climbing which led me to investigate the issue further.
Today I discovered a blog post on the WSUS Product Team Blog explaining an issue covered by KB927891 with the MSI installer. And has subsequently been released to Windows Update according to the team blog here. Thank goodness the bug has been fixed and my machine can once again behave optimally again.
Firstly let me explain a bit about the beta for those not in the know. The easiest way for anyone to get access to the public beta is to buy a copy of Crackdown - an awesome game in its own right. Bungie, the makers of Halo 3, released a public beta of the game onto Xbox LIVE on Wednesday but due to some technical difficulties it was only made available to Crackdown owners early on Thursday morning. Having a 4mbps ADSL line is what counts when it comes to downloading 911.18 MB of beta content as I managed to get it down in under 45 minutes. I must say after playing it for a few hours it is totally worth the 1 GB knock on my monthly internet cap.
Quite a few people have been commenting on one of the local forums about the gameplay videos that have been published on the Internet and what they believe are sub-standard graphics. I wouldn't rate the graphics as highly as something like the ever popular Gears of War but I believe they are impressive as it is. Remember this is a beta and generally that means that there is a lot of spit 'n polish remaining to finish of the game.
From a game play perspective the game is fast and smooth running. I didn't experience a single bit of network lag and that is quite unusual considering I was testing it on a shaped ADSL account against predominantly British and American players. One of the regular Namibian players even managed to play a team match with me over a satellite connection with a average latency of over 900 milliseconds. I don't know what Bungie have done with the network code but they have definitely pulled off some sort of magic behind the scenes.
There are bound to be quite a few bugs cropping up in the game and I suppose this is the main reason why Bungie decided to make it a public beta; to iron out as many issues before the game goes gold. I did stumble upon one or two bugs but they were mainly visual defects and one where the game pauses, takes you to the scoreboard and then resumes a short while thereafter.
Overall I recommend this beta to anyone with a copy of Crackdown and some time to get in and play. If you are a Halo or Halo 2 fan then there is no question, go download the beta as you only have until the 10th of June 2007 at 09h59 to get some practice in before the full game rocks world on the 26th of September 2007.
Cross posted from http://xboxbloggers.net/CraigN/.
This last week saw the South African release of Tetris Evolution developed by Mass Media and published as an Xbox 360 exclusive by THQ. I've always been a fan of the puzzle game tetris and was eager to see how the game developer Mass Media has managed to take the classic 1984 game by Alexey Pajitnov into the next generation. You might recall that Alexey Pajitnov was the developer behind the Xbox 360 bundled launch arcade title Hexic HD.
My initial impression of the game is that its targetted at someone who has played tetris before. The single player game starts off without any training, guidance or tips. So you'll find yourself stacking up tetrominoes with loads of empty spaces in between as the controls are just not intuitive; expect to refer to the game manual once or twice to try figure it all out. I say try because the manual leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to explaining the games concepts and how the controls actually work. Sure there are the simple concepts like rotating the tetromino left and right using the A and B buttons and moving it left and right using the left stick. But then you bump the left stick up to hard drop (make it fall to the bottom instantly) and down to make it soft drop (make it go downward faster). Then you get the more esoteric hold piece function which is activated by LT, RT, LB and RB. Basically it holds the current tetromino in holding area and issues you with the next tetromino. Quite useful if you want to save a key tetromino for later.
If the game started off explaining the concepts and controls once off it would be a great improvement. I found myself searching through the manual for descriptions of T-Spin and was disappointed not to find it. Thats where you have to be thankful for the limitless resource called the Internet. I would suggest that they update the title to include a bit more guidance for the new user which explains what some of these new concepts.
The game features online play through Xbox LIVE. I couldn't find any casual games to join but managed to find a ranked match. I found it extremely sluggish which I can only assume is a result of the 300ms international latency. It had the effect on making the controls slow to respond while my opponents didn't seem to be affected at all. So I don't recommend this for South African gamers across Xbox LIVE unless its a game between South Africans only. Unfortunately I couldn't find a fellow South African to test the local performance with.
The game features many customisations but I found the music to be highly irritating as it is linked to the background picture that you choose and doesn't change at all. Thank goodness the Xbox 360 has a media player and you can shuffle your own tracks. I think the developers could take a leaf out of EA's book when it comes to good tunes.
One great addition to the classic tetris game is the ghost mode where the final resting place of the tetromino is visualised as the piece falls.
Overall I think this game would be better suited as an Xbox Live Arcade title as it would be more accessible to play casually. However the advantage of being sold through retail channels for under R300 is that it is accessible to the majority of South African Xbox 360 gamers that are not on Xbox LIVE yet.
Cross posted from http://xboxbloggers.net/CraigN/.
Last month I posted about my shocking experience with Microsoft Direct Services. Luckily Ahmed picked up my post and forwarded it to a an escalation specialist inside Microsoft South Africa. The very same day (2nd of May) I suddenly got an e-mail from the Microsoft Direct Services agent telling me that my Office Home and Student 2007 and Outlook 2007 media would be with me on the 11th of May 2007. I tried to reply to the e-mail and got it forwarded back to me with a German quote line. So I tried to call the agent but he was out, so left a message for him to call me.
The following day I got my promised call from Microsoft Direct Services and was told that my order wasn't sent out on the 16th of April due to a stock issue. It obviously took them 17 days and 3 calls from me to figure this out. I asked if it could be express shipped as I had already waited for so long and I never heard back from them.
The very next day I got an e-mail from the South African escalation specialist telling me that the order was shipped that same day and that it was only the Office 2007 media as apparently there is no stock of Outlook 2007 media. For the love of Christ! This is Microsoft, the company that makes the software. Can't they make a plan. Send me bloody Office 2007 Professional in its place. Don't screw me around!
Then on the 9th of May I receive an e-mail asking me to complete a Microsoft Customer Satisfaction Survey but the e-mail has no reference to either Microsoft Direct Services, the case ID, the reference number, the order number or anything. So I filled it out as best as I could.
Today I get a call from Microsoft Direct Services in response to the survey. The woman tells me that the order was only shipped on the 7th of May (not the 4th like I was previously told) and she was the first one to actually provide me with a tracking number for the courier company. Apparently, according to the courier company, my parcel is now in the country for 2 days already but has yet to be delivered to me. I will have to get in my car and drive through to their warehouse to collect it myself tomorrow morning as they can't deliver it before sometime on Monday.
I must take my hat off to the South African team as they were on the ball, but Mcirosoft Direct Services in Germany/Ireland is a bunch of idiots that I hope I never ever have to deal with again. So my Microsoft Office 2007 Technology Guarrantee saga continues, what will I get tomorrow morning when I pickup my parcel from the courier company's warehouse? When will I get the rest of my order? When will Microsoft Direct Services outshine Microsoft South Africa? Who knows.
Microsoft Game Studios knows how to reward gamers with downloadable content. Today sees the release of not only a free title update to improve the gameplay, a free add-on pack called the Free-For-All Pack but they also added the Gettin' Busy Bonus Pack for 800 Microsoft points.
I particularly like the sound of new vehicles and weapons but I'm sure most gamers will agree, the hidden orbs are a mission to find. So now the orb sound comes into range sooner when you have 50% and then 20% remaining. It should make those hard to find ones a little easier to find.
There are many changes and I recommend you take a look here for more details. Its downloadable content like this that makes Xbox LIVE so worth it.
Cross posted from http://xboxbloggers.net/CraigN/.
One result of all the commotion around the Xbox 360 Dashboard update and the new content control was an urgent push to get the draft of an online petition to Microsoft South Africa requesting clarity on Xbox LIVE in South Africa out the door earlier. And I must say that it is a great effort. The South African gaming community is getting behind the online petition which I encourage every South African Xbox supporter to sign. So far there are almost 500 signatures and more being added daily.
There is a thread currently on the NAG forum where Miktar posted a statement made by Microsoft's Marc Batten (Country Lead Xbox 360):
We would like to begin by thanking you for your support and are thrilled by the anticipation around Xbox Live in South Africa. The Xbox team is currently working to an international roll out plan for Xbox Live. We are delighted to let you know that South Africa is included in this roll out, however we are unable to confirm exact dates for availability and functionality at this stage.
We commit to keeping you updated as and when we have more information and reassure you that we 100% committed to bringing Xbox Live to South Africa.
Its good to know that Xbox LIVE will be launched officially in South Africa, but the question that remains is when.
Cross posted from http://xboxbloggers.net/CraigN/.
Over the last couple of days the local Xbox 360 community has been a bit agitated regarding the Dashboard software update that has gone live today. The update adds a whole bunch of cool new features like integration with the Windows Live Messenger (or MSN Messenger for those behind the times) network so you can now chat with your buddies from your console as well.
Last week the Microsoft Games Global Marketing team blogged about the new Xbox 360 Marketplace territory controls being strengthened. What triggered the concern for South African Xbox LIVE users is the following statement by John Porcaro:
Well, if you have an account that matches the country where you are located, then you will probably notice little to no difference. However, if you have set up an account that does not match the country where you are located, you will find that these new security measures will only allow you to purchase and download content that is licensed in the country where you are located.
The reason for the concern was related to the the licensing of content. Considering that the Xbox LIVE service has never been officially launched in South Africa, local Xbox gamers have gotten a bit worried about not being able to download any content from the Xbox Live Marketplace.
To futher fuel the concerns Graeme Boyd, the Microsoft Xbox Community Manager for Europe also known as AceyBongos, blogged about the new content control measures with some questions being answered by Michael Newey, the Group Product Marketing Manager for Xbox Europe.
Q: What if I live in a country like Greece that does not have Xbox Live, but I have an Xbox Live account registered to another country?
Michael Newey: While we do not advise or condone this since a user who does this is technically breaking a contractual agreement, users with this type of account will still be able to use it. However, they will not be able to download content from Xbox Live Marketplace.
Naturally this just fuelled the fire and the local communities picked up on this very quickly and started to stress about it. The post has since been updated to address some of the ambiguities.
But the local community must not stress, you will still be able to download content from the Xbox Live Marketplace as long as the content, which will typically be movies and music, is not licensed differently in South Africa.
Cross posted from http://xboxbloggers.net/CraigN/.
I'm not sure if you have ever heard of Community-Credit, I found it recently and signed up. It is bascially a site that rewards community members and influencers with geek toys for contributing to the online community. Their tagline is We give stupid prizes to smart people. The site is run by the one and only David Silverlight, yes the guy who was honoured when Microsoft renamed WPF/E to Microsoft Silverlight.
My 12th place prize bagged me a Cubes™ Sensitivity Trainer as pictured below.
I've been asked by a few people recently how to embed and access resources in an assembly. And yes your .NET executable (.exe file) is actually an assembly.
First you will need to embed the resource inside the assembly. In Visual Studio this is very easy. Simply select the file in the Solution Explorer and goto the Properties window and set the Build Action to Embedded Resource.
Visual Studio will automagically embed the resource into the assembly at build time. The name of the embedded resource will change depending on the location of the file in the project. The basic format is that it will start with the assembly's short name, a period (.), any folder names seperated by a period and finally the name of the file. You can easily enumerate the names of resources in an assembly at runtime by using the method System.Reflection.Assembly.GetManifestResourceNames() which will return an array of resource names. To get a reference to the currently executing assembly use the method System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().
Assembly assembly = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly();
// Retrieve a list of resource names contained by the assembly.
string[] resourceNames = assembly.GetManifestResourceNames();
foreach (string resourceName in resourceNames)
{
Console.WriteLine(resourceName);
}
Getting the actual resource out of the assembly is as simple as calling the method System.Reflection.Assembly.GetManifestResourceStream() key to accessing here is the System.Reflection.Assembly class. In the following example I will retrieve a file named Foo.txt from the assembly and output its content to the console.
// The name of the resource Foo.txt will be prefixed with the name of the assembly.
string fooResourceName = string.Format("{0}.{1}", assembly.GetName().Name, "Foo.txt");
using (Stream fooStream = assembly.GetManifestResourceStream(fooResourceName))
{
using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(fooStream))
{
Console.WriteLine(sr.ReadToEnd());
}
}
The following example shows how a binary resource like an image could be retrieved.
// Retrieving an image resource follows the same principle.
string barResourceName = string.Format("{0}.{1}", assembly.GetName().Name, "Bar.jpg");
using (Stream barStream = assembly.GetManifestResourceStream(barResourceName))
{
using (Image barImage = new Bitmap(barStream))
{
// Do something with the image.
}
}
Using embedded resources is very easy and makes for very clean installers where static resources like XML Schema files and images can be neatly embedded in the assembly.
The Microsoft Community Manager for Xbox.com known as AceyBongos has made an interesting post today regarding the new content controls put in place for Xbox Live Marketplace.
Currently South Africa doesn't have official access to the Xbox LIVE service as it hasn't been launched yet locally so a lot of us signed up for access through the UK or US services. Its a common practice and it works well as we get access to the amazing Xbox LIVE network and the unlimited gaming and social networking possibilities not to mention a cool new Xbox Live Arcade game almost every Wednesday.
A little while back Xbox LIVE in the US launched the Video Marketplace where users could get access to online TV and video content. Unfortunately a lot of this media is not licensed by the content owners for distribution outside the US so Microsoft decided to only allow users to download based on their credit card address. It seems that this was not sufficient control as addresses can be easily forged and multiple issues exist in trying to enforce such a control mechanism.
So as of the upcoming Spring 2007 Dashboard update Xbox LIVE will now filter country restricted content based on source IP address. I have been reassured by Microsoft South Africa that this will not affect the account status of South African Xbox LIVE users registered in the US or UK, it will merely limit content based on the country associated with your internet connection. So yes, we will still be able to play online and access a majority of the content.
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