Just received: XBox 360

YESSS! Unbelievable: at Friday last week I got a parcel - I'm the winner of a drawing by lots happened at the recent BASTA! So equipped with my experiences with the older XBox I started yesterday to get it work (the XBox 360 Core Set) - and my frustration growed over the time. Plugging all the cable was not an issue as I had help from my child's . But then: turning on - the usual configuration screens are displayed: create a profile, connect to XBox Live etc. - crap, switch over to just gaming!

Me: "Oh, it's loud. OK, Laura - can you provide your favorite game CD? Yes, just put it in - it is as easy as it was with the old one..."
Me (a half minute later waiting that something happened): "Laura, you don't flipped the sides of the CD?"
Laura: "No - the cover is at top."
Me: "Mhm, seems the old Cd's are not working..." (I guessed that before, because the older controller's did not match the new hardware)
Maike, Laura: "Oooah. We cannot play with the dancing pad anymore? And all the cool games we just played...?" - "No multiple players anymore? There is now again just one controller...".
Me: "Yes, sorry. Looks like you are right... BUT: let's start try the other new cool features..."
Maike, Laura: "But we want to start gaming...!"
Me: "... like Video and Audio streaming!"
Maike (the younger): "What's that?"
Me: "Listen: ..." (longer talk here, cut).
Me, meanwhile trying to create a profile we needed: "Crap. Looks like I cannot create a profile without the memory unit. But look: there is a USB slot - let's get a memory stick and put it in - then we can go on successfully." I was totally wrong: it does not accept any USB stick as a memory unit replacement! And the best: there is no memory unit in the core package! I really have to bye a memory unit for around 34€ (64 MB) to successfully start anything on that crappy new console! The same amount of money I need to bye a memory stick of 1GByte!
Laura: "It's boring..."
Me: "OK, wait. I will get my Laptop, plug in the network cable - and then we can start doing all the new cool things..." As the laptop starts up, I navigated to the network configuration dialogs on the XBox - "Look, there is a web address we can look at how to get it work!"
Maike: "Dad, can you read what's there?"
Me: "Yes, it is English. But no problem: I can read it...  Ah, we have to install streaming software... named Zune. We have to download the file." (I just saw the small "international" green on gray link today, where I can switch the language, but not at the time I installed)
Laura: "It's boring, how long it will take?"
Me: "Mhm, around 5MB - two minutes only."
Maike: "How long it will take?"
Me: "Look at this progress bar, if it is at 100 percent, it's done."
Maike: "Oh, such a long time -- and then we can start gaming?"
Me: "No, but we should be able to listen to music and videos that are on my PC!"
Maike: "Why? We can just start them there with the Media Player..."
Me: "For gaming Mom has to bye a game branded for this new XBox."
Laura: "It's boring. Can you call, if we can play something?" (both went up to start playing with their Barbies)

Summery: without a memory unit, without a starting game, without a (wired) Internet connection, without a PC running at least Windows XP or Media Center, without a men /woman able to read English - the core package is just a dead piece of hardware useful for nothing really new - play a CD (we already own a CD player) is the only (untested) feature you can use immediately! I was so excited - now I'm really frustrated. Mostly about that required (and expensive) memory unit! If there is a USB port: why I cannot use the USB memory sticks I already own? Maybe I should really start reading the f****** manual - maybe I can? But it was easier to just bye the unit (and a game) yesterday evening - at least: now we are "in".

Life | Other Stuff | Ramblings

11/19/2006 17:19:07 (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)      Comments [0]  | 

Familienzuwachs!

Note: For visitors of your site, this entry is only displayed for users with the preselected language German/Deutsch (de)

Wir heissen recht herzlich wilkommen: Bruno, unseren neuen Zwerghasen: nun haben wir uns (die Eltern) also doch noch "breitschlagen" lassen. Allerdings hatte ich ja früher auch diverse Haustiere - und so schlecht fand ich das damals auch nicht. Ist nur halt etwas unpraktisch, wenn man in den Urlaub fahren will, etc.

Die Kinder sind natürlich begeistert: besonders Maike kümmert sich sehr liebevoll um Bruno. Laura (und auch Bruno, männl.) muss noch etwas auf tierische Gesellschaft warten - einen weibl. Zwerghasen. Jetzt muss sich Bruno erstmal etwas eingewöhnen, bevor wir ihn dann mal zum Tierarzt zur "Vorsorge" bringen.

Life | Personal (German)

09/24/2006 18:59:51 (W. Europe Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)      Comments [0]  | 

BASTA! 2006

I'm now again at BASTA! 2006, Mainz - Germany. Had alreda some interesting discussions here with some of the speakers, also the SOA architecture day yesterday was very interesting. Lesson learned: SOA is not really new, and it is not a technology. Just a idea to live.

Most interesting session today was about advanced debugging, by Ingo Rammer. He introduced some tools I never heard of and pointed out how to catch the most often issues debugging is used for, such as memory leaks in Windows Forms applications, or how to debug a CLR windows service. We had look inside WinDbg - what a cryptic tool, just remembered my time using the vi/unix years ago...

Most impressive was the keynote by Jason Zanders the "father of .NET Framework 3.0" today: about .NET Framework 3.0 and Vista. Live programming on Vista (RC) in Python using CLR 3.0, WPF and speech support (build in in CLR 3.0). Just one issue: the presentation machine with the slides just stopped working and required a (live) reboot. Lesson to learn: don't use beta software to just show slides

Technology | .NET | Tools | Windows, etc.

09/19/2006 14:02:16 (W. Europe Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)      Comments [0]  | 

Use a DELL notebook? Check for DELL Battery Return Program

Yesterday in the Germany 8:00pm TV News at ARD: "Dell have to recall 4.1 million notebook computer batteries." Again.

My DELL laptop battery was near by but not in the listed part number range: https://www.dellbatteryprogram.com/ (you have to ignore the certificate error displayed in IE7 to read the page). But it should be worth checkin'

Glue | Other Stuff | Technology

08/16/2006 08:23:25 (W. Europe Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)      Comments [0]  | 

Sorry, rssbandit.org is down

Because of a server outage on a too many resources used failure the site is down. This includes the forum, the online help and the main site pages. We are sorry about and currently analyzing the reasons. I will post here, if the site is up again...:

Update (July, 21th 2006): we are up again, and it seems to run stable again so far.

Glue | RSS Bandit

07/20/2006 14:42:24 (W. Europe Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)      Comments [1]  | 

Der Bandit findet sich...

Note: For visitors of your site, this entry is only displayed for users with the preselected language German/Deutsch (de)

... wieder mal in der c't 14/2006- diesmal auf der Heft-CD! Also an alle, die Internet Downloads nicht mögen (oder für unsicher halten) - besorgen und los gehts!

Links | RSS Bandit | .NET | RSS

06/29/2006 08:51:59 (W. Europe Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)      Comments [0]  | 

Jubilee: we make progress again

The last weeks were very busy for Dare Obasanjo and me (same for Phil) at work, so we had really no time to make real progress in coding RSS Bandit. But recently we restarted: fixed a bunch of bugs (see www.rssbandit.org/ow.asp?YetImplementedFeatures) and started integration of Lucene.NET. Now looking for a good explanation how to and when to use language specific Lucene Analyzers: for query string analyzation - clear. But how about the general initial indexing? An analyzer is attached to an IndexWriter: so we will get one Index per language?

RSS Bandit

05/31/2006 15:38:29 (W. Europe Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)      Comments [3]  | 

Comment and Trackback Spam

Yes: they bit me. Now I found a undocumented feature about dasBlog: just add <DaysCommentsAllowed>60</DaysCommentsAllowed> to your site.config and it will only allow to post comments on entries not older than 60 days. Then I also disabled trackback and pingback, cleaned all my tracking entries and spam comments...

Blogging | Glue | Ramblings

04/25/2006 17:57:21 (W. Europe Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)      Comments [1]  | 

Must read: Version Control with Subversion

Note to myself: must read svnbook.red-bean.com/en/1.1/svn-book.html if I got more than 15 minutes (coding-)free time.

Links | Technology | Tools

04/20/2006 10:19:38 (W. Europe Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)      Comments [4]  | 

Update: DiffPatchResources creates .strings file(s)

As I yet posted this is a little tool to help with common tasks to maintain resource files. Recently I started to use the famous StringResourceTool MS used within the Enterprise Library and it is way cool! Worth to have a look if you start a new project from scratch.
But stop! You can now migrate existing project(s) to use the the StringResourceTool by the little help of the DiffPatchResources tool! Just download and copy it to a folder you configured to be found if you start a windows command line (%PATH% variable). Then use the new option -s to create the .strings file out of your existing main .resx file and save all the hand writings...

Update: to get the StringResourceTool run in VSIDE 8.0, add these settings to your registry by help of a .reg file with content:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Generators\{FAE04EC1-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}\StringResourceTool]
"CLSID"="{1D47CA76-5AF1-4152-8106-08140FF9886E}"
"GeneratesDesignTimeSource"=dword:00000001
@="Microsoft Data Warehouse String Resource Generator"

.NET | Tools

03/25/2006 17:12:31 (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)      Comments [2]  | 

Enterprise Library - Syslog Sink Extension available for download

My user sample related to the Enterprise Library is now up and available for download. It extends the logging by providing a sink that is able to log to a syslog daemon (some of you may know that from UNIX systems). It works  according to the definitions in RFC 3164 (www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc3164.html) writing log entries to UDP port 514. Not yet optimized for speed and no EntLib Configuration Console support, but a starting point. Binaries, a short documentation and source can you find here.

.NET | Tools

03/03/2006 15:28:14 (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)      Comments [0]  | 

Vogelgrippe vor unserer Haustür angelangt

Note: For visitors of your site, this entry is only displayed for users with the preselected language German/Deutsch (de)

Life | Personal (German)

03/03/2006 15:13:53 (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)      Comments [0]  | 

Congrat's to Marco!

Congratulation to Marco Buechel (the son of our CEO): he was the second with only a diff. of only 0.05 secs to the winner in Kitzbuehl (the legendary Streif race)!  Very nice, keep it on!

Life | Other Stuff

01/21/2006 17:58:03 (W. Europe Standard Time, UTC+01:00)      Comments [1]  |