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A few days ago, I received the following e-mail: Help me out here. I've been reading your blog off and on for years and I can't figure out what it is you do. Your obviously involved with the PDC and MIX conferences, you send a lifesize cardboard cutout of yourself as your resume, you've made a plug-in for Illustrator and a converter for Flash files (which rock BTW), you take amazing photos, you implement seam carving in your "spare time", you write Tivo gadgets, you taught me about continuous integration with your orb article, your article on code review was mandatory reading in one of my classes, you read quite an collection of books, you seem to be pretty good at design considering you claim to be a geek, you build small arcade machines, you counted to a freakin' million, you worked with Tom Skerrit, you write music, you build medical software, and who knows what else. Don't worry, I'm not stalking you. :) I just read through your old posts cuz I couldn't remember all of this! Just what Read More...
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I made a very minor update to my TiVo Now Playing gadget that allows you to download recorded shows to your computer. While viewing the show details window, simply click on the title to begin the download. Because the video files are protected, you'll be prompted for a user name and password. The user name is always tivo , and the password is your media access key (check the Remember my password checkbox if you get tired of re-entering this information). If you need help configuring your gadget or finding your media access key, be sure to read my earlier TiVo Gadget for Vista post. Download the TiVo Now Playing v1.0.2 gadget (182KB). Read More...
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For awhile, I've wanted to try my hands at writing a gadget for the Windows Sidebar in Vista, but I could never come up with a project idea that was small enough to accomplish and useful enough to justify. Since we recently added two TiVo HD units to our home network, I thought it'd be handy to expose their Now Playing lists. I knew the data was available over our home network, because the TiVo Desktop software displays a lot of it. Turns out, the TiVo Developer Resources section of their site contains just enough to get going. Without going into too many details, recent versions of the TiVo software on certain units (TiVo HD and TiVo Series3 HD, I think) contain a small web server that can be issued requests. These requests are passed via the query string and return their results as XML. For example, our downstairs TiVo unit has an IP address of 192.168.1.104 (you can find the IP address of your TiVo by navigating to Messages & Settings , then Settings , then Phone & Network ). Read More...
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This past week, we had an offsite brainstorming session at the new Novelty Hill • Januik winery in Woodinville to discuss our upcoming MIX08 event in Las Vegas. Jennifer Ritzinger (who still doesn't have a blog for some reason) challenged each speaker to come up with a creative way to present their topic using a single slide. Never ones to take a creative challenge lightly, my co-presenter, Thomas Lewis, and I asked ourselves: "what have we never seen in a PowerPoint presentation?" A few minutes of brainstorming later, we decided to make our slides in 3D. Not your average everyday 3D, mind you, but the kin of 3D that would require everyone to wear cheesy red and cyan anaglyphic cardboard glasses ! Like so many of the ideas that Thomas and I come up with, we never let trifles like feasibility get in the way. What fun would that be!? So, we split up our tasks, and I volunteered to figure out how to actually make the 3D idea work. Okay, I thought...first thing's first: search the internet Read More...
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Almost three years ago, on June 25, 2004, I wrote a post titled My Current Bookshelf . It inspired a number of similar posts from other bloggers, and I received a lot of great feedback. The last set was decidedly developer-focused. This set includes some developer books, but it also includes a number of business-related titles. I encourage you to blog a photo of your bookshelf and add a link to the feedback for this post. I love to hear about good books that others are reading. The photo above shows 16 books from around the house. I keep a few scattered just about everywhere, and these are the titles that I've either recently read, am currently reading, or hope to read in the near future. Beautiful Evidence : This is Edward Tufte's fourth design book, and if you've read the prior three, you'll find a lot of those thoughts repeated here (albeit in slightly different ways). Tufte focuses on how to effectively show and present evidence using artful design techniques. His books are works of Read More...
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I used to be a Nikon guy, but I decided to dabble with the Canon Rebel XT a couple of years ago, and so far, I'm pleased. Most of my newer wallpaper images were taken with the Canon camera and a 60mm macro lens . Unfortunately, until now, all of those wonderful .CR2 files sitting in my picture folders didn't display thumbnails, and they weren't viewable in the Windows Photo Gallery. The good news is that Vista provides an extensible platform for camera manufacturers to add support for their RAW file formats directly into the operating system (as an aside, if you want to read more about writing a custom codec, check out the Windows Imaging Component Overview article on MSDN). Canon released the first version of their RAW codec today, and a few others are also available: Canon RAW Codec 1.0 - choose your digital camera, then click Drivers / Software to find a link to the codec. According to the site, this version works with .CR2 files from the following cameras: EOS-1D Mark III, EOS-1Ds Mark Read More...
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