November 2006 - Posts
I picked up my brown Zune (which I creatively named BrownZune) on Nov 19th. 10 days later and I still love it. I play with it all the time. I'm downloading tons of videos with FeedYourZune, although I haven't yet mastered my desired playlist which leaves enough room on the device for all these movies. I've wiped the thing clean several times and loaded all new music on there. I've got play lists and AutoPlaylists I've built in the PC Zune software (this software needs a name that's different from the device's name so people can keep them separate). I've purchased a pair of songs from the market place. I've used it in the office, in the car (as a passenger), and on the MARTA trains. I've listened to the radio, watched movies, and probably played something like 70 hours of music through the thing. I've shared songs and photos wirelessly with another Zune, and I've even been forced to change headphones already from my nice expensive Sony in-ear headphones to the earbuds that came with the device on account of me losing one of the squishy rubber in-ear pieces. Now that I've got new squishy bits, I can't find the headphones!
So anyway, here's my review.
Go get one - you'll like it.
Good stuff:
- The device feels solid and well built without feeling heavy. I have no problems keeping it in my shirt pocket (although I normally don't b/c I think it looks dorky).
- The sound quality coming out of the thing is amazing. I like the little presets so I can switch between Rock, Pop, and Electronic (which are generally the types of music I'm listening to). There are 8 equalizer presets to chose from
- The picture on the display is fantastic. Videos are great, photos look incredible, and I don't know why people keep complaining about album art - what I see looks great.
- The interface is a snap to use. I used to have a portable media center with version 1 of the PMC user interface. I don't know what exactly has changed from there to version 2, but I remember not really liking version 1 and now I love version 2. Not that there isn't still room for improvement
Bad (needs work) stuff:
- I want better batteries. I feel like I'm easily getting 10 or more hours out of the thing and I'm constantly fiddling with it to change songs or watch videos. I'm not saying the battery life is any worse than what I hear about iPods. I'm just saying that I want more. Build a better battery already and give me something that I don't need to plug in for a week. Mainly b/c I want to keep the screen on all the time. The screen is beautiful, and it's part of the reason I bought the device. I want to be able to keep it on so I can see what's playing without having to click a button.
- I still think there is room in the UI for contextual navigation. I'd love that feature. I'm playing 6000 songs on shuffle and I hit one I really like. I'd like to be able to dig into that song and go find more in my Zune from the same artist or on the same album.
- Um...Left Handed people play videos too! Let me flip the device the other way. It just feels *wrong* to use my right hand to manipulate the controls
- The PC software needs work.
- Now, I'm running on a single CPU device (not even hyperthreaded) but the PC software needs some more threads in it or something. I'm frequently locking up my entire machine for a couple of seconds while the Zune software does something.
- I also take issue with the synchronization order. Now, let's say I've got 1 video playlist and 2 song playlists. 1 song playlist has 2 dozen tracks in it, the other playlist is my All Music playlist. I set up the sync order to put videos on first, then my specified songs, then my All Music. The problem is that many of my videos and a bunch of my songs require conversions. Rather than just converting and putting the songs on in the order I specified, it will convert in the background and start putting the other, no conversion required material on the Zune first. I've got 60 Gb of music. I fill the Zune up before I finish converting my videos and my selected songs. That's not right. I specifically dictated that I wanted that particular material on the device.
- Finally, and I don't know why this happens, but when I have a track and I update the track info via the metaservices.windowsmedia.com lookup service, it doesn't always replace the album art. Now, if I go to Amazon, copy and paste the album art in manually, it works just fine. It's clearly not a problem with file permissions or read-only status. This bug also afflicted me with WMP. What's the deal - you know what the art should be, just CHANGE IT.
So my final words are - go get one. We can share music and build a community. Oh wait, the correct word is "social". Go get one and we can build a social.
MAKE Magazine already has several posts up about circumventing some of the Zune restrictions such as how to get the Zune to appear in your Windows Explorer. There are several other articles on the site, including how to put in your own larger hard drive and how to bypass the Zune to Zune wireless song transfer DRM in 10 easy steps. Too much work for me, but it seems like Microsoft will be making changes to their DRM scheme in the first Zune patch tentitively announced for spring. Having said that about the patch, I can't find the website where I read about it. Maybe that's a complete rumor. Who knows. Anyway - the point is that the Zune has been on the market for 12 days (I've had mine for 9 days) and there are already hacks out on the web.
Miguel Castro is coming to town to visit with the fine folks at Dunn Training and would love to have dinner with you! He's a great guy (I met him once) and loves to get together with 30 or so of his closest friends and talk technology, TV, and all sorts of geeky topics. You might have heard Miguel during his two appearances on Dot Net Rocks! (here and here). Miguel is currently teaching the inner workings of the CSLA architecture to all who are interested. In fact, I have it on fairly trustworthy authority that this training course will soon be hitting the road to be available to a much larger audience. Jump on this class when it comes near you.
If you want to chat with Miguel over some beer and pizza or something, please RSVP by posting a comment here or by sending me an email at mranlett - AT - devcow - DOT - com. We'll either be meeting at 5 Seasons Brewery on Roswell Rd. You're sure to get great food, great drinks, and great company.
Be sure to RSVP so I can get an accurate count. I've got to let the restaurant know we're coming.
Early adopter here, reporting on my Zune purchase. I've been debating an MP3 player for a while. I mean, I've actually got several portable music devices, but nothing with the right form factor and capacity I wanted. I have a tiny little 128 Mb player the size of a Zippo lighter that I can fit about 50 songs on (compressed to 64 kbps). I've got a PSP with a 2 Gb MemoryStick that can probably hold about 500 songs, but it's so big that it doesn't fit in my pocket. I used to have a 20 Gb Portable Media Center, but it was a first generation model and was also too bulky, despite it's ability to hold 5000 songs.
So I decided to bite the bullet and go get a real MP3 player. I picked the brown color for two reasons. First, it's likely to be far less common than white and black devices, which might help me raise my "coolness quotient" a little. Secondly, I like the brown color. It looks adult. It looks like something I could carry while wearing a tie in an office, if necessary (not that I frequently wear ties).
Anyway - I ran out Sunday afternoon and picked one up after arguing with Best Buy's customer support for 20 minutes on the phone. So get this, my brother mailed me a $200 gift certificate to Best Buy for my birthday a few months ago and I was saving it for just such an occasion. Anyway, I knew that I'd received the card but I couldn't find it anymore. So I called Best Buy up and asked them if they could reissue it. They said my brother needed to call it in, but they could see the transaction and it would be easy to do over the phone. He called in and they told him that it didn't show in their system as ever having been delivered (since August) and because of that, they couldn't mark it as lost. So I did a 3 way call with BB customer support and my brother on the phone. We got a 3rd customer service agent who couldn't do any single task without checking for approval or asking for help. After he came back from putting us on hold for the fourth time, the connection was messed up and he couldn't hear us talking anymore. Frustrated I just told my brother to cancel the transaction and to contest the charge with his credit card. Then I went out and bought the thing from Best Buy anyway because I knew they had one in stock and I didn't feel like driving around.
The packaging was excellent - the best consumer product packaging I've ever personally experienced. This includes the PSP, a laptop or two, a pair of Xbox 360s, PCs, and thousands of other random electronic gadgets and components. I've never seen what Apple does for the iPod, but I can't imagine anyone feeling like they're unwrapping anything but a top notch product. Having said that, I can't really see why anyone would care about the box it comes in. For my money, I'd rather get a good product than a good cardboard box.
Following the directions, I installed the software first. I'd been prewarned about crashing installations by several websites, but I didn't experience a single problem. It did seem to take bloody forever to install, but haveing installed products like Visual Studio, I knew that it hadn't crashed, it was just working without reporting progress. That should be fixed, even putting a simple spinner on the screen to indicate "working" would be an improvment. I keep all my music files on an external HDD (which I won't have to carry around anymore) so it didn't find anything to synch with at first. I plugged in the USB and let the thing charge for a couple of hours before playing with it. While the Zune was charging I attached the external drive with all my music and added it all to the Zune PC software. I then built a sync list of songs I wanted on the device. I kicked off the sync and went to bed (it was late). The next morning I found that my desired list of songs had been ignored (or superceeded). There is apparently an "All Music" playlist which tried to copy all my music to the device. I have too many songs and it failed to get all of them, but I can't figure out the order. It's not exactly alphabetical by artist b/c some songs from a 'Z' artist got on there but I'm missing a bunch of 'U' artist songs. Similar story with sorting by album title and when sorting by song title. No idea. It just picked 6000 or so songs and moved them onto the device for me.
The device itself is awesome. The MP3s sound excellent, the radio feature is a little fuzzy but that seems to always be the case when I try to listen to the radio in an office building. The screen resolution for the pictures and video is crystal clear. I've been highly impressed and so has everyone who's seen it.
Quick reference to the physical size of the device:
Blackberry - weight = 4.2 oz, 4.69in x 2.28in x 0.75in (h x w x d)
Zune - weight = 5.6 oz, 4.4in x 2.4in x 0.6in (h x w x d)
Wishlist for future improvements:
- Left handed use! Give me an option somewhere to hold the device in my left hand and rotate the screen the opposite direction when viewing movies and photos. My most comfortable position is to hold the movie upside down!
- Contextual lists while playing songs: If I'm on shuffle or in a playlist of diverse artists and I like a particular song, let me click and find more songs by that artist, on that album, or in that genre.
- Flag songs for removal from the Zune during next sync. I've got a ton of music on the thing and not all of it is good. Let me build up a kill list while listening so I can free up space automatically
- Ratings while listening to music. If I've got a track I like but I'm not interested in adding it to my quick list or in buying it, I should be able to mark it as preferred (or 5 star or whatever) so I can build my own playlists later in the PC Software
- I also with it was a little faster when I plug it into my Xbox 360. I like the concept and the integration (although I don't think the Xbox 360 team is done refining the menu system yet) but the speed isn't great.
As illustrated in this post from the SharePoint team, the upgrade from the 180 day trial versions of MOSS 2007 Standard and MOSS2007 Enterprise to the full versions is as simple as changing a license key number through the user interface.
I was working on an web application today that was having trouble rendering correct. The client added a link to the page and color of the text after that link would render incorrectly. If they took the <a href></a> anchor tag out of the HTML it would render fine. So I looked at the HTML for them and found that they had the anchor tags inside of a list and that one of the lists had not been closed properly. I thought that might be it, but No luck. I then noticed that they were using the anchor tag like a div tag.
<a class="content">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Integer nonummy tincidunt turpis. Cras venenatis. Vestibulum vehicula. Pellentesque quam enim, porttitor at, ultrices et, semper eget, odio. Integer quis libero. <a href="link.htm">Link Text</a>Aliquam erat justo, lobortis at, laoreet vel, commodo ac, nisl. Etiam ullamcorper viverra velit. Etiam non nibh. Etiam ut urna nec neque mollis adipiscing. Vestibulum id libero. Curabitur ornare nulla eget felis.
</a>
The problem, as you may or may not know, is that you cannot have nested anchor links.
Check it out: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html#h-12.2.2
The simple fix here is to change the outside anchor tags that are used like containers to div tags.
Here are both examples on one page
http://devcow.com/blogs/adnrg/samples/nestedanchor.htm
Jim Wooley and the Atlanta Visual Basic Study Group will be hosting the .NET University courses on .NET 3.0 starting this Wednesday on Windows Workflow Foundation.
Come out and join us and make sure to register.
Dotnet University comes to Atlanta
If you want to learn about .NET 3.0 during lunch Doug Turnure and my coworker Todd Fine (really my boss<wink>) will be doing lunch sessions at the Atlanta Microsoft Office.
Check out full details
http://blogs.msdn.com/dougturn/archive/2006/11/07/bring-a-lunch-and-come-join-us-in-atlanta-to-discuss-net-technologies.aspx
I once read somewhere that Atlanta has the largest urban greenspace in the country. I understand that to mean we have a lot of trees. Check out the view I have from the parking deck of my current engagement. I'm on the 9th floor in Midtown, a 2 minute walk to Lenox Mall - the big downtown mall.
I work with a lot of virtual machine images (my laptop is basically a host for Virtual PC 2004 SP1 and Outlook). I've been using the following steps to streamline my use of VPCs
Tired of having to remember different passwords for different VPCs? Set your Windows Server 2003 image to auto-logon
Sick of having to type in why you're shutting your image down? Get rid of the Shutdown Event Tracker
Do you boot multiple copies of the same image or share images with coworkers on the same network? Use SysPrep to prevent duplicate PC names when distributing images
Running out of hard drive space thanks to mega-sized VHD files? Create smaller virtual machines
Move your swapfile out to a different virtual disk. This frees up space on your main drive (for smaller .vhd files) and lets you use a single .vhd as the swap space for all your VPC images (caution, this limits you to one VPC running at a time with this config)
Build a library of VPC images by reusing base images as building blocks and adding changes to differencing disks.
Paul Wilson, creator of the popular Wilson OR-Mapper, presented on the Provider Model and custom providers. It was great to see Paul again, and I'm glad I got to see this presentation since I was unable to attend the first time he presented at the 2nd Annual Atlanta Code Camp.
<plug>
3rd Annual Atlanta Code Camp coming January 20th
</plug>
Anyway, Paul gave an excellent presentation on custom providers, how useful they can be, and how easy they can be to create. The basic premise was that while you have the ability to override a million and one different methods, you really only need to override and use a subset. His code is online at his blog. Oh, the other cool thing was that Paul came packing a dozen or so great books AND a super steller give-away!
How do you prove you are who you say you are? In the real world we have all kinds of ID methods including signatures, ID cards, passports, voter registration cards, utility bill statements, etc. In the online world it basically comes down to digital signatures. You "sign" a document or e-mail with some form of encryption that can only be decrypted if you are who you say you are. There are a variety of methods to do this; here are a few suggested by the Microsoft Office Marketplace:
- Avoco - $370 protects communications and even your entire laptop. This seems to be the most fully featured, even providing some DRM-like protections to content (i.e. sharing and copying restrictions)
- Comodo - FREE (for personal use). Sign or encrypt a message to prove that you and only you sent them.
- GeoTrust - $20 to sign/encrypt email messages AND Word documents, making your documents tamper-proof and fraud-proof. Compatible with the USPS EPM (below)
- VeriSign - $20/year to sign/encrypt email messages. Also provides up to $1000 of insurance if your ID is misused or corrupted.
- USPS Electronic Postmark for Word - FREE (for personal use) addin for Word that allows you to use a digital certificate (available separately for purchase via the USPS) to sign/encrypt Word documents. Accepted by the government as proof of identity as the certificate data is stored on a government server for seven years!
The combo of the USPS EPM and a digital certificate seems promising. Now, if only you could combine the free certificate from Comodo with the free USPS software!
Visual Studio 2005 Team edition has been focused on three distinct roles since it came out late in 2005. These roles, Architect, Developer, and Test, are now being augmented with a fourth role - Database Developer.
Atlanta is home to the launch of this new product on November 30th. Visit the Microsoft Teams Deliver site to register. You'll see the following sessions for free:
Session 1: Overview of Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals Session 2: Database Testing, Refactoring and Version Control This looks like a great event any anyone using Visual Studio to build data driven applications should be interested in this.
The date is set for the next Atlanta Code Camp and it is January 20th, 2007. We will be looking for volunteers, speakers, and even contributors for the event this year, so check out the website at www.atlantacodecamp.com.
I can't wait to see everyone again for a day of fun and we have some special people coming for Redmond for the event this year!
Ok. Saga might be a strong word for this little post. I was having some problems with a web service call I was trying to make and I thought it might be worthy of a post.
Basically I have the following problem. I want an application running on a machine in Domain1 to call a web service running on a machine in Domain2. Domain2 trusts Domain1, but I was having troubles with 401 Unauthorized access replies when I tried to call my web service.
UserGroup instance = new UserGroup();
instance.Credentials = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;
instance.AddUserToGroup(_GroupName,
newUser.userName,
newUser.userLoginName,
newUser.userEmail,
newUser.userNotes);
This code works beautifully if I’m executing it on the actual server INSIDE an IDE. However, when I move off the server with my test harness and DLL, I get the 401 HTTP error. The problem I found is that 99% of online examples (both in and out of MSDN) use the DefaultCredentials from the CredentialCache.
So I changed the code to look like this. I should mention that the user I'm specifying can browse to the URL and pass the authentication check.
UserGroup instance = new UserGroup();
System.Net.NetworkCredential _NetworkCredential = new System.Net.NetworkCredential("Administrator", "Password1", "MyDomain");
System.Net.CredentialCache _CredentialCache = new System.Net.CredentialCache();
System.Uri _Uri = new System.Uri(@"http://10.143.3.90/_vti_bin/UserGroup.asmx");
_CredentialCache.Add(_Uri, "Basic", _NetworkCredential); // we’ve even tried setting IIS authentication to basic although we really need Windows Integrated Authentication
instance.Credentials = _CredentialCache;
instance.AddUserToGroup(_GroupName,
newUser.userName,
newUser.userLoginName,
newUser.userEmail,
newUser.userNotes);
I had Keith Rome check my work and he said he thought that should work. No dice. So I begged for help from Mr. Web Services himself - Kirk A Evans. Kirk sent me this simple little snippet:
static void Main(string[] args)
{
localhost.HelloService s = new client.localhost.HelloService();
s.Credentials = new System.Net.NetworkCredential("kirke", "MyDomainPassword", "northamerica");
Console.WriteLine(s.HelloWorld());
}
It seems like my code was overthinking the process. I'd attempted to use the completely unnecessary (for this purpose) credential cache. Just assigning the NetworkCredential to my service's credentials solved the problem. This isn't a mistake I'm likely to make again.
Thanks for the help Kirk!
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