So I am running Vista Ultimate at home with Dual Tuners and all that Jazz.

I was recently asked to post a bit about how I feed my PC with TV Shows.

I use Azureus to download shows via BitTorrent.

In order to queue up the shows I use an RSS Feed scanner

I have tried a few but my fave is http://azureus.sourceforge.net/plugin_details.php?plugin=scanerss

Then for the feeds I prefer to use the prefiltered feeds.

I just have a single feed setup.... from here: http://www.tvrss.net/feeds/
I just use the unique feed.

Then I setup filters inside ScaneRSS. This simply watches for shows I like (Boston Lega, Prison Break etc....) and adds them to my queue when they appear in the feed.

 http://msdn.microsoft.com/events/pdc/

October 2 to 5 2007 in sunny Los Angeles.....

Set to be a pretty big PDC.... I'm picking more of an 03 (really early look at stuff) than an 05 PDC...

Should be a hoot... my red shoes and I shall be there... not staying in little Guatamala this time though!

Penn and Teller do the bible...

http://richarddawkins.net/article,240,Penn-Jillette-Interviews-Richard-Dawkins,Penn-Radio

Hiya Guys,

Recently the feedback board featured an interesting ‘suggestion’ around the new jukebox. Specifically:

‘A lot of the music on the new Jukebox is dance music and not really suited to working out.’

To which the Bodyworks team replied, in part:

‘The developer is increasing the number of songs and the ‘house’ music is being removed.’

Frankly I wasn’t too happy to read this. Music is a matter of taste, yet, where your correspondent sets out as an objective fact that ‘dance music [is] not really suited to working out’ your team seem to be in total agreement. Would a better reply not have been something like:

‘At Bodyworks our membership comprises a broad cross section of the community, we try to provide a broad cross section of music to suit all tastes. We’re adding songs regularly so keep checking back for new tracks.’

Your explicit agreement makes a mockery of your whole feedback system.  The customer is *not* always right- in this case the point is at the very least moot.

But, let’s take for a moment their statement that ‘dance music [is] not really suited to working out’ objectively and look towards some evidence.

Maybe we could start by consulting the various group training instructors at Bodyworks, experts surely in workout music selection. Based on my regular visits to the gym I would say that ‘dance’ music is a very popular format for their choreographies- disproportionately so if you compared their track listings against say the popular music charts. We’re not merely talking about more recent ‘house/trance/techno/…’ music. These guys use dance music from right through the past 20 odd years- remember the 80’s? Jazzercise? 80’s dance music?

But really I don’t even think that the argument as to what is good and what is not should really raise its head here.  Everybody is going to have different tastes- the whole purpose of the jukebox is to, as best one can, attempt to cater to all of those disparate tastes.

Maybe your correspondent was referring more generally to modern dance music, the electronic varieties (Trance, House, Breakbeat, Electro, Techno, Drum and Bass). Maybe they don’t like it? It’s certainly not to everybody’s taste. Maybe your team don’t like it? Ditto.  But, your capitulation really does make a mockery of the whole feedback system. Not all feedback is going to be right. On receipt and analysis you should be considering the, quite obvious, thoughts and opinions of other members. In this case you quite clearly haven’t.

If you must have your ‘perfect’ workout music then you should take an MP3 player with a decent pair of in-ear (noise blocking headphones). If you choose not to and instead rely on the jukebox then you should be prepared to compromise and show a degree of communal tolerance- others may have a different idea as to just what really suits their workout.

Anyway. Rant over. I do love my gym a whole heap. As someone who travels overseas a lot (the IHRSA membership is a real bonus) I still love coming back to my own gym and still sits at the top of my favourites list if only because of the whole sense of community. Let’s not spoil that community with this sort of feedback and response.

Regards

Chris

Well done to those who eschewed the ethnicity brackets in this years Census.

New Zealander has been reported as a seperate category.

http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/411749/916391 it got 11%

Microsoft have released the CTP for WPF/E

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=2B01EC7E-C3B8-47CC-B12A-67C30191C3AA&displaylang=en

You'll note they have a Mac Client already!

http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2006/11/tolerance_2.html

Another post on Intellectual Property for y'all.

So recently Microsoft and Novell did a deal whereby they will collaborate and cooperate to make SUSE Linux and Windows work better together. Importantly it also provides for patent indemnity for users of SUSE Linux and non-commercial contributors to SUSE (and by proxy other Linux distros).

So you'd think this would be a good thing, right?

Well it seems that the chunk of the open source community have their knickers in a twist over it.

I guess, to a degree, it all comes down to whether you support software patents or not. Now this is indeed a highly controversial area, but, as a talented software developer I fail to see why innovation in our field should be any less deserving of patent protection than say engineering or biotechnology.

Yet that's what the folks on the Samba team seem to be suggesting. Their opinion isn't just that open source software and patent rights do not go together, for the MS/Novell deal shows that they quite happily do. Instead they are quite vehemently opposed to software patents altogether.

Now I'm not always a huge fan of those enforcing their so called rights (see here on trademarks and parallel importing for example) and we should certainly be discussing and criticising the bredth of some of the patents that have been awarded by IP offices around the world- software and business process patents being the worst examples in many cases. But, a few bad apples or a bad interpretation of scope does not render software patents bad, per se.

We have patents for a reason, to encourage and reward innovation. They are a VERY powerful right to be able to enforce and as such we should be careful when awarding them, but, I really struggle to see why software should be any different to any other technological pursuit- people should be rewarded for genuine innovation. 

I taught some classes recently for Vista app compat readiness.

One of the key things you need to ensure your app does for Vista is take advantage of Windows Error Reporting.

This means you MUST NOT just swallow all exceptions with your own exception handling.

A couple of quick tips around this.

1. If you want to rethrow an exception with the original stack trace do a blind throw like this

try

{
...
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
DoFoo();
throw;
}

Note that we don'te append the exception variable onto the throw.

You can avoid any .NET dialog boxes and throw unhandled exceptions straight to WER by using this line of code.

Application.SetUnhandledExceptionMode(UnhandledExceptionMode.ThrowException);

I'm having some interesting discussions here:

http://www.vorb.org.nz/ftopicp-1055971.html

about the laws surrounding parallel importing. Specifically as they relate to the territorial exhaustion of trade marks. May be interesting for some of you PoliTechLaw-ites

http://www.petitiononline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?nzgg

Sign the online petition requesting that the GG decline to give his royal assent to the recently passed validation bill.