Mad Props!

Some further thoughts on the 360:

• The "achievements" feature is just amazing. It adds a whole new dimension to gaming. Even single-player games are transformed into multiplayer games, because you can compare your achievements to those of your friends. I can check out my Hexic HD badges compared to Crucible's, for example.
• Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter looks fantastic, and is fun (albeit really hard) to play. I don't know whether I'm hardcore enough to keep it, though (EB has a 7-day exchange policy on games). I just don't think I'd be playing online all the time, and the single-player campaign, while good, may not hold my interest
• Still waiting on my RGB SCART cable, so I'm yet to play a game in 5.1 surround
• We've watched several DivX videos on the 360's Media Center extender using LightningWare's free MCEVideoEncoder program. Great stuff.
• Check out what Crucible has been doing with his LinkSys NAS device! He can stream music and photos from it now, without the need for a PC. Awesome!

Something I want now: Some more backwards-compatibility-supported games. In particular, I'd love if Jet Set Radio Future and Kung Fu Chaos were supported. They're two of the best games on the original Xbox, if not two of the best games ever.

I've been thinking about the Windows Vista versus OSX debate, and one thing occurred to me last night.

In the very early previews of Vista at PDC 2003, Microsoft demonstrated VisiCalc (one of the first applications ever to run on a PC) running on their new OS. VisiCalc is 20 years old - a spreadsheet application written for DOS.

Here's Tim Sneath talking about backwards-compatibility in Vista.

Do you think Apple's LisaCalc (a spreadsheet program written for Apple's OS around the same time as VisiCalc) runs on OSX?

Heck - do OS9 applications even run on OSX?

Food for thought.

From the blog of Geoff Appleby comes this little quiz. See if you can guess which names are Web 2.0 sites, and which are characters from the Star Wars saga.

My score: 37. And yet, I really don't live in my parents' basement!

Some random thoughts after a day and a bit with the Xbox 360.

Setting it up was ridiculously easy. I plugged in all the cables, shot out to the garage to make sure my network point was patched correctly, then turned it on. It came up nicely and presented me with the initial setup screen.

Hoping that I hadn't accidentally unplugged the PC's network point during my patching, I walked back over to the PC's room, to discover a new message on the screen. Something like, "A new Xbox 360 has been discovered on the network. Would you like to install the Xbox connectivity software now?"

That is cool. It was about a 20MB download, and installed seamlessly.

After the software was setup on the PC, it asked me for an eight-digit code (provided by the Xbox) for Media Center connectivity. I ran back to the Xbox, jotted down the code, and gave it to the PC. That was it. Now the Xbox can talk to the PC.

For example, I can now watch live TV from my PC on the Xbox. I can set up recordings from the seven-day TV guide. I can stream videos (either recorded TV or downloaded vids). I can even watch DivX vids with a little help from some inventive folks online.

As for the Xbox itself - wow. Everything's really slick. The dashboard is a great UI. The Media Center extender feels like you're actually on the PC. The included Hexic game is as addictive as the flash version I used to play on the PC.

And get this - the "friends" system simply rocks. Sal and I were watching the latest episode of Lost last night (streaming from the PC), and part way into the episode a tiny pop-up appeared at the bottom of the screen, letting me know that Crucible had come online. That is very cool.

So now begins the long wait for my RGB-SCART cable. Until then I can't play games in 5.1 surround sound, nor will I get the best picture out of the Xbox. *sigh*

Depite what people assumed, I wasn't waiting in line at midnight Wednedsay night to pick up a pre-ordered Xbox 360. In fact, I didn't get one 'til yesterday. I almost didn't though, and here's why:

The Xbox 360 in Australia comes with an official adapter to connect the unit to a TV using SCART. SCART is a European standard, but many televisions in Australia use it, since we also have the PAL video format. My TV, in fact, has three SCART inputs, two of which will accept component and RGB video signals.

The problem is, though, that the SCART adapter that comes with the Xbox only supports composite. It can't do the higher-end signals to get a better picture.

Worse still, there are no official accessories in Australia that can do component or RGB via SCART! There weren't even any third-party cables or adapters in stores! Also, if you don't have an "advanced" cable that can do component or RGB, you don't get the digital optical audio output, so you lose the 5.1 sound!

So I was pretty bummed about that. I didn't want to buy an Xbox 360 and be stuck using a composite connection to my TV. I certainly didn't want to be stuck with stereo sound through my TV speakers when I've been playing the original Xbox through my (pretty decent) 5.1 system for years!

So I came home from my shopping expedition yesterday morning empty-handed.

I then jumped online, and after much searching around, found this: An RGB via SCART cable with optical audio out for Xbox 360, from Joytech. Huzzah!

Knowing that the cable is on its way, I went back down the street and bought the Xbox. I picked up Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter too. Now all I have to do is find an online store that'll sell me one of those SCART cables. Amazon.co.uk refuses to ship it to Australia. Yay.

I'll post my thoughts on the Xbox 360 in a future post. Stay Tuned!

I promised Pete I'd give him some link love if he posted his thoughts on this, so here goes.

Over on BrownBot there is a tirade about how Microsoft have "ripped off" the features from Apple's OSX in Vista.

Now, I can go point-by-point and completely debunk some of those myths. For example:

• Apple (and even Mozilla) did not invent tabbed browsing
• Photo thumbnails have been in Windows since Win2000 - so comparing Vista's photo manager to iPhoto is a bit of a cheap shot
• Windows Media Player has used the "treeview down the left" to display playlists etc since ... well ... the first version after 2.0 (was it 6?). That's way before iTunes appeared on the scene, if I remember right.
• The "expose" vs "flip" debate is a bit moot. Windows 3.0 had alt+tab, and that feature has just been leapfrogged by Apple. Now MS are leapfrogging them. That's what competition's about. I'm not saying that MS invented task switching, but I'm definitely arguing that OSX didn't introduce the concept.

There are other places where Pete's happy to confuse facts for opinion, but I do agree with him in some ways.

When Apple shifted from their old OS9 platform to OSX, it was a big change, and by all reports it was a long and frustrating wait for Apple users. The result was worth the wait, they say.

Why, then, is Microsoft's "big shift" taking place all these years later? Why are we getting a slew of new and interesting features (some of which are plainly "catch-up" features to compete with innovation on Linux and OSX) now, rather than back in the Windows 2000 or XP time-frame?

That's the frustrating part.

I suppose part of the reason is that MS has been focusing on security so much recently, what with their operating systems being the biggest target for exploits and attacks. Instead of being able to focus on a whole new OS, they've had to release XP SP2 and various other upgrades to existing products.

And, of course, there are a lot of big releases planned for Vista that are also being backported to XP. When OSX came out I don't think the new features also worked on OS9.

So yeah, I'm frustrated by the seeming lack of innovation from MS, but at the same time ... I have a feeling that when Vista is released, Microsoft users are going to be thumbing their noses at Apple and Linux guys for some time.

Sick of listening to PodCasts?

Tired of being tied to your desk while you watch ScreenCasts?

From Crucible and Mabster comes the Next Big Thing in information dissemination:

PaperCasting

That's right! Download our new PaperCast (coming soon*), print it, and ... read it in your own time!!!

It's a revolutionary new concept that will fundamentally change the way you use the web!!!

PaperCasting. Because you live offline, too.

* May not be for a while. Or ever.

On the drive home this afternoon I listened to this week's episode of Hanselminutes, which was all about Microsoft's new command-shell (code-named Monad).

It was a great episode (they all are), but one thing that Scott said towards the start of the show struck me as quite odd/funny.

He was talking about how every command in Monad takes the form "verb-noun". For example, you might have a command "get-childitem", or "format-list". Every command starts with a verb, then has a hyphen, then a noun.

What struck me as funny about this is that the example he was using that led him to explain this rule was "new-object"! Now, call me old-fashioned, but last I looked, "new" was an adjective, not a verb.

Surely "create-object" would have been a better choice?

Oh, man - this is a real gotcha. If you're using Visual C# Express to create an application, and deploying it using ClickOnce, you need to be aware of this.

You probably realise that when you build your application, Visual Studio creates two folders underneath the "bin" folder: "debug" and "release". The idea is that the version of your application that has debugging information included is compiled into the "bin\debug" folder, whilst the streamlined version without debugging information goes into "bin\release".

You may have noticed, too, that Visual C# Express gives you no way to change which configuration you're currently running under.

So tonight I was deploying a new Comicster version, and noticed that it was deploying the debug version instead of the release version. Not a huge deal, but it does mean that the total size of the deployment files is slightly higher. So I had a poke around to determine why it was doing what it was doing.

It turns out that Microsoft, in an attempt to simplify the way users build their apps in C# Express, introduced a few strange rules:

1. If you run your application from within the IDE, your current configuration is switched to debug.
2. If you use Ctrl+Shift+B to rebuild your application, your current configuration is switched to release.

Got that? So - the moral of the story is:

Always rebuild using Ctrl+Shift+B before deploying using ClickOnce from Visual C# Express.

Fellow Mad Props blogger Crucible recently discovered the enhanced security provided by using a passphrase rather than a simple password. A passphrase is a sentence or phrase that you use as a password - it's much longer than your average password and thus much, much harder to crack.

So he has changed to using a passphrase as his network login, and also on various web sites he is a member of.

In doing so, however, he has discovered something awry with yahoo's sign-in system. Check out his post. Interesting stuff.