2005 August | Lazycoder

18Aug/050

No more CTP’s

I’ll make a motion for no more CTP’s, anyone want to second it?

I’m sure this post will be the major topic of discussion at the next PM meeting at Microsoft. (rolling eyes)

18Aug/050

Dave Winer quote

Scripting News: 8/18/2005: ” Of course I’ll never get an invite, but if I did, I wouldn’t go, as a matter of principle. I think if you go you’re a tool. Hi Tim. “

Just preserving this quote for history.

Filed under: General No Comments

17Aug/050

$399 to play your old XBox games on a single console

Backwards-compatible Xbox 360 to cost $399.: ”

Dream of playing current-generation Xbox games on your new Xbox 360? That feature, known as
backwards-compatibility, is going to cost you because you’ll need to purchase the Xbox 360 package that comes with a
20 GB hard drive (or you’ll need to acquire the drive separately for $99.99). The premium Xbox 360 package is
expected to cost $399.99.

According to an anonymous tipster, an official Microsoft document includes the following text:

’Key Benefits/ Why to buy: Includes a Hard Drive to save games, download new content and play top selling Xbox
games’

(Via Joystiq.)

To quote Flonisha, my imaginary African-American female neighbor with a lot of Brooklyn sass. “Oh no they din’nt!”

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16Aug/050

Yahoo toolbar truly does integrate with Firefox

I was reading a new blog today and I wanted to save a particular post. Normally I would just print it out, but the color scheme was white text on a medium grey background. So I figured, “Hey, I’m using FireFox, I’ve got ‘live bookmarks’, I’ll just add it as a live bookmark. That way I don’t have to subscribe to it in my aggregator”.

I clicked on the little “live bookmark” icon in the lower right hand corner of the browser window and 4 items show up in the menu list.

Subscribe to ‘RSS’
Subscribe to ‘ATOM’
Add ‘RSS’ to My Yahoo
Add ‘ATOM’ to My Yahoo

Whoa, I wasn’t expecting that. Then I realized that the Yahoo toolbar for Firefox I have installed must be intercepting that call and adding it’s items to the menu.

THAT is pretty cool. Things like that are what is going to push RSS and Web Feeds into the mainstream. Not the cool aggregators, not the ‘RSS Everywhere’ screaming. The ability to quickly and simply add the feed to a page you see every day.

Filed under: Technology No Comments

15Aug/054

Reboot remote machine from RDC Session

Here’s a little tip I had to hunt for tonight. I use RDC on my iBook to connect to my XP Pro machine at home. Tonight I needed to reboot the remote machine, but all that would display was “Log off” or “Disconnect” in my start menu. For some reason, either because RDC disables it or the MS Apple RDC client disables it, I wasn’t able to send a ctrl-alt-del command either.

Drop to a command prompt (Start-Run- type “cmd” and hit enter) then type “shutdown -r -f.

-r restarts the computer
-f forces the issue. Otherwise the RDC client locks the workstation.

There are some other options too. Type “shutdown /?” to see them all.

That’s much easier than the WSH script I’d written a few years ago to get Windows NT to lock and/or shutdown.

Filed under: General 4 Comments

15Aug/053

Running visual studio versions side by side

Has anyone had any luck running Visual Studio versions side by side? I’m going to try running VS 2003 and VS 2005 b2 on the same machine at home. It’s not a production machine so I’m not too worried about it’s stability.