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Chris Russell's Spacehttp://chris-russell-v2.spaces.live.com
How to Kill a Year's Worth of Effort w/One Mouse ClickI recently discovered what I consider to be a major design flaw in the Zune client software that allows some idiot like me to accidentally select their entire music collection (in my case in excess of 25K tracks) and change the my rating for every single fragging track in a single mouse click - no undo, no recourse. This is extremely evil because it overwrites my actual track ratings. Consider that 25K+ tracks is 3-4 months worth of 24x7 continuous music without a track repeat (or about a solid year's worth of listening if you actually sleep and have some periods of silence during waking hours). It takes an enormous ammount of time to rate a music collection of this size and to loose all you ratings in one mouse click is depressing to say the least. To make matters worse, I leverage a feature called auto playlists in Zune which create playlists based on my ratings and then sync the playlists to my Zune device. The consequence of my mouse click was to overwrite my ratings and destroy my playlists.
Anyway, I'm mostly over it. To recover I deleted the entire contents of my Zune device (10K+ tracks) and started over from scratch. In the process of filling the 80GB drive back up it has occurred to me that I'm bored with all my music. I need new tunes. Tell me what you think are the best 5 CD's of the past ten years please (add a comment to this post).
Thanks for the help! Win7 Beta 1 Goes LiveNice to see the positive response to the first public download of Win7 Beta.
I use Win7 every day here at work on my main development workstation and on my laptop. Generally, I've been happy with the OS and impressed by the progress made by the Windows team. For those of you who know me, I'm really hard to satisfy when to computers and software (this despite the fact that I work for Microsoft on the Windows team :)). Microspotting - Geek Paparazzi Squad @ MSI came across a reference to http://www.microspotting.com in an e-mail at work the other day and was amused. If you ever wonder about a day in a life of a Microsoft geek check out the amusing interviews and photos! Also, check out Ariel's Photostream on Flickr for some great shots of Seattle life generally. Wall St. Windows API (proposed)HRESULT WINAPI WallStBailOut(...)
{ return SCARD_W_CACHE_ITEM_TOO_BIG; }
Cruise To Mt. St. HelensI haven't posted for awhile. Been busy @ work and around the house on weekends. But last Saturday I didn't write code or work in the yard. Instead I cruised with eighteen other Mazda 3's (mostly Mazdaspeed 3's) driven by members of the Northwest Mazda club up to Mt. St. Helens and back. It was a blast.
Here's some video published by some of the others in the group:
^--- This is actually pretty tame. There's another guy named Drew who has a camera mount in his car and I'm waiting for him to complete editing his footage. He's got the really good stuff (absolutely insane cruise from the visitor's center about 15-miles up through the twisties to the Johnson Observatory overlooking Mt. St. Helens).
I've posted some photos on Flickr as well that are available here:
I had so much fun that I've proposed another cruise that will take us 400 miles around the North Cascades Highway loop in Washington. There seems to be some keen interest in hitting the twisty mountain roads. I can't wait. Here's my proposed route:
2008 Mazdaspeed3 Slot CarThis is a great little car...
I don't drive like this but I think this video is pretty amusing nonetheless.
This is good review. Watch the torque steer...
Dave Russell Sr.'s 95th BirthdayMy grandfather, Dave Russell Sr. of Springfield, Vermont (no he doesn't watch the Simpsons) is turning 95-years old on Sunday. My dad and I recently put up a website for him which will be used to promote a book he published two years ago entitled "Verses from a Vermont Hillside". I spent many happy days during my childhood up on the farm in Vermont and will always remember my grandfather's office in the basement and his old typewriter and hundreds of short stories and poems strewn about his old rolltop desk typed on carbon paper and on the back of discarded scraps of paper. The book compiles the best of his stories, poems and essays and is a great read. We hope to get some additional information posted that will allow people to order copies soon.
Happy 95th Birthday Grandfather. You're a great man and I miss being within driving distance of the farm.
Ascribe vs. Imbue vs. ImputePop quiz vocab hotshots:
What's the difference between these three words?
I had to look them up recently while reading though a whitepaper. As I expected, the author was incorrectly ascribing the semantics of the word impute to the word imbue. Anyway, I had to look it up to be sure so I guess I might have made the same mistake. At The Risk Of Ripping Your Ears OffZune "Premium Earbuds" (they're pretty good) ship with a cloth sleeve which protects and stiffens the cabling. It looks nice and is functional. However, when the cloth rubs against the zipper of your jacket, the vibration is transmitted along the cable to your ears. I read this suggestion on a Zune mailing list and although I do not recommend getting your ears ripped off, with a little care you can avoid peril and lose the noise. "... [the] Secondary benefit to cord wrapped behind ear is that when you are working out the earbud doesn't fall out as easily. [of] Course then if you catch the cord on something you rip your entire ear off instead of just yanking the buds out, but to lose the rubbing sound transmission it is worth it." Joining Windows CoreAt the end of February, I transferred inside the Windows Division and joined the Application Platform Team (part of Windows Core Engineering). This is a big deal for me personally as I have been hired to help solve some vexing problems that have interested me for years. Broken RSS AggregationHmm... Looks like something has gone wrong with the RSS feeds displayed on this page. Seems like they have all been reset to pull from the New York Times. In Memory of Kyra HuskyI am extremely sad to report that our female Siberian Husky Kyra died today two months shy of her tenth birthday due to liver cancer. We first became aware of a potentially serious problem on Tuesday and an ultrasound, an exploratory surgery and three days and she's gone. She was loved dearly and will be sorely missed. New England Down In FlamesI don't want to talk about the Superbowl. Windows Vista Slideshow Screen ResolutionThe "Windows Photo Gallery" application bundled with Windows Vista supports a full-screen slideshow mode that sometimes tries to be a little too smart about choosing an optimal screen resolution for slideshow viewing. Specifically, the slideshow viewer may decide to reduce the screen resolution for full-screen viewing when invoked and doesn't expose any obvious way to override this default behavior.
For most people this is not a huge problem (if they notice it at all). Discriminating viewers may note a degradation in image quality. But you really run into a problem if your video adapter is driving a display device that (a) isn't recognized by plug-and-play (thus defaulting Window's knowledge of your dislay's actual capabilities to "Generic PnP Monitor" which is assumed to support a wide variety of different video modes) (b) doesn't actually support the display mode automaticlly selected by "Windows Photo Gallery" for full-screen slideshow viewing.
In my case, this Vista box is using an NVidia Quadro FX1000 (a dated but still kick-ass video adapter) connected to a Samsung DLP HDTV which I've configured for full 1080p (1920x1080 @ 60Hz) viewing on the desktop. However, when I flip to slideshow mode I'm toast - the Samsung supports only a view different display resolutions and the one chosen as I enter slideshow mode is not supported. The display flickers and then bluescreens (Samsung video input not detected NOT a Vista BSOD). So for me on this particular PC configuration slideshow just doesn't work out-of-the-box. Parenthetically, the standard Photo Viewer screensaver bundled with Vista is just a wrapper around Windows Photo Gallery's slideshow mode so it too is busted for this particular configuration.
Luckily it's not hard to fix.
Refer to the Windows Knowledge Base Article 930102 for specific details.
Summary:
Add the DWORD value WinSATScore = 500 (decimal) to the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Photo Gallery\SlideShow key in the registry to instruct Windws Photo Gallery to use the desktop display settings when switching into slideshow mode. This solves both the image quality and the unsupported display resolution problems. Please insert a CDI'm sitting on the sofa with my wireless keyboard/mouse typing this message. My workstation is ten feet away from me connected to an HDTV. I want to rip the audio CD that I just dropped in the tray before I sat down. But, I forgot to retract the drive tray.
Right about now it sure would be handy if the right-click conext menu item "Eject" normally associated with Windows optical drives toggled state to "Retract" when the drive tray is ejected. Sounds like a good lunchtime hack to figure out how to change the behavior. I'm getting up to push the button now.
ObjectGraph Web 2.0 Dictionary/ThesuarusI was customizing an installation of Opera and stumbled across an optional side-panel dictionary plug-in from ObjectGraph.com. Basically, they present an AJAX-powered web form that retrieves/displays dictionary queries for each character you type. Even over my crappy HughesNet satellite "broadband" connection the form is responsive enough to be useful. There's also an online Thesuarus.
Windows Media Player 11 Taskbar SettingsBooting a clean install of Vista Ultimate, the first time you minimize Windows Media Player (WMP) 11 you're prompted to decide if you want WMP to display itself as either a standard taskbar task icon OR a taskbar-embedded mini-player. I elect the taskbar-embedded mini-player-on-minimize option and continue on. Later, I decide I prefer the standard taskbar icon-on-minimize display option because restoring the mini-player window requires a precise mouse action. But how to restore the standard behavior?
After drilling through all the WMP option menu dialog boxes I've come up with nothing. WMP prompts you but doesn't appear to expose the setting anywhere. As with most things Winows, the work-around is trivial if not a little counterintuitive. The WMP mini-player embedded in the taskbar is a so-called taskbar toolbar. Toggle mini-player vs. standard-taskbar-icon-on-minimize behavior as follows:
Let There Be Bass (Electric)Sitting here half watching the Eric Clapton Crossroads Guitar Festival on PBS Great Performances and suddenly - wow... Okay Jeff Beck (one of my personal favorites from way back) is jamming... But, who is this kid he's got up on stage on bass? Man, it's amazing to see so much tallent stuffed into someone so young... Absent credits for Beck's band, a little digging on the web revels that a young woman named Tal Wilkenfeld appeared with Beck for the Chicago 2007 Guitar Festival. I'm definitely going to buy her debut CD and dig through my jazz CD's (because I haven't listened to any of them for what seems like years).
Here are some links:
Tal Wilkenfeld (Wikipedia) .::. Tal Wilkenfeld (Official Site)
Jeff Beck w/Tal Wilkenfeld "Big Block" @ Crossroads 2007 (YouTube video) Rockies SweptSweet. I orderred my Boston Red Sox 2007 World Series Champions baseball cap this AM. I'll keep it next to my 2004 World Series cap  WS Game Four and Slam the Door?Well... I really didn't expect that the Red Sox would go up 3-0 on the Colorado Rockies in the World Series. There was a lot of hype about the Rockies in the press but so far, there's only been a few brief moments where Colorado has seriously threatened to take the lead let alone win a game. Tonight's game four starts in about 45 minutes in Boston. At this point, the Rockies are in a giant hole staring at four back-to-back win-it-or-hang-up-the-cleats games. The Red Sox need only win one out of the next four to become World Series Champions for 2007. It should be a good game tonight. Ishkur's Guide To Electronic MusicMan this is great! Check this out: http://www.di.fm/edmguide/music.swf Yankees Down in FlamesSweet. Sox vs. Indians for the AL Championship Friday night, 7:30 EST in Fenway broadcast on FOX. Live Spaces and IE 7 Crash...Here's a good one: If I log into my Live Spaces account and attempt to change the layout, IE7 crashes with an unhandled exception every time (running on Windows XP). Hmm... maybe I'll submit some feedback. Or file a bug report when I get into the office tomorrow... Xcerion XiosXIOS, an "XML Operating System" from Swedish Xcerion is an interesting system. However, XIOS is not an operating system. Rather, it is a fancy scripting host that sits atop a real operating system. Safe Labels in C++An excellent new article on Artima C++ describes techiques for leveraging macros and templates to perform compile-time validation on normally error-prone (i.e. dangerous) bit-level manipulations.
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