Speed Racer tanked over the weekend as I predicted/hoped. 20 million and second place over the weekend with bad reviews to boot.

Last week the new Zune software 2.5 update came out. It looks like it fixed a few things that were bugging me, which is great. since moving to 1.0 to 2.0 I have noticed some wma files were orphaned on the player. they were not seen by the software and they player doesn't allow deletion directly. so I have a number of files that were invisible. the visual upgrade was worth it though. The 2.5 update seems to have handled the orphan problem and I finally have it all cleared out again. One this that is still annoying, is that if you are listening to a long file and you pause it, watching a movie or doing something else will cause you to lose your place. I guess they assumed there was no need to bookmark audio files, but I listen to a lot of radio shows, podcasts, etc. so the lack of bookmarks is a pain. Maybe the next update.

Overall I love the zune. it supports a wide range of formats and the movie playback is great. I wish it had a more open format though, like the ability to explore it as an external drive or read pdfs, etc.

They did add one great feature. Games. Microsoft also released the xna framework community tech preview for the zune. It works on all existing zunes and it will be more prominate with the next generation player. If you are a .net programmer, it is very easy to get something running on the zune. there are even a examples roaming around to give you a head start. You need Visual Studio 2008 and currently it only supports 32bit. Team XNA blog has a lot of good information and links. Also take the time to read the readme after installation.

One last good link. Gamesutra has an article that details the storage, networking, graphics, etc. available and what you can and cannot do. Great starting point.

I love Nine Inch Nails. It is one of the few bands that I have consistantly enjoyed since my younger days and Trent Reznor has been busy lately. First he released the instrumental "Ghosts" album a couple months ago. 36 tracks in a variety of packages, from 9 free tracks to a $300 dollar limited set. I bought mine for 5 dollars off of Amazon. Now he has released another new album called "The Slip" and it is completely free. Not only in price, but format as well. I have always been against DRM (Digital Rights Management) that is included in most music nowadays. The Slip is DRM-free and it is available in loss-less formats as well for the audiophiles out there. I hope this is a sucessful venture from them. All music needs to move to an open system and it seems to be gaining momemtum in recent months. Radioheads in Rainbows was another huge release that was put out under the name your price model and I believe that was considered a sucess.<br/><br/>Get the Slip.

I want to throw out a prediction now. Speed Racer will be the biggest big-budget bomb of the summer. I was never a speed racer fan as a kid, but I am the demographic the movie is aiming for. I don't even think Speed Racer fans are into it. I read somewhere that it cost 120+ million to make and they expect to make 30 million the first weekend. Good luck with that

After a decade+ out of comic books, I returned to reading them on a regular basis again 2 years ago. At first I hit the titles I was familiar with, but within the last year I have branched out into the independents as well. It is amazing what is offered now on a weekly basis. Literally hundreds of titles come every wednesday. As a coding exercise outside of my normal realm and to keep up to speed on what was coming out I built the comic release list that is listed in the bar under the site title. to build it I put together series of web pages that would retrieve the list automatically from diamond publishing, reformat and order the entries and list the contents on a user friendly page. it worked, but it required some amount of manual work to maintain.

Once I had a working list I was looking to release it to a wider audience. I started using iGoogle six month ago and I like the gadgets so I began to build a new release schedule. However I was looking to expand the listing to cover all comic books, toys and magazine. At this point I was also using Midtown comics for my weekly comic fix. I didn't receive the titles the day they came out, but the convience and prices were better than my local shop could provide. The delivery service is also amazing well done. In 2+ years of weekly deliveries, Midtown has only made 2 mistakes, but corrected without any fuss. After finding a contact at Midtown I was allowed to leverage their list to use as a basis for a new release schedule gadget and the results are in the sidebar. I want to go into my details on the iGoogle gadget building process as well as the experiences I have had with midtown comics.

I have been an avid gamer for 30 years (started when I was 7). I now how 2 young boys that are hard-core gamers as well. Because of the shared interests we are in a game store a few times a month and up until recently that has been mainly EB Games/Gamestop. I really haven't ever liked the stores, but when you want games it will have it most of the time, so we keep heading back. Watching X-Play a couple weeks back I heard about a new store opening that was taking a new modern approach to the video game store and I was really interested. So it was great when they got to the end of the story and it turned out to be located in San Diego. The store is called "Games On" and it is located in Pacific Beach. it is clean and open and the store owner is not trying to get you to pre-order anything, unlike the vultures at Gamespot. There is one issue, the shop doesn't have much in the way of advertizing, so it was hard to find. After watching the story on X-Play I knew the name and street but not the full address. It took a lot of goggling to run it down on another blog. Here is the address, stop by if you get a chance, this type of business needs to be encouraged. It is lit up and airly with a good selection of games, I would add a few more demo options and displays, but for the most part it is great and I plan on heading back in a couple weeks when I need another set of games.

Check out the this blog interview with the owner, it gives a lot more details and great pics of the store

953 Garnet Avenue
San Diego, CA 92109

Hours are currently 11AM-8PM every day except Monday, when the store is closed. Games On can be contacted at 858-272-4212.

Home server has turned out to be a handy thing to have. I was in the habit of running a portable USB drive around the house, but after the initial stumbles it has been rock solid and gave a system that was collecting dust new life. Odd thing with the install, it looks to be based on the Windows 2003 small business server, at least that is what it was reporting at the beginning when it was going through the blue screen initial system load. The installation process was odd as well, it had to reboot 4-5 times before it was to a stable initial state. However once that was over and patched it hasn't acted quirky since. Once the server is in place you need to install the home server connector software on any machines that you are adding to it. this was easy on all my Vista and XP machines. The next stumble I hit was the user accounts. It suggests setting up a mirror account on the home server that matches the users profile on there machine, to make login easier. I found that not only is it easier if you set up the mirror accounts it may be the only way to set up the accounts. I couldn't get a mismatched set of accounts to work at all and had to line them up identically. However, once again, after it is past this stage it has been solid and problem free. Now that I have everything set up, I have moved my music, videos and pictures to the home server and the convience is great. Next, I am going to hook it into my xbox 360, add some of the add-ins available and make it externally available so I can reach it from work. The add-ins look especially interesting and I am curious what else I can get this thing to do.

I am a do-it-yourselver (which I hope is a word) and have been for many years now. Because of that I have accomulated mountains of old hardware and systems as I have built out new ones to keep up with my gaming. One of the things I always wanted to do, but didn't have the time/energy for was to put together a home server for the family. I have been taking the lazy route and running portable hard drives between systems or just putting in a quick share between systems in order to get done whatever it was I was working on. Now that I took a few weeks off from work I decided to put in a proper network. I had heard about the new Windows Home Server and a couple good comments on its design and usability, so I decided to go that route.

 Step 1 - getting the software. I figured I would be able to download Home Server from MSDN like the rest of my experiments, but it was not available there. So a quick google turned up the official site. I had to double check the url and make sure it was legitimate. I didn't feel comfortable getting software from a goob like this

and it looked like the company was Stay-at-Home servers. After it checked out and I filed it away as bad design I hunted down the eval copy. Microsoft is giving out "free" 120-day trials on the software, which should be enough time for me decide to either chuck it or keep it.

 I wrote "free" because the Disk is free but you have to pay 10 bucks for Shipping. I couldn't find anyway to download it which was i hoping to do. So I signed up and waited for the disc to arrive. Even with Christmas in the way it got here in just a couple of days, which is great, but I still think they are missing out on wider try-outs if they had put it up as a download. I usually have the attention span of a gnat and I would normally move on and forget it, but I still wanted to give it a shot and setup a proper network.

I updated the look of the comic book release list and added the ability to switch between the current weeks list and the next. next I will be working on an automated feed. If you have any ideas or suggestions, please send them over. david@shaff.com.

About 2 week ago I was playing and enjoying Hellgate: London, despite the so-so reviews. It is simplistic, but fun. Anyway, my system is about a year old, I custom built it with a fast dual core CPU and a high-end graphic card. I went with the 64bit version of Vista because I was expecting to upgrade over time and I was hoping games would start taking advantage of the processors. The system was setup with 2 gigs of ram, which i figured would be enough for a while. However, as I played the game I was encountering severe slowdown. Looking at the system monitor I found that Vista was taking close to a gig of the ram and the game was easily taking the rest.
Shopping around a bit I found a great deal on another 2 gigs of ram from the same family as the original set.
2 gigs of Cosair 800mhz DDR2. , $87 ($47 after Mail-in rebate).
A few days later the ram arrived and I popped it in expecting the system to be humming in no time. Instead I was hitting long Vista startups, followed by a crash a few minutes into the startup completing, if it got that far.
My first thought was bad RAM, so I ran the new Memory diagnostic included in Vista, but it didn't find any issues. Than I pulled the ram and hit google to track down the issue.
Turns out I have a problem with the motherboard and Vista that took a good deal to track down and set up, but now that it is done, everything is running smooth at 4 gigs. If you are running into a similiar issue, I hope this helps. First off, if you are going to 4 gigs or beyond, you should use a 64x processor and version of Vista. You can get up to 4 gigs of RAM with XP and Vista x32, but it takes some tweaks and it doesn't fully use all 4 gigs. See Pae for details. I have an ASUS P5N32-SLI SE Deluxe motherboard. The Microsoft KB doesn't specify this motherboard in the description, so I assume it is true of other motherboards as well.

Here are the steps you need to take if you run into the same issue.

• Take out the new ram until you are done.
• Read the manual, or at least skimp it for pretty pictures and anything to do with Bios updates and Ram.
• Update the Bios. If your motherboard supports it like the P5N32-SLI than use EZ-Flash. Get the latest ROM from the motherboard manufacture website and write it to a floppy. Rename the file to P5N32SD2.ROM. When the system is loading hit <ALT>-<F2> during the POST to get to a EZ-Flash prompt. Then insert the diskette with the latest ROM.
• Once it is flash load up windows and make sure you are still good.
• Get the KB file KB 929777. Install the KB and reboot.
• After the reboot, check to make sure everything else is patched up to the current level and shutdown.
• Once it is down, install the new ram and boot it up, stopping at the BIOS setup, which is usually <DEL> during the POST.
• Here comes the painful pain that I am going to research further to figure out why it is necessary. In order to get the system stable at 4gigs I had to knock the memory speed down to 600mhz from 800mhz. It isn't readily apparent how to do this in the BOIS, but you need to go to the chipset settings | AI Overclocking and move the board speed down to 800mhz, which in turn kicks the memory down to 600.

Truthfully I don't really notice the downgrade in memory speed, but I am seeing improvements in all applications and the game is running smoothly now.

I will try to find out the reasons behind these steps, but for now i have a fast, smooth system and I am happy with it.

If you see this post it means that BlogEngine.NET is running and the hard part of creating your own blog is done. There is only one thing you need to do from this point on to take full advantage of the blog and that is to set up the first author profile.

Setup

Find and open the users.xml file which is located in the App_Data folder. Edit the default user and provide your own name as the username and a password of your choice. Save the users.xml file with the new username and password and you are now able to log in and start writing posts.

Write permissions

To be able to log in to the blog and writing posts, you need to enable write permissions on the App_Data folder. If you’re blog is hosted at a hosting provider, you can either log into your account’s admin page or call the support. You need write permissions on the App_Data folder because all posts and comments are saved as XML files and placed in the App_Data folder.

On the web

You can find BlogEngine.NET on the official website. Here you'll find tutorials, documentation, tips and tricks and much more. The ongoing development of BlogEngine.NET can be followed at CodePlex where the daily builds will be published for anyone to download.

Good luck and happy writing.

The BlogEngine.NET team