Last weekend was the wife’s birthday. She hates having 14 different remotes to control the entertainment center; none of the “universal” remotes that came with any single component are really universal. The Comcast PVR universal remote cannot change inputs on the receiver. The receiver’s universal remote cannot access the PVR functionality of the Comcast box. So, for her birthday I got her a Logitech Harmony Advanced Universal Remote for Xbox 360. She loved it—or at least, the idea—but it sucked, so we returned it the same day.

I have heard great things about the Harmony remotes. The Harmony 360 is just another choice in the product line, with a few modifications:

• It controls the Xbox 360, out of the box
• It contains Y, X, A, B buttons to ease use of the Xbox via the remote

The Harmony 360 is nearly identical to the Logitech Harmony 550, except for different colored display (green vs. blue), different color casing (Xbox White vs. Black / Grey), and a few button changes (Y, X, A, B replace the Info / Guide buttons, though Y is sub-labeled ‘Guide’ and B is sub-labeled ‘Info’).

This is, or was, my first experience with the Harmony remotes. I am not a fan of this remote. Most of my distaste lies from the programming / editing software for the remote that is installed to your computer.

The interface is unbelievably slow
After all, performance is important to me. The installed application (not a browser application) would regularly take 5+ seconds to switch between screens.

The “future proof” codes were incorrect
For my A/V Receiver, my Comcast PVR cable box, and for my TV, the codes were incorrect. Though it identified my receiver, a brand new Panasonic SA-XR57 released only a month ago, it didn’t even know the receiver had a DVR input. As the only other component-video-equipped input on my XR57 besides TV, I use it for my Xbox. The problem here is that the software forces you to choose an input for the Activities macros, after which you can specify additional custom commands. My “Play Xbox” activity macro included ‘Turn on the Receiver’, ‘Set the Receiver to TV Input’, then a custom ‘Set the Receiver to CustomInputDVRCommand’. A kludge. A hack. I’m not a fan.

The “smart help” wasn’t so smart
The remote comes complete with a Smart Help feature via a Help button right on the remote that assists you when things go wrong. Because of my incorrect codes, the remote would do things wrong, but the Help would retry in an infinite loop. “Is your TV on?” No. [Sends IR command] “Did this fix the problem?” No. “Is your TV on?” No. [Sends same IR command] “Did this fix the problem?” No. “Is your TV on?” …
It is quite annoying.

The remote went back into the box after 2 or 3 hours of trying to get it set up correctly. It was more hassle than the 14 other remotes. It was not worth $129.99. I am just going to save some cash, and pony up for a Pronto TSU7000. Touch screen, configure my own button layout using my own bitmaps (for the UI side of me), more programmable interface (for my Developer side of me), and a lot more control over how I want my remote to be.

The folks over at SvN found this gem. In another case of “Let’s all point and laugh” or “Don’t be that guy,” I direct you to Usability.gov, courtesy of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Note the side-nav article on “Navigation: Left is Best.” Note how the navigation is on the right side.

Hanlon’s Razor. “Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence.”

If you haven’t bought an Xbox 360, yet, stop reading this and go buy one. Even if you do not play video games–I certainly don’t have much time to play them–then you still need one.

I finally convinced the wife a week ago. We picked one up from Best Buy with a copy of Need For Speed: Most Wanted. It is a great game, and I am quite addicted to it, but I’m more impressed with the non-game features.

Windows Media Connect 2.0. (Sell your CD player)
I have already disconnected my CD player. It is going in a box, and I will probably sell it at the neighborhood garage sale next weekend. All of my CDs were long ripped to MP3, so that they can be played on the computer or on the iPods. The only bad thing is the home stereo system has always been the best in the house, expectedly better than iPod headphones or the computer speakers. However, now all that has changed. The Xbox 360 will stream all of my music from my computer. I no longer have to pick 5 CDs and toss them into the player. I can just turn on the 360 (wirelessly, via the remote or controller) and play whatever music I want to play. I’m not even sure if I will ever even buy a CD, anymore, instead opting from some sort of digital media, like iTunes.

One of my favorite “Cool Features” with this is that you can play your MP3s while playing a game. You can replace the in-game music with tunes to fit your current mood, yet it does affect the other sound effects in the game (like the sound of the police car behind you in NFS: Most Wanted). Through the 360, you can also control the volume of the MP3s independently of the other game sounds.

iPod Friendly
I plugged in my iPod. They had a chat for a few seconds, and I was instantly able to play anything off my iPod, just as if I was playing through the iPod UI. There was no setup, no drivers, and (my favorite) no iTunes installation. The 360 just knew what it was, and that was that. It even uses the iPod name that you gave your unit for iTunes. So, in the 360 Dashboard, I have “Jay’s iPod” or “Amy’s iPod.” This was the system I used in the 2 or three days before I got my 360 on the network. Though it is really cool, I no longer needed it thanks to WMC2.0 and streaming MP3s from the computer, since all of my MP3s are on the computer.

It’s all Wireless!
This may seem small, but it is the feature to beat all other features: the unit is totally wireless. The controllers are wireless, and the controllers can turn on the unit. I no longer have wires running across my livingroom (well, I do when I play GameCube or PS2). And if I’m going to be playing the same game I just played, or if I want to play some tunes while I’m sitting on the couch reading a book, the controller can turn on the unit, so I can be lazy and never have to get off the couch.

Xbox Live Arcade
There are over a dozen (and growing) small, downloadable games you can buy from Xbox Live Arcade. My wife loves Hexic, a small Bejeweled-like game that came with the unit (I got the fully-loaded package), though it can be purchased on the Arcade. She is addicted to it. Soon I will also buy Bejeweled 2, Gauntlet (”Warrior needs food badly.”) and Joust. This feature was available on the original Xbox, though not as fluid. There are a bunch of cool Xbox-only games that I hope come over to the 360, soon, like Pacman.

As for the games:
Need For Speed: Most Wanted
I love this game. It is a mix of NFS: Hot Pursuit and NFS: Underground. I like this much better than either one. It has the city-based racing of NFS:U, without some of the street-racing types that I didn’t like, such as URL or street-X, and above all, drifting. The pursuit is much better than NFS:HP, as the cops are much smarter, and will tag-team you to box you in using 4 or 5 cars.

I did download the demo of Project Gotham Racing 3, and I liked NFS much better. PGR3 was too touchy for me.

The next games on the list to buy are Fight Night and Oblivion.

I’m finally catching up on some of the blogs that I haven’t checked out in a while. I came across an intriguing post (on 04 March 2006) by Daniel Grunwald on the #develop teamblog. It seems that he created a tool to analyze Subversion’s ‘Blame’ output to check the ‘Blame’ data from #develop repository and tell what percentage of the code was committed by each contributor. (Incidentally, he has contributed 27% of the application, according to the post’s screenshot.)

My analyzer program gets the person who committed each line of code. Additionally, it searches log messages for the term “patch by” and uses that name instead.

He admits that the tool may need some love, and that some of his parameters are hard-coded, but it may be worth a look. I’m curious to see the contribution stats on our LMS.

Additionally, it is coded in Boo. I’ve been meaning to check out Boo, and getting Daniel’s app working against our configuration might serve as a great introductory Boo task for me.

Most of our VS.Net solutions contain hundreds of files (classes) organized neatly into dozens of folders (namespaces), but despite all of this organization the vertical content size of the Solution Explorer can get quite large. Finding a particular file when the majority of the tree is expanded is tedious and time-consuming, considering it should be a simple effort of less than five seconds. Fortunately, all of this is solved by the click of a button (assigned to handy macro).

The most useful macro for Visual Studio that I have ever encountered (and in the running for most useful VS tool, period) is the CollapseAll macro authored by one current and one former colleague, Dennis Burton and Mike Shields. In a quick XP effort, Dennis and Mike created a handy macro that recursively collapses the entire Solution Explorer tree down to just the solution and its projects.

With the tree collapsed, it is easy to find that desired file.

CollapseAll Macro for Microsoft Visual Studio.Net 2003
Dennis Burton & Mike Shields | Published with Permission

Based on code from Edwin Evans

Here, the macro is so popular that it is a part of our default developer’s build for every new machine, and is conveniently assigned to a toolbar button. The default button icon list contains an Up Arrow (in the Change Button Image menu when customizing the toolbar) that seems quite appropriate. That little button has saved us all from a lot of pain, five seconds at a time.

Steve Yegge blogged an interesting article, yesterday, on (Not) Managing Software Developers. I feel that it is a very interesting article, and definitely worth a read. I agree with most of it, though I do warn you that it should be read with an open mind to prevent feeling “slighted” if you are the managing type.

As the title proclaims, he covers how to (not) manage your developers, advising managing types to be open to new processes and practices, be reflective in a quest for constant self-improvement, and above all to be empathetic–developers are people, too. As his posts often are, his pessimism starts at “We are all bad managers!” to aid in his self-improvement quest, forcing an ego-driven drive to improvement. Again, this is not for everyone, as he already has a few flames in his comments, though perhaps if you are on the flaming side, you may most benefit from his words; everyone should pursue self-improvement if for only to improve their craft.

One modification that I would make is that this is not just for managers. It applies to everyone on the quality assurance team, too. (I am sure it applies to everyone, everywhere, but I only speak of what I know.) We all-to-often attack our developers–even if unintentionally, and if only from their point of view–over bug-ridden code and underperforming applications. Steve’s advice will help everyone have a better understanding of everyone else. Empathy is all too uncommon in our world.

Recently, here at the ranch, we have been experiencing a few issues with Internet Explorer’s javascript functionality. It’s not that IE is doing anything wrong, but rather that it performs unexpectedly. When opening a new window in javascript [window.open()], the height and width dimensions are relative to the size of the canvas / stage / content area (depending on what discipline you are from), all commonly referred to as innerHeight and innerWidth. However, when you execute a resize function in javascript [window.resizeTo()], the height and width dimensions are relative to the size of the entire window, including any chrome, commonly referred to as outerHeight and outerWidth.

Thus, if you create a window (500px x 300px), then resize it to (505px x 305px), the window will actually get smaller, since the chrome adds more than 5 pixels to height and width.

The problem: SCOs (Courseware) can be of any size, depending on the specifications, requirements, and whims of the original clients and developers. To keep courses in their most visual-appealing state, we need to size the content window to precise innerHeight and innerWidth pixel dimensions. Due to our site’s design, the link that launches the Course Shell window has no idea what the size of the SCO is. The Course Shell (LMS) knows how big the SCO is, but it is loaded into the Course Shell window, which is obviously done after the window is created and initially sized. We need a way to size the window to content-dimensions after the window is created.

The catch: Internet Explorer has no native support for innerHeight and innerWidth, let alone a way to resize to those dimensions. Furthermore, the difference between the inner- and outer-dimensions due to window chrome can change from OS to OS and from theme to theme. For example, in Windows XP’s default “bubbly” themes, the title and status bars are much taller than in Windows “Classic” themes. Internet Explorer has no native way to identify the difference in inner- and outer-dimensions, making it difficult to resize to an inner size using an outer size command.

I hacked together some (perhaps mediocre, but still effective) javascript to resize a window to its inner dimensions rather than the outer dimensions, regardless of the amount of chrome that the OS adds.

HTML

Javascript

The HTML tag creates a hidden DIV whose height and width match the window. This provides innerHeight and innerWidth. The JS takes the dimensions of that DIV and resizes the window to those measured dimensions. Since this transfers the inner-dimensions to the outer-dimensions, this provides the exact size of the window chrome. We can now resize to the input parameter height and width, plus the height and width of window chrome, to give us a resize to inner-dimensions.

Execute resizeWindow no sooner than below the closing Body tag, so that the DIV is rendered.

It is a bit of a hack, but it works for now.

“He’s a big pig. You can be a big pig, too.” ~Timon

Turns out that Flash isn’t the murderous killer with the 9-inch chef’s knife. It’s just a big pig. Flash, within this Scorm course, was passing Scorm data to an external JavaScript function. JS was opening an ActiveX XmlHttpRequest object to send the Scorm data to the service via a WebService call (think AJAX). However, Flash was requiring that this be a synchronous call (so much for AJAX). W3C regulates [Hypertext Transfer Protocol — HTTP/1.1 RFC 2616 Section 8.1.4] that “a single-user client should not maintain more than 2 connections with any server or proxy.” Flash is busy downloading external assets, so both connections were taken, and it then says “go and make a synchronous XML call.” XmlHttpRequest object doesn’t like making a synchronous call when there are no available connections to the server; it bugs out and the browser freezes.

Hopefully things will be better with Internet Explorer 7. It is slated to no longer use the ActiveX version of XmlHttpRequest object, but rather the XmlRequest object that Mozilla uses. Perhaps this one will handle itself a little better.