(link)

Here are some short videos that I made:

Unboxing:

link

Out-of-the-box experience:

link

First-sync experience:

link

Clicking on it, this window opened:

This is great!  This tells me that Windows Update now has a streamlined path for new features and updates to current Windows-bundled applications.  In the past, Microsoft has been very timid about updating programs bundled with Windows, which is one reason why Microsoft pulled many of them out into Windows Live.  (Internet Explorer 7 was a big deal to update.  At some point Windows Update in XP would open up the installer, right in the user’s face.  The alternative would be to update IE automatically, that’s not fair to the user.)  Microsoft would never push a new program (with a whole new UI, etc.) to an end user without asking first, and it seems that this path allows Microsoft to easily ask that question.  (The question would be queued in the Action Center maybe?)

Since I’ve had the Windows 7 Beta running for a few weeks, I’m guessing that this Windows Update type was itself an update, which just goes to show the extreme flexibility of Windows Update.

I’m looking forward to the release candidate in April!

Unfortunately, multi-touch doesn’t work on my Toshiba Protégé M700 tablet PC yet, but I’m still hopeful that Toshiba will put out drivers before 7 is released.

edit: Here’s another:

IE8 has a few features for the transition time between now and when IE7 (and older) usage drops to an insignificant level.  First is Compatibility View.  If the user sees a website that isn’t rendering correctly (for example, my website right now), he can click the “broken page” button in the navigation bar.

Here is the page viewed in Standards Mode.  (I scrolled down to show how the content is pushed down past the sidebar.)

Here is the page viewed in Compatibility View, which is called “quirks mode” behind the scenes.

I would love to know enough about CSS to fix my WordPress theme to render correctly in standards mode, but honestly I have better things to do, and the website renders correctly in Firefox already, so there doesn’t seem to be much point.  Why?  Because I can simply force IE8 to render the website in Compatibility View with a simple tag interested into the page.  What is the tag?

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7" />

When I add that tag to the proper place in the WordPress theme…

The webpage renders correctly, and the compatibility view button goes away.

Note: the version of IE8 used in this post is the one that was bundled with the Windows 7 Beta.

A simple double-click on an ISO file will bring up this simple interface:

It couldn’t be simpler, but you will still need some third-party software if you want to create a disk image.

Now there is a “movies” menu front and center in Media Center’s start menu.

Selecting the “Movie Library” item shows the following screen.  I started taking screenshots of the process of adding the DVD’s into the library, but the process was so “duh” obvious that I decided to leave the process out.

After I told Media Center where the DVDs were it found all of them and put them in the menu for me to play.

Selecting a DVD brings up a menu about the DVD.  (This menu is the same template as for selecting an album in a list of music or a video in a list of videos.)  There seems to be a lot of room for metadata.  I don’t know how that is supposed to work, but hopefully there’s more to come.

Pressing right bring up a list of actions, which for DVDs apparently only lets me edit the disk title.

When I select “restart” my experience is just as though I put in a DVD, except more responsive.  I have found that skipping around in the video is much more responsive in this version of Media Center, as compared with Vista’s.

After holding right for a seconds, the selector switches from jumping from one item to the next slowly to this new scrolling mode in Media Center.  I forget it’s specific name, but what it does is great.  All of the items in the background fade out a little and wizz by, while only a few items show up slowly on top.  This allows the user to jump to the general area of an item in a big list.  When the user lets go of the left or right button, the item shown in the forground is left selected, and the items in the background fade back in.  The whole process is very well animated and seems useful as well.

However, this still is a beta after all, so currently in the Windows 7 beta if the DVD that it selects to show in the foreground begins with “The”, media center will select those letters as the current position.  It’s nice that Media Center ignores words like “the” in it’s alphabetizing algorithm, but the guys who wrote the quick scrolling feature didn’t seem to get the memo.  I’m sure this will be fixed by the time the Release Candidate is released.

Another nifty new feature of Media Center in Windows 7 is that the user can now, finally, change the position of the video by clicking and dragging the position indicator.  It’s acceptable that this wasn’t possible in the past; Media Center is primarily intended to be used on a couch with a remote control, but it’s nice that Media Center is getting this feature as well.  (Side note: Media Center is also receiving many touch-related features, but more on that later.)

I wonder if this thing supports ripped BluRay disks…  I’ll have to investigate.

When the user first opens Windows Media Center, he is greeted with the following screen.  He may pan left and right to get an overview of the software’s features, as I will do through a series of screenshots.

After clicking “Continue” the user is greeted with the following:

The Learn More item apparently brings the user to a simple Media Center application with a few demo and tutorial videos.  Keeping in mind that this stuff is still in beta, it is a unfortunate that in the time between selecting “Learn More” and seeing a list of videos, there is no loading animation or status indicator of any kind.  Hopefully this will be fixed in the final release.

Back to setup.  Selecting “Express” does some things and then brings the user to the Media Center start menu (if that’s what it’s called.).  I was curious to select that, but I wanted to see what “Custom” had to offer.

Media Center did some processing for maybe a minute, which was curious.

Here is the obligatory “may we collect statistics?” choice.  This is one reason why I usually choose “Custom” for things like this, because I like to participate, but I don’t think the epxress option opts me in.

And of course a privacy statement…

w00t!

Now I have more options.  I don’t have a TV tuner any more, so the first option is not applicable to me, and the other two are not really that exciting or necessary for my system.  I was curious about the media libraries option, however, so I selected that.

Just as I thought, there is a “DVD movies” option now.  Move on that later…

I’m done, so I selected “I have finished”.

w00t!

And here’s the new start menu.

I’ve already played around with Media Center for a bit, and am really excited about a lot of the new features and improvements.  I’ll be writing most posts about them in the future.

…it looks like it’s breathing.

From my previous installation of Windows 7, I discovered that the installer allows the user to start a “complete” install from within a current installation of Windows, unlike the Vista installer, which requires the user to boot from the install disk.  I discovered from this installation that the user still needs to boot from the install disk if he wants to format the drive that the current installation of Windows is on.

Onto the install.  I put the disk in and restarted my computer.  When a message was displayed that said, “Press any key to boot from CD,” I pressed a key.  The setup loaded some files, and then showed the Windows 7 boot screen.

Next I was presented with a screen requesting basic computer information that was necessary to proceed.  The defaults were correct.

The next screen:

After clicking “Install Now” I was presented with the following:

Next I was presented with a EULA.  I checked the “accept” checkbox and clicked next.

Next I was presented with the option to do an upgrade or a complete install.  I wanted to wipe out my current install, so I chose “Custom (advanced)”.

Next I chose the hard drive to which I wanted to install Windows 7, which was the drive labeled “Vista 64”.
 

Fist I wanted to format the drive, so I clicked “Drive options (advanced)”.

After clicking “Format” with the proper drive installed, I received the following message, to which I clicked “OK”.

I had to wait a few seconds for the format to complete.

As a side venture, I wondered what would happen if I tried to install Windows 7 on the Files drive, which is of the GPT partition style, as opposed to MBR.
 

Back on track, I clicked “Next”, and waited for the install to complete.  I consider this the start of the installation.

The “Copying Files” step completed almost instantly.  I assume this is because the installer expands the files directly from the disk for this installation type.
 

At this point the installer must have tweaked the video settings, because the output changed to the native resolution of the display, and the secondary display was no longer a clone of the primary display.  (This is usually something that I have to do manually after a Vista or XP install completes.)
 

I still haven’t had to touch anything.  The install is still running…
 

Here Windows is checking the system performance to evaluate the computer’s Windows Experience Index.  The Vista installer waits until after the user inputs his information to run the tests and shows a little slideshow of Windows features during the test.  Having the test before the user needs to interact with the installer again means that the user doesn’t have to wait through it to get to his desktop.  The Windows 7 evaluation is also much more elegant, with only a small strip of glowing light rather than the slideshow.

Here is where the installation task is complete, and the user is prompted for necessary information.  That makes the total install time 19 minutes on my standards.

I was prompted for a username.  I put in “David”, and the setup chose “David-PC” as the computer’s name.

Next I was prompted for a password.
 

Next I was prompted for my product activation key.  I wanted to put that in later when I could simply copy and paste it in, so I just didn’t put one in and clicked “Next”.  (I unchecked the “Automatically activate Windows when I’m online” checkbox out of habit, because the Vista install requires the user to uncheck a box to click next.  Oops.)
 

Here the user can choose his participation level in Windows Update.
 

Here the user sets the date, time, and time zone.
 

Here the user can connect to a wireless network before he ever logs on to the system.  This is new to the Windows 7 installer.  (I blocked out my network’s SSID.)
 

After I click on the network the item expands to allow me to put in the passkey, which is shown in plain text.
 

Next I can select a profile for the network, which dictates things such as file and printer sharing.
 

Next setup connects to the network.
 

Here setup allows me to set up a new homegroup, which is a new feature of Windows 7 that I need to test out.  The password, which I deleted from the picture, was random numbers and letters.  I am going see if I can set it myself to something that makes sense.

After I click “next” there the system logs me on…

…and prepares my desktop for the first time.

And I’m on.  Windows Update is already doing it’s thing.

So that brings me to the end of the installation.  The whole process up to this point took 28 minutes.

I went on to run Windows Update again and install optional updates, which included a new video driver, which sadly did not work.  I used a new Windows 7 feature that helps troubleshoot problems and discovered that the driver doesn’t support Aero, and when I went into Device Manager the video adapter icon had a waning symbol on it.  I fixed this by using System Restore to restore Windows to before I installed the driver.  I blame ATI, but it’s no biggie.  The drivers, like the operating system, are in beta.

That’s it.  Later I’ll post a video of the boot screen along with other posts about Windows 7.

Download DVD Cover Art Finder version 1.0.0.0 here

Download DVD Cover Art Finder version 1.0.0.0 Source Code here (open with Visual C# 2008 Express)

This usage tutorial begins with the DVD already properly ripped to the hard drive.  I’ll have to make a tutorial about how to do that later, but for now you could use the tutorial that I used to learn how to do that. (link)

First, download and open DVD Cover Art Finder, duh! (note that I made two minor changes to the program since I did the tutorial.  Can you spot them?)

Next, click “Scan for DVDs”.

Select the folder where you store all of your DVDs and click OK.

Select the DVD of which you want to get cover art.  (notice how the DVDs that lack cover art show up at the top of the list.)

Be patient, and DVD Cover Art Finder will show cover art, which is currently picked from Amazon.com.  If the right cover art doesn’t show up, edit the Title text box and click the “(re)load coverart” button.

Click the cover art that looks right.  This will put the cover art in the image box in the Selected DVD group box and update the Title text box with the title of that DVD.

Edit the title box if necessary.

Click the “Save” button.  This will save the cover art to the DVD’s folder, as well as rename the DVD’s folder to match the title.  Saving also creates a data file to keep track of the information and places that in the DVD’s folder.

Great!  Now the DVD shows up in Media Center with the right title and cover art.

Here’s a quick jump forward to the final product:

 Amazon has a great set of web services available from aws.amazon.com, and one of the services enables integration with Amazon’s online store.  Best of all, the sample code was written in C#, which is my programming language of choice.  The API itself is very easy to use and quite powerful, but enough of that.

My program, which I quickly decided to call DVD Cover Art Finder (very creative), uses the Amazon Associates Web Service to suggest 6 possible cover arts.  When the user selects one of the choices, the selection is shown in the bigger image box, and the dvd title is updated to the title as listed on Amazon.  I added in a bunch of quick keyboard shortcuts to make the process go a lot faster, which I really needed since I used the software to get 200+ cover arts.  The program also renames the DVD’s folder to the DVD title, and preserves the DVD disk label and some other information in a data file that it keeps in the DVD’s folder.

As you can clearly see, I haven’t put much effort into polishing the product yet (note the window’s title of Form1).  Using it to get a bunch of cover art, however, the thing is stable.

I’ll be finalizing this at some point and publish it to my blog, including the source code.  For now just marvel. 

FYI, Media Center also supports three ways to display the DVDs.  The one previously shown is “View Large”.  This one below is “View Small”, and there is a third option that I don’t find very useful called “View List”.

Selecting a DVD shows the disk’s location and and bigger cover art.

Playing the DVD is exactly the same experience as playing a physical DVD, except there’s no disk.

Here is a screenshot of the FRI version 1.8.0.0 main window with no search filters applied.

Here I typed mario kart into the title search box.

Clicking onthe Advanced Search button gives the user more options.

For example, here is the result of an advanced search for all Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 ROMs that are categorized as English or an unknown language and are a not known bad image dumps.

Sorting the results by community rating brings the some of the best ROMs to the top.  At the time of this writing community ratings only include some Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis games, however FRI checks for updates to the community ratings file every time it starts, and will automatically pull it from my web hosting and apply the changes if I make a new version available.

FRI can pull ROMs from multiple file locations.  This allows more flexibility to the user, and offers some very convenient solutions.  For example, a user may have a desktop computer with a large ROM library and a laptop computer with a small ROM library.  FRI allows the user to add the local and remote libraries (via network share) into each copy of FRI.  When both computers are on the same network, the user can then right-click on a ROM that is in his desktop computer’s local library and have FRI send a copy to his laptop computer’s local library.  While both computers are on the same network, the user could also select any ROM displayed and it would just run, regardless of the file’s location.  In addition, when the laptop doesn’t have access to the desktop computer’s network share, the user can hide all of the unavailable ROMs by doing an Advanced Search.

When FRI scans for ROMs it automatically picks out all of the ROM files and infers a lot of information about each ROM, including platform, language, image health, status in the public domain, region, and number of players.  The information is totally dependent on the contents of the ROM’s file path/name.  Below are the default Vocabularies that come with FRI, which are completely user-editable.

The most important (and most difficult) part about FRI is telling FRI what emulators use what platforms.  Note how the “Compatible Emulator Detected” column shows whether or not an emulator is configured to work with FRI for each of the known platforms.  For now users have to locate, download, and configure the emulators themselves (which is the status quo for most emulated gaming), and then tell FRI where each executable is and what platforms each emulator supports.  As FRI integrates more with my web hosting, I plan on having a simple selector to download, configure, and integrate emulators with ease.  The emulator lists would of course be updatable by me at will.

For more information about FRI, see entries about it on my blog.

I got a new graphics card in the mail today.  It’s a Sapphire HD 3850, which is a (you guessed it) ATI Radeon HD 3850 manufactured by Sapphire.  The cool thing about this card, other than it uses PCI-express 2.0, is that the thing is fanless.  Yesterday I had a fanless MSI card with an ATI Redeon HD 2600XT chip in it, so I was ready for an upgrade.

Here’s what came in the box.  The card (which looks kick-ass) and an S-video to component, S-video to composite, and DVI to HDMI adapters.

Since the 3850 takes an extra power source, there is also an included adapter to draw that power from an ubiquitous power connector type.

Here is a size comparison between the 2600 (bottom) and the 3850:

And here’s the card from the end.  Notice that the top of the picture is actually the top of the card, even though the GPU is on the bottom.  Heat pipes bring the heat to the top.

Finally, here it is in my system, a Core 2 Quad q6600 (2.4GHz) rig with a 300GB raptor system drive, and 6GB RAM that runs Windows Vista Ultimate x64.

Now for the performance…

Here is the Windows Experiance Index of my computer with the HD 2600XT:

And here it is after:
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It appears now that the new bottleneck in my system is the speed of the RAM.  I can’t do anything about that without upgrading the motherboard, but that is for another day.

About upgrading the motherboard.  This card supports PCI-e 2.0, but my motherboard only supports 1.0.  Luckily PCI-2 2.0 is both backwards and forwards compatible, but even so, I won’t get the double bandwidth that 2.0 enables, even if I have a 2.0 card.  So when that motherboard upgrade happens, I’m curious to see how much better the graphics card performs.

As for practical gaming, I found that I could increase the settings on Unreal Tournament 3 to 1920×1200 resolution (the native resolution of my 24" monitor), with the screen percentage up to 90, the texture detail in the middle with 2, and the world detail a little higher at 4.  All the while the game runs smooth.  It is a bit disappointing that I can’t turn the settings up all the way without affecting the frame rate, but with such a big monitor I can’t complain.

The card runs in the upper 40 degrees Celsius at idle, mid 50′s with regular windowing in Vista, and intermittently breaks 70 with intense gaming.

I might attempt to recreate this tomorrow when no one else is in the house.

Here are some unboxing pictures:

The loading mechanism is really neat.  Here’s a video showing how it works:
<video coming soon>

The connectors are a bit odd…  The rack itself requires power, but rather than pulling power from the regular SATA power connector (which probably has a more technical name), the drive comes with a funny splitter shown here:

The rack is constructed to absorb the vibrations created by the drive to reduce sound.  The result is that the sides flex without much force applied.  (Note: my Antec P180 case requires that I attach little things to the both sides of devices installed through the front.  I put one on for these picture.)

Here they are in my case… pretty!

Here you can see what looking into an open, empty tray look like:

Here is an empty tray, a partially-loaded tray, and a loaded tray:

In this picture the bottom two racks have drives in them, and the top drive is being written to:

So here’s a demo/tutorial:

More information about FRI version 1.4.0.0 is available here.