Xbox 360 games on with Internet Explorer

One of Microsoft's E3 2012 conference announcemnets showcased Internet Explorer for the Xbox 360.

I hope that when it is released that we will be able to have full contact web surfing,
as compared to the pointless efforts currently available from nintendo on the wii and sony on the ps3 in the arena of web surfing from a game console.

If there were a bootcamp for iPad...

With the future release of Windows 8 sometime later this year,
we really wont know the full extent of what the OS will be capable of,
except that the Start Button will be gone.

The direction Microsoft is taking with the new OS is very clear,
they are trying to create and OS that has duality.
Meaning that it can be used as a complete touch interface,
or one that is a peripheral driven.

We already know that there will be Windows 8 Tablets,
but what we dont know is what Apple is going to do.
Since they have already enticed the Windows World
to come and play in the Apple World with Bootcamp.

I would imagine that the ability to run Windows on Apple hardware,
has made for a greater increase of Apple hardware sales.
Which is why I think that it would be interesting if they started
offering a version of bootcamp to do that with the iPad.



















Because after all, Windows 8 is a Tablet OS

But then again, there are those that would say its Phone OS

Dont judge a presentation by its title

SYN101: Optimal storage design and best practices to achieve agile VDI

Presented by Alex Danilychev on 11 May 2012

Description

Traditional VDI architectures favor server hosts in a blade form factor to achieve high user density. These designs gravitate towards shared storage where cost of ownership and short- and long-term scalability are largely bound to storage design.

Source: http://www.citrix.com/tv/#videos/5798

Too often is the case in which one attends a conference looking to get the most out the available presentations, and it is inevitable that there is going to be conflict and one has to make a choice between one and other.

We often do this by looking at the title, description, and presenter to make our final choice. In the case of “SYN101: Optimal storage design and best practices to achieve agile VDI”, one could have been misled by the use of the acronym VDI and assumed it was about desktop virtualization. This was further used in the slide deck presented, “Storage Design for Agile VDI”.

But nothing was further from the truth, as this presentation was about a much broader topic, and while yes VDI was used as an example in the presentation, the overall topics covered were of greater scope and importance to design criteria and business needs, that were backed up with very thorough technical analysis and understanding of what is needed for true business planning.

The title of this presentation is most likely the result of the Citrix Marketing machine not looking at the broader picture and clinging to the term VDI.

Dont let Alex's title fool you, its almost an insult to label him as a sales engineer.
No offense to sales engineer's, it's just that Alex is on another plane of thinking.

If you looking to see what it takes to design a true building block architecture that is high performance, scalable, and cost effective, then you should watch this presentation. The principals in which Alex talk about are applicable to not just infrastructure design, but also software design, and a great many other aspects of today’s IT world in which we live and work in.

Microsoft's recent changes to MVP Program

Microsoft made these non-NDA changes to the MVP Program last week

"Dear MVPs, Today, to align with the evolution and expansion of the global technical community, and based on MVP feedback and program participation levels, we are announcing some changes to the MVP Award Program. The technical community continues to expand into new technologies such as mobile and cloud computing, new venues such as social Web sites, and more countries. Microsoft understands the importance of community, and we continue to invest in community development. For example, to reflect the expanding community, we plan to develop new ways to recognize community influencers beyond the MVP Award Program. Meanwhile we are creating Microsoft Forums in 10 languages; building systems to help us to better listen to our customers worldwide; and expanding our investment in the MVP Award Program. We remain very excited about community and the opportunities it gives people.

The spirit of the MVP Award Program, including its core tenets and principles, is not changing. We continue to recognize leaders in the community, and say ‘thank you’ for the most outstanding community contributions and leadership through the MVP Award.

We remain committed to delivering a great MVP Award experience, including more focused, more relevant, and more targeted opportunities to enable you to offer us feedback, help people get the most out of their technology, and share your expertise and experience with others.

We want to offer benefits that are most relevant and beneficial to you and your technical communities. In order to invest in the most impactful MVP benefits, we need to remove some of the less significant benefits. Through our research, and MVP feedback, we discovered that less than 10% of MVPs use our e-Academy, e-Reference Library and MS Press book reviews. We also know that worldwide, MVPs’ experience of their MVP Bucks (eCompany Store benefit) can be impacted by local laws, taxation and customs.

From October 1, we will retire these benefits: Company Store (MVP Bucks), E-Academy, E-Reference Library, MS Press Book Reviews

Technical Experts Connection (TEC) - coming early 2010 As some of you will know from last year’s MVP Global Summit, we are investing in an exciting new online MVP portal site to enhance your program experience. The new site – Technical Experts Connection (TEC) - will enable you to see your benefits, easily access events and opportunities, and connect with your fellow MVPs and with Microsoft, all in one place. We anticipate that this new tool will save you time, dramatically reduce the volume of program emails in your inbox, and bring you closer to your program opportunities, engagements with Microsoft contacts and other MVPs. We will share more information on the new platform closer to launch in early 2010. Moving the program year from October to January, starting January 2010 In the past, the program year began in October to align with Microsoft’s business calendar. This caused some confusion, so we are moving the start of the program year to a calendar year. We will also adjust the dates of our twice-yearly MVP survey, in order to give you enough time to evaluate your award experience before offering us your feedback.

Our worldwide team is very excited about the developments in the community, and the investments we are making in the future of community engagement. The MVP Award Program continues to recognize the very best contributors in the community, and to say ‘Thank you’ to those outstanding people who share their knowledge and help people maximize the benefits of technology. Microsoft MVP Award Program"

Source: Activewin 

Something about iTunes 9 is possibly breaking/fixing my mp4’s

I recently updated to the latest version of iTunes, iTunes 9. My first reaction to the install of it is well let’s just say, it wasn’t one of those feelings of joy. I’m not going to go into my thoughts about iTunes either, but what I am going to focus on is the something that has changed due to installing it, and the impact it has had on my media.

The problem I am seeing is that all of a sudden ALL of my mp4/m4v videos are showing up with durations that insanely way off the mark. As an example, if I go to the file properties of one of my m4v files, it shows a play time of 2:05:10, but when I open the video in quicktime or through iTunes,
It thinks the video is 65:23:14! The video actually plays fine, but the timer bar is really scaled out, and clicking anywhere on it just goes to dead space once you get past the actual length of the video’s real time scale.

Here is the timescale ticked at 00:00:00
(Things appear to be normal at first glance)




Here is the timescale ticked at the end of the scale, 43:28:15?
(The movie is only 01:48:40 and should not be 43:28:15)



Here is the timescale ticked at 00:32:40
(This point in time is in reference to the above scale also being wrong)



Here is what the tack properties look like from QuickTime
(Notice that somehow only the video track is what is wrong, hmmm)



At first, I thought it was iTunes and or Quicktime that was the culprit, and it is, but not entirely in the way I first thought, as I was also seeing the problem appear in other media players, but then again that could be just a side effect of the root problem. The thing of it is, what is it that has changed to cause this, as this problem was not there before I installed iTunes 9. I think I may have found the culprits, I say culprits, as I think this is a two part problem.

First, iTunes has definitely done something to the mp4 decoder, and second, one of the tools I use for encoding is doing something the others aren’t.

To better understand how I think I found where the problems are, you need to know what tools I am using to create my mp4's.
I do a lot video encoding, my tools of choice for mp4 encoding are:
HandBrake - http://handbrake.fr/
Mencoder - http://oss.netfarm.it/mplayer-win32.php

HandBrake has an option to add chapters to an mp4,
but If I am not using HandBrake, I usually use add the chapters after the fact.
The tool that I use to add chapters after the fact has been:
mp4creator (http://mp4creator.sourceforge.net/) or
mp4chaps (http://kurtnoise.free.fr/index.php?dir=mp4tools),
you might say that mp4box (http://gpac.sourceforge.net/doc_mp4box.php)
has the option to also add chapters, which it does,
but it does not have the ability to add quicktime style chapters,
it just does the nero version of chapters.

So for giggles, I went ahead and created some new video encodes and checked the state of the mp4 at each step of the encode process, I also went as far as using previous and upcoming beta’s of the tools I use, and some others, just to be sure.

The first program I tried was HandBrake, I did not see the issue appear, and I also did not see the problem appear if I created it with or without chapters.

The second program I tried was Mencoder, which cannot add chapters, and also I did not see the issue appear .

The third program I tried, which I needed to for adding chapters was mp4creator,
I don’t use mp4creator for muxing, I just use it for adding chapters with the following syntax:

mp4creator.exe -c "mychapters.chap" "mymovie.m4v"

Bam! The file now showed the issue, so after that ah ha moment, I went ahead and tried mp4chaps for adding the chapters, and well sure enough, since it is from the same branch, it too showed the problem.

It also worth noting that even after using any of my tools to remove the chapters track, it did not revert the mp4 back to showing a correct duration.

So what is it that is causing the problem?

I think that either Apple updated the way in which they interpret the contents of mp4/m4v files, or mp4creator and mp4v2 tools are incorrectly modifying the files in some way, in reality it’s probably a little of both.
The reason I say that is because none of this was a problem prior to installing iTunes 9.

So what can you do to fix the problem if you have it?

You can use mp4box to demux the file, and then to remux back.
Doing this will recreate the mp4 container correclty, but sadly without the chapters, as this tool does not have the ability to import quicktime style chapters.
But I can live with that for now, chapters were really only usfull and usable on the pc or apple devices anyway.

You can use the following example to get information about the tracks:

mp4box.exe -info "filename"

You can use the following example to demux and remux the file correctly
(note: you'll want to know the fps of the video, or mp4box defaults to 25fps)

mp4box.exe -raw 1 "filename" -out "filename.h264"

mp4box.exe -raw 2 "filename" -out "filename.aac"

mp4box.exe -add "filename.h264":fps=23.976 -add "filename.aac" "newfilename.mp4"

Here is an example of the newly remuxed video
(Notice that the timescale appears as it should)



Here is an example of the newly remuxed video
(Notice that the end is the actual real intended end length)



Here is an example of the newly remuxed video
(Notice that the properties also show things correctly)



If you happen to run into this problem, I hope this information helps you get your media files back to the way they should be.
In my stumbleing around looking for answers, I ran into this post on sourceforge where the mp4creator program is hosted, it was nice to see that I wasnt the only one who happened to notice this problem.

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=2855734&group_id=232803&atid=1087686

If you run into any other ways of dealing with this let me know, I would be interested to find alternatives ways of fixing the problem. As I had to write a script that scoured through my Windows Home Server and had it demux and remux the plethora of videos I have on it, and I am glad to say they are all now working again as they should, without the chapter markers of though, which I will tackle another day.

If your looking to revert back to iTunes 8 here are the download links:

http://support.apple.com/downloads/iTunes_8_2_1_for_Windows
http://appldnld.apple.com.edgesuite.net/content.info.apple.com/iTunes8/061-6717.20090715.XsE4R/iTunesSetup.exe

http://support.apple.com/downloads/iTunes_8_2_1_for_Windows__64_bit_
http://appldnld.apple.com.edgesuite.net/content.info.apple.com/iTunes8/061-6718.20090715.MJwE3/iTunes64Setup.exe

10 Years of Messenger

Ten years ago, Microsoft launched one of its most innovative communication services: Windows Live Messenger (formerly known as MSN Messenger). Throughout its many stages of evolution over the years, Windows Live Messenger (which is claimed to have 330 million users!) has become the most widely used free instant messaging service in the world.

Click below to continue to source:
http://windowslive.com/Connect/Post/a5447c6b-7031-4ed7-b6fe-f4360fef0582

Messenger 10th Anniversary

Its hard to believe that its been 10 years already that messenger has been with us. I think back to the days of doing netsend commands, and then stepping it up with windows chat, messenging sure has come a long way.



Click here to receive a Free Gift Pack

Introducing Hyper-V 2008 R2 presented by Aidan Finn

Here is a presentation from PubForum 2009 Dublin on Introducing Hyper-V 2008 R2 presented by Aidan Finn

Click below to download the video presentation:
http://www.pubforum.org/videos/DUB09/Introducing_hyper-v_2008_r2.wmv

Multimonitor Emulation on Local And Remote presented by Alex Danilychev

Here is a presentation from PubForum 2009 Dublin on Multimonitor Emulation on Local And Remote presented by Alex Danilychev

Click below to download the video presentation:
http://www.pubforum.org/videos/DUB09/Multimonitor_emulation_on_local_and_remote_env.wmv

AppSense Management Suite v8 Personalize Regardless Of Delivery presented by Bas Bremer and Dan O'Connor

Here is a presentation from PubForum 2009 Dublin on AppSense Management Suite v8 Personalize Regardless Of Delivery presented by Bas Bremer and Dan O'Connor

Click below to download the video presentation:
http://www.pubforum.org/videos/DUB09/AppSense_Management_Suite_v8_Personalize_regardless_of_delivery.wmv