16.7ms in the life

So, the last several months have been fairly busy, what with Vista shipping (woohoo!), vacations, and plannng the next rev. I worked long hours alongside my fellow eHomers, we shipped, and I took off a couple of months to find myself in Mexico and decompress...

If you've ever tried to create a software application of any decent size, you have probably realized that what works with small tools more often than not does not scale well to larger sizes. There are whole books written about how to scale up and out...

... working, working, working. That, in short, is why there have been no updates in so long. Between my work schedule, family and renovation project I have not had much time to myself. I have neglected my blog in favor of meatspace; sorry! When...

The Media Center TV experience driven by a flexible, multi-standard engine that works with any compatible tuner (including a good number of analog tuner cards and all BDA digital tuner cards) to create portable recordings viewable on any Windows XP machine...

One of the more popular subjects for users who email me is how to get Media Center to do something that cannot be done (or is hard to do) from the UI. Since I have not been able to talk about my current work much (Windows Vista and unannounced other stuff...

From Engadget: When we heard that VoodooPC was planning a media PC with 16 drive bays and a maximum capacity of 8 terabytes... [ Read full posting on Engadget ] Sounds pretty cool--maybe I'll get one here to "test" with ^_^.

I saw this the other day... definitely worth a viewing. WARNING: If you have a girlfriend/wife/S.O. and you game a lot, you might want to put on headphones or suffer facial contortions and rolling eyes. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1329362959167995041&q...

Now and then it's necessary to use "private" or "internal-only" functions in DLLs that you did not write, don't have the source for, and/or cannot get public interfaces for. I recently had to do this again for a utility application, so I thought it would...

Looking back at the bugs we've fixed over the last several months, we certainly have had a good share of captioning issues, especially with regards to the size of the codebase compared to the "video" code. Surprisingly, we don't hear from users a ton when captions don't work properly, but maybe that's because a minority of the users actually use them in the first place. I'm not usually so negative, but I'm just annoyed at captioning today. The following is a poorly thought-out rant on the subject. ......

We have been getting reports about Guide problems from DVB users across Europe and the world, hopefully in time for the next Rollup release (external date not yet announced, but should be late Q1 to early Q2). The problem typically manifests itself when...

In the beginning there was NTSC in Freestyle (Media Center 2002), and it was good. Media Center supported the #1 market and proved that computers could do a great job recording television, pausing Live TV, and organizing recordings. With support for one...

I have been working on a fix for the ATSC channel number assignment issue currently impacting Rollup 2 users. The scenario is that if you have any channels in the 9000s (like DISH Network) and you have ATSC channels, they will get assigned numbers in...

If you use ATSC with Media Center, and have mapped minor channels to listings, you probably noticed that the listings from the .1 channel are duplicated across the other minor channels (if the callsigns are similar enough). This results in a display like...

In some cases you may find that ATSC (HDTV) no longer works after uninstalling Media Center Rollup 2 from your computer. The issue is caused by a schema change in the Tuners registry key. Today I identified a workaround to get your ATSC back up and running...

I am currently investigating a fix for two DVB Radio issues identified a workaround for those affected. If you are getting a "No TV Signal" blue overlay when tuning to a DVB Radio station, particularly a low-bitrate station like BBC World Service, or...

I'd like to thank all of you who submitted entries--even the person who felt it necessary to email me a large picture that had, at best, a tangential relationship to the posited question and probably should not have approached within 100 nautical miles...

Sometimes being obtuse is it's own reward, but this time there's something in it for you if you know what "16.7ms" is referring to. I'm curious enough to see that I'm willing to shell out my own hard-earned cash to the first non-Microsoft employee that...

One of the issues I am investigating for a fix relates to the auto-suspend feature in Windows. The way it's supposed to work is you set a time in the Power control panel (Control Panel --> Performance and Maintenance --> Power Options) that controls...

Happy New Year! It was a nice month, but the break is over and I've returned back to work. Christmas at the Rosser house was a low-key affair, mostly spend decompressing from hectic work schedules and enjoying family and friends' company. My daughter...

As time permits, I've been working on the next version of MceRepair, but with the real world taking up so much of my extracurricular time it's been a slow row to hoe. Here's what's in it so far: Detects and reports your installation status, including...

Precious... (sorry for the quality, it's from my camera phone) UPDATE: "a while" == 1.5 hours (YMMV)

You know I'm a geek when something like that gives me even a little bit of a thrill. November 7th... not just an election day or my birthday, but also the VS2005 public ship day. ^_^. I'm installing it now on my primary and backup dev boxes at work now...

There has been some recent effort to pry open the 1394 interface in various STBs (set-top boxes), most notably that of timmmoore's STB package that goes to extraordinary lengths to hook into Media Center's experience. The state of the world today, at...

Symptoms Aaron Stebner blogged this a few days ago, but some folks are still running into it, so I'll speak to it a bit. If you get an error dialog with the message " The procedure entry point GetRequestedRuntimeVersion could not be located in the...

I've posted an update to MceRepair at http://www.pegasi.com/MceRepair_0.2.zip , which adds additional error logging in case of problems. If you tried 0.1 and it failed, 0.2 may work for you. If not, at least you will have more complete information with...