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It's like being at the PDC, but without the lines or the tote bag

Michael Swanson announced last night that the arduous process of assembling the PDC 2005 DVD content is now complete and the results are now online. For free. For six months. You can choose a session and watch it via streaming video, or you can download the video itself for offline enjoyment (!). Michael also has links to the order form if you want to have shiny silver DVDs in your grubby mitts. I'm told that the masters have been released to manufacturing; this means that shiny silver DVDs (including Channel9 bonus tracks) will probably be in the grubby mitts of attendees by (U.S.) Thanksgiving. But don't quote me.

So go ahead, set up your own "virtual PDC". Tote bag not included.

Published Tuesday, October 25, 2005 7:00 AM by oldnewthing
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Comments

# re: It's like being at the PDC, but without the lines or the tote bag

Tuesday, October 25, 2005 10:07 AM by Tim Smith
Thanks alot.

I'm not going to be getting any work done now for days.

:P

# re: It's like being at the PDC, but without the lines or the tote bag

Tuesday, October 25, 2005 1:07 PM by Bryan
Well, I doubt Raymond has any control over the content of the microsoft.sitestream.com site, but maybe he knows someone that does. It's broken in FF 1.0.7. None of the menu items do anything helpful (they sometimes bring up an interesting little sub-window thingy, but it's blank), and none of them are really links (although they look like it).

It's apparently all javascript (clicking the "fundamentals" menu item, for instance, registers a JS error: "SessionText is not defined"; from the markup, SessionText is the id of a span element, but according to the DOM standard, you can't refer to an element by just its id, you have to use document.getElementById(...) to get at it), when IMO it should have been some real links and a server side script or two for the searches. (Or at least, all of that would be cross browser.)

(Plus the server's slow, but that may be because a lot of people are downloading stuff. Or it may be because it's lunchtime here, and our outgoing connection sometimes gets pretty busy around lunch. I'm pulling the full zip file of Raymond's session, and it's going at about 13K/s. Whee, only 2 and a half hours left!)

# re: It's like being at the PDC, but without the lines or the tote bag

Tuesday, October 25, 2005 5:51 PM by jmazner
Bryan, we're working on both issues. Perf is indeed slow, our vendor reports that they're at max bandwidth right now but are trying to add more capacity

As for FFox, we are going to ask them about that as well. I think what happened was that they developed the UI for the DVD set first, as an .hta wrapper, and then they tweaked those files to host on the web site.

# re: It's like being at the PDC, but without the lines or the tote bag

Tuesday, October 25, 2005 9:49 PM by Bryan
Ah, OK, I see. I wouldn't have chosen the .hta stuff myself, but I can see why they would have. And I can see why that would make it hard. Not a huge deal, I suppose (I can always look at the page source and try to figure other URLs out from that); it'd just be nice to use my main browser.

I did get a download going using IE (which I realize isn't as obvious as I thought it was when I wrote that), which is how I "measured" the speed. It actually slowed down to about 7K/s by the time I left (4 or 5 hours into the supposed 2.5-hour download), and it still had about an hour left at that time.

And I just checked it again; after pulling down 129MB of 136MB, it actually *timed out*, and IE canceled the download. (AAAAAUUUUGGGGHHHH!) The speed at the time that it died was about 5K/s.

From what you said about the vendor, it does sound like they're getting saturated (and the more people that find out about that URL, the worse it's going to get, unfortunately). Maybe I'll just wait a while before trying it again, or something. It is supposed to be good for 6 months, after all. ;-)

Thanks!

# re: It's like being at the PDC, but without the lines or the tote bag

Wednesday, October 26, 2005 1:24 AM by Jan
You mentioned that the video content can be downloaded. I looked for it, but didn't find the possibility to do this. Am I missing something?

# re: It's like being at the PDC, but without the lines or the tote bag

Wednesday, October 26, 2005 7:38 AM by Jonathan
I noticed something wierd about Raymond's PPT: Almost all words got the spelling-squiglies. When I right-clicked one of them, PowerPoint complained that I don't have Swedish proofing tools. I guess PowerPoint marked the text as Swedish...

# re: It's like being at the PDC, but without the lines or the tote bag

Wednesday, October 26, 2005 9:34 AM by Ytram
Jonathan: Raymond runs his software in several different languages. His OS is apparently in Swedish(http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/10/17/481810.aspx).
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