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Wednesday, February 20, 2008 11:18 AM

What Now?

I have had some readers ask what is to become of this blog. Well, it started out discussing Office Development , then it covered Threat Modelling , and most recently it has been about HDi . There have been several posts about the Pet Shop Boys and then
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Friday, February 01, 2008 5:24 PM

Fun Friends for Functions, Part 2: Handling Exceptions

Previously we looked at how you can bind a function to a set of arguments and then call the resultant function at some time in the future. This technique is very powerful, but as-is it is a ticking bomb. As Amy points out in her blog post on exception
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Wednesday, January 30, 2008 1:46 PM

Why the ‘arguments’ object is bad, Exhibit #3,745

Having just written a post with an example of how to use the arguments object , you might question my choice of title for this blog post. In my not-so-humble opinion, the 'arguments' object in ECMAScript is only useful for one thing: The 'arguments' object
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Tuesday, January 29, 2008 4:45 PM

Fun Friends For Functions

And now for a more techy post. In ECMAScript, functions are considered first-class objects. "What," you might ask, "differentiates a 'first-class' object from a merely 'economy-class' object?" Well, the main thing is that functions in ECMAScript are treated
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Tuesday, January 29, 2008 9:36 AM

A Concert with PowerPoint Slides?

As you may know, Howard Jones played an acoustic show in Seattle last night with Robin Boult on guitar. The performance was fantastic, and the venue ( The Triple Door ) was actually quite nice with a limited menu coming from the kitchens of Wild Ginger
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Monday, January 14, 2008 12:02 PM

Good News

Not one but two bits of good news this morning! Firstly, TWICE reported on Toshiba's plans for HD DVD this year. Probably the biggest news was that the entry-level HD-A3 player will have a new recommended price of only $149 and that the higher-end models
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Sunday, December 16, 2007 9:04 PM

What I’ve Learnt about Coffee Lids

When I first moved to the US over eight years ago, I thought it was very odd that people put lids on their take-away coffee. I found it quite strange to drink through a hole in a lid rather than to just drink directly from the cup, and routinely discarded
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Thursday, December 13, 2007 5:22 PM

HD DVD Emulator for Xbox 360!

It's finally here! The Xbox 360 HD DVD Emulator went live today, enabling content authors to test their HD DVD content in a real-world consumer player before committing it to a shiny disc. This can save a lot of time and a lot of money for those folks
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Tuesday, December 04, 2007 6:56 PM

“Open Season” Hits #2; World Scratches Head

If you follow the High-Definition format war at all, you're probably familiar with the weekly sales breakdown published in Home Media Magazine and other places. If you checked them last week , you would have seen something strange. Something very strange.
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Wednesday, October 24, 2007 11:29 AM

Maintaining Callback Semantics

One of the key programming concepts in HDi is the use of asynchronous processing with callback functions. The HDi platform exposed to title authors is not multi-threaded (which helps reduce the complexity of writing applications), but many of the functions
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Tuesday, October 02, 2007 11:49 AM

Sliced bread ain’t got nuthin’ on this!

Forget being the best thing since sliced bread – this is the best thing ever . Well maybe not quite that good, but it's still darn cool! Finally – FINALLY! – you can get decent IntelliSense for JScript inside Visual Studio ! Holy hotcakes, Batman! This
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Sunday, September 30, 2007 11:43 AM

Wikipedia editing

Short post: In the interests of full disclosure, I've started editing Wikipedia on various topics related to HD DVD. Initially I made several "anonymous" edits, but decided to create an account for transparency and so I can "watch" pages as they change.
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Wednesday, September 26, 2007 2:32 PM

Why Old Films Still Benefit from High-Def

Every now and then, I hear people make comments like "Movies more than 5 years old won't look any better in HD because they were shot before HD was invented – the movie studios are lying to you about better quality!" This is horribly, horribly , horribly
Posted by ptorr | 2 Comments
Wednesday, August 29, 2007 7:21 PM

Using Timers Effectively in HDi

The use of timers in HDi applications is very common, and there are a few things you should keep in mind when using them to avoid performance issues when playing back your title. I will categorise these as: The autoReset problem The closure problem The
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Thursday, July 05, 2007 2:36 PM

Simple ACA dumper

Quick one today – if you have an ACA with some files in it, you can use the createaca tool (provided as part of the Jumpstart Kit ) to list the files inside it. Trouble is that the output is not very helpful; it contains too much information. So here
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