Archives for July 2008 | Software Development in the Real World

July 31, 2008 By miguelcarrasco 23 Comments

1 Week Until Olympics and Internet Broadcasting History

Beijing 2008 Silverlight After months of hype surrounding the Olympics in Beijing, we are only a week away! Earlier this year Microsoft and NBC Universal announced plans to make NBCOlympics.com the official online home of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. The partnership is expected to result in the largest online broadcasting event in history, offering viewers a new level of choice and flexibility in Olympics coverage.

What makes these Olympics so exciting is that it will be the first time that anyone with an Internet connection can view events of their choice for free on the NBC web site. NBC will be streaming more than 3,000 hours of live and on-demand content during the games. 20 Simultaneous streams will be serving the content for up to 34 of the most popular sports at the Olympics.

The Best Part of the Live Stream Is…

The best part is you will be able to not only watch one live stream, but up to 4! Simultaneously! Also, while you watch your favorite sport, you will be getting live up to the minute results and statistics on the event, athlete information, play-by-play, commentary, and much more. You will be able to set alerts and reminders, and watch events with your friends, sharing in the experience.

Beijing Olympic Games and Silverlight A few years ago streaming even one live feed would have been choppy and unusable. What will start next week is something that has never been attempted before. All this will be made possible with Microsoft Silverlight. Not only will Silverlight offer some extremely high quality streaming video feeds to viewers, but it also makes the real time stats, “control-room” and picture in picture features possible.

It’s Go Time for Silverlight

Microsoft has really played the “Put up or shut up” card here. Should the event go off without any major complications, it will probably be the biggest install festival of Microsoft Silverlight to date. Media coverage will be very positive touting a huge win for the Internet, and it’s future as the next big broadcasting medium. However, if some of you recall the Sydney Olympics in 2000, sites were down for days as traffic numbers reached ridiculous proportions.

Silverlight will be under a huge magnifying glass through the Olympics. Should the servers and network bandwidth not keep up with requests, this could spell PR disaster for Microsoft when it needs huge wins like this to get back into the online game.

You can get ready for the Olympics by checking out the new Microsoft web site promoting the Beijing Olympic Games coverage, or you can go right to the NBC Olympics Web Site. Make sure you click on the “Enhanced Player” to see the new features. Just remember not everything is working until the Olympics start.

Filed Under: Real World News, Silverlight

July 20, 2008 By miguelcarrasco 39 Comments

Silverlight vs Adobe Flash Install Experience

I just recently got a new Dell Laptop XPS and was re-installing some software and had the chance to go through the Silverlight and the Adobe Flash install experiences. In all honesty I was expecting the Flash install experience to go much smoother than the Silverlight install experience, simply because they have been doing flash for so long. So I was presently surprised that the install experience of Silverlight is actually much smoother that flash. In fact, I used Firefox to do the install so I thought surely, flash would install much smoother. That just didn’t happen.

Lets go through the install experience.

I went to YouTube in search of The Dark Night reviews. A pop up tells me I am missing a plugin.
Firefox says it found a plugin for me, the Adobe Flash Player.
Firefox tells me there is no plugin available for Adobe Flash Player. Now I’m confused.
I am redirected to a manual install on Adobe’s web site.
Download starts for the flash player.
Adobe Flash Player installer won’t let me install the player until I close my browser.
Install occurs. I like the screen but the details button with folders and weird names like flashplayer.xpt can be scary to a lot of users.
Flash installer doesn’t restart the browser it made me close, so I have to go launch it myself.
I go back to the site and my video works!

That’s way too many steps. Most users should be able to get through it, but it seems really complicated for no apparent reason. New users would be completely confused.

The Silverlight Install Experience

I go to Line Rider to check out the new Silverlight version, it warns me I don’t have Silverlight.
I click the link to install it and a pop up comes up to “install now”.
It installs and I press “close”.
I refresh my web site, and the application works.

Anyway, I really like how Microsoft has built in a “Direct Install” Experience into their Silverlight installation experience. It really makes the installation experience of going to a site with Silverlight required a smooth and easy one.

If you want to create your own Silverlight Install experiences, you can download the Silverlight Installation Experience Guide and learn how you can optimize your site’s Silverlight install experience.

Filed Under: Silverlight

July 13, 2008 By miguelcarrasco 30 Comments

Apple Keynote Bloopers

Steve Jobs will go down in the history books as one of the most visionary technology leaders of our time, transforming the personal computer, music, mobile phones, and the movie industry. If you have ever had the opportunity to watch Steve Jobs in action presenting a keynote and demonstrating software, you know he is a true master of presentation. The way his presentations come across without any tension, how he makes them look easy, it’s just amazing. The amount of preparation that goes into them from his entire team, to Jobs himself is astonishing. There is no other company out there or presenter that prepares better.

That is why this video of Apple Keynote Bloopers is so great. I mean ya they are funny, but they also have to make you feel good. I’ve given hundreds of presentations, and a couple handful of large presentations. If you haven’t experienced the rush before a presentation, or how you deal with something gone wrong, then you probably will just laugh. But when I watch this video, it makes me feel normal when things don’t always go according to plan. Should have prepared more? Sometimes things just don’t work out and it doesn’t matter how much you prepare.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

July 10, 2008 By miguelcarrasco 17 Comments

Installing Bluetooth on Windows 2008

I’ve been running Vista for over a year now, and I wanted to make the switch to Windows 2008 a few months ago. I have an awesome Dell XPS M1330 with a Core 2 Duo T8300 CPU and 4GB of Ram. It’s freaking light and has about a 5 hour battery life with the LED screen I got mine with. I’m all bout getting every last drop of performance out of my computer, so I decided I would go with the 64-bit version of Windows 2008 Standard.

Installing Windows 2008 64-bit was actually a breeze. It took about 15 minutes actually to install on the Dell XPS. After turning on a few services like the Wireless Service, Themes, Windows Audio, and a few other things, I realized “Where the heck is Bluetooth!” I have a ton of Bluetooth devices so It was totally unacceptable!

Anyway, here is the simple step by step instructions on how to hack the drivers inf files that come with Windows 2008 to allow you install Bluetooth.

Step by Step Guide to Installing Bluetooth on Windows 2008

Your going to want to create a folder for yourself to work with, so create C:DriversBT
Go to: C:WindowsSystem32DriverStoreFileRepository
You will notice a bunch of folders, your going to want to go into folder that you need to grab files from, and copy the following files to your C:DriversBT:
1. bth.inf
2. bthenum.sys
3. bthmodem.sys
4. bthpan.inf
5. bthpan.sys
6. bthport.sys
7. bthprint.inf
8. bthspp.inf
9. bthusb.sys
10. fsquirt.exe
11. hidbth.inf
12. hidbth.sys
13. hidclass.sys
14. hidparse.sys
15. hidusb.sys
16. input.inf
17. mdmbtmdm.inf
18. netirda.inf
19. rfcomm.sys
20. tdibth.inf
There is one other file you need, modemui.dll and you can grab it from C:WindowsSystem32
Now you should have a folder that looks like this:
Next go through each inf file and change anywhere you see “NTamd64…1” to “NTamd64…3”. Basically by doing this, you are telling Windows to allow you to install the driver. Pretty simple.
1. bth.inf – Line 47 and Line 132
2. bthpan.inf – Line 29 and 31
3. bthprint.inf – Line 19 and Line 21
4. bthspp.inf – Line 12 and 14
5. hidbth.inf – Line 29 and 34
6. mdmbtmdm.inf – Line 19 and 27
7. tdibth.inf – Line 15 and 17
You are now ready to go. The next step is to load up your device manager and find the bluetooth hardware that you need to install. Click Update Driver, and point to to your bluetooth driver files. For me I pointed it to C:delldriversR1401353100_216 which was where I put my dell drivers for my Dell Wireless 355 Module.
Once It installs, you will get a prompt that “Windows needs to install driver software for your Unknown Device”. Just click “Locate and install driver software (recommended)”.
Point to the modified files in c:driversbt
Windows will freak out because you modified the inf files. No problem, just click install anyway.
You will see three separate installs for your Bluetooth device
Here comes the second one.
One more!
And finally you know have Bluetooth running on Windows 2008!
It is very exciting to have that Bluetooth icon in the control panel!

Anyway, that’s the magic trick to get that pesky Bluetooth working again. I know had I not done this, I would have been switching back to Vista pretty quick!

Filed Under: Real World News

July 6, 2008 By miguelcarrasco 66 Comments

LinkedIn’s Security Certificate Expires

If you are attempting to log into LinkedIn today, your going to have add an exception to the site as their security certificate seems to have expired this morning. Trying to log into the site with firefox or Internet Explorer will cause a fairly scary warning to pop up for most users. Most technical users will be able to add an exception and get into the site anyway, however something like this clearly detours a lot of people from logging in, and will probably jut turn people away until they get it resolved. Not a huge deal for LinkedIn, probably just a little embarrassing to say the least.

Trying to log into LinkedIn with firefox.

Trying to log into LinkedIn with Internet Explorer

Anyway, I’m sure someone will come in on Monday or hopefully later today and realize they forgot to renew their security certificate! Maybe too much 4th of July partying. Things like this seem to happen routinely on the Internet. Process’s, tools, and infrastructure have come a long way, but still have much further to go. Yes someone probably forgot to pay a bill, but you would think there would be better software monitoring these kinds of things that wouldn’t let this happen.