This week I received my XBox 360 Premium from NewEgg with the goal of streaming video from my computer to my XBOX.

Previously, I had to have my laptop computer connected to the TV and then via that I would browse the network and play the video file I wanted to watch. But that was such a hassle and if I wanted to use my laptop for other things, well then I would have to disconnect it from the TV and reconnect it later. Now that I have a dedicated XBOX near the TV it makes life much easier. The XBOX’s interface makes browsing through my collection of videos simple so that anybody can use it.

Using Media Center Extender
XBOX 360 can function as a Media Center Extender, meaning that the interface which you see on your computer for Media Center, is the same interface that you will see on the XBOX. So acts as a computer that is running the Media Center program.

At home I have two machines, one my Vista development machine and the other is a XP machine with all my media and video files. I was able to use the Media Center extending capabilities of the Vista machine, but when I tried to add a shared folder from off the network it would only recognize shared folders from machines that were running a Media Center capable operating system. So all I could see were the shared folders for our laptops and my Vista machine.

There were two options at that point, upgrade the XP machine to Vista to be able to use Media Center Extender or find another way to stream the videos. Because I didn’t feel like dealing with the hassle of upgrading the machine, I opted to find another way. Plus the Media Center Extender interface was slow and unresponsive at times.

Using Nero MediaHome Server
So then I tried the latest version of Nero’s MediaHome Server , version 8.2.8. I had used it previously to serve up videos to my cousin’s Playstation 3, but even when I did that I noticed major reliablity issues. I thought it would be worth another try to see how well it interacted with my XBOX 360. Surprisingly the interaction between the server and the XBOX was a lot better than it had been with the Playstation 3. What makes Nero MediaHome server attractive is that it could re-encode all the videos into whatever format the device needs.

After testing it out what I found is that navigating all the videos was incredibly slow. We’re talking about 1000+ videos. Another feature I disliked was the fact that when you navigate to say “Nero Media Home (NATHANI)” it then brings up its own menu with options, “My Videos”, “My Music”, “Web Radio”, etc.

Using Windows Media Player Sharing
Windows Media Player 11 has a sharing option that allows you to share your media with other devices on the network including the XBOX 360. At first I was hesitant about using it because you know, Windows Media Player is kinda crap, but this crap suprised me. Serving up a list of 1000+ videos took only a few seconds. Setup was easy, there were no extra programs you needed to install, buy, or configure, and it integrated well. For navigation Windows Media Player sharing presents a list of the folders that you are sharing. It is great. I already know what I have in which folder and I can navigate to which ever one I want accordingly.

Using TVersity
For the Playstation 3 I tried TVersity. I didn’t get a chance to try it for my XBOX 360, because I was turned off by it. The software’s interface is a piece of crap and looks like a poor rip off of Apple TV. Seriously, if I wanted an Apple TV, I would have bought one, but thank God I didn’t. Even on the Playstation 3 the TVersity software didn’t seem to work all that well it just didn’t feel robust.

Compared to SageTV
Another product available that will allow you to watch videos on your television is called, SageTV. It is something that I’ve even developed a plugin for. After my experience with the XBOX 360 I’ve found that the XBOX tops any sort of machine that runs SageTV. Can SageTV play games? I didn’t think so. Either way you’ll end up paying for a new machine having to sit next to the TV, unless of course you have a really long cord that just connects from your computer to your TV. With the XBOX 360 you get more bang for your buck compared to what you could get with a machine that has SageTV installed on it.

It has been a while since I posted anything about television, but I liked this movie enough to post about it. Atonement is about a love story that never happened that should have happened but didn’t happen. A little girl had to ruin it. The story takes place before, during, and after World War II.

Over the break I saw several movies including War, Charlie Wilson’s War, Rush Hour 3, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, Rise of the Footsolider (sux), and lastly Atonement. I would have to say that National Treasure and Atonement were byfar the best. If you’re looking for a film to rent, I would highly recommend this one.

VirtualBox, is an open sauce virtualization alternative to Parallels and VMWare. After using it for a good two days, I have decided that it is not quite up to par with Parallels. Entering and exiting the virtual machine is the most horrible way ever invented and on a Vista host it is just screwy. My right-control key is now stuck until I have to restart. The video card drivers don’t support Direct3D or DirectDraw. It allocates all the memory for the virtual machine in the VM’s process space at once, slowing down the host. Ick. It does have networking support on a Vista host, something which Parallels does not. You can also specify how much video memory to use, where as in Parallels you are stuck with 8MB of video card memory. I think I’ll still to Parallels just because I like what I’ve seen in Parallels better. Screenshots can be found here.

In the words of Ruby Rhod from The 5 Element, Command and Conquer 3 is.. “hot, Hot, HOT!”.

EA Games finally did something right!

The following actors will be in the game’s cut screens and the top three were shown in the demo trailer.

Tricia Helfer (Number Six from Battlestar Galatica)
Grace Park (Sharon from Battlestar Galatica)
Michael Ironside (Lt. Rasczak from Starship Troopers)
Josh Holloway (Sawyer from Lost)

I’m so excited, that I just can’t hide it. I’m about to lose control and I think I like it.

If you want to see the ugliest settings dialog ever invented by man, please by all means, try Cyberlink PowerDVD. Their program, including popup menus are riddled with advertisements informing you that you can “Activate” / “Upgrade” to a higher version. Even if you have the highest version and have activated it will still show all those fony ads to you. Their whole user interface is just plain ugly and the program feels like it was written in Visual Basic. I used it because in Windows XP I could install it and it their Cyberlink codec would work just fine and it would allow me to play my media files. With Windows Vista, this is not the case. When you install it, it is not able to play media files anymore. Maybe I had an older version, but I ditched it never the less. Windows Media Player is not the greatest either, but hey the interface looks more decent than CyberLink PowerDVD.

What I don’t understand is why so many companies can excel at making a functional product, but at the end of the day they package it in shit. Why would I want to buy it? If you haven’t already figured it out, the lust of the eyes run this world. If your package looks like shit you will have a hard time trying to sell it to people, especially people like me.

Anyways, like I said, Windows Media Player for Vista does a fine job and if you don’t like it there is always Media Player Classic. There are still a few things I wish Windows Media Player did though. For one, you cannot drag and drop MP4 files, or non standard file types, into the interface. You can only open them by double-clicking on them in Explorer or by using the open menu. Lame. Also, I wish it would repeat songs, but not repeat videos. I think most people agree that they are don’t usually watch the same video over and over, but that they do listen to the same song over and over.

To play all your video files with Windows Media Player on Vista you can download the Vista Codec Pack. I had great success with it. Most of the codec packs out there don’t work after you install them. This one works just fine and you don’t have to mess with it at all.

I used to use a program called Partition Magic to resize my partitions, but it wasn’t until recently that I found out about one called GParted. Unlike Partition Magic, GParted is absolutely free. I resized a Parallels virtual disk image using GParted and it worked like a charm. Using this program makes me rethink some of my negative vibes that I have toward Linux. I am surprised I had not heard about the program sooner as it has been in development since 2004. All in all, GParted is a great tool that every system administrator should keep under their belt.

If you don’t know, now you know – osCommerce completely and utterly sucks. I tried setting up an osCommerce shopping cart but got so frustrated trying to customized it that I vow never to fuck with it again. The problem is that osCommerce does not have a skinning system. By default, there are no templates and no themes. If you want to be able to customize the look and feel you have to go and search through the source code and hack it up. If you want to extend its functionality with a module you have to overwrite the default osCommerce installation files, making multiple “modules” not function or work together at all. Everything in the osCommerce open source world is hacked together by its various users. The osCommerce user contribution add-on “themes”, buttons, and more are so ugly they make me want to puke. It was such a complete waste of time downloading and viewing them. I can truly say I know the reason why all osCommerce carts look the same, because customizing it is next to impossible to those of us who have a life. I am being completely honest and hope you heed my warning because the time you waste with osCommerce will be your own.

What really frustrated me even more is that if you want to install user contributions or modules you’ll usually find say, “MyModule 1.0″, then you’ll also see “MyModule 1.0a Update Patch”. It is so bad that there are usually 3 or 4 or more updates off of a main release. So if you want to be able to use the latest version of a module you’ll have to download first the main release then you’ll have to also download and apply all the various patch updates that are available for it. Nothing in the osCommerce world is up to date. The source code itself is hardly maintained.

I don’t even know why I ventured into osCommerce territory. I should have figured and took note that when a shopping cart’s administration area is not password protected then it is a total piece of shit and shouldn’t be bothered with.

Side note: At work we have our own proprietary shopping cart which was built from scratch and which I help maintain. Let me say that after becoming so frustrated with osCommerce, I am more appreciative of the templating system that we have built into our cart at work.

As I said, after fussing around with osCommerce for 3 or 4 hours and finding I wasn’t getting anywhere I quickly looked for an alternative.

I looked at the commercial osCommerce branch product CREloaded. What is total bullshit is that the CREloaded site makes you go through a checkout process to even be able to download the thing!! I mean.. what a serious way to lose customers. I did not actually try out CREloaded, but I found out that if their website makes things that difficult and frustrating then their software cannot be that much better. Hasn’t anybody ever heard of a straight forward download link? I don’t want to go through your shopping cart to download some thing that is $0.00. Furthermore I don’t get why somebody would pay for, according to their website, “A compilation of many contributions into the latest MS2 release of osCommerce,” when osCommerce and all their user contributions are horrible.

Scouring the Internet I found that I am not the only one who thinks osCommerce is terrible. There is an article called 5 Reasons Why osCommerce Sucks that Google helped me locate. Everything this guy says it totally true. Upon his recommendation I took a look at ZenCart.

When I first started my search for open source shopping carts I saw ZenCart, but because their demo cart had a really kid-like feel and buttons to it I passed it by. Upon trying it out I found out that it’s origins are osCommerce, which from their demo cart you would have no idea that is based off of osCommerce. Fortunately ZenCart is such an improvement over the original osCommerce distribution that it is not even funny. I would not be surprised if ZenCart was almost completely rewritten. It is no wonder that osCommerce is not maintained or improved anymore because it has been simply been passed up by it’s various branch projects. The administration section of ZenCart is way way better than the shitty one in osCommerce, plus it is even password protected. The installation was pretty much a breeze although uploading all the files through FTP to my server took atleast an hour or so. Customizing the shopping cart was just how it should be. It comes with example templates that you simply just copy and edit where desired. I highly recommend ZenCart to anybody who is looking for a free open-source shopping cart.

Frankly, it would do everybody a great service if osCommerce stopped making their original distribution available on the Internet.