As you can see above, I have the Roomie website’s main page displaying on an iPad.  The first two controls are an example of the new feature.  Before I go to bed I might want to click the “set alarm” button, which would run a RoomieScript that I wrote that wakes me up in the morning.  The same deal goes for coffee. (Of course, making coffee is also part of the alarm routine.)  It would be easy to imagine many other virtual devices.  Eventually I will likely make a “basement” device, which would have buttons like “Movie” for nice movie lighting, “all on”, “all off”, and of course, “PAAARRTAAYY!”

I mentioned that these controls were highly customizable in code.  In the C# code-behind I can set the size of these controls with pixel precision.  That came in really handy when I made an iPad-specific page, which resizes the controls to be just the right width to fill the screen horizontally and high enough for easy pressing with a finger.  A tweak of the sizes only takes a few seconds.

All of this has been a really good learning experience for me, and of course I am far from done.  I’ve applied so much of what I’ve learned writing Roomie, which is just for fun, to other projects at work and in school.  If you want to help test Roomie, send me an email.

I’m not really a fan of jumping on the “mock Microsoft” bandwagon, but this is priceless.  I could say something intelligent-sounding about non-Google search engines’ difficult task of changing users’ mentalities about “search = Google”, but I wont.

Even with all its limitations, my iPad hooks into my Windows- and Microsoft-dominated world quite nicely.  I have hundreds of ripped DVDs on my Windows Home Server for viewing on my Xbox 360 through Media Center Extender.  Do I also want to view those videos curled up in bed with my iPad?  To quote Apple’s less-than-meek advertising slogan, “There’s an app for that.”  While I hate, hate, hate Apple’s uncanny ability to command attention, that doesn’t mean they don’t make some pretty nifty products.

Why do I have a picture of my iPad and Zune making hearts to each other?  It just so happens that I want to download an album that isn’t available on the Zune Marketplace.  Checking Amazon MP3, I discovered that the album wasn’t available there either.  What about iTunes?  I tapped open the iTunes app on my iPad, and sure enough there it is.  What’s great about DRM-free music?  I can download a song from iTunes, on my iPad, and sync it over to my Zune.  (I would say this is interoperability at its finest, but I suspect to have a less-than-satisfactory user experience with iTunes on Windows.)

The point, however, is that less and less consumers are having to choose sides.  Mac or PC?  The real issue is AAC or OOG, or why not support both?  The platform is losing significance.  Microsoft Exchange, a protocol for synchronizing email, calendar, and contacts, is available on Windows Phones, Android Phones, and iPhones.  The protocol itself is being served up not just by enterprises in business-type scenaros, but also for consumers.  Gmail, for example, offers Exchange support for free.  When every platform speaks a common set of protocols and file formats, something customers shouldn’t have to bother worrying about anyway, customers can more easily mix-and-match different devices and services.  A year ago got a Windows Mobile phone because it would easily synchronies with my Windows Live Mail.  Now, however, the phone and the email service can easily be interchanged independently, since both pieces can speak Exchange. (side note: yes, yes, IMAP exists blah blah.  That only synchronizes email.)

How long until there’s a Zune app for iOS?  What about a PlayStation Home app for Windows Phone?  Arguably the latter is more likely to happen, but all is possible in the magical world of technology.

(It’s like the error message is commenting on my relationship. It’s ironic.)

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I was making some very benign changes to the navigation bar on the left side of the website, when I refresh the page to see the “on/off” buttons interchanged for the favicon (stretched horribly, of course).  I refreshed the page in Chrome, verified the URL of the image, and finally looked at just the image.  Then I looked at the URL.  The favicon?  How strange.  I viewed the URL in Firefox, and saw the correct picture.  Next I viewed the URL in Incognito Mode in Chrome.  Again the correct picture.  How could the image appear differently?

I can’t be sure, but I think the problem could be with Google Chrome’s updating mechanism.  After trying various troubleshooting techniques, including restarting the browser, I went to the about page to see if the thing had updated.  It seemed like it had, but to make sure I went to my laptop.

So that seems to be it.  Restarting and/or clearing the browsing cache fixed the problem.  It’s nice that Chrome updates so transparently, but apparently it doesn’t always work perfectly.

This morning RoomieRemake woke me up with two short scripts.  And hey, more news!  I used the recently-updated website (which I’ve apparently never directly blogged about) to write the scripts.  Here’s a screenshot of that.

Here’s the script that ran on Dreaming Nest, my Home Server, which has a ThinkStick USB Z-Wave controller.

<RoomieScript>
  <Timing.WaitUntil Hour="8" Minute="50" />
  <ZWave.PowerOn DeviceName="Coffee Pot" />
  <Timing.WaitUntil Hour="8" Minute="59" />
  <ZWave.PowerOn DeviceName="Monitor and Speakers" />
  <Timing.WaitUntil Hour="9" Minute="15" />
  <ZWave.PowerOff DeviceName="Coffee Pot" />
</RoomieScript>

Here is the script that ran on Rory, the desktop computer in my bedroom.

<RoomieScript>
  <Timing.WaitUntil Hour="9" />
  <Output.OpenFile Path="F:/music/playlists/Driving in Spring.wpl" />
</RoomieScript>

…So screw in that cable!

Sure, an extra DVD might not cure cancer or solve world peace, but it sure is a nice gesture from a company that works really hard for customer loyalty.

You can download the project here, but since I know most people just want to get some quick answers, here’s a few code snippets:

This following is a member method of a WPF Window.

The following is an example of a member method of a WPF window that runs itself in a separate thread. 

The project file contains more examples, including handling multithreaded events, how to create custom delegates, getting thread states, and intelligently killing threads when the program shuts down.

Today I did some reorganizing and had a chain of really long USB cables to use, so I plugged one end into the back of the Xbox 360 and then wrapped the cable along the baseboards, ending nestled into couch.  Woop!  Now I have a USB port for the Xbox 360 right there.  My inner dork rejoices!

By the way, the Xbox 360 has USB keyboard support.  It’s really handy for typing out messages and such.  Media Center Extender doesn’t work all that great with the keyboard, unfortunately, since the arrow keys inexplicably don’t work in it.

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Arcadia Preview 2 (version 1.0.489.0) is finally here!

I’m really pleased with Arcadia’s progress.  Arcadia’s features currently include selecting repositories (where game files are kept), scanning for games (based on a user-editable vocabulary of platforms), and (most importantly) searching for and running ROMs in your favorite emulators of choice.

Thanks to FlotsamX for his usability feedback for Preview 1.

Download Arcadia Preview 2 here.

Here’s the video!

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12 bags of awesome later we were done!

Arcadia, my emulator frontend that manages a wide variety of classic gaming system files, is just around the corner!  I have a stable version right now, and am looking for beta testers.  (Contact me if you’re interested!)  Once I give Arcadia the ability to check for update to itself I’ll release it publically, but for now email me and I’ll give it to you.

Apparently Sony requested to have it’s own video removed from YouTube.

I assume someone at Sony ran a search for the music video and included their own (in error) in a submission to YouTube to remove other copies of the music video.  still…

First, have a Windows 7 ISO (duh)

Next, download and install Microsoft’s ISO tool here. (That is a direct link, originally found the link here.  If you’re doing this on Windows XP, go to that page and scroll down to “For Windows XP Users” to find two more downloads you will need.)

When you open the program, it will look like this.

Click “Browse”.

Select the ISO file and click “Open”.

Click “Next”

Click “USB device”.

Select the drive you want.  Make sure you don’t have any data on it that you want to keep!  Click “Begin copying” and wait for the process to finish.

Congratulations!  You now have a Windows 7 installation hard drive.  You will still probably have to do some fancy stuff in the BIOS to get the computer to look at the flash drive while the system is starting up.

This isn’t necessary, but I like to put a copy of the original ISO on the flash drive.