BenHollis.net

Just a quick heads up that I've uploaded a new version of Collapsible Amazon. It's a Greasemonkey script that lets you collapse any section of the standard Amazon detail page. This update makes it work on a lot more sections - the only one it can't collapse that I've found is the Customer Discussions section. Basically, wherever you see an orange header, you can click it and its content will disappear - and the script will remember that you want that type of section collapsed everywhere.

Honestly, I'm no fan of Jane Austen - I was just looking for a screenshot! If you like this script, you should check out some of my other Greasemonkey scripts.

This weekend I decided to go through the hodgepodge of common code that's shared between a lot of my ASP.NET websites and refactor it a bit. I'd only just learned about the magic of HttpModules and HttpHandlers, and I immediately saw a lot of canidates in my copy-paste code and global.asax handlers where a HttpModule would be a better solution. One of these was the code I was using to redirect old pages to new pages whenever I moved them. For example, at some point I had moved http://www.numbera.com/rome/tools.aspx to http://www.numbera.com/rome/tools/, and I wanted anyone who visited the old URL to get redirected to the new one. Previously, I just had some code in global.asax that hooked Application_OnError, checked to see if it was an HttpException (a 404 file not found, specifically), and then redirected if it knew where the file really was. Pretty simple, but not very general. So I broke it out into an HttpModule that basically did the same thing, but no longer required me to cut and paste code into my global.asax. However, one improvement I wanted to make was to allow for configuration through my web.config file, instead of having to hardcode an if/else tree for each redirect. I basically wanted to have a section in my web.config like this:

[xml]

[/xml]

It seems these days that everyone has a blog (or two). There are big news blogs, little blogs with useful articles (such as the many C# blogs I read), the countless teenagers with MySpace or livejournal blogs. There are blogs about tech, politics, clothing… there are even blogs about blogging! Even I have been sucked into the blogging scene. Even my Xbox 360 has a blog. So why shouldn't my hedgehog have a blog?

So that's what I did. Right after we got Pliny and got him set up with a nice cage and a big wheel, I started thinking about how I could get him to blog. I thought about teaching him how to type and operate Wordpress, but as cute as he is, he's not very smart. So I took the technological route. I built a little sensor out of a magnet and a reed switch and attached it to his wheel. After about 4 months of on-off (mostly off) C# coding, I had a client built up that would poll the sensor, log Pliny's wheel activity, and post to his blog. The Hogblog was born! It posts his activity, along with charts and occasionally a pic from Flickr. It's all automatic, and I'm subscribed to his RSS feed to find out just how much running he's been doing while I was asleep. It's already brought up some interesting information. For two days his wheel was stuck - the little log he sleeps in was jammed up against it. In the two days since he's run almost half a mile!

This has been a really fun project that has tied together a lot of fun aspects - playing with physical elements like the sensor, coding in C# (and interacting with the parallel port to get the stats!), and making web services calls to Wordpress and Flickr. I'm already thinking up more ways to improve his blog, but for now I'm going to sit back and watch for a bit!

A few weeks ago I watched the Al Gore slideshow-in-a-theater “An Inconvenient Truth”. Al Gore parts aside, I thought it was very good, and while it didn't tell me much I didn't already know, it did make me think about my power usage. In general, I hate waste - wasted money, wasted time, wasted material, wasted code. Wasting energy is just as bad. This is sort of at odds with my tech-heavy lifestyle, though. I realized that my entertainment center probably wastes a lot of energy while I'm sleeping, what with the TV, the stereo, the powered subwoofer, the Xbox 360, the PS2, the Xbox, and who knows what else casually sipping electricity just to stay in “standby” mode. I don't know what standby mode does, but I don't think it's worth having power flowing into those devices for the 18-odd hours I'm not using them each day. So I went to Target and bought a remote switch - the one I got cost less than $25 and included two remote switches that are controllable by one remote. All I needed to do was put this between the wall outlet and my power strip, and now I can just push a button on a remote when I go to bed to save energy. The other switch now controls the lamp over in the corner. It's perfect. And I bet within a year I'll have saved enough on my electricity bill to pay off the switch. In that time I'll be using just that much less electricity, saving that much carbon dioxide, and sparing my equipment that much wear and tear. Seems like a win overall.

I'm still working on XBList 3.0 (though not as much as I'd like, between work and a social life). However, I noticed today that XBList won't auto-signin to Passport anymore. Bummer. It has to do with the new live.com ID stuff. I promise this will be fixed in XBList 3.0, but in the meantime, you can just fire up Internet Explorer, log in to Xbox.com, and XBList will start working again.

So an update on how things are going with the next version of XBList. I've gotten a few questions about when I'll support the new ability to do messaging between Xbox.com and Xbox 360, and I put out a bunch of questions in my last post, talking about how much overhaul to do to XBList. Well, I'm going full in. I've already done a lot of work on it, and there's a lot to be done. I think the end result will be a cleaner, faster, prettier XBList. The bad news is that this is going to take time. The worse news is that I've gotten distracted with other projects, and other things (like Burnout Revenge, and enjoying the beautiful Northwest). It's just been hard to sit down and crack open Visual Studio these days. I do expect to have a nice new version of XBList out before too much longer, however.

It should be no surprise to people who have looked over BRH.numbera.com, or who know me even in passing, that I love Halo 2. The game is a lot of fun, and was obviously built with a lot of care. However, I'm always on the lookout for a good online game, especially one for the Xbox 360, since I really like what Microsoft has done with Live on their next-gen platform. However, no matter what game I've played, I've been disappointed. Halo 2's approach to multiplayer has essentially spoiled me to all lesser implementations. From here on out, I expect three things from Live-enabled games. These three things have so far been present only in Halo 2:

1. Matchmaking Parties
2. Playlist Matchmaking
3. Split Screen over Live

Matchmaking parties are a group of friends, who get together online to move through the matchmaking system as a unit. For example, me and three of my buddies can get together and join the Team Skirmish playlist in Halo 2. We'll always be in the game together, no matter who else gets matched with us. This means we get to play 8-player matches, but we don't need to set up a custom match. As a result, we get into matches quickly, and enjoy all the benefits of playlist matching. In contrast, while The Outfit allows me to play 2 on 2 and 3 on 3 team matches, it doesn't allow me to enter the quick matchmaking with a friend as my teammate! This brings the likelyhood of me playing a team game down to about 0.

Playlist matchmaking was a feature of Halo 2 that actually received a lot of scorn early after the release of the game. The old way of getting a match going (and still the default way for many games) was to create a room, select the options, wait for people to join your room, wait for everybody to get ready, then play. With this strategy, getting a game together took a while, you have to make decisions about gametypes or maps or options, and you're not very likely to switch things up between rounds, or play with different people. In Halo 2 (and some newer games) you simply select a playlist that contains the general type of games you want to play. A random, preconfigured game gets chosen from the playlist, you get matched with other people wanting to play that playlist, and you're off. Combined with matchmaking parties, this means more time in the game, more variety, and a more diverse group of opponents.

Split screen over Live is one of those features that for the life of me I can't understand why it isn't default everywhere. In Halo 2, or Crimson Skies, or a small handful of other games, you can have two or more people connected to your console, on your TV, while you are online playing with other people. This means, for example, that me and my girlfriend can both play Halo 2 online with our friends back East simultaneously. Amazingly, this capability is rare in Live games. X-Men Legends 2, the online successor to a great party game, allows only one person online at once, even though it doesn't even need to split the screen for multiple people. Burnout Revenge is the same way. The game has split screen multiplayer, and online multiplayer, but never the two shall meet. Perhaps it's a good assumption that most gamers only play games by themselves, but I would imagine a situation where the Xbox is shared between members of a household is pretty common.

The lack of any one of these three features basically kills an online game for me. And I really can't understand it - most game developers must have played Halo 2. Why can't they just rip off these ideas? Why aren't these features part of the Microsoft livensing guidelines? Can it really be that the designers of a great game like The Outfit, which is really a multiplayer-only game, never tried to play their game online with friends?

Here's hoping the next generation of games truly understands online multiplayer the way Bungie does. And here's hoping Bungie comes up with 3 new indispensable features for Halo 3.

Well, the new Xbox.com/Xbox Live update is out. It mostly introduces a Message Center for Xbox.com, where you can send and recieve messages just like on your Xbox. Of course, I'm already thinking about how best to integrate this into XBList, which is starting to see some strain from all the features I've added to it. Actually, it's still pretty lean, but it's more complicated now than I had ever intended.

I have two choices now. I can do what I usually do, and stay up all night cranking out a quick implementation of Message Center integration. You'll be able to see how many messages you have from each friend, and send them messages and whatnot. Not exactly Adium level messaging, but it would get the job done. The other option is to go straight to XBList 3.0. By that I mean a bunch of new features, and a rewrite for a lot of the older stuff. Here are some of my ideas:

• Message Center integration, as I mentioned
• A new friends list display that's not based on TreeView, which could be prettier and also include larger icons, gamer points, etc.
• Remove the IE control from the system, or at least everything but the gamertile popup. I'll get back to this one later.
• Upgrade to the .NET Framework 2.0
• Plugin support, so people could write their own providers for pictures or other neat things.

Those last three require more explanation. Removing the IE ActiveX control would be the biggest change. If I can remove it completely (the Gamer Tile popup uses it to draw the tile, and it would be a bit of work to draw it by hand), the XBList download will be smaller and the program will take a lot less memory. Even if I can't get rid of it completely, removing it in favor of a custom approach would mean XBList would be faster, more stable, and less prone to throwing up weird dialog boxes or making clicking sounds. In general, I think it would make the program much nicer. The down side is that I'd have to start prompting for your Passport login/password from XBList. While I know that I'm not going to take advantage of your info, or even store it anywhere, it's a lot easier to convince people if they get to sign into Xbox.com from IE instead of entering their info into some random, possibly untrustworthy program. I've resisted this in the past, but I'd like to know what people think about the idea of switching to an XBList login dialog, maybe with some clear text that promises no harm will come to your information.

Upgrading to .NET 2.0 is mainly a perk for me. It would make XBList run faster, and would make it easier to develop, since I could use Visual Studio 2005. In addition, I could use the new managed WebBrowser control instead of Torsten Rendelmann's excellent but undocumented IEControl wrapper. I could also use things like the new BackgroundWorker control to improve the admittedly shaky multithreading in XBList. The downside here is that you'd need the .NET Framework 2.0 installed. I hate to force people to download yet another thing, though I suspect most people will already have it by now.

The last one, plugin support, has been a pipe dream of mine since XBList 1.0. It could be used to support things like GamerPics.net, who could create a plugin to use your real photo instead of your gamer picture. This one is pretty open-ended, and I'd like to see more ideas of what sort of plugins people would want before I commit to putting a complicated infrastructure in place.

So, if you're reading this, what I'd love is if you'd post in the comments here, or in my forums, what you think about these ideas. I'll go back to trying to beat my high score in Geometry Wars until the comments start flooding in…

I've been meaning to write about my impressions of the various Windows Vista previews since I first tried it out in January. My thoughts (and my feedback to Microsoft's beta site) have been piling up since then, but I never got around to putting virtual pen to even more virtual paper. However, Paul Thurrott's recent article on where Vista fails really sums up a lot of my feelings here. Thurrott's always been the type who'll try his hardest to find the positive in even the worst Microsoft releases, but as a long time reader, I can tell that he's very, very frustrated with Vista, and as a Windows journalist it really pains him to see something that promised so much deliver so little. He's not alone. I've tried my hardest to like what I've seen of Vista so far, but it's nearly impossible, especially when Mac OS X is out right now, and in many respects better than Microsoft's late update to XP.

This is going to be a pretty long rant, so if you want more you'll have to click inside.

The big news out of Cupertino this morning is BootCamp. It's Apple's beta bootloader for Windows on their previously-closed Mac platform. Now you can dual-boot Mac OSX and Windows XP, complete with drivers for the important bits of the system.

Putting aside why this is a great move for Apple, this really puts the company in a new light for me. I've never liked Apple's marketing - they've always seemed more like a cold white plastic monolith than a warm fuzzy people company to me. To me the Mac, and Apple, is about lack of choice. They give you something, and that's what you get. It's good, but things are going to be their way or no way at all. I tend to think a lot of their growing success lies with the fact that their defaults (a stock OSX install and standard Mac hardware) are fantastic, while the default install of Windows or Linux (and the standard OEM boxes) are rather dismal. While this makes a Mac great for most people, I've never really cared. I can make Windows do what I want, and aside from my Thinkpad I've never bought a computer that was pre-assembled in a factory.

The first thing Apple did that made Macs interesting to me was embracing UNIX with OSX. That was not the sort of decision I expected from a company that had made previously shipped operating systems that show you frowny-faces on error. The fact that the Mac now had a command line suggested that it wasn't just for playing that sliding-puzzle game anymore. Since then I've had a little bit of interest in the Mac, and I even have a rescued-from-the-garbage 350Mhz iMac that I test Safari on. The OS is interesting, but the hardware lockin has always stayed my had mere moments from the “Place Order” button at the Apple Store. Recently I've become enamoured of the Mac Mini, whose diminuative size makes it seem more like buying a toy than a computer. Coupled with the fact that it's the cheapest Mac that comes without a built in display, it seems like the best choice for my tinkering, though the price hike for the new Intel models makes me wish for some additional customization options - do I really need to pay for Airport Express when it'll be sitting 5 inches away from an ethernet switch?

Today's introduction of BootCamp really got me though. All of a sudden the guys at Apple HQ are speaking directly to me - they're letting me make a choice! Not just any choice, but the choice to run software from their sworn enemy, Microsoft, on their pristine white hardware. This from the iTunes company! It's not really a choice, of course. I wouldn't dream of putting XP on a Mac Mini when I could build a cheap PC for half the price. It'll be nice for people who want a great laptop but can't give up Windows. But for me it's the fact that they're opening up and letting me do something as radical as replace the operating system. I feel now that if I were to buy a Mini, I'd be getting it from Apple, a company full of cool engineers with good design sense, not Apple, a company full of snobby elitists who know what's best for me.

Not 18 hours from Major Nelson's announcement of the new Xbox.com Friend List management features, I've updated XBList to take advantage of them. Now you can add friends, remove friends, confirm and reject friend requests, and all that good stuff. It's a lot easier than doing it all on the Xbox, that's for sure.

Of course, this update also includes a whole bunch of bugfixes and small improvements that I've been accumulating since the last release in November. You can now see what friend requests that you've submitted are still waiting for approval, and see when people have marked themselves “Away” or “Busy” on the Xbox 360 Dashboard. And there are more keyboard shortcuts, though I don't see that helping all too much. There were some embarassing bugs fixed, like the inability to choose a different sound for notifications and the fact that “Friend Removed” popups would always show my Gamer Tag because I had forgotten to change it. So go ahead, get the new version, and let me know what you think!

I'm a die-hard Winamp user, and one of the reasons for that is the fantastic plugins that are available for Winamp. One of my favorites is Toaster, which gives you this cute little popup whenever the song changes. I've been enjoying this one for years, but only recently I discovered this cute little app: Album Cover Art Downloader. After an all-night cover downloading spree, I realized that Toaster supported showing album art in the popup. After fiddling with it for a bit, it showed up, but it still didn't look that great, so I created my own little skin for it.

I already have the whole Mac theme going on my PC, so I thought a clean, simple style reminiscent of Growl would be the best. I think it looks pretty nice, and I love seeing all my album covers come up. You can grab it here if you want to try it out yourself.

I just release my newest Greasemonkey script: Amazon Super Saver Snooper. If you're cheap like me, you always go for the free Super Saver shipping at Amazon.com (free shipping on orders over $25). It gets even better when you've got Amazon Prime (I got a 3-month free trial). And if you're like me, you hate having to sift through the search results to find the items that are eligible for Super Saver. Well, that task has been alleviated by the power of Firefox and Greasemonkey. Just install my little script, and all the search results that are eligible for Prime / Super Saver will light up.

Another cool bit is that the script will update the prices shown in the search to the lowest price available from a Super Saver-eligible source. That way you don't get suckered into looking at cheap items you'll have to pay shipping on.

The script turned out to be pretty easy to write - it just calls the Amazon E-Commerce Web Service. I'm hoping to do some more cool stuff with that service in the future. If you're into customizing Amazon don't forget about my Collapsible Amazon script, too. And feel free to check out the rest of my scripts while you're at it.

I just heard an interview with Robert Scoble on KUOW (Seattle's NPR station). I've been reading Scoble's blog for a long time, and I have agreed with most of the things he's said over the years about the importance of blogging for companies in a world where word-of-mouth can spread a story around the world in minutes. Specifically, I agree that transparency and the “naked conversations” (as the title of Scoble's book puts it) are beneficial to both the customers of a company like Microsoft but also to the company itself - they recieve feedback and can keep bad spin from igniting the blogosphere (ugh, I can't believe I just used that word) like a brush fire.

However, I have a big question for Scoble and the other corporate blogging proponents. What about Apple? Apple doesn't blog at all as far as I know - even Dave Hyatt's old Safari blog is long gone. Yet people hang on their every word, every product announcement. Even the completely uninteresting launch of the new Intel Mac mini and iPod Hi-Fi was talked about all over the place - I got sick of tabbing through people repeating the story in my RSS reader. Engadget and some other tech blogs had a posts for weeks before the keynote buzzing about the magical products that might be released. You couldn't hope for better PR. And even after the disappointing keynote, people still had positive things to say, despite some worrying problems with the new Mac mini (I admit, I was stoked to buy an Intel Mac mini when they came out, but I think I'll reconsider for the time being).

When I interviewed at Apple I asked them why they didn't blog, why there wasn't more transparency. They responded that secrecy and surprise are one of Apple's biggest assets, which I completely understand. But I don't see Apple employees blogging about Carbon, or Automator, or any of the cool things that people aready know about, the same way I see Microsoft employees blogging about .NET or Microsoft Gadgets. What I'd love to have explained to me is how a company can survive, or rather, be loved so thouroughly, completely, and perhaps irrationally, without the level of transparency Scoble prescribes. Is it that blogging doesn't really help the way we hope it does, or that it only helps for new companies and companies that already start out reviled by much of the community such as Microsoft?

Update (3/29/06): Scoble and Shel Israel came and gave an enjoyable talk today, and I got to ask them a version of the question I had posted above. I wish I could have talked with them further, but they basically said that while Apple is a PR powerhouse now, their lack of transparency will bite them in the long run. I tend to agree with that, but I think right now blogging is significantly more necessary for companies that don't have flawless PR or fanatical customers.

So it's here. There's finally a blog on BRH.numbera.com. I had, up till a few minutes ago, harbored grand ideas of writing my own blog system from scratch, as a series of ASP.NET controls. I may still do it, but WordPress has impressed me so much that I feel I can loosen up on my convictions a bit and let some PHP code in. I'm still upset by the fact that it won't integrate with the main BRH.numbera.com site, but a little work should at least make this look similar to the main site.

Sometime back in the late (but not too late) 90s I had an idea, and I told my friend Greg about it. “Greg,” I said, flush with my first experience in writing a database-driven website, “wouldn't it be cool if I wrote some program that would let people keep a diary online? I mean, they could post little entries and the program could keep them as a calendar. You could even have a site where you could just sign up for a diary account, so people wouldn't have to know how to set up a website and install software.” Greg was quick with his reply. “That's stupid. Why would anybody ever want to keep a diary online? And who would want to read it?”

“You're right. That is pretty stupid.”

So, I'm completely aware that I'm talking to myself right now. I'm OK with that. This is not a place for me to write poetry, or talk about my friends, or even go on about things I've been up to around town. I'm going to try to make sure posts aren't about me, but about the things that might be relevant to other people. At the very least, something like “XBList has been updated with the following changes” or somesuch notification. I'll also try to set things up so that people could subscribe to just one category of the blog, so that my ramblings about games or my experience with Windows Vista (oh, there's a juicy post queued up right there) or whatever other thing I find interesting at the moment won't get in the way of whatever it is they want.

Anyway, welcome, and I hope if you're reading this post you also visit my website, for some free software if nothing else.