BlizzCon & the state of Warcraft

Well another BlizzCon has come & gone, but alas, this time I was left watching the con from my living room. They sold 20,000 tickets in less than 1 minute...that's insane!

One real benefit of buying the Internet Stream (not DirecTV in my house) is that I was able to watch the opening ceremony live, and then got to watch the rest of the segments "On Demand" from the website. If I had been there, it would have been "What did he say? Did I hear that correctly?" and then wait until I get to the hotel to see what the blogs/fansites were saying!

That being said, I'm writing these thoughts since Silvermoon-US is currently down, along with a BUNCH of other servers as Blizzards Battle.Net authentication network has a massive stroke. :S

New Mechwarrior Game Announced!!!

Woohoo, I'm sooo excited! I just read the linked article and am ecstatic to learn there's a "reboot" to the Mechwarrior series! From watching the trailer it looks AWESOME & fairly far along! Woot!

Warrior Caps!

Okay, so I'm trying to make sure that I've got all of my bases covered & after scouring over a TON of different posts on several sites, I believe I've compiled a concise list of the "soft caps" for a warrior. I've posted them here, so I can quit emailing myself this info & possibly help someone else out. Please feel free to comment below if my numbers are completely out of whack.

Protection-Tank:
Hit Rating: 163
Expertise (Rating): 24 (189)
Defense: 540

DPS-Fury:
Hit Rating: 165 (w/Precision)
Expertise (Rating):
- 18 (149) with Weapon Mastery
- 26 (214) without Weapon Mastery

DPS-Arms:
Hit Rating: 263
Expertise (Rating):
- 18 (149) with Weapon Mastery
- 26 (214) without Weapon Mastery

More Boxee Love - My BoxeeBox

Okay, so to alleviate the issues from my previous post, I'm building a "new" BoxeeBox for use as my primary Media Center. Here are the parts I'm getting:

• Case: Athena Power CA-1015IS30 (MicroATX)
  
• Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-US2H
  
• Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200
• RAM: Use existing 2GB DDR2 sticks
  
• Hard Drive: Use existing IDE for boot + 500GB MyBook for storage initially.
  

Several GREAT features of this motherboard:

• Integrated 780G chipset (which includes the Radeon HD3200) and is discussed in-depth at Tom's Hardware Guide.
• HD3200 features an embedded Universal Video Decoder (UVD) providing hardware decoding support for MPEG-2, H.264 and VC-1!!! Given this sort of hardware support, Tom's said that you could even use an AMD Sempron 3500+ to play back Full-HD.
• HDMI Output direct to HDTV
• eSATA connection for fast access to external storage

Also, on a whim, I saw a great deal on a refurb Sony Blu-Ray drive at Buy.com ($69.99)and so I picked one up. The Blu-Ray drive got here late last week, but the rest of the parts aren't scheduled to appear until Tuesday/Wednesday. I'll fill you guys in with a more detailed report, once I get the Case/MB/CPU in-hand & start the build!

Feeling the Boxee Love - Part 2

Okay, so I've been playing with Boxee for awhile now (almost 2 months). I started out with Boxee on Ubuntu Linux and I was really excited to get to use Linux again (and avoid the hardware heavy MS operating systems). Unfortunately, I was plagued with Samba/smb issues & couldn't consistently get the sources to work. Luckily, I was invited to participate in the closed Alpha for Boxee for Windows.

So, I reformatted the hard drive, installed XP & got to work with Boxee! So, a couple things of note here:

• Don't use UNC names (i.e. \\MyComputer\MyMovies) as a source, map it to a drive instead.
• Don't map drives to "internal" boxee drive letters (H:, Q:, T:, U: and Z:).

I hijacked my wife's wireless keyboard/mouse to use & it makes life MUCH easier to manage/play. I was extremely impressed with how well the new nVidia software handles connection to a HDTV via DVI=> DHMI adapter. It allows you to "tweak" the settings & nailed the resolution the first time out.

All that being said, a couple other "hardware issues" I had include:

• An old Athlon XP CPU was not "up to snuff" for playing back DVD or HD content.
• Wireless (802.11g) introduced additional latency that caused some streaming content to be "jumpy" (especially http://trailers.apple.com).
• Having a loud computer next to your TV sucks. :(
  

Nesting a Repeater inside of a GridView that is bound to an Array of Custom Objects

Wow, isn't that title a mouthful! But that's exactly the situation that presented itself to me at work this week. Since it too me way longer than I thought it should to figure out, I figured I'd put my effort in here, just in case it might be able to help someone else out someday (possibly even me).

Here's the results:

#	Name	Email Addresses
1	Ian Cazabat	IanCazabat@Example.com Ian.B.Cazabat@Example.com IanCaz@Example.com
2	Malcolm Reynolds	CptnMal@Example.com Serenity1@Example.com
3	Jonas Blane	SnakeDr@Example.com 303rdLSG@Example.com

So, without any further delay here's the code:
ASPX:

<%@ Page Language="c-sharp" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="_Default" %>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head runat="server">
<title>Nested Sample</title>
</head>
<body>
<form id="form1" runat="server">
<div>
 <asp:GridView ID="gvNestingSample" AutoGenerateColumns="False" runat="server" BackColor="White" BorderColor="#999999" BorderStyle="None" BorderWidth="1px" CellPadding="3" GridLines="Vertical">
     <RowStyle VerticalAlign="Top" BackColor="#EEEEEE" ForeColor="Black" />
     <Columns>
         <asp:BoundField DataField="EmployeeId" HeaderText="#" />
         <asp:BoundField DataField="EmployeeName" HeaderText="Name" />
         <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Email Addresses">
             <ItemTemplate>
                 <asp:Repeater runat="server" ID="rptEmailAddrs" DataSource='<%#  DataBinder.Eval( Container.DataItem, "EmailAddresses" ) %>'>
                     <ItemTemplate>
                         <a href="mailto:<%# Container.DataItem %>"><%# Container.DataItem %></a><br />
                     </ItemTemplate>
                 </asp:Repeater>
             </ItemTemplate>
         </asp:TemplateField>
     </Columns>
     <FooterStyle BackColor="#CCCCCC" ForeColor="Black" />
     <SelectedRowStyle BackColor="#008A8C" Font-Bold="True" ForeColor="White" />
     <PagerStyle BackColor="#999999" ForeColor="Black" HorizontalAlign="Center" />
     <HeaderStyle BackColor="#000084" Font-Bold="True" ForeColor="White" />
     <AlternatingRowStyle BackColor="#DCDCDC" />
 </asp:GridView>
</div>
</form>
</body>
</html>

CodeBehind:

using System;
using System.Data;
using System.Configuration;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Security;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts;
using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls;

public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page {
protected void Page_Load( object sender, EventArgs e ) {
UserAccount[ ] aryUserAccounts = new UserAccount[ ] {
 new UserAccount( 1, "Ian Cazabat", new string[] {"IanCazabat@Example.com", "Ian.B.Cazabat@Example.com", "IanCaz@Example.com"}),
 new UserAccount( 2, "Malcolm Reynolds", new  string[] {"CptnMal@Example.com", "Serenity1@Example.com"}),
 new UserAccount( 3, "Jonas Blane", new  string[] {"SnakeDr@Example.com", "303rdLSG@Example.com"})
};

gvNestingSample.DataSource = aryUserAccounts;
gvNestingSample.DataBind( );
}

public class UserAccount {
private long employeeid;
private string employeename;
private string[ ] emailaddresses;

public long EmployeeId {
 get { return employeeid; }
 set { employeeid = value; }
}
public string EmployeeName {
 get { return employeename; }
 set { employeename = value; }
}
public string[ ] EmailAddresses {
 get { return emailaddresses; }
 set { emailaddresses = value; }
}

public UserAccount( ) {
}

public UserAccount( long lEmployeeId, string strEmployeeName, string[] aryEmails ) {
 this.employeeid = lEmployeeId;
 this.employeename = strEmployeeName;
 this.emailaddresses = aryEmails;
}
}
}

Okay, so there you have a working sample of how to create a GridView with a nested Repeater, that gets it's data from an Array of Custom Objects. Here's a couple points of interest:

1. In order to bind on the data in the object, they must be created as "fields" using get/set.
   
2. To access the array that's part of the object use:
   DataSource='<%# DataBinder.Eval( Container.DataItem, "{Array Property Name}" ) %>'
3. To display the "data elements" from the array, you use:
   <%# Container.DataItem %>
   
4. If the "data elements" in the array are custom objects, then you need to use the following:
   <%# DataBinder.Eval( Container.DataItem, "{Property of Custom Object from Array}" )%>

Okay, so that's about got it, hopefully I've helped someone out & I've likely kept myself from losing too much sleep over this issue again! So, go forth & create! ;)

So much for MythTV, I'm loving Boxee!!!

Okay, I wrote quite some time ago about my experimentation with MythTV & my pursuit of a HTPC (Home Theater PC). So, the initial requirement was to be able to play my DVD's, CD's & look at pictures on my 56" TV in the living room. MythTV met this goal, but also added quite a bit of complexity when you factor in the PVR functionality that it provides.

So, after weeks of playing with MythTV, I've been turned on to Boxee! Boxee is quite simply, a digital media player, that allows me to do the following:

• Play existing Movies - DVD, ISO, mpeg
  
• Play existing Music - CD, mp3
  
• Browse Photo slide-show
• Watch on-demand streaming media from CBS, MTV, YouTube & Hulu (right now via a hack)
• Listen to streaming audio via the internet
• Browse photos from Flickr & Picasa

All of the media options are available using a local Optical Drive (CD/DVD), local hard drive, or across your local network via SAMBA!

A great Blog post with a fairly detailed write-up on installing Boxee on Ubuntu 8.10 can be found at the OpenSourcePenguin.net. This is a nicely detailed piece, that doesn't waste time on a lot of unnecessary fluff.

I'll be following up with another post regarding using a remote & how the rest comes along!