I complained several months ago about expiration of DRM under MSN music, as a result I refuse DRM music at every turn. There appears to be an about face on the original notification. 

On April 22, Microsoft notified you that as of August 31st, 2008, we would be changing the level of support for music purchased from MSN Music, and while your existing purchased music would continue to play, you would no longer be able to authorize new PCs and devices to play that music.

After careful consideration, Microsoft has decided to continue to support the authorization of new computers and devices and delivery of new license keys for MSN Music customers through at least the end of 2011, after which we will evaluate how much this functionality is still being used and what steps should be taken next to support our customers. This means you will continue to be able to listen to your purchased music and transfer your music to new PCs and devices beyond the previously announced August 31, 2008 date.

Microsoft continues to recommend that you back up your music on CD or hard drive along with other important data.

Sincerely,

MSN Music team

I am not willing to bet (with my money) that the Zune experiment will continue to work. I am officially out of the DRM business.

I do not normally comment on particular artists or films, however, this weekend I had the misfortune of seeing 'The Happening'.

I can say with a clear and truthful heart that The Happening is the worst film I have ever seen. Worse than Howard the Duck, Dreamcatcher and Rocky V combined!!!!

I like poking fun at code only because I hope to help highlight simple errors and make our programming world a better place ;) I am sure there is a trail of awful code littered behind my career, however, I am grateful for the fact that I do not have to look at it.

So the latest faux pas was seen in a piece of code that required a string to undergo URL encoding. This is a simple process that requires one to remove all the illegal characters from a URL. The following are considered illegal (reserved) characters:

! * ' ( ) ; : @ & = + $ , / ? % # [ ]

This led to the following code snippet...

String HttpPost = GetRawHttpString();
HttpPost = HttpPost.Replace("%","%25");
HttpPost = HttpPost.Replace("|", "%7C");
HttpPost = HttpPost.Replace("/", "%2F");

Now the basic concept is to identify the reserved characters and replace them with their percentage encoded equivalent. This is not wrong just a little off ... It is the kind of thing you do when you are, for example, an expert C programmer converting to the .NET Framework. It is really easy to fall into traps of how to solve the problem verses the idea of learning the more about .NET Framework. This is probably what I would have done:

String HttpPost = GetRawHttpPostString();
HttpPost = HttpUtility.UrlEncode(HttpPost);

I think the real reason why HttpUtility was not used was because this was not a Web application and in that scenario you are required to import System.Web.dll as a reference manually.

If you are not using SharedView for interactive demonstrations then I urge you to take up the cause while the day is still young and the application is free. It provides the same kind of display features as Live Meeting, however, you are able to allow viewers to interact with the presentation in a more direct and intuitive way.

Unfortunately as far back as last year I have been seeing issues with some demos where the video was completely scrambled, this was a problem with both SharedView and Live Meeting. Being a remote employee this kind of issue will simply not do.

The problem is apparently related to the the hardware acceleration options. The presenter should update the Hardware acceleration slider to None as shown below and everything should work as designed!

For more troubleshooting tips check out the SharedView forum.

Most of the machines I use at home and at work have some kind of DVD playing capability but I just realized that I do not have a single one that burns DVD's. I am assuming that DVD's have effectively run their course and while they were and are hugely successful I think the advance in online storage and flash drives really renders the burning of miscellaneous information to CD's or DVD's obsolete.

With that in mind I have recently had my MSDN subscription fixed at work and so I can now partake in the full featured Visual Studio 2008 goodness. Unfortunately the first thing I noticed when preparing for the download and subsequent installation was that they were only available as DVD iso images  ;( again no DVD burner.

I did find a nice clean solution for this in the form of MagicDisc. This humble application allowed me to launch a Virtual DVD drive directly from the system tray. I know this concept has been around for a while this is just the first time I have had a need for it. Did I mention I like free tools!

Automatic updates has really helped XP, and subsequently 2003 and Vista, stay on top of the mounting attacks directed against PC users. Whenever I am called upon by relatives and friends to fix their PC's this is the first gift I always give them. My windows workstation is still using XP I have opted not to update to Vista, even though I have a copy sitting in my cupboard, because there remains some continuing compatibility issues with some of the Music software I use. Due to the critical nature of this workstation I am strict about not letting it connect to the Internet on a regular basis. I try to conduct the updates once a month to ensure that everything is as it should be.

I noticed that there have been several non critical updates that I have had queued for a while, and upon further investigation I realized that they have been failing. All the failures were related to the .NET framework and their associated service packs.

So I am thinking that there maybe an issue with the Automatic Updates delivery system and so I proceed to download the .NET Framework SP (1.1 and 2.0) in the hope to circumvent the problem. I end up being give this useless error message to the left which tells me absolutely nothing.

Seriously what were they expecting me to glean from this, what is SL4.tmp? how does it relate to my problem? Is the file corrupted or missing? Where is it supposed to be? All the bits of useful information I was hoping for did not seem to be given when the failure occurred.

At this point I am forced to perform a Google search on it but I come up with nothing! My next step is to try uninstalling the entire framework both 2.0 and 1.1, but unfortunately neither the remove or repair options for either framework appears to be functional. This new error appears related to DOTNETFX.MSI, which does not appear to exist on my machine ... aaargh!!

I performed a series of searches on the topic of .NET installation errors and come across the blog of Aaron Stebner who has developed a tool for cleaning up installations of the .NET framework (called the Installation Cleanup Utility) . He clearly indicates on his blog that this should be considered a last resort, and that is certainly the position I found myself in, so I took the leap of faith and downloaded the tool.

Well it worked! The Cleanup Utility is easy to use and allows you to select which framework you are having problems with, or  select them all. It produces a log file indicating what changes were made (this may include registry updates so you will want to make a back up before proceeding). All in all it took about 20 seconds to fix the problem at which point all the Automatic updates started to run successfully! Another useful tool that is free!!

Before you decide to use this tool you should consider the following:

There are a couple of very important caveats that you should read before using this tool to cleanup .NET Framework bits on your machine:

1. You should try to perform a standard uninstall first.  This tool is not designed as a replacement for uninstall, but rather as a last resort for cases where uninstall or repair did not succeed for unusual reasons.
2. This cleanup tool will delete shared files and registry keys used by other versions of the .NET Framework.  So if you use it, be prepared to repair or reinstall any other versions of the .NET Framework that are on your computer to get them to work correctly afterwards