Windows MCE

There is one program that I really like from Microsoft and that is the Media Center. I have been using it since the XP version. For the most part, the XP version is working great after all these years. However, in few areas XP starts to show its ages, and that is in new hardware support and handling.

I have recently got an ATi 4550 card to replace my trouble 8600GT card. This card has HDMI output which should save me from have two cables for carrying video and audio separately. Despite all my attempts, I couldn't get the sound to work as XP would not recognize the HDMI as an output. Since my brother has a similar setup and the sound work well under Windows 7, so I decided to upgrade my XP to Windows 7.

Presto, sound works as it should be plus now I can use my MCE remote to change channels that have successive numbers, e.g. 112. I have this problem for a long time and finally Microsoft has fixed it!!

Data Recovery with PhotoRec

Yesterday I made a mistake to delete an important and have the joy of looking for ways to recover them. After a bit of search, I found this utility called PhotoRec. It seems recover files by searching for file signatures. It worked reasonable well but prepare to give it plenty of time to do it job! It took a whole day (24hrs) to go through my disk to savage files.



In addition, owning one of these can help too

C# Comments and Doxygen

Similar to Java, you can comment your code using special mark-ups, however, unlike Java, you need to source your own tool similar to javadoc to covert these comments into document pages. There are plenty of such tools for Windows, but for Linux, may I recommend doxygen to you. It is an open source documentation tool for a variety of programming languages, e.g. Java, C/C++/C#, php etc, and it is available through the APT package manager under Ubuntu. You can installed it by running

sudo aptitude install doxygen-gui

This would install the doxygen command line utility plus doxywizard, its graphical tool. To run the wizard, you run doxywizard in a command prompt, and after, you simply follow the simple step by step instructions. Presto, you have a well made documentation in minutes!

64Bit Windows 7 MCE and RMVB

While it is generally great to move to 64bit to take advantage of cheap memory, there is an exception. If you are using Windows Media Center to playback RMVB files, you may want to stay put to the 32Bit version as the 64Bit version cannot use the popular 32Bit Real Alternative DirectShow filter to playback RMVB video inside the Media Center. So, if you have lots of videos in RMVB format and you would like to use Windows Media Center to getting round things, you may want to still with 32Bit a bit longer ... at least till the 64Bit version of Real Alternative is available.

skype 4 and speed-dial

I have been using the USB-Skype adapter to allow me using my normal house dect phone for skype call for a while. It works great with Skype 3.8. However, skype decided to remove the speed dial from version 4 which is needed for my adapter to work. Hence, until today, I am forced to stay with version 3.

Today, I found a solution for my problem, and it works great. I found this little utility called SkypeSpeedDial which lets you to reveal the hidden speed dial feature in skype 4. You can use it to set speed dial numbers for contacts. To remind yourself the number, I use the rename function to add the speed dial numbers next to the contact names, e.g. John Smith (01)

Windows 7 and ULi Chipset

When I try to install Windows 7 on my Acer computer which uses ULi chipset, I got no hard drive. It seems Windows 7 does not carry ULi drive, and requires to load ULi drivers manually. After some search on Google, I manage to find the driver at

http://www.4shared.com/file/i1fDjHnr/ULI1575_RAID_F6.html

You simply extract the driver from the archive file and put the extracted file onto an USB pen drive. Load the driver from the USb drive prepared when you reach the empty drive screen. Hope this helps others in a similar situation.

TraceSource

Yesterday I was trying to get the TraceSource (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms228993.aspx) working in C# under mono. I have been following the example in Microsoft website, but nothing seems to work. Today, I finally manage to get the TraceSource working. It turns out that I need to include TRACE as a define symbols in the compiler option (see the image below).



After making this change, my code

TraceSource ts = new TraceSource("DefaultTraceSource");
ts.TraceEvent (TraceEventType.Error, 1, "test");

works perfectly as intended.

Another catch I found with TraceSource is that the switchName attribute in the source element seems to be got ignored. To define the switch level, it seems better to use the switchValue attribute in the source element directly.