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Friday, June 29, 2007 - Posts

  • Internet + TV = New and Improved SetTopBoxes

    Earlier this month Microsoft announced the Microsoft Media Room , which is really a rebranding of the Microsoft's IPTV platform. While I could go on and on touting the endless possibilities that TV over the internet brings, I might as well point you to Scott's blog to find out more about it. One of the things Microsoft Media Room has that is totally mind-blowing is the fast-channel-switching, which you can actually see in the video on the MediaRoom site, that allows you to surf channels are break-neck zapping speed. You totally have to really see it to believe it. Unbelievable ! If you think your current channel switching is fast, wait till you experience this SetTopBox. While this is a TV/Broadband provider play, I am glad (and somewhat mininalistically involved ) that we, Singaporeans, will get this very soon in our very own living rooms. Stay tuned and dont be too quick to renew your current cable subscription of your current provider yet, if they are displaying territorial, monopolistic behaviour in your house. And even if they are not, why not exprience TV over a new medium ? How about chatting with your pals over MSN while watching your favourite reality TV on the same screen ? How about discussing with your contacts about who you are voting for in Americal Idol, or similar, while you paused the TV and then resume watching on-demand and sending your vote through the TV on the same screen ? How about sending an email/IM to your friends/contacts and notifying them of your own-content that you have just uploaded to your own TV channel ? Heh. The market is sure big enough for another TV service provider. If you look at the picture below on some of the cable providers carrying Microsoft MediaRoom, you will notice a familiar national icon there. Like I said - It is really coming to a TV near us. (c) William Tay 2000-2006 | Solution Architect Consultant http://www.softwaremaker.net/blog Read More...
  • New and Notable 176

    TGIF!! I am super busy right now designing a multi-CPU/multi-threaded Parallel Calculation Engine and diving into the science of Parallel Computing. I'll have some links when I get a chance. Windows Workflow Tomas talks about Silver , the integration of WF + WCF. The marriage is sorely needed because, as I have posted here , the current situation well, sucks. Silver uses Queues and bypasses EDS completely, which is what anyone needs to do to have any real success of communication into Workflows. Because we could not use Orcas here, we actually implemented our own version of the mechanism to avoid the hell that is EDS. Jon Flanders , the guy that helped me with the above, also worked on the PageFlow Sample that has been updated to V1.1 Even more interesting is that he has working on this project for hosting Workflows inside of BizTalk. This is very interesting as developing your own host is so not trivial, but I totally challenge Paul's assertion that " No BizTalk Experience Required ." Architecture Steve Jones has a post YAGNI, Requirements and why scaling isn't always important that I totally agree with and is in-line with what I try to do as an " Agile Architect ": "Split information exchange from the business services, and worry about the scaling that is appropriate for your information exchange. Don't worry about technical purity and some "wonder" architectural approach. Don't over engineer because if you do X (or R) then it will scale to 100,000 users, but your requirements say "6". Software Design/Agile/XP/Design Patterns/CAB Number 11 for Jeremy in his continuing excellent series on UI Design Patterns in Build your own CAB #11 - Event Aggregator Jeremy has another big AMEN post for me in his Design for Testability , which really goes with my Writing Maintainable Code post, "" Done, done, done " isn't just writing code. It's writing code and verifying that that code works correctly. Read More...

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