More Xbox 360 Hardware Failures: Smoking Racing Wheels

I had seriously considered getting the Xbox 360 Wireless Racing Wheel when it came out to play Project Gotham 3, but I am really glad I didn't now. Joystiq is reporting that the racing wheel smokes used with a wired power source instead of batteries and is going to "retrofit" the device to not smoke. Isn't "retrofit" just the weasel way of saying recall? Retrofit or recall, MS needs to do this for the Xbox 360, not just fix/replace them as they break.

My friend Jenny's writing partner Andrew wrote about the design failures of MS with the 360, and now you can add the wireless racing wheel to the list. Even more sadly, Jenny's Xbox 360 has been put in a coffin and shipped off to MS, where they will hold onto it for 4-6 weeks, this was after a 1 week wait for the coffin! Anyone that says they don't care about 360 problems because they have a 3 year warranty hasn't thought it through. If your Xbox 360 fails, you could be without it for greater than 1 and nearly 2 months!

All that said, and contradicting myself from the Xbox 360 recall post, I am in rapture with BioShock. When I told my wife I was going to get the game, she said "aren't you afraid you'll kill your 360 before Halo 3 comes out?". I am, but BioShock is so good I am willing to take the risk.

Tip: Determining the Hex Color value of anything on screen in Mac OS X

I can't remember when I started using Pipette, an OS X application that tells you what the HEX value is for any color on screen, but it has been very helpful during Web development. I adding the App Update widget to my Dashboard a few weeks ago, and one of the apps that gets "stuck" on figuring out that a current version is installed is Pipette. I went to Version Tracker to see if App Update was just messed up, and started reading the comments when user walfrieda points out Pipette is unnecessary. Mac OS X includes a utility that does more than Pipette called DigitalColor Meter

Sorry Pipette, but your going out with the Trash.

Review: iPhone - Starfleet Standard Issue

I was on vacation on iDay (June 29, 2007). No one was in line to get me an iPhone, nor did I order one online. I followed the coverage online during vacation downtime though, eager to read about the line and hands-on reactions. When I got home, I called around on July 4th, none of my local Apple Stores had one. I had no intention to get one, but called out of curiosity. I went to the mall on July 5th with the intention to try the iPhone, and the Apple Store had a bunch of them. Within a few minutes of using the iPhone, it's pretty clear this is an amazing device. I still had no intention of buying one, but my wife pushed for it because she was smitten, figured out how to pay for it (business expense, check) and thus the 8 GB came home. My first impression...

Starfleet Standard Issue?! If you were a Star Trek The Next Generation (TNG) fan, you might have realized that the computing interfaces where multi-touch screens. The controls on-screen at any time were dependent on what the user was doing. Of course, this was all fiction, and back when TNG and later the movies where new, as a computer geek, that was always one of my eye roll moments. Where where all the buttons!?! The iPhone is the first device that nearly entirely implements a TNG-style interface (there are 5 physical buttons). All of the on-screen controls adapt to what the user is doing. It is breathtaking how far ahead the iPhone software is compared to the mobile devices I was using (Moto RAZR and Blackberry 7100) or that I have seen first-hand. My wife was emboldened by having the iPhone with the Web and Google Map, and she said why don't we really put it to the test, see if it can do all Apple claims and be a true mobile computer. So we took an unplanned road trip which we called iPhone Weekend.

Friday July 6th 2007
We didn't book hotels or print directions, we just got in the car and started driving south on the NJ Turnpike. We decided to go to Washington DC and take our son to the National Zoo (true story: when I wrote this part on my laptop riding the Northeast Corridor NJ Transit train to NYC, my 3G Verizon EVDO card couldn't contact Google to lookup the URL of the National Zoo. I had to use the iPhone because EDGE just seems to work everywhere). With my wife driving, the first thing I noticed navigating with the iPhone is that EDGE is faster than I expected and coverage is pervasive. AT&T and EDGE are the supposed weak link in the iPhone, but those criticisms seem overly negative. I had been using the iPhone on WiFi the previous day, and it was surely fast, but not laptop fast. EDGE is obviously not as fast as WiFi, but entirely usable, and certainly good enough. Google Maps loads data pretty fast. Web surfing feels slightly faster than 56K dial-up, and depending on location sometimes a lot faster. I never lost coverage with EDGE as we drove through NJ, into Delaware, and then Maryland. I used Google Maps to plot our way to DC, then killed time Web surfing, email, and seeing what's on YouTube. Again, EDGE is pretty good, even for YouTube because the video is scaled to your bandwidth. We left pretty late on Friday and weren't sure if we were going to drive straight-through (3 hrs, 41 minutes) or stop somewhere in Maryland.

About 40 minutes into Maryland we pull into a rest stop and decide we only want to drive another 40 minutes. I go back into Google Maps on the iPhone. I have our route from NJ to DC plugged in. I have been scrubbing along the map with my finger while we drive, I am acting as GPS. It is quickly obvious I don't really need GPS, it's a nice to have. Google Maps is a great tool to have on the go even without GPS. So I look ahead on the map and figure out that Edgewood, MD is about the right spot that we want to be. I then searched for hotels or motels around Edgewood, and it's just like this Apple movie on using maps shows. I tap on pins for each of the hotels, tap on their phone, and call to see if they have rooms available and pricing. It's all very slick. There are some problems with Google Maps though:

• It wasn't obvious to me at first how to get out of directions mode (the two-way arrow on the bottom left)
• Sometimes when you go out to iPhone home screen, do other stuff, and come back to Maps, it forgets what step in the route you are in
• Google Maps crashes sometimes. You know this happens when you land back at the home screen without hitting the home button.
• You really want to be able to tap anywhere on the map and get a push pin to do "Directions To/From Here" or use this as the current location to do searches from (filed as Radar Bug # 5350128)

We pull into our hotel, and score they have free WiFi. I get the access code from the front desk, plug it into their Web application on iPhone, and I am off surfing on WiFi again. My wife breaks out the MacBook and books our hotel for the next night in DC, while I surf the Web checking out the Zoo.
iPhone Weekend Day 1 Score: 9
Fantastic device. 1 point deducted for Google Map crashes

Saturday July 7th 2007
iPhone Weekend Day 2 started when I re-routed in Google Maps from Edgewood, MD to the National Zoo. My wife is again drove so that I could navigate using the iPhone. The drive is pretty straightforward, with Maps alleviating all doubt about how we get to the Zoo because of the map zoom level and turn-by-turn directions. Totally destroys paper maps, I can't imagine even buying one again. We get to the Zoo. I read that the iPhone camera is worse than Scoble's Nokia N95, so I wanted to try it out. My wife has the aging 3.1 MP Kodak the focus/shoot/review workflow is so slow, makes the iPhone feel like a revelation. I have been sticking it out with the Kodak because the images have always seemed good and it has good optical zoom. I didn't take a lot of pictures with the iPhone, because I wanted full-size images, but here is a sample iPhone image:
This was taken under pretty poor light conditions, I was behind glass (so the iPhone non-flash was a plus) and pretty much in the dark, and I think this turned out pretty good, again like EDGE speed, better than I expected. I was able to take some shots with the iPhone we missed with the Kodak because of the glacial workflow, come on Apple, where is the line of full size cameras?

We wrap on the Zoo and need to check-in to the DC hotel, so I mapped from the Zoo to the the hotel. The directions again were spot-on, but I flubbed it up a bit. There is a tunnel under Dupont Circle, which I was supposed to avoid and take the circle instead, but I messed it up. Google Maps helped me out again, I just panned and zoomed around the map to get us routed back to the hotel. I am disappointed to learn we don't have free WiFi like we had at the cheaper hotel off of I-95 in MD. They wanted $25 for WiFi. My wife intended to look for restaurants and Sunday attractions, but paying that much money to use WiFi isn't going to happen. So we used EDGE on the iPhone with Google Maps and Safari to look up some restaurants. We quickly find one, immediately call and make a reservation, then call back and cancel after tapping the restaurents website and see the restaurant using Safari. Just a little too upscale for my sons's mood :-). We see a bunch of restaurants north of the hotel on Maps, but with the number of choices, I look to see if there are any reviews within Google Maps and there aren't. I try to hit a bunch of their websites to view the menu, but it's here that the lack of Flash is a real hinderance because most restaurants in the area, for whatever reason, use Flash, so I am stuck. So we decide to head out on foot and find Sette Osteria, which turned out to be quite good.
iPhone Weekend Day 2 Score: 8
I am loving it. 1 point deducted for Google Map having no star rating or reviews (Radar Bug # 5350338), 1 point deduced for no Flash

Sunday July 8th 2007
It was really hot, 96 Degrees hot and high humidity. Our son likes rockets, so we decided for the cool air conditioning of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum for our afternoon in DC. I used Google Maps to route us there, again the directions get us there with no problems. My wife reminded me that my voicemail wasn't setup, so I went to take care of that. I tapped the Phone button, then Voicemail and was a bit surprised to be dialing into voicemail. Where is my Visual Voicemail? Turns out you first have to setup using the bad old standard dial-up procedure, but then the iPhone recognizes you have voicemail setup and prompts you for the password. Once you correctly enter this, boom, now you can manage everything on the phone, and even set your greeting. It's wonderful.

We wrapped up our trip to the museum and I routed us out of DC and back to NJ. I was surprised to see us go a totally different way than how we came into the city. If I had done this on my own, I would have backtracked to get on I-95 again. We drove for an hour into Maryland and the traffic started. I looked at Google Maps, only a bit of the traffic showed up. I found the exact point we were on the map, no traffic on the map, but it's bumper to bumper. When you have a feature called Traffic in Google Maps, I better see all of it especially on a major road like I-95. This logjam didn't last too long, so we got back to Jersey pretty much on schedule, but then we hit the parking lot. Right after Exit 6 (where the PA Turnpike mergers with the NJ Turnpike), everything slowed to a crawl. Again, Google Maps only shows a small stretch of this in red much further ahead of where we were. I planned some alternate routes. Eventually we got off at exit 7A (inside Jersey joke: no not for a side-trip to Great Adventure), but as step 1 on the alternate route home. Google Maps didn't just automatically plan this out for me, I had to look around at surrounding towns and plot from there, but having Maps easily saved me 2 hours of bumper-to-bumper driving hell.
iPhone Weekend Day 3 Score: 9
This interface is really sublime. 1 point deducted for Google Maps not having total traffic data coverage

Conclusion
To paraphrase Morpheus: "Unfortunately, no one can be told why the iPhone is so good, you have to see it for yourself". I wrote a review like this because I don't think feature comparisons alone can help define what it's like to use the iPhone, you really do have to go try it. It may be the phone features that get you, or the best-ever iPod, the rich Internet experience, the Maps, or something even more surprising, like the huge and natural interface calculator (I am not kidding), but I think the iPhone will get nearly all that give it a try, and those people will really get the iPhone. I haven't talked about a lot stuff in depth, either the positives (watch the movies or commercials, it does all that just like you expect), the adjustments (text entry takes some training, but I am now faster than on my BlackBerry), or the negatives (application crashes), there are tons of reviews for that. If it wasn't clear from the above, the interface, the way you interact with the device, how smooth it is, and how you truly can access all the information on the Web in very high fidelity, are revolutionary. Eventually, all mobile devices are going to have to work like this, and I find myself wanted some of the functionality in the MacBook Pro now too (why can't I get auto-correct as I type like on the iPhone?). One more thing, if you were willing to spend $249 on an 8 GB iPod nano, the iPhone is only a $350 premium over the nano. When you think of it like that, it almost feels cheap.

iPhone Overall Score: 9 of 10

iPhone Tip #002: Skipping tracks without touching the iPhone

If you have the iPhone, you pretty much have to use the included headset since the jack is recessed in the body. This is no problem for me, I have been using the Apple provided headsets (earbuds) for a while, even eBaying my Shure earphones because I was constantly losing pads.

So why are the Apple earphones beneficial? Here is the uses I have found, and the best one skipping tracks forward while using the iPod:

• Phone - Single-Click - End Calls
• iPod - Single-Click - Play/Pause currently selected song
• iPod - Double-Click - Skip to the next song in your playlist

This is typical Apple. Take the old style iPod remote, that attached to the earbuds and was always more a hassle than necessary to actually remember to bring and use, and whittle it down to just the essential features, Play/Pause and Skip to the next song.

One more thing, you can change the volume of the song that is playing in the iPod on the iPhone with the volume rocker on the side of the iPhone without unlocking the iPhone. Another nice touch.

Anyone else know any other tricks the iPhone headset does?

iPhone Tip #001: Seeing Song Length in the iPod application

When a song or a podcast is playing in the iPod application on the iPhone, by default (pictured left) you can't see how long the track has been playing, or scrub (move forward or backward) through the track. But there is a way. If you just tap on the cover art, a small translucent strip will pop-up that shows you how far along a track you are, total time, and gives you the options to play continuously (the loop) or start shuffling right from where you are (the crossed arrows). This last bit is really sweet, but it took me a few days of using the iPhone to figure this out. This only works vertically, when you go widescreen, tapping the cover art shows you the albums track list.

Microsoft should recall the Xbox 360

I just read Newsweek's Level Up: Confession is Good For the Soul: Why Microsoft Must Be More Forthcoming About the Xbox 360's Flaws--Or Initiate a Recall by N'Gai Croal. First, Level Up has become one of my favorite gaming news sites. Everything N'Gai Croal says in the linked article is true. I have been telling friends for weeks now that I have been laying off the Xbox 360 out of fear that the device would break before I got a chance to play Halo 3. Every Guitar Hero II session has been accompanied by the thought that this could be the time when the box dies with the Red Ring of Death. A friend of mine's 360 pulled up lame last October with the Red Ring of Death, a mere 4 months after purchase. My 360 is 15 months old, but it hasn't died on me. Put the problems aren't limited to just the Red Ring of Death. Another friend whose Xbox 360 is 9 moths old, yesterday decided to stop playing games for her. No Red Ring of Death, but still this could happen to me and unless I convinced customer service to replace the 360, I would never play Halo 3 because I am not buying another console from Microsoft with these amount of problems. The 3 year warranty is not good enough for just the Red Ring of Death issue, it should cover all hardware failure. Not to mention the disc scratching issues. Everyone I know that has a 360 has some level of disc scratching and the consoles never move, they are completely stationary. If the 360 dies, I will either get a PS3 or just stick with the Wii. I can certainly find enough games to play without a 360, but it would kinda break my heart to never play Halo 3.

Review: Nintendo Wii

First things first, if you have a Wii, add my Wii code to your address book and send mail to innerexception at mac.com so our Miis can be exchanged:


Back over Memorial Day weekend (May 28th 2007 to be exact), I finally got a Wii. I learned the night before that my local Best Buy had been stockpiling for the big Sunday flyer announcement, so I headed off about an hour before opening and got in line, as did a bunch of other people. I got it, but they were short on Wii Remotes, so I headed to the local Target, where I had never seen a Wii in the case before even though checking since launch, and they had 5. 3 left as I walked to the case, but the irony, and I haven't seen them in that Target again since.

In short, the Wii is pretty much great. This review from Scott Hanselman and this Wii series by Jeffrey McManus Wii some up a lot ofwhat the Wii is about. For me: Finally, something new in gaming. My wife, in-laws, friends, and yes even grandma have played and enjoyed the Wii a tremendous amount, none of them save a few friends would touch an Xbox or Playstation gamepad. Even the friends that have played and owned gamepad-based consoles before either admit how much fun the Wii is or are planning to get one, even holding off on Xbox 360 or PS3 to get a Wii. On June 10, mere hours before the Halo 3 beta expired, the gamer friend I had over was bored by Halo 3 compared to the fun the whole house was having with the Wii. It wasn't even close.

I am not just a casual gamer, so one of the most unexpected benefits of the Wiimote is that you have near mouse levels of control. Why is that important? For a First Person Shooter (FPS) player like myself, it might make all the difference. I have Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess in addition to Wii Sports, and it was during the early slingshot training sequence this became obvious to me, targeting was so much easier with the remote as pointer than an analog stick. If Nintendo's developers show the way with Metroid Prime: Corruption, the Wii could be revolutionary for hard-core FPS players as well as casuals, bringing close to the precision that PC FPS players have enjoyed on an easy to use console. The graphics are what they are, but if you can use the component cables, they do look better. The widescreen 480p Zelda is no Gears of War and isn't even a Wii exclusive, so I am extremely curious to see what Metroid looks like, but it really is all about the controls. I haven't got any other traditional FPS games yet, but I am seriously looking forward to Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition when I get back from vacation.

This isn't to say that I have junked the Xbox 360, I haven't. I got Guitar Hero II for father's day, and that is a great game that taps into the same kind of fun that the Wii does. But a guitar is a very specialized controller, the Wiimote makes many game experiences new again. Depending on when Mass Effect drops, the only game I get for the 360 the rest of this year might be Halo 3. Another thing I noticed playing Halo 3 Beta with random strangers and the Wii with family and friends. Playing games over Xbox Live with random strangers, not that much fun. Playing with people you know, priceless.

NJ Transit Ticket Machines Run NT 4

I was pretty amused this morning to see the ticket computer at my NJ Transit stop:


Walking right up to the screen, you see the following (red highlight mine):


What genius told NT 4 it was OK to shutdown? 

Test Post from Blogger Widget

Nice, but a little limited, no labels!

SharpDevelop 2.1 broke building in Visual Studio 2005 SP1

When I was researching Mono, I installed SharpDevelop to play around with. One of the first things I did was open an existing Visual Studio 2005 solution to see how the SharpDevelop IDE compared to VS. After I opened it, I let the IDE sit their since I had to go do other stuff, and when I came back to it, SharpDevelop had crashed with an unhandled exception. Crap, if the IDE can't even sit still without crashing, how could I even think about using this as my main IDE?!? There were some posts in the SharpDevelop Bug Reporting forum and I added one to the list (still waiting on a response, over a week later). So I stopped looking at it. Yesterday my dalliance with another IDE caused Visual Studio 2005 to go all Glenn Close fatal attraction and I missed a deadline because of it. This is what happened.

I hate you Publish...
The first thing I noticed that something was wrong was when I went to publish my site. I have written before about problems with Publish. Visual Studio was immediately acting weird. You care supposed to see this:

Instead in the status bar, I see this build succeeded. What?!?! At first I am ready to chalk this up to Publish not working, and I go to Scott Gu's blog to get that Publish hotfix. I know I am not seeing the error message described, but hey maybe the installer will fix it anyway. But something is wrong with the link to the hotfix, I see a page not found error. I eventually find DevDiv Hotfix Public Availability Pilot Program. In the table on the site, I find the hotfix, 3rd from the bottom:

I click the download link, only again to see this:

Argh! Again the Output window didn't automatically appear, so I open it and pin it to see if their is any more info and it says this:

Odd, what was skipped and why? Just a little higher up in the Output I see this:

It doesn't make any sense, even with a full rebuild, a clean and rebuild, and me dumping all intermediate products manually and cleaning out anything that looks like a VS cache. I am ashamed to admit, I even rebooted Windows, which I usually make fun of anyone for. It means they are out of ideas, and that was true of me, I was out of gas and starting to freak because I was supposed to have the bits deployed hours ago. So I bagged it, pushed the deadline to get the code tested a day, and came back fresh this morning and finally cracked it.

Do you want an extra project with that solution?
A thread in the back of my mind said "Didn't you open the solution file with SharpDevelop last week? Seems strange, but do you think it edited the solution file?" Hmm, could be, I wouldn't think there was any need to, but could be. So I opened up the directory and I see that TortoiseSVN says the solution file has been edited (icon on the left). Ut oh! I immediately do a diff, and their are two groups of changes, this:

And this:

I surely didn't add any more projects to the solution.

TortoiseSVN sure tells me I haven't, and the GUID in the highlighted block doesn't match anything in the solution file. So I revert the solution file to what is in the repository, and Visual Studio has no problem building or publishing! I haven't proved yet that SharpDevelop did this, it could be a Visual Studio bug. That is of course until I open the solution file in SharpDevelop again. I diff a copy of a SharpDevelop butchered modified solution file with the newly SharpDevelop mangled modified file, TortoiseSVN says they are identical, right down to the dodgy GUIDs used. If I isolate the changes, the problem is not the # SharpDevelop 2.1.0.2429 definition at the top of the solution file, it is the extra configuration junk.

A Cautionary Tale
You could say Visual Studio is a jealous lover. She found out I had an extra-IDE affair and made me pay the price with a blown deadline and hours of frustration. The fault was all mine though. My project contracted an STD (solution transmitted disease) by fornicating with SharpDevelop. It was only because I used protection, a good source control system, that this disease wasn't fatal. The solution recovered and has been deployed. If you are thinking of Giving up on Microsoft, or at least fooling around, be prepared for the consequences.