*ahem*

It seems I may have a family member about to start blogging. ‘course, it’ll be about boring things like Soccer.

Right, Brad?

First up, Microsoft has announced “Xbox Live Video” - basicly a download service for TV and Movies. No details on pricing as yet, but it looks like a pretty good deal.

On the TV front it allows you to purchase the shows, and keep indefinitely, and re-download them as much as you like (or your ISP will allow). Given the deployed user base of the Xbox 360, this is certainly a big move for MS, and is a (big) step towards edging out the other pretty much non-existant Movie-Download services.
You can also watch them on any of your other XBox 360’s, or take the movie (on the detatchable drive) over to a friend’s console and watch there.

Movies are currently only “for rent” - they expire after a day or two.
All of the HD content is delivered are as WMVHD, and 720p w/ 5.1 Surround, I assume SD content is also delivered as WMVHD, but with lower resolution.

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Over on the code front - they’ve shipped Version 3.0 of the .NET Framework.
I was only telling my boss on Friday that it’d probably be out sometime in the new year, I guess I was wrong. (Maybe that’ll be the next version of Visual Studio - Orcas?)
Now we can tell the Intranet Platform guys at work to forget about going for .NET 2.0 (Yeah, we’re still on .NET 1.1), and go straight for .NET 3.0.

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Staying on the code front, ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 Beta 2 Library (aka Atlas - which is much easier to say) is out now.
This lets developers (like me) do fancy stuff* on the client side — without having to do a whole lot of additional work in a different development environment, with a different language.

Practical example of what kind of fancy stuff I can do, that actually improves the user productivity: Customer-search-as-you-type.

I can be typing in a customer/service key, it automaticly does a search, and displays the results right there - no page reloads.
Typically the time it takes for the system to do that search is less than it takes for someone to switch to a mouse and click the “Search” button. It’s always faster than waiting for a page to re-load with search results. 

More AJAX goodness == good fun, good productivity increase, happier users, happier management. Being able to do this stuff easily == happier developer.

* = Fancy Stuff is the technical term for it. Other accepted terms are “”Magic” or “Holy crap that’s fast”

Someone please tell me what the background music to this ad is, please?

(I guess it’s an effective ad if it’s succeeded in getting me to think about it)

I won $26 in the office sweeps for the Melbourne Cup.

Yay.

From ABC News (AU): Google warns Aust copyright laws could cripple Internet.

Looks like there’s more implications… And the Senate Committee is due to submit it’s findings on Monday Friday, by my count.

I took this pic on Tuesday last week, so it missed (just outside the acceptance range for the Whirlpool Photo Comp 21 ”Man-Made Meets Nature”).

Thought it was interesting enough to pop up here… not sure if I’m satisfied by the cropping, but it’ll do for now.

Just got this in an email:

Yesterday we were advised that during the period 23/12/06 to 7/01/07, it is intended for the [department] to effectively ‘close down’.
It is intended that unless extenuating circumstances apply, all staff are to take leave over this period.

According to our systems, the time specified would amount to 51.45 Leave Hours* (7 days, or 1 working week + 2 days). According to the leave projection thingy, I’ll have about 103.88 Leave Hours accrued as at 2007-01-07 (14 working Days, or just shy of 3 weeks).

Dangit, I don’t want to take the leave just yet.

* = These are decimalised values. One working day is 7.35 Hours, or 7 hours, 21 minutes. (Why they have twenty-one minutes, I don’t know)