Incredible, indeed. A new version crept onto the www yesterday with an expiry date in November, so we'd suggest you replace your current version with this one.
Your projects will still work - nothing at that low level needed to be changed, and if it did we'd have made sure your work was safe.
So.. download it, play with it, create superb videos, become internationally recognised and ludicrously wealthy, and... ah... drop us a note about it...
Thursday, 24 September 2009
Tuesday, 8 September 2009
Windows 7 XP Mode - Very Cool Indeed
It's been a while since I needed to use Virtual Machines - they used to be a big part of my life, and suddenly they are again. I really feel the need to congratulate the Windows team on the new Virtual PC and XP Mode options in Windows 7 - what a truly superb job they've done.
One minor gotcha was trying to read an existing VM though - to enable the integration capabilities (so your VM can see the host machine and the internet), the VM starts asking for device drivers for USB (this being some of the clever stuff the new version has added). Where are those going to come from? Your Windows XP disc of course. How are you going to read that without the integration capabilities working? You ain't.
Unless someone knows better? Holler if you do...
One minor gotcha was trying to read an existing VM though - to enable the integration capabilities (so your VM can see the host machine and the internet), the VM starts asking for device drivers for USB (this being some of the clever stuff the new version has added). Where are those going to come from? Your Windows XP disc of course. How are you going to read that without the integration capabilities working? You ain't.
Unless someone knows better? Holler if you do...
Skype impact on ASP.NET!!!!
Moving to Windows 7, a couple of weird things happened, so (just in case you see them too) it turns out that the new Skype client (4.1) listens to http on port 80, as an alternative to its default port, and that's enough to prevent ASP.NET debugging your dev site. It's the kind of interaction between applications you'd never look for, and I'm hugely indebted to Martin Kulov - if you see the not terribly helpful "server committed a protocol violation" message, there's a very real chance if you kill the switch in Skype that lets it listen on 80 all will be well.
Also I suddenly discover I need to enable Windows authentication for VS2008-generated web sites - not sure whether that's fall out from the move to Windows 7 or not...
Also I suddenly discover I need to enable Windows authentication for VS2008-generated web sites - not sure whether that's fall out from the move to Windows 7 or not...
Thursday, 27 August 2009
Off Topic...
We've just returned from the Edinburgh Festival, and my, what a splendid event it is. Not a cheap couple of days at all, in fact, quite the opposite, but a fantastic experience. If you're into drama, comedy, music or dance, or some combination, or all, of the above, it's got to be on your agenda. And if you're not, Edinburgh's a magnificent city so if all else fails you can drink in the architecture and the palpable buzz.
One lingering thought is that technology has pretty much failed to invade the world of art. We saw some plays which included video, and that was it. As a token, LED spotlights are everywhere, but that's hardly the point.
Of course there isn't much of an intersection between the arts and geek communities, but when you look at the presentation of a pop group from thirty years ago - drums, guitars, microphones, singers - and you look now, nothing much has changed.
Technologically we have the ability to create a much richer experience for the audience, and the tools are there (Vixer anyone?), and undoubtedly the creativity is there too, so where's the fusion?
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to devise a new art form that exploits the ubiquity of graphical technologies. If you take your show to Edinburgh next year, let us know eh?
One lingering thought is that technology has pretty much failed to invade the world of art. We saw some plays which included video, and that was it. As a token, LED spotlights are everywhere, but that's hardly the point.
Of course there isn't much of an intersection between the arts and geek communities, but when you look at the presentation of a pop group from thirty years ago - drums, guitars, microphones, singers - and you look now, nothing much has changed.
Technologically we have the ability to create a much richer experience for the audience, and the tools are there (Vixer anyone?), and undoubtedly the creativity is there too, so where's the fusion?
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to devise a new art form that exploits the ubiquity of graphical technologies. If you take your show to Edinburgh next year, let us know eh?
Tuesday, 18 August 2009
ASP.NET- Unable to Start Debugging
We've been around ASP.NET since it was a baby, and have lost track of the number of times we've seen the pesky "unable to start debugging" message from Visual Studio. There are a zillion things that can cause it, and about two years ago we found the zillionth and first - one of the Windows updates hijacked a critical file.
Two years is a long time, and having just encountered yet another dead stop, we've just had to go through the whole sorry process again, to rediscover the same issue.
If you're at your wits' end with the self-same message, take a look at your "hosts" file (no, we didn't know we had one either)...
It's in the snappily-titled c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc and it's called simply "hosts" - it doesn't have a file extension. You'll need to be running as the administrator to mess with it (or right click on Notepad and take the "run as administrator" option) and inside (apart from some comments) you'll find the line:
127.0.0.1 localhost
and you may or may not find a second line:
::1 localhost
That second line may have been trashed - if it ain't there, add it in and save the file, and savour the joys of being able to create a new ASP.NET web site in IIS and debug it once again. Yip, it sounds like science fiction, but it's true.
We're a little unclear on the significance of it (and if anyone finds a human-readable piece on what on Earth an IPv6 loopback is do let us know). We're client-side graphics geeks, not server-side infrastructure boffins, and we're also sure there are good reasons for the horrific complexity of web site infrastructure. Okay, we're not at all sure there are.
In passing, if you ever wondered how the string 'localhost' became associated with the IP address '127.0.0.1', it's because of this file. You can add extra entries here too, so if you wanted to associate 'www.Vixer.co.uk' with '127.0.0.1' as well, you'd add an extra line into this file.
We have a side project running which is all about making the massively complex digestible through the use of graphics, and while it was never designed to deal with things that have grown up through the tangled machinations of standards bodies combined with knee-jerk reactions to unanticipated threats from hacker vermin, sprinkled liberally with dollops of glue to deal with its own ghastly legacy, it would nevertheless be an interesting exercise to try to go from "it's like this" to "and this is why". Still, we're ranting now...
Two years is a long time, and having just encountered yet another dead stop, we've just had to go through the whole sorry process again, to rediscover the same issue.
If you're at your wits' end with the self-same message, take a look at your "hosts" file (no, we didn't know we had one either)...
It's in the snappily-titled c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc and it's called simply "hosts" - it doesn't have a file extension. You'll need to be running as the administrator to mess with it (or right click on Notepad and take the "run as administrator" option) and inside (apart from some comments) you'll find the line:
127.0.0.1 localhost
and you may or may not find a second line:
::1 localhost
That second line may have been trashed - if it ain't there, add it in and save the file, and savour the joys of being able to create a new ASP.NET web site in IIS and debug it once again. Yip, it sounds like science fiction, but it's true.
We're a little unclear on the significance of it (and if anyone finds a human-readable piece on what on Earth an IPv6 loopback is do let us know). We're client-side graphics geeks, not server-side infrastructure boffins, and we're also sure there are good reasons for the horrific complexity of web site infrastructure. Okay, we're not at all sure there are.
In passing, if you ever wondered how the string 'localhost' became associated with the IP address '127.0.0.1', it's because of this file. You can add extra entries here too, so if you wanted to associate 'www.Vixer.co.uk' with '127.0.0.1' as well, you'd add an extra line into this file.
We have a side project running which is all about making the massively complex digestible through the use of graphics, and while it was never designed to deal with things that have grown up through the tangled machinations of standards bodies combined with knee-jerk reactions to unanticipated threats from hacker vermin, sprinkled liberally with dollops of glue to deal with its own ghastly legacy, it would nevertheless be an interesting exercise to try to go from "it's like this" to "and this is why". Still, we're ranting now...
Tuesday, 11 August 2009
Gone Quiet?
Yip - we've been quiet for a little while... it's the Summer so we're dodging the rain clouds and traffic jams in search of a photon of sunlight. In between, we're working on a build for a specific customer (nope, we can't tell you) but some of the goodies that are going into that will find their way into the mainstream product which is exciting.
We're also testing under Windows 7 (which went live just at the tail end of last week) and thus far all is well. One opportunity Windows 7 gives us is to do away with the need to grab video frames from the screen - there was a bug in previous versions of the .NET Framework that pushed us down that route and in theory it's fixed now. Hence we'll be looking into a Windows 7 version (or, rather, a .NET 4 version) in parallel with the XP and Vista version that's running wild out there now.
Exciting times....
We're also testing under Windows 7 (which went live just at the tail end of last week) and thus far all is well. One opportunity Windows 7 gives us is to do away with the need to grab video frames from the screen - there was a bug in previous versions of the .NET Framework that pushed us down that route and in theory it's fixed now. Hence we'll be looking into a Windows 7 version (or, rather, a .NET 4 version) in parallel with the XP and Vista version that's running wild out there now.
Exciting times....
Friday, 31 July 2009
Whaddya Think?
A request that comes up from time to time is for a way to make it easier to track over selected points in a picture - imagine a wedding photo where you'd want to fly the camera over each of a number of faces, zoom in and then zoom back again, effectively defining a flight path over the image.
You and we know you can do that today by stringing together several of the 3D Effects, but one school of thought says that's a bit fiddly, while the other says if we add a special way of solving that one problem we'll make the interface more complicated and hence scarier.
It's the age-old debate between power and ease-of-use - do we make it clever, or do we make it easy? Let us know where you stand - it's your choice....
You and we know you can do that today by stringing together several of the 3D Effects, but one school of thought says that's a bit fiddly, while the other says if we add a special way of solving that one problem we'll make the interface more complicated and hence scarier.
It's the age-old debate between power and ease-of-use - do we make it clever, or do we make it easy? Let us know where you stand - it's your choice....
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