robboek.com

I love the fact that my church puts video of the services online. I hate missing a week, but when I do it's nice to be able to watch online. The only problem is that the videos are too small on my 20" 1600x1200 LCD, and unfortunately they don't currently provide a way to make them larger. To remedy that, I wrote a little web application that pulls the list of videos from the video page and lets me watch them at whatever size I want. If you are interested, check it out.

http://robboek.com/livinghopevideo

Tip: To make your browser go full screen press F11.

Scott Hanselman has a great post on junctions in Windows Vista. Scott mentioned that he was seeing different behavior from David Mohundro surrounding the Documents and Settings folder. I ran my own tests and this is what I came up with.

C:\>dir /ad
 Volume in drive C has no label.
 Volume Serial Number is 6053-B050

 Directory of C:\

09/16/2006 01:38 AM   <DIR>      $Recycle.Bin
09/05/2006 06:12 PM   <DIR>      Boot
09/22/2006 12:59 AM   <DIR>      dnn
08/29/2006 05:35 PM   <JUNCTION> Documents and Settings [C:\Users]
09/05/2006 06:13 PM   <DIR>      MSOCache
09/26/2006 06:25 AM   <DIR>      Program Files
09/20/2006 02:46 PM   <DIR>      ProgramData
09/29/2006 03:41 AM   <DIR>      System Volume Information
09/05/2006 06:00 PM   <DIR>      Users
09/17/2006 09:06 AM   <DIR>      utils
09/23/2006 04:50 PM   <DIR>      Windows
              0 File(s)            0 bytes
             11 Dir(s) 8,475,971,584 bytes free

So I'm seeing "C:\Documents and Settings" as a junction pointing to the new C:\Users. Makes Sense, but a directory listing on Documents and Settings didn't return anything.

C:\Documents and Settings>dir /a
 Volume in drive C has no label.
 Volume Serial Number is 6053-B050

 Directory of C:\Documents and Settings

File Not Found

However, I was able to change to "C:\Documents and Settings\rob", and it behaved as expected, showing the same contents as C:\Users\rob. Looking further, when I double click Documents and Settings in explorer I get an "Access denied" message. Looking at the folder permissions gave the answer, Documents and Settings has a special permission setting of Deny Everyone for "List folder / read data".

There were two new search engines presented at DEMOfall that look interesting.

Retrevo is a consumer electronics search engine. Just enter the product you are looking for and it will return categorized links to product documentation, reviews etc. This fills a much needed gap in my opinion since Google seems to be overrun by shopping sites that provide no useful information.

3DSeek: By Doodling is a start towards something I've been wanting to see in a search engine, they let you search, by drawing a picture. 3DSeek is limited to finding manufactured parts and custom service suppliers and only searched diagrams and 3D models in it's database. I would like to see something similar combined with Google Image Search. They could process all the images using some tracing software like Imagaro Z and store the results enabling users to search by drawing, or uploading an image. There have been several time where this would have been extremely useful. A picture is worth a thousand words...

MojoPac is a new product from RingCube that is essentially a virtual computer you install on a USB storage device (hard drive, memory key, iPod etc.). You can plug the device into any Windows XP computer and have access to all of your applications, games, documents, and whatever else you install on your MojoPac PC. Your MojoPac PC is isolated from the host machine, so that when you unplug, there is no trace of it being there.

I installed it on my iPod and played around with it a bit, and it shows a lot of promise. The basic install only took around 40MB of space on my iPod, plus whatever applications I installed. It wouldn't work on my Windows Vista machine, but that was to be expected.

Watch the demo of MojoPac from DEMOfall 2006.

You can download a 30 day trial version from the MojoPac website.

Pwilly just sent me a link to this video. It's very well done and will make you think.

You can download it now from the Microsoft Download Center. This version supports the RC1 release of Windows Vista.

Here's a list of some of the more significant enhancements courtesy of Jensen Harris: