The XBOX Media Center is now codenamed Atlantis and is NOT just for XBOX anymore.  It now runs on Mac, Linux and Windows!  So you don't know what XBMC is?   Well it has been the best home movie player for years!  It started as a project on sourceforge.net for the original XBOX to play movies and music and has been one of the most popular projects on sourceforge.  Best of all it plays every file format you would ever want it to.  It plays all them torrent/Usenet type movies.  It also plays right from a .ISO file without the file needing to be burned.  It will even go into a .rar and play it without extracting.  Need I say more?   Okay how about it is already compiled and has a installer too.  Skip to the download already.

I did not know that XBMC had a windows version so me and the fiancé sat down to watch the Blue Ray version of Batman Dark Night.  I had downloaded the 16 gig .mvk file and had my somewhat trusty VLC Player on my PC ready to go.  I know what your saying, shame on us we downloaded a video.  Well, bite me, we saw this one in the theater and I don't own a Blue Ray DVD player hence why we are using my PC.  But I do own a 30 inch Samsung monitor that is hooked up to my PC. I also don't own any high def televisions and we wanted to see this movie again in high def.  Hence the 30 inch PC monitor.    We watched a good portion of this movie only to find that about every two minutes or so the video skips and continues.  Arghh!  What the heck can it be?  this is my first Blue Ray movie but come on.  I have a quad processor and two gigs of memory and a 300 gig sata drive running 64 bit vista.  So I go to the command line and run perfmon and look for bottle necks but I don't see any.  I figure it has to be caching but I don't have any options in the VLC Player to do caching.  I also run "fsutil behavior set memoryusage 2" with no success.  The video still skips on my PC.  My fiancé  is less than entertained and we "can movie night" and go watch advertisements on TV (crappy night).

Next day I have given up on the whole Blue Ray thing and started thinking about the kid's movie that needs to be push out to the XBOX.   Yeah, I need some programming time today and the kid watches his movies off the original XBOX, not the PC with the 30 inch Samsung.  Sorry, but I need some programming time today kid.  That got me thinking and Googling, what about that lovely XBMC program that the kid uses on his XBOX?  OH-Yeah they have done it!  XBMC for windows my problems are solved.  I know that XBMC will not have any issues skipping but I did have one small problem that is easily fixed.  The windows download (here by the way) would not work on my less than wonderful VISTA 64 bit computer.  This is somewhat understandable because I can not get a lot of things to work on 64 bit Vista.  I know the real problem is the 64 bit part.  This is likely just because Microsoft sucks and has no style. It is totally understandable, that XBMC's alpha software does not yet run on a crappy 64 bit version of Vista  yet.  Getting anything to run on 64 bit has been a ongoing pain.  Why is that?  64 bit processors are pretty common place now a days.

To overcome XBMC not running on 64 Bit Vista I simply download what the XBMC team is calling XBMC Live and burned it to CD.  The CD is bootable and therefore it does not run the Vista OS at all.  The bootable XBMC version appears to use it's own tiny Linux OS and it DOES NOT INSTALL anything onto my PC if that is what I wish.  XBMC Live simply runs off the CD! Thank god for that!  We now don't need to rely on Microsoft to NOT break anything for XBMC to work!  Please XBMC team let's remove the "Live" from the name it sounds like you guys are going to charge us a monthly fee like Bill Gates.  They don't charge anything by the way, XBMC is Free and Open Source not Microsoft.

After booting XBMC I configured it to find the movie on my server with a SMB share or Samba share for you Linux people.  What is a SMB share?  Well a Samba is what the rest of the world calls a windows shared folder.  This part was really easy for me because this is what I'm use to doing.  I have a server in my basement that runs 24/7 that I call it Black-Server.  So Black-Server is wired via a firewall router to two XBOXes and one computer.  Black-Server also happens to be the server that is delivering you this web page right now.  I sometime sing Cream's Song "White Room" but replace the lyrics with "In Black-Server with white hard-drive's.. In the Basement".  But my sanity is another blog altogether, black server has a file share on it.  The point being is that the computer with the big 30 inch monitor has a gigabit connection to the server in the basement where the movie was stored.  The movie is 16 gigs and I don't have any media upstairs that has room for it.  Black-Server has plenty of media in it's white hard drives where I keep all the movies, in the basement. (okay I'll work on the song later.)

So now a quick diagram in case you got lost :

Don't let Samba file sharing scare you into thinking this is a large project, you might not even need Samba or Networking to play your movies. I would also dare say that your not as nutty me.  First off your computer will likely run XBMC's install because it's NOT the 64 BIT version of Vista and 2ndly you will not be doing file shares all over the house to two XBOX consoles and one PC.  If you are like me and already have two computers on the same network the hard work of networking is done.  Your basically just entering in a \\computer_name\folder_share_name\ and User IDs and Passwords into the dialog boxes in the XBMC application.  The XBMC application is not like the older version of XBMC either where you needed to put this information into a xml file however this is still an option.   We now have dialog boxes and your PC's keyboard at your disposal.  So go for it easy stuff but if your need to read about the Samba Stuff try here.  Expert PC (likely you) can really skip the manual just try the XBMC install here.

Have you ever wanted to monitor a website for changes?  Perhaps you just can't wait until the very next change to (Name Your Favorite Web Site) to occur.  Perhaps you just want to monitor a web page so that you are alerted to any errors.  What ever the case, this free download might be for you.   Click here to install.

Here for your downloading pleasure is a small and nifty gadget that will monitor any web page for any changes.  I've named this gadget RadPop.  Once a change has occurred on the web page that you are monitoring you will receive a pop-up like the one displayed in the picture below.   The picture below is displayed in a continuous loop; it is showing how it slides up from the system tray.  It also slides back down after a configurable amount of time and you can simply click it closed with the red x.  It is designed to not toally distract you but rather catch your eye. 

 <--The application hides in your system tray when minimized and at startup.

The RadPop application  is just right of my red blinking camera above.   The message displayed in the pop-up area is also clickable and will take you directly to the web page that you are monitoring.   RadPop is designed to hide and not be annoying and only becomes noticeable if a change occurs on the web page that you are monitoring.   If you leave the defaults after you install you should notice it activate a pop-up in a few minutes.  By default it monitors a html page on my site that is already programmed to change every minute. This is a good way to test it out before changing the settings. 

I have been using my RadPop application at work for a couple of years to monitor a seven server web farm.  Our servers are load balanced by a product called Radware.  This hardware router has a webpage of its own that displays the current status of each individual server.  If this status web page were to ever change then one of our seven servers has either moved out of or into the server load.  If the router has removed a server from load balancing then I want to know about it!  However there are six more servers doing the exact same thing, so no rush I just need to quickly check what happened.

RadPop is very customizable Web Monitor. 

Below is the configuration panel where you can make changes to what is monitored and how the pop-up should appear.

Dot Net Blogs free application. 

I started this Web Monitor project a few years ago after following a Project on Code Project.  Thanks to John O'Byrne for the original slick popup.  My contribution has been to allow users to enter a url and select how often to monitor the site.  Additionally I have created a "Save My Settings" button and the last saved settings are reloaded at startup.  

The program starts by getting the stored settings from an xml file.   It then takes a finger print or a MD5 hash of the web site to be monitored.  It starts up a reoccurring counter and waits until it needs to look again at the web site for changes.  When RadPop again looks at the web site it gets another MD5 Hash of the web page and now compares it to see if they are the same.  If they are the same it continues otherwise a pop-ups will occur in one of three different looking styles.  

This has been a really fun program to write and is a really good VB.Net beginners program.  I can think of a dozen enhancements that could be done to it.  This is  the reason I have released it here as a Click Once deploy.  If I ever get a good reason to enhance this application further the people that have downloaded the application from my Click Once page will get the revised version the next time they run RadPop.

But what I really hope is that if someone else changes the code to do even more cool things and has a learning experience for themselves.  So I have included my source for download here.   A future addition could be the ability to monitor multiple sites or make the monitoring part proxy aware.  Anyone care to take up the cause?

DownLoad Here :

ListTable.sql (1.67 kb)

Switch the query analyzer to display results in text and now you can copy cut and paste the columns that you need.