Xbox 360 - Top 10 Games on Amazon

		Gears of War 2
		Fallout 3
		Fable II
		Grand Theft Auto IV
		Dead Space
		Call of Duty: World at War
		Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
		Prince of Persia
		Mirror's Edge
		Left 4 Dead

Xbox 360 - Prey

I really like Prey for the Xbox 360. In Prey, you play the role of Tommy, a Cherokee warrior with special mystic abilities including the ability to spirit walk. The game has a great story compared to typical first person shooters and the brief dialog interspersed throughout the levels really adds to the overall experience. The game designers did a great job of visually melding organic and mechanical elements to create other-worldly levels and a deep sense of immersion. Two interesting game play elements include shifting gravity and portals. Both game play elements are often used as puzzles and often grant access to previously inaccessible areas in the game.

See GameSpot for a complete review of Prey.Prey

Fix Extremely Slow Firefox Localhost Connections

Dan Wahlin discovered why Firefox runs so slowly when connecting to localhost. The Firefox IPv6 localhost bug significantly impacts page load times for the integrated Web servers in Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008, as well as local AJAX development. Dan explains the issue and outlines the resolution:

It turns out that the slowness is caused by an IPv6 issue with DNS and can easily be resolved by turning IPv6 support off in Firefox while doing localhost testing. To make the change, type about:config in the address bar, locate the network.dns.disableIPv6 setting and double-click on it to set it to true. This does the trick for the Firefox localhost issue on Vista and everything is running fast again.

 

Xbox 360 - Media Center

Scott Hanselman wrote a great article about the Xbox 360 media center and multimedia features found natively in the Xbox 360 console including the New Xbox Experience.

Xbox 360 - New Xbox Experience (NXE)

On November 19, 2008, Microsoft launched the New Xbox Experience (NXE) for the Xbox 360 console in North America. Most people with Xbox Live have probably already heard about the new avatars; however, a really slick feature is the ability to embed your avatar in a webpage by linking to a special image directly on Microsoft's servers.

Here's an example of my Xbox Live avatar:

To display your avatar on a Web page, insert an image with one of the following URLs:

http://avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/Verious/avatar-body.png
http://avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/Verious/avatarpic-l.png
http://avatar.xboxlive.com/avatar/Verious/avatarpic-s.png

Replace "Verious" with your Xbox Live screen name.

Emption - Comparison Shopping

The new Emption comparison shopping website launched today.

Emption is a comparison shopping website that has developed unique technology to improve and simplify the shopping experience. Shopper's can search, browse by category, and filter products to quickly compare prices and find the best deals.

Even though Emption is in beta, it already has a number of exciting features.

MySQL Row Number

Use the following MySQL query to return a row number for each record in a recordset:

SELECT @row := @row + 1 AS `RowNumber`, SomeTable.*
FROM SomeTable, (SELECT @row := 0) `DerivedTable`;

Explanation

MySQL allows variables to be assigned and selected in the same statement; therefore, @row := @row + 1 increments the value of the @row variable by one and selects the result. Because the default configuration of MySQL does not allow multiple queries, the value of @row is initialized through a sub-select in the FROM portion of the query. It is important to note that MySQL requires a name for each derived table, in this case the derived table was named DerivedTable. SomeTable and SomeTable.* should be replaced with your table and field list respectively.

Alternate Syntax

If MySQL is configured to allow multiple statements per command (this is turned off by default to prevent several types of SQL injection attacks), you can use the following alternate syntax, which does not require a derived table:

SET @i = 0;
SELECT @i := @i + 1 AS RowNumber, SomeTable.*
FROM SomeTable;

MySQL Numeric Data Types

Signed

Type	Minimum	Maximum
TINYINT (1 Byte)	-128	127
SMALLINT (2 Bytes)	-32768	32767
MEDIUMINT (3 Bytes)	-8388608	8388607
INT (4 Bytes)	-2147483648	2147483647
BIGINT (8 Bytes)	-9223372036854775808	9223372036854775807

Unsigned

Type	Minimum	Maximum
TINYINT (1 Byte)	0	255
SMALLINT (2 Bytes)	0	65535
MEDIUMINT (3 Bytes)	0	16777215
INT (4 Bytes)	0	4294967295
BIGINT (8 Bytes)	0	18446744073709551615

Source MySQL Numeric Data Types

Microsoft to Ship jQuery with Visual Studio

Microsoft has announced they will be shipping the JavaScript jQuery library with Visual Studio. From the jQuery Blog:

We have two pieces of fantastic, albeit serendipitous, news today: Both Microsoft and Nokia are taking the major step of adopting jQuery as part of their official application development platform. Not only will they be using it for their corporate development but they will be providing it as a core piece of their platform for developers to build with.

This is important news for developers because they will now be able to standardize on the jQuery library for all JavaScript development.

Not So Delicious First Impressions

I do not a very good first impression of Delicious:

Sorry, there is a temporary problem. Adding a new bookmark failed.

Please use your browser's Back button and try again. If this problem persists please contact support.

Hmm... isn't adding a bookmark the main feature of the service? Delicious has now broken over a dozen times in the first 10 minutes of use.

I would think adding bookmarks would be rock solid.

Ironically, many of the support pages fail to load properly because Delicious has mixed secure content with non-secure content causing warning messages to pop-up on a regular basis.

Delicious

Like Twitter, I have been hearing about Delicious for awhile now so I finally signed-up. I'm really glad they changed the main URL from http://del.icio.us/ to http://delicious.com/, the former was a challenge to remember (and type).

Follow me on Delicious:

http://delicious.com/Verious/

Web-based Services

I recently stumbled across Username Check, a website that lets you check if your preferred username is available at a variety of popular (and several obscure) websites. The complete list of websites is as follows:

• Behance
• Blogger
• Brightkite
• Colourlovers
• Corkd
• Dailymotion
• Delicious
• Digg
• Diigo
• Disqus
• Ebay
• Etsy
• Favtape
• Ffffound
• Flickr
• Friendfeed
• Funnyordie
• Hellotxt
• Hexday
• Identica
• Ilike
• ILikeLoveIt
• Imageshack
• Isfingawesome
• Jaiku
• Koornk
• Kwippy
• Lastfm
• Linkedin
• Livejournal
• Magnolia
• Meemi
• Mixx
• Multiply
• Myspace
• Pandora
• Picasa
• Plurk
• Posterous
• Pownce
• Rejaw
• Smugmug
• Stumbleupon
• Technorati
• Tinyurl
• Tipjoy
• Tumblr
• Twitter
• Typepad
• Vimeo
• Virb
• Visualizeus
• Vox
• Wordpress
• Xbox-live
• Yahoo
• Yoono
• Yotify
• Youtube
• Zooomr

Twitter

It was bound to happen sooner or later. I have been hearing about Twitter for awhile now so I finally signed-up.

Follow me or leave your username in the comments so I can follow you:

http://twitter.com/Verious/

Windows Live ID Web Authentication SDK

Recently I have been researching Single Sign-On options to streamline the user's experience. One interesting provider I found is Windows Live ID Web Authentication, which allows visitors to logon to a website using their Hotmail or Windows Live account. Microsoft describes the Windows Live ID Web Authentication SDK as follows:

The Windows Live™ ID Web Authentication software development kit (SDK) gives you a platform-neutral way to bring the power of the Windows Live ID authentication service to your own Web site.

According to Microsoft the benefits include:

• Ability to use Windows Live gadgets and controls to incorporate authenticated Windows Live services into websites
• HTTP-based, platform-neutral interface for implementing Windows Live ID authentication in existing websites, even if they are hosted by third-parties
• Freedom from the technical details of authentication
• Huge user base: any of the millions of users who have a Windows Live ID can login to Windows Live ID Web Authentication websites

Download Windows Live Web Authentication SDK 1.1

Manage Windows Live Web Authentication Websites

Experience the Nintendo Wii

I definitely encourage everyone to checkout the following link to a really cool Adobe Flash-based Nintendo Wii advertisement. The concept and implementation are first class.

Experience the Nintendo Wii