Pablo Averbuj

Encoding and streaming to the XBox 360

Some very kind friends of mine availed me of an XBox 360 and Halo 3, an act for which I continue to thank them every time I see them. Having owned the original XBox (thanks to Vlad, are you sensing a pattern?), I was interested to see the next iteration, which I hadn’t to date. It’s a very solid product and I’m pretty happy with it.

I was pleased that it automatically detected my Twonkymedia server but it wasn’t playing my videos properly. The playback worked for a few seconds but then would subsequently deteriorate the further into the video it got. I don’t think it was a bandwidth issue because the original XBox with XBMC had no troubles playing the video. I concluded it was just some wonkiness between how I had encoded and what the XBox was capable of. I tried downloading some movie trailers and they played fine from the same device. My next task was to figure out what encoding settings to use.

I’d ripped all of Anna’s DVDs with Handbrake to h264/avi and those were having trouble playing. I searched the web hoping to find an XBox 360 preset for Handbrake but all I found was other people looking for the same. I finally remembered that Andrew had mentioned that he was playing videos across the network, so I consulted him. He suggested using the Apple TV preset, and that still wouldn’t work for me, until I figured out that Twonkymedia was keying off of the file extension. Changing the extension from mp4 to avi fixed Twonkymedia. Once I realized that things started working perfectly.

BootCamp on Tiger (Post Lepoard)

So Apple did a fairly crass thing by terminating Boot Camp for Tiger when Lepoard launched. I was replacing my Dell at work with a Mac and wanted to have a native install of XP for troubleshooting. I couldn’t find Boot Camp 1.4 which was presumably able to work until Dec 31 because Apple had pulled it, but I did find an old copy of 1.2 on my laptop but it wouldn’t run because it was past expiration. How do you solve this impossible problem? Uh, set the clock back. I circumvented annoying beta policy by the same technology with which I avoided nag screens in shareware in 1996. Lame.

Bugs vs Defects

I read and became persuaded by the idea that calling software errors “bugs” is too cutesy and downplays the significance of the problem. On the other hand, as a developer, there are times when my software doesn’t work correctly but it is not my fault. And calling my software defective because the API doesn’t behave as documented (or is undocumented) is unfair. This is something that has vexed me in the course of my job and I finally think I have a reasonable distinction.

A bug is a defect once-removed (indirection, if you like). My software can simulataneously have defects and bugs. The distinction is whether I am responsible for the error. Relatedly, documentation can be defective.

The whole issue seems like a nuance to me and it has not been something I have been comfortable broaching at work but has come up recently in the terminology of some tools we are evaluating. I think the distinction is important but for practical purposes likely to be lost on the folks who are most concerned about the problems (usually not the developer).

An alternate distinction, and maybe an easier one to sell is core functionality versus non-core functionality. The core functionality of banking software is around maintaining transaction integrity: a math error is a defect; a button that is misaligned is a bug; a crash that corrupts the database is a defect; the saved backup on exit not working is a bug. Again, I think this is too subjective and subtle to be useful, but I think it’s at least a distinction that business people could grasp.

Webex = crap

Just joined a meeting that was using meetmenow.webex.com. Impressively crappy for a tool to share your desktop. No Mac support, requires ActiveX control, and on XP it shit the bed with both FF and IE6! (Found the bug, it doesn’t properly handle the case where the task bar is not at the bottom). This problem has been solved before and solved better. At work we use Cisco Unified Meetingplace which is actually pretty nice.