Feb
11
2010

Zune Software 4.2 and the case of disappearing functionality

Last week saw the push of the latest release of the Zune desktop software, normally a new release is the indicator of new functionality. Following the update there was a flurry of postings to the Zune community forums complaining about the mysterious disappearance of serveral parts of functionality, namely all of the social functionality and the recently introduced Smart DJ function. As these posts rolled a pattern emerged…they were all from international users.

Now Microsoft has prior for attempting to block international users from accessing the Zune social, which I have discussed at length here before so rather than drag that up again we’ll focus on Smart DJ. Smart DJ was introduced with the Zune 4.0 software and greeted with applause, it provided the functionality to automatically build a playlist of similar songs based on a selected album, track or artist ala last.fm. This feature obviously adds value to the product, and competes well against iTunes Genius playlist, there seems to have been no reason to limit this to US users only.

Fortunately EwanD over on the Zune.net forums has posted a cunning work around which re-enables Smart DJ.

”

  • Close Zune software
  • - Run Regedit.exe
  • - Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Zune
  • - right-click and create a new Key under \ Zune, called FeaturesOverride
  • - Open that key (folder, essentially) and right-click, create a new DWORD (32-bit) value called QuickMixLocal
  • - Open that key, set the value to “1″
  • - Start Zune software … et voila!
“
Under that FeaturesOverride key it is possible to add a number of new values which re-enable all of the functionality which international users have been blocked from.

· SignInAvailable

· QuickPlay

· Marketplace

· Picks

· Videos

· Social

· MusicVideos

· Podcasts

· Channels

· Games

· SubscriptionFreeTracks

· FirstLaunchIntroVideo

· MBRRental

· MBRPurchase

· MBRPreview

Hopefully the sheer number of international users which have expressed their feelings over this direct attack on them will provoke Microsoft to take strides to make the Zune platform available outside of the United States.

By Andy | Posted in technology | Tagged | Comments (0)
Nov
09
2009

Not dead merely sleeping

…well damn its been a while since I’ve written a post on here. But life has been more than a little hectic over the last few months, exams, moving house, graduation and starting a new job.

Well four years after I started there I have graduated from the University of Kent with an upper second class bachelor of science with honors in Computer Science with a year in industry. It has without a doubt been an amazing four years, I’ve met some brilliant people, experienced so much and enjoyed myself immensely. I’d like to thank all of those who have been there over the last four years, early morning drives to practice, late night coding sessions, many awesome nights out and just kicking back to watch the world pass by. Without these people I would not have been able to achieve what I have.

I’ve been very fortunate that I’ve been able to secure myself a job, which I will not go into on here for many reasons. Its nice to be in a position to apply what I have learnt over the last four years, spend my working day with people who have an genuine interest in technology and most of all enjoy the work I do. After all what is a 40+ hour working week if you are only waiting for the other 128 hours?

By Andy | Posted in University | Tagged , | Comments (0)
Mar
04
2009

Dick Wall Open Lecture

Last December I was fortunate enough to attend the ‘Annual Centre of Excellence Distinguished Lecture’ from Dick Wall (of The Java Posse fame). At the time I was intending on writing a short post about it but it never quite materialised, however the other day while rummaging around the departments open-lecture series announcements I came across the recording from this lecture and I thought I would share it with you all. It is publicly available from the Kent Computer Science department here. Dick covered a range of very interesting topics including the progress of Computer Science in the last 20 years, the abundance of frameworks, open source, stateless computing and the Furby grid.

One of the points Dick mentioned that really grabbed my attention was the habit of graduates to build everything from the ground up dispite the wide availablity of open source solutions. Instead he emphasizes how much more important it is to work on the problems no one has tackled yet, it is this ambition to push development that really drives me to continue expanding my knowledge. It was truely fasinating to attend and having spent the last hour enjoying it again I highly recommend you take the time to download it and give it a listen.

By Andy | Posted in Development, University | Tagged , | Comments (0)
Feb
23
2009

ColonyFS an Introduction

Chris has written an interesting introduction to our final year group project on his blog.  Our project has been an to implement a working secure peer-to-peer file system over the internet with anonymity as the key. I can honestly say it’s without a doubt one of the most enjoyable projects I have worked on in a long time.  The core of my work has focused around the development of the Windows GUI and I’m working on a post about this, until then I highly recommend giving Chris’ introduction a read.

By Andy | Posted in Development, University | Tagged , , | Comments (0)
Feb
02
2009

Zune Social - Success at Last!

A while ago I wrote about my experiences with the Zune, my only complaint was the fact that the Zune social features are locked out if you live outside of the continental United states. Well this evening I returned to my attempts to get access, first I tried the FroxyProxy plug-in for FireFox I but could not find a usable US based proxy. However the delay caused in contacting the proxies did allow me to snag the URL for Zune.net’s sign-up page before it redirects to the region error that has been taunting me. After a few further searches I came across a forum post proposing that for some reason Opera was allowing users outside the US past this redirect. I have an alpha build of Opera 10 installed so I gave it a try and …. it works! I’m not sure why exactly but it allows you to complete the sign-up process without a hitch.

So a couple of months after getting my Zune I’ve finally got onto the social. So what do I think? Well it looks like I’m still locked out of the marketplace so I can’t give a view on that, other than that it doesn’t appear to add much to the already solid Zune experience when viewed within the application. However if you look at your Zune.net profile in a browser you see a lot more information. There is the normal web 2.0 recent activity feed and a comments section, in addition to this there are stats tracking most played tracks and artists as well as what your friends are playing. Lots of this information is incorporated into the Zune Badge which is clearly being targeted to the MySpace and Facebook crowds. My friend feed is looking a bit empty at the moment so if this has been of use to you please feel free to add me (AndyMarch)

By Andy | Posted in Reviews, technology | Tagged | Comments (2)
Jan
26
2009

Get Meshed

I got a pretty good reaction to my post about DropBox so I thought I’d share my latest experiment with synchronisation software. Microsoft have released a new version of their Live Mesh software, I had a developer licence for this several months ago but never really had chance to use it in anger. I’ve just downloaded the latest build and I must say it has definitely improved.

Live Mesh has taken a really good approach to cloud storage, they have implemented a web interface that mimics the environment you would find on your Vista desktop. Sure this makes the site a little heavier but makes for a far more familiar experience, which is crucial when sharing files with less technically inclined friends and family. Sharing is one thing that is handled very nicely by Live Mesh including proper file permissioning. One thing I did notice during the course of this reveiw is that Live Mesh has implemented one of the things I cried out for in my review of DropBox and that is the ability to select which files and folders are synchronised to each computer the software is installed on.

One problem I did come across while using Live Mesh on my desktop was with UltraMon. If you haven’t come across UltraMon before and you have a multiple-monitor setup go now and get it by far its the best £30 you can spend. UltraMon’s SmartTask bar spreads across all your screens showing which windows are open on which screen. I rely on this application so much, so when I turned on my machine this morning and could not get it to work I was rather frustrated. After some rummaging I came across the ignore monitor functionality, Live Mesh had added another monitor for remote desktop as display two horribly confusing UltraMon. If you ignore this remote desktop for the purposes of UltraMon you get your taskbar back. A little frustrating but easily remedied.

Regardless of this, the main reason I reinstalled Live Mesh was to see how it behaved with my phone, being able to retrieve my files on the go is incredibly convenient. I was impressed just how smoothly this worked,  just navigate to the Live Mesh website, log-in and traverse your files and download direct to your mobile device. For comparison I also tried this with DropBox, first impressions are good, any files that are in your root directory are easily accessible and download quickly. Unfortunately the Dropbox page doesn’t seem to handle navigating to sub-folders. From what I can gleam from the page source this looks to be because of some JavaScript that is used to display the folder tree interface on a conventional browser. Its unfortunate that this is preventing full use of this service from mobile devices. There seems to be a lot of demand on the DropBox forum for a mobile version fo the page or even the predictable IPhone app so hopefully we’ll see these in the near future.

Both of these tools make it much easier to share your files across devices and access this information on the go. Sure there are glitches and the odd bug or two but overall they are both incredibly impressive and I highly recommend experimenting with both to find which you prefer if you even infrequently need access files remotely. My opinion so far is that DropBox is a better solution for the large majority of people who just want to put files into a folder and go. It will be interesting to see what direction the Live Mesh team take their product as the Live Desktop is crying out to be used as more than a glorified file browser.

By Andy | Posted in Reviews, technology | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)
Jan
14
2009

Mailing List Automation

How often are you at an event and join a mailing list? How often are you on the other side of that table trying to get people to join you mailing list?

Every year for the past three I have been convincing of freshers to join a mailing list. I help run the paintball society at the University of Kent and each year we run a stall at the freshers faire to get new members and promote what we do. The interest has always been good we generally collect a few hundred names and emails, the problem comes when we try to process that information. In the past we had to manually type all that data up to prepare a mailing list, which becomes even more frustrating when you have to decipher someones handwriting. This process would normally take a day or so, however by this time most of the enthusiasm they had for the society had died away. This year we decided on a different approach to the problem, we always have a laptop on the stand to display videos and event pictures to capture people’s interest, why not just get them to enter their information into that? I picked up C# while working at Morgan Stanley and have always been impressed how quickly a developer can produce a decent interface for Windows. So in preparation for the freshers fair I wrote a short application that would sit at the top of the laptop screen allowing interested students to enter their name and email. This application would build two files the first a line by line listing of names and email address and the second a comma separated list of emails, a ready made mailing list!

During the four hours we were able to generate an amazing amount of interest in the society, we collected over 400 names and email addresses most of the people we spoke to commented on how easy the process was compared to other societies. Within an hour of the faire ending we were able to write our introductory email and sent it out to all these addresses. We are having our best ever year for converting mailing list sign-ups to full membership.

Recently I’ve been attending a lot of large recruitment events where companies are trying to do the exact same thing we were and they are falling into the same trap, a paper based system. Someone somewhere will have to type that data up, not too much of a task for a hundred or so emails but once you start to scale that up it rapidly becomes a daunting feat of endurance.

In the hope that this software can be of use to someone I’ve packaged it up and am releasing it here. If you use it please drop me a email and let me know how you got on. I’ve included the source code so if you wish to modify it with company logo’s etc you are welcome to.

Download the rar file  here.

By Andy | Posted in Development | Tagged , , | Comments (0)
Dec
04
2008

Amazon Music Store…unleashed on the UK at last!

Yesterday without any fanfare or spectacle Amazon threw open the doors to their music store for the first time outside of the United States.

I’m glad to say it was worth the wait, I gave it quick try last night and I’m glad to say it’s what I’ve been waiting for. Once you have downloaded the assistance program it is as easy as browsing the store, picking out the tracks you want and checking out. The files (all DRM free I might add) are then downloaded to whatever destination directory you select in the assistant. I directed my downloads to one of my monitored folders and they were instantly detected by the Zune software and synced to my device. It could not be simpler, finally there is a music store that makes it easier to legitimately purchase the music and download it than to pirate it.  One feature I would like to see Amazon implement is the option to automatically close the download assistant on completing the download. While it is not resource hungry it would in my view at least make the process even more seamless than it already is.

If you are of the Apple persuasion Chris reports that it plays nicely with iTunes loading your songs seamlessly to your iTunes library. However if like me you feel the need to avoid iTunes then finally there is a DRM free store with a expansive collection that does not make you pay through the nose. I hope that people make the effort to support this and that Amazon continues to expand their offerings.

By Andy | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)
Nov
18
2008

Update on the Zune and FOM

Just a quick update on what was mentioned by Dom in the comments of my previous post, I’ve just tried the region switch and still can’t access ‘the social’ elements of the Zune. It is asking for a confirmation of terms and conditions on the Zune website which appears to be doing an ip look up for my location. This might work once I’ve got an activated account, looks like i’m still going to need a poxy to do this. Thanks for your comment Dom and I’ll give this another try once I’ve proxied an account.

Future of Mobile was awesome yesturday Chris and myself had a great time, I have a ton of notes of sift through now. I hope to get a post up by the end of the week.

By Andy | Posted in technology | Tagged , , | Comments (1)
Nov
16
2008

Zune - Short Review

My tiny Creative Zen 4gb has been on its last legs for a while now so when it finally died the other day I was not massively surprised.  I had been looking around for a new MP3 player for a while but nothing out there caught my fancy, Creative’s design team seems to be on some experimental type of drugs and iRiver has continued down the insane interface line a little too far for my liking…then there is the iPod.  Every time I mention getting a new MP3 player the inevitable is mentioned…”just get an iPod” there is a simple reason i refuse to do this and that is iTunes.  I hate iTunes and i’m pretty sure it hates me back, any time I install iTunes it attempts to purge my music collection. Then there is the DRM issue.

Ok rant over. The Zune appeared to be the solution to my problems, the only issue…they are not available outside of the United States. A quick search turned up a importing company specialising in Zunes and all possible component parts (find them here). However eBay turned up a few second hand, a quick bid later and my Zune was on its way.

The Device:

I have to say the Zune packaging is impressive, having seen how the touch arrives (in a tiny platic case) the Zune unboxing was far more momentous. The Zune itself is dominated by its large and very clear screen,  the devices physicals controls are limited to back, play/pause and the infamous “Squircle”.  The user interface is really what drew me to the Zune, the landing page is very clearly laid out and beautifully designed, clicking into the music menu shows you a view by album by clicking right or left on the squicle allows you to see your collection by artist, genre, songs or play list. It is moving through these lists that the true power of the control is evident, swipe a finger over the squircle and it rapidly accelerates through the list, yes I know the iPod Touch has a similar feature but once you reach roughly where you want to be in the list you can click up or down with the edges of the control to move one item at a time, the tactical feedback provided by this gives you much better control.  I have heard many people crying out for haptic feedback on the Ipod Touch/ IPhone and it will be interesting to see whether or not Apple chooses to implement this.

The large screen of the 80GB Zune begs to be used for video, natively the Zune will play any .m4v, .mp4 or wmv. I loaded a couple of high quality paintball videos to the device from my library, the results are very impressive, great clarity and colour. I’m looking forward to a nice long train journey to get the best out of this!

The Software:

The Zune software is a truly beautiful looking piece of code, unfortunately it seems to suffer from some terrible performance issues, right now just playing a track it is consuming ten percent of my duel core cpu and using 120,000k of memory. A search for Zune software memory issues throws up a large number of users suffering from similar or worse issues, especially those using Windows Power Packs.  That however is the complaint i can make about this otherwise great piece of software. The control over your collection is superb and it does all of this without having to mutilate my music collection (iTunes take note!). The playback on the device has a very impressive visualisation mode The smart sync works excellently, especially with podcasts with which you can set the number of episodes you wish to have on the device at one time, removing older podcasts automatically to replace with the latest downloaded content.

A short gripe:

The Zune is a US only product, OK getting hold of one in the rest of the world is not a major issue, either hunt one down on eBay or face a extra charge on import duty. However I feel that I’m missing out of a major part of the Zune experience…the Zune Social. If you are outside of the continental United States any attempt to access the Zune.net features such as the Album Store and the Zune Pass is greeted with a simple denial “The Zune service is not yet available in your region.”.  The Zune has been supposedly on its way to Europe for over a year now I’d love to see these features over here, until they are I guess I’m going to have to try proxying past the IP restriction.

I’m really impressed with the Zune, if you are looking for a high capacity mp3/video player and don’t want to end up with an Ipod I recommend having a look at the Zune.  I’m going to have chance to use it extensively tomorrow as I’m off to the Future of Mobile with Chris. I hope to get a write up about that event up later this week.

By Andy | Posted in Reviews, technology | Comments (4)