Section: Blogs

Custom Armor Configurations in Halo 3

Oct 24, 2007 1 min.

In Halo 3 multi-player you can customize your SPARTAN or Elite’s armor, with different variations unlocked by various achievements/activities in game (including one that can only be unlocked by being a Bungie employee). You can find out more about the different variations here, but it turns out that your profile on Bungie.net knows what choices you’ve made and displays your current armor configuration on the web site. If you go to the Halo 3 Model Generator though, created by a community member, you can find the picture of any particular gamer you’d like (including yourself, which is how I found my picture, below) or create a custom image to plan out your own armor customizations.

The code for my blog site is now available on codeplex.com

Oct 24, 2007 1 min.

For anyone who is interested in using the code behind this site for their own blog, or who just finds reading code to be a fun pastime, you can go to http://www.codeplex.com/oxite to check it out. Of course, there are other blog engines up there, including blog engine .NET (which appears to be very highly supported and recommended by many folks), if you are in the market for some free blogging code.

Xbox 360 Arcade System announced

Oct 23, 2007 2 min.

For the price of $280, you can now get a new edition of the Xbox 360 console. This one is similar to the original core system, but with HDMI output, a 256mb memory card (so you can play and save your games right out of the box), a wireless controller, and five full arcade games. Perfect if you are more of a casual gamer or if: you have an existing 360 with a hard drive and would like one with a HDMI output you need a DVD player and/or a Media Center Extender (play all your Zune and Windows Media Center or Windows Media Player content in the living room!

We added a Silverlight player to Channel 8 today

Sep 15, 2007 1 min.

We used a modified version of one of the templates that ships with Expression Media Encoder as our player… and channel 8 has become the first of our sites (which include Channel 9, Channel 10, VisitMix.com and more) to have a Silverlight video player on them. And, below here, you can see that player embedded into this blog post… Note that I had to remove the ‘scrubbing bar’ due to some odd bug around releasing the mouse after scrubbing was completed… but we’ll figure that out and get it back in as soon as we can.

Tracking RSS Feed Statistics

Sep 5, 2007 3 min.

A few of my friends and co-workers have jumped on the FeedBurner bandwagon, and I’ve been pretty impressed with the stats they’ve been gathering. I’m not willing to send my readers off to someone else’s service though (even though there are some reasonably safe ways to do that), so I started to think about how best to gather similar info myself. One idea would be to ship the IIS logs from my site back to my PC on a regular basis and run them through a LogParser script that would figure out all the stats for me… but that seems like a rather manual (or difficult to automate) and data transfer intensive method.

Added Silverlight Streaming support to Channel 9’s forums

Sep 4, 2007 1 min.

Continuing on in the same pattern as my last post, adding Soapbox support to C9’s forums, Adam Kinney bugged me a bit and I went ahead and added support for Silverlight Streaming as well. It will be interesting to see if (or more accurately, how long before) someone turns this to malicious purposes.

Added Support for Soapbox Videos on Channel 9

Aug 30, 2007 1 min.

When I started on the C9 dev team, one of the first things I did was to remove the ability for users to post embed, object and script tags. We had a couple of people abusing this feature and I wanted to lock it right down. The downside to this move was that it prevented some forms of user interaction/posts that we didn’t really mind and in some cases would even like to encourage.

Overlaying HTML over Silverlight

Aug 29, 2007 1 min.

In the new code that we are building for Channel 9, we have a few HTML popups here and there… floating divs for user info being one example. At the same time as we’ve been adding that feature, we also moved from using Windows Media Player to using Silverlight as our video player. We ran into a bit of an issue though, in that our floating HTML was sitting under the Silverlight player, no matter what I did with the z-index of the two areas of the page.

XSLT and Alternating Rows

Aug 17, 2007 1 min.

Saw this today (it is over a year old though) on Roger Hartford’s blog; XSLT alternating rows In an XSLT template tag you can simulate the same functionality as in GridView/DataGrid “AlternatingRowClass” property using this syntax: AnotherClass/xsl:attribute /xsl:if It’s that simple! Roger I’m a big fan of XSLT based processing… and it is great to see ways to get exactly the results you want without additional server or client side code…