Entries for Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson

Windows 7 theme packs. [Windows 7 theme packs.]

Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 22:41:52 GMT

Check out these EVE Online themed themepacks :D

http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=967784

You guys should be able to create some cool ones too. Jamie?

in reply to Windows 7 theme packs.

My cat loves the C9 guy! [My cat loves the C9 guy!]

Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 16:47:58 GMT

I found my cat Leo hugging the C9 guy the other day while lounging on top of my computer case (Leo likes the heat) so i decided to snap a picture of him. Usually he slaps him off the top of the case since Leo likes to keep the case for himself.

Do you niners have any similar pictures of your cats/dogs/other animals doing funny stuff with/around the C9 guy? If so, post away :)

in reply to My cat loves the C9 guy!

.NET Framework 3.5 SP1 [.NET Framework 3.5 SP1]

Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:43:03 GMT

For those interested the SP1 for the .NET Framework 3.5 is RTM along with SQL Server 2008. In fact if you install SQL Server 2008 (Developer edition at least) you will find that it also installs the RTM version of Frameowrk .NET 3.5 SP1. For those interested you can find it on the SQL Server 2008 disk in the folder \x86\redist\DotNetFrameworks\dotNetFX35 ;)

Now we just need Visual Studio 2008 SP1 to get all the sweet designer features and updates :D

in reply to .NET Framework 3.5 SP1

Microsoft offers $44.6 billion for Yahoo. [Microsoft offers $44.6 billion for Yahoo.]

Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 11:52:26 GMT

wow! :|

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22947626/

in reply to Microsoft offers $44.6 billion for Yahoo.

Microsoft Secure Content Downloader (Avalanche) [Microsoft Secure Content Downloader (Avalanche)]

Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 09:07:26 GMT

I just caught this Nimbus link on bharry's blog.

This seems an awful lot like what we heard about "Avalanche" a few years ago (the peer-to-peer bittorrent-like download system Microsoft Research was working on).

I think this would make for great video material Charles :)

Could we get some more information on this, i can't try it out a.t.m since i'm at work and behind a firewall.

in reply to Microsoft Secure Content Downloader (Avalanche)

Electronic Music [Electronic Music]

Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 09:44:36 GMT

Has a whole new meaning to me right now :)

http://www.hauntedfrog.com/gt/movies/2007/duckon/SingingTeslaShow.html

in reply to Electronic Music

Hilarious.. iPhone killer song. [Hilarious.. iPhone killer song.]

Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 08:54:43 GMT

http://iphonekiller.ytmnd.com/

This is so awesome.

in reply to Hilarious.. iPhone killer song.

Vista - 6 Month Vulnerability report [Vista - 6 Month Vulnerability report]

Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 18:06:06 GMT

http://blogs.csoonline.com/windows_vista_6_month_vulnerability_report

Although he works for Microsoft this seems like a very fair comparison. What are your opinions?

in reply to Vista - 6 Month Vulnerability report

What's going on at Microsoft? [What's going on at Microsoft?]

Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 11:26:58 GMT

It feels like Microsoft is stuck in it's treads or has ground to a complete halt in some aspects lately. Orcas looks really really exciting though, and so does Surface, Windows Home Server and Windows Server 2008. But those are mainly new products that have been in development for a long time. There are a couple of things that have really bothered me lately.

1. Long Zheng has just pointed out the Microsofts appalling commitment to the Ultimate Extras program. He thinks customers have been screwed over and i have to agree, they have been. It's been 6 months since Vista was officially released and we're still stuck with the same Ultimate Extras since then and Dreamscene seems nowhere close to get out of it's Beta status. We've been shown "possible" Extras (developed by MS Research if i remember correctly) a long time ago but heard nothing since. Way to show Microsofts support for the enthusiasts.

I ask the same as Long Zheng, Where's the responsibility?!

2. Just recently the Messenger team launched the Windows Live Messenger 8.5 Beta complete with a UI overhaul (yet again). I immediately thought "Finally Microsoft are going to give us something cool, perhaps a WPF powered Messenger since Yahoo seem to be well on their way with their own WPF powered IM". But no! A slightly changed UI that tries to imitate Aero Glass with no new features whatsoever (at least none worth upgrading for i.m.o), ONE new emoticon (do i hear a rumbling applause? no?) and get this. a NEW SETUP (amazing!). All of this most likely with even more memory usage (i'll wait until i see the final about that though). A complete let-down. We all know that the IM market is the perfect market for flashy, animated things. So what's the hold up?

We're seeing all sorts of tech demos, tutorials and lot's of really really good stuff from Microsoft regarding WPF, WCF and some research technologies for example but still Microsofts seems afraid to put it to use in it's own products (I don't count the Expression tools since they are aimed at a very small group of customers).

I ask again, what the hell is going on? Are the days of dogfooding (not just products but your own new technology) and leading by example gone? Microsoft seems to be afraid of taking chances and making changes lately. It's pretty clear to me that developer adoption of the new .NET technologies for example will be rather minor until Microsoft themselves lead by example.

And someone please wake up the Ultimate Extras team (if they even exist anymore)!

in reply to What's going on at Microsoft?

Microsofts new HD Photo codec. [Microsofts new HD Photo codec.]

Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 22:14:31 GMT

Has anyone here tested the new HD Photo codec. I've been doing some tests with it at home so i wrote a simple and basic command line encoder and i must say i'm pretty impressed with the image quality. The main difference i notice between HD Photo and JPG is that artifacts in HD Photo are more like overall picture noise instead of halos around edges and bad gradients like JPG.

I haven't done very scientific tests though but i'm liking what i see so far. Lossless encoding is pretty much on par with PNG (at least with standard 32bit/24bit (A)RGB files).

If you don't have Photoshop and the HD Photo beta plugin feel free to check out my command line encoder, since i posted the source code in the Sandbox. The code was written pretty quickly though so it could propably be prettyer and the error handling and input checking could be a lot better :P

Also, I don't have any real life, high def files to test though, so if someone could hook me up with some high res PNG's from a high-end camera that'd be awesome.

Edit: The source didn't get uploaded to the sandbox for some reason so i edited the post over there with a link to the file. You can also grab it here.

in reply to Microsofts new HD Photo codec.

HD Photo Command Line Encoder [HD Photo Command Line Encoder]

Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 22:05:48 GMT

I created a very basic command line encoder to convert images to the HD Photo format to do some basic tests. I did it because i don't have Photoshop so i can't use the new beta HD Photo plugin. Vista's new Photo Gallery is able to read these .wdp files but i don't think it's possible ti view on XP without someone whipping up a WPF image viewer or by using Photoshop so i recommend you use the Windows Photo Gallery app in Vista to view the output files.

The app uses the new managed classes for Windows Imaging Component that are part of WPF (in the System.Windows.Media.Imaging namespace) so you'll need the .NET Framework 3.0 installed before you can use it. I included the full source code as well as a compiled EXE so feel free to mess around with the code.

The code is commented a bit (mostly function explanations) but this was thrown together in a couple of hours (including reading through the docs) so don't expect any miracles. Error handling and input checking isvery basic as well so doing silly things and breaking the app isn't hard. I also do not support the advanced codec options, just the basic quality level.

The app saves files into the same folder as the input file(s) with the same filename except they have a .wdp extensions (Vista still doesn't recognize the .hdp extension).

The app should be runnable on XP but don't expect to be able to view the files on XP unless you have Photoshop and the HD Photo beta plugin installed.

Here are some examples of the usage:
HdpEncoder "C:\Users\Stebet\Pictures\test.png" -q 1.0 - Saves the picture as a lossless .wdp file.

HdpEncoder "C:\Users\Stebet\Pictures\test.png" - Saves the picture using a quality setting of 0.9 (default).

HdpEncoder "C:\Users\Stebet\Pictures\test.png" -q 0.5 - Saves the picture using a quality of 0.5. The Quality can range from 0.0 to 1.0 with 1.0 being lossles and 0.0 being horrid quality :P.

HdpEncoder "C:\Users\Stebet\Pictures\SomePictureFolder" -q 0.8 - Saves all the images in a folder as .wdp's with a quality setting of 0.8

HdpEncoder "C:\Users\Stebet\Pictures\test.png" -s 102400 - Saves the picture as a 100 kilobyte .wdp file using binary search to find the optimal quality for that file size, using a 2% file size error margin, brute force by encoding again and again and looking at the resulting file size. This is good if you want to compare .wdp to .jpg for quick comparison purposes. Do not though that it is not using any of the advanced codec options so the comparison isn't very accurate except for quick and dirty testing.

As input you should be able to use .bmp, .jpg, .png, .gif, .tiff and .wdp at least (can't remember what other file formats are supported with the WIC by default).

That's all for now, enjoy the code and feel free to mess around with it and experiment.

in reply to HD Photo Command Line Encoder

Vista Ultimate demo wallpaper? [Vista Ultimate demo wallpaper?]

Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 13:37:52 GMT

Is there a chance someone at MS could hook us up with the Vista Ultimate wallpaper. It's been shown on quite a lot of ads and promo videos and it was used in a few of the CES demos as well (so i know it exists as a real thing somewhere ;)). The wallpaper i'm talking about is the one that looks like the art on the Vista Ultimate retail box.

I've noticed quite a lot of people all over the net are looking for it as well so i thought i might as well try to get it from "the source". Some people have made their own but i.m.o they don't have the "polish" of the real thing.

The wallpaper i'm talking about is the one shown here.

Since i'm on the topic, how come MS doesn't release more of the "demo" wallpapers we see all the time in product demonstrations? The IIS7 team had a few that they finally published on their blog, and we have seen the WMP guys release a few as well. It'd be nice if there was a repository of some sorts of official MS product wallpapers. I'm not talking about wallpapers like the official Vista ones but wallpapers they use in demos to promote products like IIS7, Vista, WMP etc, because many of these wallpapers are release worthy and quite nice (all in my not so humbe opinion of course).

in reply to Vista Ultimate demo wallpaper?

Larry Osterman and other audio/video gurus. [Larry Osterman and other audio/video gurus.]

Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 16:24:26 GMT

Is it possible some of you audio/video guys could please write a comprehensive blog post refuting some of the more absurd points of this FUD article, because as the local "Vista dude" at my workplace and among my friends i'm being bombarded with insanely stupid questions like "I heard i won't be able to play my DVD-Audio from my PC to my amplifier.", "Is it true Vista won't play any music unless it's DRM'd" and countless other equally stupid questions. These are questions coming from people that are not very tech savvy and get this drivel as a result of that article.

Believe it or not, that article is going the rounds all over the internet and i'm getting links to it sent on IM, email and whatnot from an amazing amount of people that i know. That article is as far as i know spreading wrong (or misinterpreted?) information to lots, lots and lots of people. And what's worse is that people are eating it up bigtime.

I know The Audio Fool has commented a bit on the article but i sorely feel a better response from Microsoft is required here.

in reply to Larry Osterman and other audio/video gurus.

Where's .NET 3.0 RTM? [Where's .NET 3.0 RTM?]

Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 14:06:07 GMT

I was hoping it'd be released before or at the same time Vista goes RTM. Since it's supposed to be integrated, i'd have thought it would have to be completed before Vista can be RTM'd.

Maybe it's the Framework that's holding Vista back still? :P

Here's to a few more weeks of patience ;)

in reply to Where's .NET 3.0 RTM?

Studios force MS to remove HD playback from 32bit Vista? [Studios force MS to remove HD playback from 32bit Vista?]

Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 14:46:15 GMT

Quote from this article:

“This is a decision that the Media Player folks made because there are just too many ways right now for unsigned kernel mode code [to compromise content protection]. The media companies asked us to do this and said they don’t want any of their high definition content to play in x32 at all, because of all of the unsigned malware that runs in kernel mode can get around content protection, so we had to do this,”

Any truth to this?

in reply to Studios force MS to remove HD playback from 32bit Vista?

Windows Live Messenger invites are out! [Windows Live Messenger invites are out!]

Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 14:53:38 GMT

Seems that the Windows Live Messenger team has started giving beta testers their friend+family invites. Everyone seems to be able to invite two people.

I noticed some people (me included) have signed up on the in reply to Windows Live Messenger invites are out!

A suggestion for Microsoft regarding images. [A suggestion for Microsoft regarding images.]

Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 15:27:07 GMT

I'm getting really annoyed at Microsofts love for crappy bilinear filtering. Image artists and designers should know what i'm talking about.

You have access to high quality Bicubic filtering in GDI+ so could you guys please start taking advantage of it:

Vista Team:
Please make sure thumbnails, desktop images (when stretched) etc. is resized using Bicubic filtering. Wallpapers that look gorgeous end up looking like crap if they are run on desktops that are not in the same resolution as the wallpaper unless we manually resize them using said Bicubic filtering.

Windows Live Messenger Team:
Use Bicubic filtering when resizing images for the display pictures. I find myself manually resizing images into 96x96 using Bicubic filtering so they don't end up looking like crap. I never let MSN do it for me because frankly, images to end up loosing a whole lot of detail and get "jaggy".

IE Team:
Since you insist on enabling image resizing as default (when viewing images) could you please also use Bicubic filtering. The bilinear filtering makes images and screenshots look horrid.

The only MS program that i have found doing an adequate job of image resizing is the Office Picture Viewer. All other apps resize using crappy methods.

Down with crappy filtering. I at least want quality rather than a marginal speed in rendering (first time only).

If you guys demand the utmost speed in these operations at least give us the option to sacrifice this tiny bit of speed for quality.

in reply to A suggestion for Microsoft regarding images.

Visual Studio 2005 RC now has Go-Live! [Visual Studio 2005 RC now has Go-Live!]

Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 14:42:44 GMT

Yay!

Can't wait to try it out with Team Foundation Server Beta 3. Wish the MSDN team could hurry this up a bit ;)

in reply to Visual Studio 2005 RC now has Go-Live!

Thank you Microsoft (PDC 2005) [Thank you Microsoft (PDC 2005)]

Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 06:19:19 GMT

I wanted to take this opportunity and thank Microsoft and all it's employees and partners for an awesome conference. This was my first PDC and i can definitely say that there will be more for me if Microsoft keeps this up. Awesome keynotes as well as awesome events and talks. The service was great, i love the goods and i pretty much couldn't be happier about this event at the moment.

What stood out:

Bill Gates and Napoleone Dynamite... i laughed so very very hard.
Office 12 keynote... i loooove the new UI changes. People need to see this in action to really grasp how much better this is.
LINQ... simply put... it rocks my socks off
And of course... Vista. It's really fun too see how Beta 2 is shaping up. People claiming that Vista doesn't have anything over XP are so dead wrong.
Universal Studios... simply awesome.

Again, thank you for an awesome time. Since this was my first time in the USA as well i must say that this will be one trip to remember :D

Keep up the good work.

in reply to Thank you Microsoft (PDC 2005)

Vista PDC Build blues :( [Vista PDC Build blues :(]

Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson — Thu, 15 Sep 2005 07:24:48 GMT

Well.. thing is, the serial which came inside "The Goods" booklet simply doesn't seem to work (not for me at least). Were we handed out the wrong serial for the PDC build?

If not, is there some place in the conference hall where i can get a correct serial?

in reply to Vista PDC Build blues :(

Any word on a Avalon/Indigo CTP that's compatible with Beta2? [Any word on a Avalon/Indigo CTP that's compatible with Beta2?]

Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson — Mon, 02 May 2005 16:01:23 GMT

Now that Beta 2 has been out for awhile can we expect to see a new CTP drop of Avalon/Indigo soon? I'm dying to try this out in a more stable environment :)

in reply to Any word on a Avalon/Indigo CTP that's compatible with Beta2?

WinHEC keynote [WinHEC keynote]

Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 18:58:03 GMT

Just finished watching the keynote stream and all i can say is wow! Longhorn just got a whole lot more interesting. The new search functionalities look really really good, as well as the Virtual Folders concept.

Now i just long for some higher-res Longhorn videos and more in-depth demos. Any hope of getting them soon from you 9-guys?

Also, anyone know when we can expect some more info on Metro?

in reply to WinHEC keynote

ASP.NET 2.0 quirks. [ASP.NET 2.0 quirks.]

Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 12:47:19 GMT

After messing around a whole lot with beta 1 and the CTP i hit an issue (well an issue for me at least) that i'd want to see addressed in some way and i hope it's not too late.

I put it up as a suggestion in the VS2005 feedback thingamajig and you can see it here.

The thing is that the new controls (Login control for example), are great and i was pretty excited to see that they had template support, so i though "ooh goody, now i can use these great controls and save me some code and just edit the HTML these controls output in case i don't like it!". Well my excitement died when i saw this silly mechanism of wrapping the control inside a table, even if i had specified my own template!

Why does it have to be this way?!? I think it is done on purpose to make the control "designer friendly" with the VS designer but outputting this wrapper table sort of nullifies the templating support for me (i don't want tables where they aren't needed thank you very much). So i put up this suggestion at the VS2005 feedback page to give us some sort of switch or additional tags to get rid of this wrapping behaviour. Since it also doesn't seem to be getting any attention i decided to post it here in hope that some of you might agree with me and bump it up a little :)

Also, i understand if this is too late to be fixed (since Beta 2 is right around the corner) but there's always hope right?

in reply to ASP.NET 2.0 quirks.

Event Based OS Notifications - A good idea? [Event Based OS Notifications - A good idea?]

Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson — Fri, 21 Jan 2005 01:31:43 GMT

Here's an idea i 've been thinking about for awhile. What if we could be able to monitor almost every aspect of our OS's operation easily? What i'm thinking about is, what if Windows would have a very rich, easily subscribable event model. Think if we could easily subscribe to many miscellaneous OS level (and User level) events, such as, New Email arrived, a new network socket is opened, a file is opened or created, CPU temperature has changed (by a specified margin), a user logged on to the computer, IIS got a new HTTP request etc. etc.

I'm thinking Windows could have a directory of events and properties which programs and services could expose their events and status to (similar to Web Service method discoveries). For example when you'd install a junk filtering software on your email server, that software could expose an event to the OS, allowing developers to listen for that event and let the administrator know each time an email is classified as spam etc. This could perhaps be tied in with WMI in some way too, allowing other programs to closely monitor almost any OS and program activity. This would open up a lot of possibilities for all sorts of notifications to the end user, allowing him to more closely monitor his system and it's activities.

Anyways, this is just an idea i had, and i don't think anything similar already exists, so don't hesitate to bring up any pro's and con's you find thinking about it. All you system System Admins might be more interested in this thatn others?

in reply to Event Based OS Notifications - A good idea?

Visual Studio 2005 - Beta 2 dates? [Visual Studio 2005 - Beta 2 dates?]

Stefán Jökull Sigurðarson — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 17:10:29 GMT

Well, i tried searching the blogs and forums and some places mentioned feb. 2005, but they all had in common that they mentioned this date last summer as a pure estimate. Well since ZBB was a couple of months ago, i'm wondering, is this date still propable, and if not, can someone "in the know" (preferably a Microsoftie) give us an approximate date for Beta 2 (are we talking days, weeks or months from now)?

in reply to Visual Studio 2005 - Beta 2 dates?