Entries for Ben Matthews

Ways to improve the Silverlight video player [Ways to improve the Silverlight video player]

Ben Matthews — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 22:17:51 GMT

1) Make it so the UI pane will hide when you're viewing in full screen after a few seconds
2) The UI pane is 1 pixel off the bottom; move it down 1 pixel
3) Fix the buffering so that when you jump to an area already played it doesn't need to buffer again
4) Default to highest volume; C9 videos are quiet enough without defaulting to half-volume
5) Use high quality videos, not the lowest possible
6) Simplify the UI a bit; wouldn't it be possible to put the embedding stuff outside the player? Fullscreen could just be left to double click

in reply to Ways to improve the Silverlight video player

Weird Windows Search behaviour [Weird Windows Search behaviour]

Ben Matthews — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 07:22:09 GMT

A few minutes ago I tried to do a search for one of my labs in the start menu search by typing in "lab 8". This yielded a never ending "Searching...", so I just left my start menu and went into the directory to get it myself. Afterwards I noticed everything was running incredibly slow and my hard drive indicator was stuck on, so I opened the task manager and was horrified to find that explorer.exe was using 99% of my CPU resources! A little more investigation revealed that any time I use a search phrase with a number, explorer.exe does this. I'm not sure if this is a bug or if it's running through my index and getting a hit on everything, but it's kind of annoying.

Anyone else seen this?

in reply to Weird Windows Search behaviour

Associating Channel9 Profile with a different LiveID? Choosing one when you sign in? [Associating Channel9 Profile with a different LiveID? Choosing one when you sign in?]

Ben Matthews — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 04:34:42 GMT

It would be really nice if I could change what LiveID my C9 profile is associated with, as I have several and it's becomming a bit of a pain. For instance, say I want to check my live email in my "@live.com" based live ID; switching from my "@dal.ca" one used on this site is hard enough there, but on this site it's impossible to even choose which live ID you want to first sign in with; clicking "Sign In" logs you in (really quickly) with the last used Live ID. I can sign out again and choose to sign in with a manually typed live ID (the screen doesn't even use the slick new live ID login page, bit of pain in itself) but this is kind of annoying, and it doesn't seem to work all the time. The other day the first time I navigated to this site with my newest live ID, I couldn't even do the sign in, sign out trick since C9 insisted I create a new username when I logged in; I ended up making one named "asafasdasdasd" or something like that just to get through, only to log out and log back in to try and get to my older Live ID.

Other cases besides mine might be on a shared user account, or where someone (friend, colleage, relative) logs in on your browser and suddenly there are >=2 live ID's recognized.

There might already be a way to change the live ID associated with the profile, but a I could find one looking in the profile settings.

in reply to Associating Channel9 Profile with a different LiveID? Choosing one when you sign in?

Any way to install IE8 RC on Win7? [Any way to install IE8 RC on Win7?]

Ben Matthews — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 01:50:02 GMT

I know the link on the download site only works with WinXP/2003/Vista/2008, but is there another place to download it for 7? Will it appear on Windows Update?

in reply to Any way to install IE8 RC on Win7?