We've had our Dish Network HD DVR for two days now, and overall, we're very happy with it.  It's very, very good, but it's not quite perfect.  Here are our observations so far.

The Good

I've got a whole list of good things to say.

• Dish has way more HD channels than Time Warner KC.  We've spent 80% of our time with National Geographic HD, which wasn't available on Time Warner.
• The DVR is reliable - Which is a huge advantage over Time Warner.
• No crappy analog channels.  Time Warner KC still has any channel below 99 on an analog signal, and it was very noticeable, and very sucky.
• The user interface is very friendly and very aesthetically pleasing.
• On-screen caller ID that works with any telephone service (we use Vonage).  Time Warner's caller ID only works with Time Warner's telephone service.
• The price is comparable to Time Warner.
• Built-in home distribution.  This is the slickest feature.  It actually has two output displays - The primary, which is high definition, and the secondary, which is a standard definition signal that it broadcasts to the rest of our house over the existing coax.  It comes with a second remote that operates via a UHF signal, so it doesn't have to be used line-of-sight.  This is great for our bedroom TV, a 32" standard TV that was our former living room TV.  It has all the channels and DVR stored programming available to it, and can watch any of it independently of what the primary TV is watching.  THIS. IS. AWESOME.  Connor can watch this morning's Blue's Clues in the bedroom while we watch last night's Heroes in the living room, or vice-versa.  And all of our high-def content is available either room, because it actually downscales HD programming for SD.  Wow.

The Bad

I found one issue worth complaining about.  I could do it on my old Series2 DirecTiVo, and I could do it on Time Warner's craptacular DVR, but I can't do it on Dish's DVR.  It's a little complicated, so bear with me...

Say I set up an Event Timer to record new episodes of a show, say, The Simpsons, on the local Fox affiliate and assign it a high priority, so I always pick up new episodes of The Simpsons.  Great.

Now say I set up a Dish Pass (equivalent to TiVo's wishlist, basically a way to tell the DVR to keep an eye out for something you like) for The Simpsons, any time, any channel.  I want to pick up Simpsons reruns on the local Fox affiliate as well as in syndication.  I assign this a low priority because I don't want to give reruns any priority over new programming.

At this point, the Dish DVR will accept the new Dish Pass, but it will not schedule any recordings based on that, and it will not allow me to add ANY additional Event Timers or Dish Passes, claiming that I have reached the maximum number of timers and that I need to delete some before I can add any more.  This error is wrong, though.  If I delete that additional "Simpsons" Dish Pass, I can add more Dish Passes and Event Timers to my heart's content. 

I'm aware I could just set a Dish Pass to record the Simpsons on any channel at any time, but the point is that I want to give new episodes the priority, as well as set them to "preserve" (not delete automatically).  I've tried several permutations of this with Dish Passes and Event Timers, and it's always the same result.  The best I can figure is that it has something to do with trying to have multiple event timers/Dish Passes with the same name - It's as if the name has to be unique.  I have a hypothesis that I can work around this with manual timers (e.g., telling the DVR to record a specific channel at a specific time), but that's a pain.

I emailed Dish Network about this, but I imagine they won't thoroughly read what I wrote and will just send me a canned response to delete some event timers.  We'll see.  It's certainly not a deal breaker.  I probably waste too much time on reruns anyway.

(Note:  The Simpsons is just one example of a show I want to do this with.  Others include South Park, Family Guy, and Battlestar Galactica.)

The Ugly

• The local NBC affiliate, KSHB 41, has some kind of an issue with their HD feed to Dish.  The audio sounds like it's in a tin can, like someone turned on "stadium" mode on their receiver.  And I've heard of the video stream having some artifact issues.
• I wish there was a clock on the front.  That's about the only thing I really miss about Time Warner's DVR.

Update - 2/25/2007

I got a reply from Dish Network's tech support:

Dear Mr. Soper,

Thank you for your e-mail. We are aware of the issue with this receiver. It will not set up two different types of timers for the same show. It will either setup a dish pass, or a normal timer. To record all episodes at two different priorities is not available at this time.

We are always looking for ways to improve our service, and we appreciate your input. We will forward your comments and concerns to the proper department; however, we can not promise this will be implemented. Thank you again for choosing Dish Network and please feel free to contact us again with any future concerns.

I'm very pleased that someone actually read and understood what I wrote, but it doesn't appear that there's a way to do what I'm asking.  I still give this DVR high marks...  Say, 8 out of 10.

My wife and I lost yet more shows when our Time Warner DVR (SA 8300HD) suddenly decided to stop recording without warning.  And considering that popular opinion is that Time Warner's new Navigator software sucks even more than the software we've got, it became clear to us that it was time to jump ship.

So I logged onto Amazon and ordered the TiVo Series3.  Then I did some browsing around the TiVo community to congratulate myself.  I'm glad I did...  It turns out that there is a pretty serious issue with the TiVo Series3 boxes on certain cable providers.  You see, the TiVo Series3 uses the CableCARD 1.0 spec.  A lot of big cable providers are moving parts of their channel lineup to a new technology called Switched Digital Video (SDV).  SDV is not compatible with CableCARD 1.0.  So as a given cable provider moves channels to SDV, a CableCARD customer would lose those channels.  There's no way of knowing when or what channels would be affected - It all hinges on how Time Warner decides to maintain their network.

Today, I doubt it would impact us.  In all fairness, I would probably be very happy with the Series3 at first.  But what about in a few months?  Years?  How long would it be before my $660 TiVo (Amazon's price) became a boat anchor?  I'm a geek, and I enjoy being an early adopter, but not in this case.  The technology is already partially obsolete with a good potential of becoming further obsolete in the very near future.  I love you TiVo, and you're doing some cool things, but I can't accept that.  Give me a call when you roll out the Series4.

So we started thinking outside the box, and we decided to drop our terrestrial cable (except for RoadRunner)  in favor of Dish Network and their very well received HD DVR.  The installer comes Thursday.

I've been running Vista on my home desktop and my wife's Dell XPS m140 laptop since it went RTM, and I've got nothing but nice things to say about it.  However, I can't run Aero on my wife's laptop.  Turns out that Intel has elected not to make the prerequisite WDDM video drivers for the 915GM chipset in the XPS m140 and half of all the other laptops manufactured in 2006.  They blame Microsoft, but honestly, I just don't care.  I bought a "Vista Ready" PC in 2006, and the damn thing isn't completely Vista ready.  Jerks.

That's an easy one - busting my ass on Commerce Bank's Online Banking.  We've built a great development team and we've done amazing work in a short period.  I've come up with a bunch of stuff to blog about, too.

But right now, let's talk about what's on my mind most at the moment:  Time Warner's HD DVR, the Scientific Atlanta 8300HD sucks balls.  I finally talked my wife into letting me get an HDTV (a super-sweet ViewSonic N3751W) for the living room, so we moved the HD DVR from the projector room downstairs to the living room and hooked it up with sweet, sweet HDMI (of which my rockin' sweet TV has three (!!!) ports).

Little did I realize, however, that this stupid DVR has far more problems than it's worth.  It starts recording shows that are half over, it cuts off recordings mid-program, and it reboots randomly.  It's just absolutely freakin terrible.

So my wife and I have decided that we're going to wait for Time Warner's forthcoming software upgrade.  If that doesn't improve matters, we're going to ditch the HD DVR altogether and get a TiVo Series3 with 2 cable cards.

Why the heck is it so hard for cable companies to get DVR software right???

I just read on DotNetKicks that apparently Visual Studio 2003 is not going to be officially supported in Vista.  Allow me to say: Double-ewe.  Tee.  Eff.

I'm floored by this.  Supposedly, though, it will only break debugging in VS2K3, since the security model has been reworked significantly.  Note to self:  Install VS2K3 on my Vista box and try to break it.

If this is true, I suppose one could develop in VS2K5 and compile the MSIL in .NET 1.1 with MSBee.

Anyone not reading this website from behind a content filter (I'm looking at you, Commerce employees) has probably noticed my Google AdSense ads.  I added them when I started this blog because I figured it's free and it surely couldn't hurt.  To date, I've made exactly $1.84.  And who says bloggers aren't real writers? (BTW, why don't you take this opportunity to click on some ads?  Go ahead, I'll wait.)

Today, I noticed this ad on my site.  Apparently, geeks who read my site would be likely to watch Superman Returns and buy virtualization products.  Or maybe watch a movie about Superman running a Virtal Machine farm.  Or something like that.

One of the first things I noticed about Vista was that they'd included thumbnails on the alt-tab dialog and on the taskbar buttons.  Thumbnails in alt-tab is nothing new.  I've been using TaskSwitchXP for a while now.  What is new is the thumbnails on the taskbar buttons. When you point at a program's button in your taskbar, you get a tooltip with an embedded thumnail.

As if that weren't cool enough, the thumbnail is actually updated in real time.  Observe here, I'm viewing Weird Al's White and Nerdy* and the thumbnail is updating at the same 30 fps as the actual video player (I added the red box for emphasis)!  Well, maybe not the same framerate, but it has to be pretty close.  How cool is that???

* Yes, I'm an unabashed fan of Weird Al.  He's like the patron saint of geeks.  If you don't like it, suck it.

Scott Hanselman wrote an online diary of his upgrade to Vista RC1 a few weeks ago, and I have to admit, I felt for a short period like I would have to trade in my geek card for not having tried it myself. Then yesterday, I caught on Slashdot that Microsoft had released RC2, so I figured what the heck. I downloaded the 64-bit version and installed it over the course of about 3 hours this morning.

Scott's experiences with RC1 had me dreading hardware compatibility issues, but so far, the only problem I've really noticed is that my cheap Logitech web cam wasn't recognized.  Besides that, it was a very smooth install (I installed clean).  I'm still exploring the new interface, but my first impression is that I totally dig it.

I did notice one weird thing with the guest account.  It looks like web access controls for the guest account are enabled by default with no way to disable it.  So, when my mom is here and wants to check her Ebay auctions, she'd actually have to ask me for permission.  Meh.  So as a workaround I created a standard user account name "Visitor," denied it access to any sensitive info anywhere on my system, and gave it full web access rights.

If anyone's curious, my Windows Experience Index is 3.0. Apparently, my integrated video card sucks (well, duh!).

While importing a Virtual PC image into our enterprise VMWare server, the process kept bombing out with sysimage.fault.ReconfigFault.  I Googled high and low, and didn't get any hits on sysimage.fault.ReconfigFault (or anything that appeared to be related).  I decided to try to convert the VPC to a VMWare Workstation image so I could try playing it in VMWare Player, and I got the same results.  I was resigned to giving up.

Then I noticed that VMWare Player included Microsoft VPC in its list of compatible images.  On a lark, I loaded my VPC image in VMWare Player, and it started a short conversion process.   Sure enough, it bombed out with "A required archive (driver.cab) could not be found in the source OS."  Hmmm.  Something else to Google.  Thankfully, this new Google search was a bit more fruitful in its results.  This guy's solution fixed the problem in VMWare Importer as well as VMWare Player.

I'm totally surprised nobody else has run into this.

Update 3/18/2007:

So it looks like this is the #1 hit on Google for resolving this issue.  That's pretty cool.  So I decided that, just in case the above link breaks, I'd grab the pertinent part out of the above link (in case that site ever disappears).

1. Find another computer running the same operating system and service packs.
2. Copy the "%windir%\Driver Cache" directory into the same location on the VPC image.
3. Shut down the VPC.

That's it!

Hey, if this helps anyone, please take a second to drop me an email or leave a comment here.  I'd love to hear from you.

After 9 hours of arguing with Visual Studio 2003, I'm tired, frustrated, but triumphant.

I have no freakin clue what went wrong, but the end result was every time I tried to build my Web Deployment project, it bombed out with "Unable to build folder CBI".  Turns out that there are multiple folders spread out throughout the project tree named "CBI".  And VS2K3 doesn't like that when it's building an MSI.  If I went through the web project and renamed all those CBI folders, it worked fine.

The really weird part was that the project built fine on my workstation, but not on my build server.

Long story short, I uninstalled and reinstalled all my project dependencies on the build server, did a rain dance, and built the code on the c: drive instead of the d: drive (since that's where the original developer built his project).  Voila...  it works.

9 freakin hours.