Ryan McDonnell - Pursuing Web Application Zen

Vista Media Center “Restricted Content” error on Live TV

June 11th, 2008

I’ve been using Windows Media Center on my primary television for several years now. First, with Windows XP Media Center Edition and now Windows Vista Home Premium. Until recently, the old Pentium 4 2.8Ghz (478-pin) with 2GB of RAM and an Nvidia FX5200 AGP video card was running fine. Unfortunately, the video card driver started crashing frequently and I had to replace it with an ATI HD2400 (the only AGP card available in local stores). Switching to an ATI card meant that the Nvidia PureVideo decoder couldn’t off-load some of the decoding to the video card anymore. Video playback would get choppy on very rare occassions but it was still annoying. Finally I decided to replace the internals of the system and jump to a motherboard that supported PCI Express. I had a spare ASUS P5WD2 Premium laying around, so I dropped that in with a Pentium 4 3.4Ghz (775-pin) CPU. I also recovered an Nvidia 6600GT from storage and added that into the mix. I kept the same hard drive as before (Western Digital 250GB with 16MB buffer) as I didn’t want to reinstall Vista, lose my settings, recording schedule, etc. Read more »

4 Comments »

“The path is already mapped to workspace…”

December 7th, 2007

I just recently setup a new Team Foundation Server installation on a newer more powerful server. The older server was quickly taken offline. I stripped the source control bindings from old projects and proceeded to bind them to the new server. In doing so, I was given the following error:

The path <path> is already mapped to workspace <workspace>.
Read more »

Comments Off

Always show the PagerTemplate in GridView control

August 1st, 2007

The PagerTemplate can be a handy place to put some frequently used controls or data in your GridView. I like to use the area to include the number and range of records displayed, some paging details and a DropDownList to let the user view more records at a time. Read more »

14 Comments »

Multiple blogs, one WordPress install, zero code changes

July 12th, 2007

Now I know there are plenty of patches and other projects out there to host multiple blogs from a single installation of WordPress. Many of them focus on trying to host multiple blogs that have a common element such as users, site design, or subdomains. What I wanted to do was a bit different.

71 Comments »

Search engines agree on auto-discovering sitemap.xml

April 11th, 2007

Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask all announced today that they will support the sitemap.xml format. Furthermore, you can now include a line in the robots.txt file that points the search engines to the URL of your sitemap. Now sitemaps will be auto-discovered by the engines and no longer require manual submission. Read more »

Comments Off

About Ryan McDonnell

I am a web application developer living in southern California. Commonly called a “jack of all trades” by collegues, I constantly strive to broaden my knowledge into other fields.
More about Ryan McDonnell »

Subscribe in a reader