After a couple weeks of "not sure why my XBOX is hanging periodically."  I finally made it to "The XBOX 360 is toast."  Had to find a repalcement so we can have the kids' brithday parties in the newly finished Theater and Media room.  I can't wait to spend the month watching for a new one to arrive.  At least I'll have a nice PC to spend some more time with so I can code more to keep my mind off of it.

I built a machine that most of us would appreciate.  Room for 2 processors, I had it built to support the "not yet released" Quad core 2-way Opteron 2350's.  I may just grab a second FX-74 so I get my 4 cores (although not quite the 8 I had been anticipating.)  But with 2 high end video cards, a 28 inch HD LCD, 8 Gigs O RAM, 1.5 Tb disk its woking just fine.  VM ware 6 on Vista-64 works like a champ, as it does on XP and even 2003.  I'm going to try out dual bootin ...

We're currently in process on a monthly update for our flagship product and a Beta release for our new Electronic Medical Records product(see the 6N Systems site if you're interested in learning more). As an ASP, we make data updates to centralised (yet separate) db servers, then push webservice changes, then finally update a file patching application that will load the any changed client functionality on the next user login.

This model has been in place for quite a while, and it's been somewhat successful over the years. I say "somewhat" because as we've grown, we have more clients, more patch requests, and at least one problem to be solved each time we do a push.

As I see it, the problems that we have can include:

• Odd permissions issues where files pushed for client delivery are marked as ReadOnly. Our automation software doesn't attempt any file wipes in this instance, as it could potentially backfire if not written ...

My 360 has been slowly but surely giving me signals its ready to die.  COD 3 has been locking up whenever I get into a good session (and I'm actually winning.)  Now I can't get a anything with a disc in the drive to start up.  Of course I'm looking forward to Microsoft support to come to the rescue since it's still under warranty.  :|

Anyone know what's wrong and if I should just fix it myself ???

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Update...almost 8 months later...

Sent it to MS and received a refurb unit, that lasted until January 2008.  Now it has the Red Ring of Death.  I guess I'll be sending it back again.  Of course, the warranty doesn't cover lost playing time :(.

The Halo 3 Multiplayer Beta is out, and my 360 is fried. I'm eBaying frantically for a refurb at a good price, and I'll then sell my old 360 (minus the hard drive, of course). I was a madman with Halo 2 multiplayer for a while, and my last Halo run had me up 15 kills to 1 in a 1 on 1 (I feel sorry for him, I truly do); from what I read Halo 3 is sharper graphics (but no Gears of War killer), balanced gameplay, and at least one OMG element per match.

And I have a dead 360.

ARRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!

I know that this was a short post, but I'm working on some finishing touches at work before a 3 day weekend up at Lake George. Have fun all, and I'll talk to you on my next post!

Well, I've actually had this blog area setup for quite a while, and before the site revision was done last year, there was even an entry on the architecture of the new site. I'm not quite sure that it was art, but it was nice and topical based on our DotNetNuke presentation in june '06. For the curious, the site was originally built using DNN 4.X, and had to be reverted to 3.X due to a lack of ISP support.

The change in format had an unfortunate effect on the blog: the original, "get your feet wet" post was lost in translation, and my attentions shifted away from the writing world. However, a recent post on Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror about maximizing your keystrokes kickstarted the writing portion of my brain. In this particular post, Jeff actually quotes a blog post ...