Found this article from Engadget about the new PVR that DirecTV will be offering along with their current one powered by TiVo.  The article says that TiVo revealed recently that 75% of new subscribers from last quarter came from DirecTV meaning that once the DirecTV wells drys up that TiVo will be in trouble.  Man, I hope not.  What TiVo needs to do is build their standalone versions with a dual-tuner just like the DirecTV boxes do.

Most people don't realize how important the dual-tuner is.  I've gotten people interested in TiVo before to the point that they purchase a stand alone version.  They like it but it's not as big a change is TV watching because their TiVo can only record one show at a time - what happens if you've got two shows on at the same time or you want to watch live TV for some reason (can't think of one but you know what I mean).  For some reason TiVo has avoided building their stand alones with a dual-tuner and maybe it time to add that?  They may have a deal with DirecTV so that only the DirecTV boxes have them...I don't know but seems like the only thing that makes sense to me.

This weekend was a good of family time for Thanksgiving and Geocaching!  We cached on both Saturday and Sunday and it was, again, lots of fun.  We placed three new caches in our "Seinfeld" cache series...."Take the Pen", "Adjacent to Refuse", and "Low Flow?".  We even found another neat piece of history that we would've missed if it wasn't for Geocaching and I loved it! 

There is a multi-cache called "Arlington Downs" that takes you to what was once the location Texas' first parimutual racetrack.  It was 1.0625 horse track from 1929-1937 that had a grandstand that seated 6,000 (a portion of it is now at the G. Rollie White Downs track in Brady, TX).  The most famous race run at Arlington was the Texas Derby, described as a tryout for the Kentucky Derby.  It closed in 1937 when parimutual betting was outlawed in Texas and after that the track was used for a lot of different things such as auto racing and was used during the filming of the movie "To Please a Lady".  The track was finally sold in 1956 and has since been demolished long ago.  The area is now a business park not too far from The Ballpark in Arlington and all that is left is an old watering trough and with its little horses and riders along the outside are the only clue that it was part of the track.  The trough is about 0.2 miles away from the Historical marker describing the track.

This picture is from Roadside America	This picture is from the J.W Dunlop Photo Collection at UTA

It's the end of the week for me at work and I'm getting ready to head home for 5 days of family time...woohoo! 

It's weird that in short weeks like this I feel like I get more done than during normal 5 day weeks.  I guess it's because so many people are out of the office.  Most of my team is here today but there's just less going on around me (less phone rings/conversations/etc..) so I'm less distracted from coding.  Man, to have an office instead of a cube I think I could do more work.  Somehow I would probably find a way to get distracted.....

I can't believe this is my first post in the Seinfed category...

Everyone by now knows that Seinfeld is finally coming out on DVD this Thursday.  It's been a long time coming especially when it's now common to see newer shows that aren't that good come out on DVD pretty fast. My post is really to get the word out that NBC is hosting "The Seinfeld Story" on Thanksgiving night so set your TiVo and Giddy Up!

Here's the write up:
10/9pm Thanksgiving Night (Thursday, Nov. 25)
THE SEINFELD STORY
Jerry Seinfeld hosts this retrospective that takes a look back at the wildly popular Seinfeld series. The show includes new interviews with all four original cast members and co-creator Larry David, yada, yada, yada. The special will be simulcast in High Definition.  TV14

I'll be honest, I'm not sure what the real name is.  Anyway, I know this has been out for over a month but I'm going to post mine since it's straight forward and easy to install...Just download the zip file and extract the files to \Windows\Resources\Theme and you're good to go.  I also added a very cool wallpaper in the zip that I prefer and goes well with the new theme.  I need to give WSTaylor from WSTWebDesigns credit for the added wallpaper.  He does great work!  Here's a sneek peak.

My post about TiVo ads has another story to shed some light on it and some screenshots.  Basically TiVo will use currently used technology to generate the ads and shouldn't be more than what current users see...go see the screenshots to see what I mean.

Guess it won't be that bad after all.

I tried using w.blogger a few times and SauceReader but I didn't like them very much.  Now I'm giving PostXING a shot.

I really like it for posts that I want to included images in.   - So far so good!

Oh, and it has color coding/syntax for inserting code...cool!

private string GetFolderName(IPortalSearchRequest searchRequest, int folderID)
{
	//search for the given folder name 
	searchRequest.SetQuery(folderID.ToString());
			
	// only search for folders 
	ObjectClass[] objectTypes = {ObjectClass.DocumentFolder};
	searchRequest.SetObjectTypesToSearch(objectTypes);

	ISearchResponse searchResponse = searchRequest.Execute();
	ISearchResultSet resultSet = searchResponse.GetResultSet();
	int numResults = searchResponse.GetReturnedCount();
	if (numResults > 0)
	{
		IEnumerator result = resultSet.GetResults(); //just get the first element
		IPortalSearchResult results = (IPortalSearchResult) result.Current;
		return results.GetName();
	}
	return string.Empty;
}

I read on the pvrblog that TiVo is now going to have ads that show up anytime you fast forward (FF).  This only for the stand alone boxes and not the ones from DirecTV (I guess since DirecTV already pays fees to TiVo). 

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?  I guess from the business standpoint it's good for TiVo and at the same time if it keeps them in business it's good for us end-users too. 

I mean how much advertising can they give us while in super FF mode?  I already miss the ones on the TV why wouldn't I ignore these new ones too?  The only issue I would have is if they slow down the FF speed to basically make me view the commercial or somehow make it more difficult for me to see the screen while FF'ing so I know when to stop so I can resume watching my TiVo'd show.

Any thoughts?

Ok. Now I've got the table state thing figured out now is my first real stab at using a required client-side script (Plumtree) and have it post back the page so I can catch the event and return values to process the data as needed. This could all be done via client-side script but I've already written 90% of the needed code in the codebehind and I want to reuse it.

So how do I trigger the event-handler and pass it a parameter value from the client-side script? I looked and looked and I saw many different styles on how to raise an event but most of what I read was dealing with custom server controls. So what I ended up doing was registering a hidden field (initially blank) on Page_Load that would then be populated by the client-side script when it ran. So on postback I would check the hidden field for a value. If there was a value then I knew the client-side script caused the postback and then I would call the needed event and pass in the value from the hidden field.

How elegant is this? I don't know but it works. I really was wanting a way to keep everything in the code-behind and only use client-side script and hidden fields as a last resort...that's were I was at. See the code snippets below and if you've got a better way please comment.

    51: // Hidden field to store return value from pt:tree

    52:       RegisterHiddenField("__ObjectID", "");

    53:  

    54:       if(Page.IsPostBack)

    55:       {

    56:         _links = (PortletHyperlinks)ViewState["LinkCollection"];

    57:         // Check for return from pt:tree

    58:         if(Request.Form["__ObjectID"].Length != 0)

    59:           DrawTable("addDoc");

    60:       }

    61:       else

    62:       {

We have some consultants in for our Plumtree implementation.  They were looking at some of my code and saw that I got intelllisense when putting in an <asp:repeater> tag.  They were wondering why they didn't have such luck!  After looking around...we found that since they are so accustomed to developing portlets within Plumtree that they don't have the "@ Page" directive at the top of the page nor did they have <body> tags around their HTML code.

Ding, ding, ding.  When they added both they now have intellisense.  Giddy Up!