Media Center: Wrong guide listings no more

One of the issues I’ve always had with Media Center in both XP Media Center 2005 and Vista Media Center is the incorrect information provided for the guide data. As a result, the channel numbers were always mixed up and, consequently, program info was either wrong or missing. Since the Guide is actually a very useful feature of Media Center which allows to see details for a program as well as schedule recordings, having a Guide that doesn’t work as it should can become somewhat frustrating.

The issues I’ve had, applied to my cable provider, Videotron Montreal, for my region, and may or may not apply to others. Let me know if this article helped you with your issues so I can post it here as reference for others.

I started by going to “About Guide Listings”, in Media Center’s Settings/TV/Guide. On the top, it shows the Guide data provider, Zap2it. On the bottom are your current Guide Settings.

A quick visit to Zap2it’s website, showed me a listing of TV schedules available for my area. Among them, since on my pc I have the analog/cable service and not the digital one from Videotron, were the two that could apply to me: Videotron Ltée – Cable (Montreal Métro) and Videotron Ltée – Cable (Montreal Laval). Obviously, since I do not live in Laval, I chose the Montreal Metro as option and proceeded.

As expected, the information I was shown corresponded to that I was receiving in Media Center; wrong channel numbers and in some cases even missing channels entirely.

By curiosity, I went back to the list of providers and chose Montreal Laval option this time. Surprisingly, the channel listing and schedule that appeared was actually the one I was looking for. All the channels were there and with the correct numbers. That’s the channel lineup I was looking to have in my Media Center.

So, no problem. I’ll just go in Media Center setup, and choose the new provider there as I did on the website, right? Wrong.

When setting up the Media Center Guide, you’re prompted to enter your zip code, just like on Zap2it’s website. However, the results returned are different. In the list of options, the Montreal Laval option is not there, since Media Center determines my postal code is not in Laval so that option shouldn’t be available to me. What to do then? The initial thought was to find some kind of hack that would allow me to manually edit Media Center’s Guide configuration file or something along those lines. But then, I thought again. Why don’t I just pretend I live in Laval?

So all I needed was a Laval postal code. Ok, Canada Post should help with that. So I went to Canada Post’s website, clicked on Find a Postal Code, entered the name of a major street in Laval and was given a bunch of postal codes to choose from. I picked the one that appealed the most to me, typed it in Media Center Guide setup, selected the Montreal Laval option for Videotron Cable, downloaded the newest listings and I am now enjoying a whole new, fresh and accurate channel lineup, just like I should.

Life’s good again.

Theater & DVD Movie List

I am making this an on-going post that i will update regularly with new movie and dvd titles that i will have seen. With so many titles, it is easy to lose track of which movie you've seen and how worthy it was. Hopefully this will help.

300 - Tuesday, March 21, 2007

Wow.. simply wow! I was expecting a graphic movie and boy did it deliver! Amazing photography, filming, action, story, everything. Certainly one movie not to be missed. A very different war movie than anything so far, that makes you wish all battle movies were the same. I am not big on seeing the same movie twice, but this i will have to see again.



The Number 23 - Friday, February 23, 2007

Really great, definitely worth seeing, made my late Friday night. Being a psychological thriller, i must say, it was quite thrilling. Finally, a very different style and performance from Jim Carrey which suits him very well. Hopefully this won't be his last one of the sort.

24 hours without your computer... are you up for it?

As the title says, think you can do it? Read below.

	Be a part of one of the biggest global experiments ever to take place on the internet. The idea behind the experiment is to find out how many people can go without a computer for one whole day, and what will happen if we all participate!
	Shutdown your computer on this day and find out! Can you survive for 24 hours without your computer?

http://www.shutdownday.org/

Vista: MEMORY_MANAGEMENT Blue Screen Crash

You upgraded to Vista and are all excited about all the new cool features, like: Dreamscene (preview), Sidebar, Flip 3D, Translucent Windows and yes, snappier, quicker loading programs, etc.

What is that, you say? Quicker loading programs? But why? Why? Well... because of SuperFetch.

While SuperFetch will or at least should make your life... easier, it will put a lot more strain on your hardware; more specifically, your system's memory. As a result, all your enjoyment could come to a (temporary) halt by a dreaded blue screen crash...

So if you've gotten some of those crashes lately with Vista, and particularly those that give a MEMORY_MANAGEMENT error message, wait before you decide to change out memory sticks. They may still be good but just a bit overwhelmed by all the new requirements... and need a little more juice to keep them working properly.

To fix the blue screen crash problem, you may try the following: go into the BIOS and see if you can adjust the memory voltage manually. If you can, increase it by 0.05v. Save and reboot and see if the crashes still happen.

If they still do, you may try to increase by another 0.05v, but proceed with care. Increasing voltage will also increase the operating temperature of your memory sticks which can possibly lead to them burning if you don't monitor their temperature.

Needless to say, playing with the voltage supplied to the different parts of your computer is fairly hardcore for some, so do this at your own risk. Other than that, enjoy...

If you've tried to increase voltage by up to 0.1v and the crashes continue, you really may have a memory problem.. or a temperature problem... or a driver problem. Try to cool those sticks off first or ultimately try different sticks; or wait for driver updates. Good luck.

UPDATE 09/30/2007: This memory management blue screen in vista may also be caused by overclocked memory. So check your BIOS settings and make sure your memory is running at its default speed. If it is overclocked, either bump it down a notch and then see if you still get the blue screen, or to isolate the problem quicker, run it at its default speed.

Some motherboards allow you to asynchronously overclock your processor and memory. That means that you may run the cpu at one frequency and the memory at another. In my case, i discovered that while having my cpu overclocked and the memory at its default speed, the memory was still running at the processor's overclocked speed. I believe that was the cause of the memory management blue screen errors. Running the cpu at its default settings, caused the memory to also run at the default settings, solving the memory management blue screen crashes. For those interested, this issue occurred on a Asus A8N-SLI motherboard.

Vista Sidebar Gadget: Polaroid

So has the sidebar changed your life yet? Because it really shouldn't... But if you have plenty of photos laying around your desk, it may help you clean it up by moving them on your desktop.

Download it here: http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=49c22971-b1ab-46ee-b5aa-6069923ac240&l=1

Granted, it would be nice if it allowed to easily resize each polaroid by dragging one of its corners so you can have different sized polaroids all over. Maybe in the next update...

And remember this:

Place photos on your desktop, rotate them and give them captions. Double click to start rotation, then click once to stop.

On a similar note, if Polaroids are your thing, you may want to give the Polaroid-o-nizer™ a try:

http://polaroidonizer.5gigs.com/

To top it all off, here's a tiny screenshot of my desktop:

Flex2: Populate ComboBox from RSS

Starting out in Flex development, one of the "simplest" things I wanted to do is to populate a ComboBox with values from an RSS feed (XML). Surprisingly enough, despite all the Flex documentation available, i had a hard time finding exactly how to do it.

So here it is for those who may be looking for something similar:

<mx:HTTPService id="feedRequest"
 url="http://www.megaszu.com/photoblog/rss.asp"
 useProxy="false"   />

<mx:ComboBox
dataProvider="{feedRequest.lastResult.rss.channel.item}"
labelField="title" />

Note that the key is specifying the "labelField" property for the combobox. The below will not work:

<mx:ComboBox
dataProvider="{feedRequest.lastResult.rss.channel.item.title}"  />

Take a look at the actual feed to see its structure.