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September 2005 - Posts

Beresheit, with sidekicks (from the New Yorker, via Monica Cellio's blog)

Monica (old friend from college) linked to it, I nearly had to clean up my monitor after reading it... Day No. 1: And the Lord God said, “Let there be light,” and lo, there was light. But then the Lord God said, “Wait, what if I make it a sort of rosy, Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 28, 2005 8:16 AM by LarryOsterman | 7 Comments

The Amazing Race: Family Edition, first impressions (no serious spoilers)

Interesting. I think I'm going to like it - the kids aren't as bad as I had feared (the Gaghan kids are cute, although I thought "She'll be coming 'round the mountain" was cruel (and funny)). The Gaghan girl (Carissa) is 9 going on 20. Oh, and "Sorry Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 27, 2005 11:31 PM by LarryOsterman | 4 Comments
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Anniversaries

Judaism has a tradition that on the anniversary of a loved ones death, one lights a candle (known as a Yahrzeit candle). Since it's a tradition, there are no laws associated with it, so each person chooses their own time to light a candle. Yahrzeit candles Read More...
Posted Monday, September 26, 2005 12:10 PM by LarryOsterman | 24 Comments
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New Audio APIs for Vista

In an earlier post , I mentioned that we totally re-wrote the audio stack for Windows Vista. Today I want to talk a bit about the APIs that came along with the new stack. There are three major API components to the Vista audio architecture: Multimedia Read More...
Posted Friday, September 23, 2005 11:18 AM by LarryOsterman | 17 Comments

What's an audio endpoint?

One of the parts of the audio engine rework was a paradigm shift in how audio devices are addressed. Before Vista, audio devices were enumerated (more or less) by the KSCATEGORY_AUDIO PnP devinterface that exposed a Wave filter. The big problem with this Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 21, 2005 1:34 PM by LarryOsterman | 9 Comments

Windows Audio Quality Enhancements

In my last post , I mentioned the architectural thrust behind the Vista audio changes. I left off explaining how we're dealing with problem #2 - the audio quality issue (because it deserves an entire post on its own). There were a couple of significant Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 20, 2005 10:54 AM by LarryOsterman | 13 Comments

What's up with Audio in Windows Vista?

Steve Ball (the GPM for the MediaTech group (of which Windows Audio is a part)) discussed some of these changes in the Windows Audio Channel 9 video , but I'd like to spend a bit more time talking about what we've done. A lot of what I'm discussing is Read More...
Posted Monday, September 19, 2005 10:05 AM by LarryOsterman | 39 Comments

Windows Audio Channel9 Video is up.

Robert Scoble's posted the audio team Channel9 video , in it, the GPM for our group goes over what the Windows Core Audio team's been doing for the past three or so years, and lays out some of the stuff that we've got in store for Vista. I am super psyched Read More...
Posted Friday, September 16, 2005 10:43 AM by LarryOsterman | 15 Comments

Converting between bases...

The other day there was a thread on Channel9 where "orangie" was complaining about the fact that his programming class required him to learn how to convert between different bases (base 10->2->whatever). In reality, it's actually quite useful to Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 15, 2005 11:44 AM by LarryOsterman | 35 Comments

Interacting with Services

In the comments for my first services post, someone asked about the SERVICE_INTERACTIVE_PROCESS flag that can be specified for the CreateService API. This flag allows the user to specify that the service should be allowed to interact with the logged on Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 14, 2005 9:30 AM by LarryOsterman | 13 Comments

I'm NOT at the PDC this year :)

It seems that every single Microsoft blogger's at the PDC today, but unfortunately, I'm not :( On the other hand, Robert Scoble's going to be posting a video he did of the Windows Core Audio team sometime in the next couple of days where we finally get Read More...
Posted Tuesday, September 13, 2005 10:01 AM by LarryOsterman | 5 Comments

Breaking Up (shared services) Is(n't) Hard To Do

The last time I wrote, I talked about shared services . One of the problems of working with shared services is that sometimes one service in the process gets in the way of other services. For the audio service, it lives in the "networking services" service Read More...
Posted Monday, September 12, 2005 10:55 AM by LarryOsterman | 17 Comments
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Shared Services

One of the comments I made when doing my "first impressions" of the Mirra backup device was that the Windows software starts two separate services running in two different processes. I see this a lot - people architect their product into multiple services Read More...
Posted Friday, September 09, 2005 10:56 AM by LarryOsterman | 13 Comments

APIs you never heard of - the Timer APIs

It's time for another "APIs you never heard of" article :) This time, I'd like to talk about the time* APIs. The time* APIs are a set of 7 APIs built into the windows multimedia extensions (winmm.dll). They provide a rudimentary set of timer functions Read More...
Posted Thursday, September 08, 2005 9:55 AM by LarryOsterman | 23 Comments
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Mirra, first impressions

We've currently got something like 7 computers currently in use in my house these days, and I've been looking for a centralized backup solution for the home for a while. Eventually, I settled on a Mirra - a small form-factor appliance-like backup server. Read More...
Posted Wednesday, September 07, 2005 10:57 AM by LarryOsterman | 17 Comments

Administrivia

When we switched to community server, back in April, I decided to stop moderating my posts, since the comment spam had reduced. Well, over the past couple of weeks, I've seen a number of comment-spam attempts, which means that I'm likely to be a target Read More...
Posted Saturday, September 03, 2005 11:13 AM by LarryOsterman | 6 Comments
 
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