I've been looking getting a home theatre PC for myself recently, and I'm not sure what to do. See, the dilema is that Windows Media Center 2005 is rather dated these day, and 2007 only comes with Vista Home Premium or Vista Ultimate which would cost me in the order of $400 (on top of the cost of the PC itself, of course! I'd be going home-made here, not OEM because there's certain parts that I specifically want...)

So I've been looking at my choices on Linux, and -- as with anything Linux, it seems -- my choices are quite varied, but nothing seems to live up to expectations.

Of course, there's Linux MCE which looks to be about as full-featured a product as you can imagine, but it's rather lacking in the compatibility stakes (which may not be a problem for me if I'm buying everything from scratch). It's also relatively new, and it doesn't quite have the "polish" of other solutions.

Then there's Elisa which looks more polished but doesn't have the features (not even TV integration!) -- that's pretty much a killer right there

Of course, there's MythTV, but that's more of a PVR than a full-fledged Media Centre (in fact, Linux MCE uses MythTV as its PVR). It's pretty good for what it does, from what I understand, but again not all the features you'd want.

There are many more, but I'm not going to list them all... this is not a review :)

But it seems to me that the common theme here is that you've got many projects, but they're all still in too early a stage to be really useful. I'm not really sure what to do... I'm not sure I like the way that Linux MCE pretty much takes over your installation. I'd want to use the PC as a normal PC as well (though I'd probably dual-boot with Windows XP so I can at least play games as well :p)

Still, I'm probably a few months off actually buying anything. I want to make sure that when I get something, I get the right thing.

Seems crazy, right? After all, the PS3 has a Blu-Ray player built right in, so why would you pay twice as much, and get only the Blu-Ray player? I mean the PS3 is an awesome console (not sure it's $999 awesome, but still awesome)... so how on earth is a stand-alone Blu-Ray player worth $2,000?!

But that's what Pioneer is trying to sell us: a $2,000 Blu-Ray player. The reviews look pretty good, but I just don't see how anybody can justify $2,000 for such a device. I spent less than $4,000 on a 40" 1080p LCD TV and now they expect me to fork out over half as much again for a Blu-Ray player?

Maybe this is just a marketing ploy between Sony/Pioneer to make the PS3 look like a more reasonable buy. Sorry, but I think I'm going to stick with my upscaling DVD player and PS2 for the time being...

This article from ZDNet claims that most companies are simply not satisfied with current anti-spam technologies.

I managed to find a link to the actual report on the ZDNet UK site, so I took a bit of a look.

The report is actually quite interesting, and basically the conclusion is that challenge-response (which I described as "click here if you're human" filtering) is the "best" form of anti-spam. To me, that should come as no surprise, and what I don't understand is why more people don't actually use it. It is kind of annoying for legitimate senders, and it also blocks legitimate bulk senders, but it is very effective and that is reflected in the report.

What does that have to do with "validated email" though? Basically, validated email provides you with a means by which you can skip the challenge-response in more cases. For example, say you have a new business partner, you can tell your challenge-response scanner to skip all messages from that business's domain (presumably because you already know they're all human). You might also skip the big domains like hotmail.com, yahoo.com, etc -- assuming, of course, you trust them to legitimately only allow humans to sign up in the first place!

As with anything in security, though, anti-spam works best in teams: you have multiple defences that must all be breached in order for a spam to get through. Validating email provides you with another layer of defence -- but it also helps to ease the load on your servers because it allows you to skip other defences in many cases.

As another example, you might leave the challenge-response on for yahoo.com and hotmail.com etc, because maybe you don't fully trust them. But that means that for every email you get from those domains, you have to send another one out. That might be a big load if you're expecting lots of such messages! Validating email allows you to skip that process entirely if it detects an inbound email that says it's from hotmail.com but is really from "bigbagspammer.com" -- you can just drop that message without even bothering with issuing a challenge-response.

Anyway, I should stop trying to "sell" validating email now :) Suffice to say that most anti-spam technology in use today does not really work. How much is too much spam? I say even one is too much!

Say I have a form (we're talking WinForms here, by the way). Now say I have an "OK" button that, when you click it, goes off and does some processing. Let's also say that I'm a good citizen and I do that work in using a BackgroundWorker.

With me so far? Right, so while we're doing our background processing we want the cursor to turn into an hourglass, right? So we set the UseWaitCursor property to true just before we kick off the BackgroundWorker. Great, it works!

But we notice that, even though the cursor is an hourglass, you can still click stuff and interact with the window -- not a very good user experience! So we also try to set Enabled to false. But as soon as we do that, we run into a problem!

You see, if a form is disabled, it totally ignores the UseWaitCursor property! So you can either disable the window, or you can display an hour glass, but you can't do both!

A "workaround" is to not disable the whole form, but all of it's child windows. But that's a right PITA because as soon as you add a new control, you've got remember to disable it as well. I could write a helper fuction that disables everything except the form itself, but that sounds kind of silly as well.

Oh well, I guess it's just something I have to live with...

grep is one of the most useful tool ever created. I don't know why a version doesn't come built-in to Windows -- it's quite annoying whenever we set up a new server at work that we have to install one every time.

Anyway, I've created this very simple version based on the .NET Regex class.

You can download the binary and source here.