On the third Thursday of every month at 3PM Pacific Time, the Windows Media Center MVP’s and members of the Media Center team from Microsoft host a live chat session with users of Media Center. If you’d like to put some questions to us live remember to come along to the chat session this Thursday at

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertzone/chats/chatroom.aspx

Today during his keynote speech at the RSA Conference, Bill Gates announced Microsoft's on going commitment to provide safer web browsing for Windows Customers. As part of this it was revealed that the first beta of Internet Explorer 7 will arrive this Summer for Windows XP SP2.

This goes against a decision made back in 2003 which was that a new version of Internet Explorer would require a new version of Windows and not be available as a standalone for other versions (Windows XP featured Internet Explorer 6, and would receive upgrades to IE6 SP1/SP2 as part of a service pack update). As Windows Longhorn has been taking some time in arriving I welcome this update for XP, however I hope Internet Explorer 7 will not be an entirely security focused release. Since Internet Explorer 6 in 2001 a great many things have come onto the web scene, some technologies which are in IE6 simply do not fully work as they are meant to/’modern’ versions are not implemented at all, CSS support is a good example. This is something which really does need to be addressed. Bill also announced that Windows® AntiSpyware technology would be made available with no additional charge.

Press Release

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/feb05/02-15RSA05KeynotePR.asp

IE Team Blog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/02/15/373104.aspx

Well, the upgrade to v1.7 of dasblog was a bit more fun than I expected it to be, and ended up with all of the content being non accessible today. But luckily thanks to Karl on the server side it all seems to be up running nicely again. The new version of dasblog looks quite promising, particularly in the area of blog spam and actually having a decent log viewer.

I’m off to have a play

The MSN Remote Record Service allows you to remotely schedule programs to be recorded on your Media Center 2005 PC. A Public Beta is now available but only to users in the United States and Canada. To join the beta...

Go to http://beta.microsoft.com
Sign in with your Passport ID
At the top of the Beta Place page you should see:

"If you were issued a Guest ID by Microsoft, you can sign in by clicking
here."

Click on "clicking here"
Sign in with guest ID: myshows (all one word, all lower case)
Click on "MSN Remote Record Service Beta"
Click on "survey" on the left side of the MSN Remote Record Service Beta
Program page
Click on "MSN Remote Record Beta Nomination Form"
Fill out the form and submit.

All valid nominations will be approved. Once approved, it takes about 24
hours for the information to get through the Beta Place system and testers to have access to the Beta program

Version 1.01.3 of my Media Center Configuration Reset tool is now available for download. This is essentially my 1.02 version of the program with the ‘backup recording schedule’ feature turned off so that I could put out a version which would support Media Center 2005 with Rollup 1 installed. Once I’ve been able to test 1.02 a bit more it will be up for download. http://mvps.org/marksxp/MediaCenter/util/reset.php