Last week, a trial version of the Opera web browser was released for the Wii. I was able to successfully control my mouse on my laptop using a bluetooth adapter and today I found a media center has been released for the Wii by Red Kawa.

I installed the media center and found that the music functionality does not yet work on the media center, its no big deal because I was planning on using it for movies/tv anyway.

Converting the videos takes about 20 min with the Red Kawa Wii Video Converter, a couple of games of Wii Sports Tennis should make that go by quickly.

Apparently you can combine the Red Kawa converter with Videora and it will automatically download and convert Bit Torrent RSS feeds for you. The downside is that Videora is not free but there are other programs out there that can do the same thing.

Once you have your video converted you use the Wii browser to access the media center and play your videos. It works pretty well but the Wii browser controls never go away so you have to deal with them while watching your videos.

I would be very impressed if Nintendo built its own media center and made it available for download from the Wii Shop Channel. Hopefully Nintendo provides a better experience.

I've been tagged by D'Arcy, so here we go with 5 things you may not know about me.

1 - I originally went to school to be high school teacher majoring in history. As part of my curriculum I took a programming course which I enjoyed more than teaching so I decided to take my current career path.

2 - I love hockey (maybe thats a bit obvious). I grew up playing and I still play today. I played against a couple of guys that are in the NHL today but no one really special. I also think that Steve Yzerman is the best all around player to ever play the game, and don't say Gretzky was better because all he could do was score goals, his defensive game was WEAK!

3 - I am a big fan of Tennis but have never really played. Maybe thats why I am addicted to Wii Tennis. My ranking is 2034 (pro is 1000).

4 - Like D'Arcy I grew up on Macs. I didn't get my first Windows machine until I was 18.

5 - I am a big supporter of dropping Africa's debt and providing them with cheap drugs for treatment. I am a proud Canadian but I think it is embarrassing that Canada originally authored the promise that all G8 countries should contribute 0.7% of their GNP to Africa in 1969. Yet,we have failed to meet that goal despite budget surpluses. 4 countries that are not members of the G8 and with weaker economies than us have met that goal. We are being embarrassed on the world stage.

I will now tag Catherine, Jean-Paul Boodhoo, James Kovacs, Dave Woods, and Kyle Bailey. Sorry, again sorry.

A lot of programmers are not familiar with the term immutable when it comes to software development the terminology often confuses them. I am going to try and explain it in this post.

An immutable object is an object that once it is created none of its values should change.

A simple way to do this is to only assign to the variables of that object in the constructor so that once the object is created its variables cannot be changed:

    public class GPSCoords
    {
        private readonly int longitude;
        private readonly int latitude;

        public GPSCoords(int longitude, int latitude)
        {
            this.longitude = longitude;
            this.latitude = latitude;
        }

        public int Longitude
        {
            get { return longitude; }
        }

        public int Latitude
        {
            get { return latitude; }
        }
    }

You can also achieve the same goal in .NET by making the class GPSCoords a struct:

    public struct GPSCoords
    {
        public readonly int longitude;
        public readonly int latitude;
 
        public GPSCoords2(int longitude, int latitude)
        {
            this.longitude = longitude;
            this.latitude = latitude;
        }
    }

If you have worked with the string class in the .NET framework you probably didn't realize that you were working with a immutable class. So the next time someone asks you in an interview to explain the behaviour of the string class you will be able to explain it to them. 

[ Currently Playing : Window in the Skies - U2 - U218 Singles (04:07) ]

Today I have been  checking out all the fun stuff at WiiLi.org. You can control various applications on your computer using the Wiimote! All you have to do is buy a Wii compatible bluetooth adater and hook it up, follow some setup instructions and download some apps. Check it all out here. I wonder if I will be able to use it at work?

After about 20 previous tries I decided to once again re-try installing the new Windows Vista RTM tonight. I had tried installing it numerous times before but the installation would always freeze on me. I don't blame Vista itself for the freezes because it turned out the first time I burnt the image I burnt it on an angry dvd that my drive didn't agree with.

Heres my first impressions:

• My favorite thing so far is the Alt - Up Arrow shortcut when navigating through folders. Its a lot more intuitive than Alt-V-O-U!
• My computer scored a whoping 1 on the Vista O Meter because my video card is old! Besides maybe playing around with WPF (after WCF) I have no reason to upgrade it.
• My old D drive is now my E drive.
• My old E drive is now my D drive.
• .NET 3.0 is already installed. IIS7 is not.
• Nero now works with Vista.

Hardware

The Wii is a sexy machine. It is a lot smaller than what I expected. The only problem that I have with it is that the power adapter is big and the power cord isn't that long. The Wiimote is akward at first but feels natural once you get the hang of it. My best advice to anyone new who uses the Wiimote is to use the wrist strap! I thought I was too cool to wear it and I ended up throwing my Wiimote into the ceiling while bowling.

Wii Channels

The Wii was able to find my wireless router easily and I had no trouble connecting it to the Wii shopping channel. I have run into problems with the Wii Forecast channel and the Wii News Channel, when I try and access them it says that I need to update my Wii but when I try and update it says that no updates are available, I hope that this gets ironed out.

The Wii shopping channel is easy to use, you need to buy Wii points before purchasing any of the old games. The games cost between $5 and $10 each. I bought Golden Axe, Bomberman and Bonk's Adventure. The best thing about the downloading is that the progress bar while you wait for your game to download is Mario getting coins and smashing blocks.

Gameplay

This is the best part about the Wii! I haven't had this much fun playing video games since I got my first system. I didn't sit down the whole time I played Wii sports (I don't think you can). The graphics are not even close to the XBox 360 but to tell you the truth I didn't really care. If Nintendo comes out with a hockey game it will rock because you will actually get to deke the goalie with your best move on a break away instead of moving a joystick back and forth.

The other day Catherine received an MSN message from a friend with a website link. After clicking on the link (which looked perfectly valid) the website she went to ran a zero-day exploit on her machine and installed a nasty trojan.

The trojan proceeded to message everyone in her contact list with the link. I probably would have clicked it but when it messaged me no one was sitting at her computer, it seemed a little strange to me.

I went over to her computer to take a look and it was going wild! It was opening up windows by itself and messaging people and killing applications I was trying to run. After running her Anti-Virus I was able to successfully find the trojan but the anti-virus could not delete it.

I went straight to download TCPView, Process Explorer and AutoRuns from Sysinternals (now hosted at Microsoft) and used Scott Hanselman's post as a guide.

The first thing I checked was TCPView to see if the trojan was calling home, luckily it was not, so the next step was to check out what was being run at startup. The first thing I noticed in Autoruns was a weird entry called explorer:

 I also noticed a weird guid being loaded at startup:

If you check out the IE Toolbars and the Browser Helper Objects you can see that an entry for the 888Bar has also been created:

I located all the offending assemblies and registry entries, deleted them and now her computer seems to be fine. I find it very interesting that all of this crazyness happened from clicking a link to a website.