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Apple recently started offering film rentals and purchases to Irish users via iTunes. For some reason they haven't started offering TV shows yet, though I suspect that's down to licensing problems (as usual!)

Last night I thought I'd try out the service, so I rented a film for a couple of Euro.

Since my mac book screen is small and my TV has a nice big screen I thought I'd be able to stream the video to it relatively easily using Connect360.

Unfortunately it simply does not work

Connect 360 cannot "see" the downloaded file in the iTunes folder. I tried copying it to the "Movies" folder, but while that rendered it visible it still won't actually play. Any attempt at playing returns a totally unhelpful error message on the Xbox.
After doing some searching it would appear that you simply cannot stream rented films! That's nuts! Seemingly it will work with ones that you "own", but not with rentals at all!
I wouldn't mind too much if the Zune selection on Xbox was semi-decent, but the Irish catalogue is very restricted. Sure, you can find some nice "oldies", but the new releases section is extremely limited.

So if anyone has a sane solution for this I'd love to hear

However I suspect that this is Apple DRM at its worst !

If you've been following the EU vs. Microsoft over the last few years this latest titbit should interest you.

From the beginning of March 2010 (ie. tomorrow) Microsoft will be rolling out a new update to its users which will give them a choice of browser.

While users have always been able to install alternative browsers to the default Internet Explorer the software company will now make that choice more explicit and obvious.

Have Microsoft suddenly changed tack? Not really. They're only doing this it would appear as a result of the EU's pressure on them.

More details on the Microsoft legal and policy site.

Will this have much impact on browser usage?

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• Microsoft's EU browser ballot approved, arrives March 1 (arstechnica.com)
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We've been using Microsoft Exchange to handle the company mail for the last year or so.

One of the minor annoyances with Outlook Web Access (OWA) was that it only made a very small subset of its features available to non-IE users ie. anyone using a browser other than Internet Explorer got a very small feature set.

This morning I logged on to our new install of Exchange 2010 and was delighted to find that they've finally reworked it so that it works properly on most browsers.

Admittedly you don't get the full "threading" and "conversation" style experience that is available to Internet Explorer users, but it is a huge improvement on the previous version.

Update: Just noticed that the "threading" and "conversation" experience is present, but the way it loads it is slightly less obvious than on IE

Bing is the "new kid" when it comes to search engines. I'll be the first to admit that I haven't used it much, partially because I'm happy enough with Google and partially because Bing keeps getting confused about my location. (Some of the time it think I'm in the UK, other times it knows I'm in Ireland)

In any case Bing (Microsoft) have done some kind of deal with Twitter to offer more of a "realtime" search experience.

The new Twitter service on Bing was launched in the last couple of hours, so it's brand new.

What's cool about it is that gives you tweets + links.

So a search for "ireland" will give you the latest "tweets" (messages posted on Twitter) followed by the most recent links associated with the keyword. So if you post a link to something cool on Twitter it should be picked up almost instantly and "ranked" against the rest of the community.

Danny Sullivan has posted in more detail over on SearchEngineLand. Hopefully Bing / Twitter won't be swamped by the spammy junk that can get sent onto Twitter by automated scripts...

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I've been toying with the idea of getting some form of media server solution setup for quite some time. I had initially been interested in setting up some way of streaming all my audio CDs, but more recently I was interested in doing something similar with AVIs and DivX.

I don't use Windows that much and I currently don't have a functioning desktop PC at home (hard drive death).

So that leaves me with my MacBook Pro and an Xbox360, which I got a few months ago from Microsoft Ireland.

The Xbox does have support for video and audio, but the problem is getting the files onto it or to it..

Fortunately there are solutions available.

Connect360, which costs $20, is a simple, yet powerful, bit of software that can help turn your Apple Mac into a media source for your Xbox.

Download the installer, run it and then tweak the settings a small bit and off you go.
I currently don't have iPhoto installed, but it recognised both the Xbox and the various multimedia files on the hard drive of the Mac.

The only other setting that I tweaked was the location and scan frequency for "movies":



The one possible downside is that the Xbox itself will display absolutely all the directories and subdirectories of the source, so you could end up doing quite a bit of scrolling to find the file you want to watch.

In terms of supported formats, the Xbox seems to support most of the common ones that you're likely to encounter, though some AVI files I threw at it wouldn't open.
Passing them through Avidemux seemed to resolve a lot of the problems.

Of course, if you can't view the file using something like VLC on your Mac, then trying to get the Xbox to open it is probably futile.

The Xbox's user interface for playing AVIs etc., is reasonably intuitive and includes basic play, pause, fast forward controls.

Being able to watch various video formats on a decent sized screen with the audio going through my AV receiver is a significant improvement over trying to watch them on a 15" laptop screen with "tinny" audio.

There are, of course, other ways of doing this.

In terms of commercial software there is also a package called Rivet, which retails for slightly less than Connect360. According to this review Rivet has better structuring in terms of the navigation of files on your Mac.

I also came across a "free" way of doing streaming, but haven't had a chance to try it out.

When I got my Nokia E71 back before Christmas I immediately fell in love with the device.
One of the options that we setup was MFE (Mail for Exchange) which was pretty functional, although a bit limited.

However while we were working on our Hosted Exchange service launch Paul came across a really nice bit of software that takes the E71 and Microsoft Exchange 2007 to a whole new level.

The software - RoadSync - is really cool and makes full use of ActiveSync on Exchange server 2007. Basically it means that you can get "email push" without having to spend a fortune on expensive addons for your Exchange server.

Configuring RoadSync is pretty easy. You just enter your login details on the device you're using and off you go.

If you're connecting into an Exchange Server 2007 setup, like we are, then you can turn the synchronisation to use ActiveSync, which means that you'll get your email on your phone almost instantly.

The other features that give RoadSync that extra "edge" are its support for HTML emails (MFE simply can't handle them) and sub-folder support. Since I get so much email every day I have a rather complex set of rules to filter emails off to different folders depending on subject lines, senders and addressees. MFE simply cannot deal with the subfolders, whereas RoadSync does a reasonable job of it.

All in all moving my business email onto my phone has made things a lot easier. I don't feel as "tied" to my desktop / laptop as before and can receive emails easily while on the move. While admittedly a lot of this would have been possible on my N95 the full keyboard on the E71 takes "possible" to "comfortable", which in my mind is a pretty important difference.

The only problem with any of the mobile email software seems to be an inability to handle multiple Exchange accounts, which is understandable. Unfortunately it means that I can't move my personal email onto our Hosted Exchange cluster, which I wouldn't mind doing ...

I generally don't use Windows on either of my desktops or my laptop. I normally use Mac OSX or Ubuntu Linux, so this kind of message is not only annoying, but kind of pointless:

I wouldn't mind so much, but as far as I can see you don't need anything special once you're actually logged in to the Microsoft Partner portal (I had to remote desktop into a Windows machine to find out!)

If, like me, you don't use Windows, then you probably rely on Adium or Pidgin for instant messaging.

As of this morning neither Adium or Pidgin has not been able to connect to the MSN messenger servers for instant messaging.

If you're on a Mac you can install the Microsoft Messenger for Mac software or you can downgrade Adium to an older version.

The Pidgin developers are aware of the issue and are promising to release a fix, though when remains to be seen

For more in depth technical details check out the post on the Adium blog

Trying to get sites to display identically across multiple browsers and multiple operating systems is awkward. This site probably doesn't display particularly well on all browsers, but I'm not a professional web designer / developer, so you'll have to excuse me. It's also not a corporate / business website trying to sell products or services to the public.

Screenclick, however, is a business website.

Earlier this evening I decided to visit it on my Mac using Firefox. Apart from the really annoying splash page, which doesn't do anything useful, the main page does not load correctly in Firefox 3 on the Mac:


Now if you open the same page in Safari you seem something totally different:
Why?

Seemingly somebody decided to use Microsoft's Silverlight, but didn't bother to do a simple plugin check that would either prompt the user to install the plugin or gracefully degrade.

I won't be able to view their site on my Linux desktop either, as Silverlight isn't available for Linux (there is a port, but last time I checked there wasn't a native Debian / Ubuntu version available)

UPDATE: I've now moved to my Ubuntu Linux desktop and this is what I get:

The wonderfully helpful splash page (do they honestly expect me to continue browsing after seeing that?)



and the inner page (for some odd reason it's actually telling me that I need Silverlight now, whereas it wasn't on my Mac!)

High profile websites are always going to attract attention and Microsoft Ireland is no different.

The main page of the Irish branch of Microsoft was defaced earlier this morning.

See screenshot below (courtesy of CJB):