Wizard's Blog

Image via CrunchBase

The Xbox 360 NXE (New Xbox Experience) will be out tomorrow, but Microsoft have very kindly released it a day early to the 10,000 people who signed up for the preview.

The first thing you do after the update is set up your avatar.  Comparisons to Nintendo's Mii's are obvious and justified.  It's basically the same as avatar designers in other systems/games, from Sims to Saints Row 2.  They seem to have neutered it slightly in that there aren't a lot of clothes and you can't change the colors of the clothes - presumably because they intend to make money by selling you more later.

In any case, my avatar ended looking fairly realistic:

ghosttie

As much as I want to like the new interface, it's very... noisy.  There are a lot of panels with ads and lots of text, and I find myself just staring at it thinking where am I, and where do I want to go?

One of the things I was looking forward to in the NXE was the ability to save games to the hard drive to improve load times.  The problem is that I only have the 20GB hard drive, and each game needs 7Gb, so I would have to pick at most two games to save.  At the moment I don't even have 7Gb free, so I can't even try it out with one game.  I want to upgrade to the 120GB hard drive, but the price just isn't coming down.  And charging $1.12 per Gb when everywhere else charges between $0.10 and $0.40 pegs the needle on my ripp-off-meter.

The other thing I was really looking forward to was the Netflix integration.  Ideally I thought it would destroy the market for physical media.  Just think - if you had instant access to every movie and TV program ever made for a reasonable, flat subscription charge, why would you ever need to buy a DVD or HD-DVD?

The final thing I was looking forward to was the Parties feature - joining games with a group of your friends.  I don't know that many people that also have NXE early, so I haven't been able to try it out yet.

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Image via CrunchBase

I tried FeedBurner back in the days when this blog was running Blogger, but I never really saw the point and I didn't have any subscribers anyway.  Since then I switched to WordPress and FeedBurner was bought by Google, so I gave it another shot.

I've been using it for a while now, with mixed results.  The stats are inaccurate to the point where they seem random (and weren't stats the original point?), their whole website is dreadfully slow, and there was no easy way to switch everyone over from the direct feed to the burned one.

Then today I read about a WordPress plugin called FeedBurner FeedSmith, which (somehow) takes care of that exact problem.  Hooray!

And then I noticed that the FeedBurner feed wasn't working at all.  I checked Google Reader and sure enough, it hadn't had a blog post in two weeks!  And I've been posting every day!  And although I have FeedMedic alerts set up, I never got one.

The FeedBurner feed was showing this error:

Error getting URL: 502 - Source feed is too large ... maximum size is 512K

Which is fairly self-explanatory I suppose, but it still took a while to fix.  First of all I lowered the number of posts that WordPress sends to the feed from 500 down to 10.  Although that should bring down the feed size drastically, I was still getting the error.  It turns out that the trick is to ping FeedBurner so it actually tries getting your feed again rather than just showing you the error from the last time it tried.

So in the end all is well with the world.

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