it's full of stars....

First thing is first, NHL '08 is miserable on Superstar mode.  You actually have to play hockey defense.  Not just jump up and slam somebody in to the boards.  And whatever you do, don't make any mistakes passing in your defensive zone.  99.99999999% of them end up in the back of your net.

Second thing would be, well, second.  Astronomy is brutal to your pocket book.  I recently acquired a Meade® 8" LX200®R telescope and after talking to a few friends who are further down that slippery slope, it's become apparent that I may need to sell almost everything else to continue this habit.  And here I thought photography was bad.  Try Astrophotography, which I think is an acronym for Astronomically expensive Photography, it was very cool seeing some of the larger bands on Jupiter and the 4 primary Moons on that first night, but I'm not sure I'm ready to give up my house, yet.

On with our normal show.

I wanted to answer part of a question that has been thrown around by a few people; Why can't you do the 1394 virtual device or a 1394 function driver as a full UMDF driver?

Well the biggy right now is really the 1394 I/O Request Block (IRB) prevents us from doing so.  Since the individual 1394 Bus I/O requests are tied in the union within the IRB, we are bound to use that structure.  Not such a big deal for UMDF drivers really, until you dig deeper in to the nested elements of the specific requests.  Let's take REQUEST_ALLOCATE_ADDRESS_RANGE.  That first element in the structure is gonna kill any hope for UMDF right now.  MDLs.  It is something we plan on addressing, but for right now, we're kind of at an impasse for using IRBs.

So what you'll see in the sample (and in the current 1394 vdev samples as well) are those I/O request structures replicated with 33% more User Mode compliant objects at no additional cost to you!

The same is sort of true for USB which uses nested elements within an URB.

Now isn't this fun? IRB, URB, IRP, MDL.  I'm sure Peter has been hearing some of terms these from his newborn, but probably just before a giggle or a burp happens. ;)

And in closing, your "ha-ha" moment to live by today.  Apparently comments have formed an alliance w/ the ASCII character "Space".  A simple script copied a file to a location in a post build operation.  Except it prepended the file name with a space.  The post-post build script kept generating errors which caused much consternation in my office, yet again.  LUCKILY being a devoted command window user, when I attempted to open the file in notepad with the quick insert command, I noticed the file name was in quotes with that leading space.

It's now a full two pronged attack against me from comments and the Space key.  If they manage to ally themselves with the semi-colon, our world may be at risk.