I recently installed a Roku HD-XR streaming media player and had a minor problem with the network setup.  Since I was able to figure out a solution to problem, I want to share it here to save anyone else some time if they run into the same thing.

If you’re not familiar with the Roku, it’s a streaming media device that allows you to stream a number of different Internet channels to your television.  You can use it to view or listen to content from Netflix, Amazon Video, Pandora, TWIT, MLB.Tv and a whole lot more.  The list of available channels is growing all of the time.

Connecting the device to your television is simple enough, simply connect audio and video cables from the Roku to the appropriate connections on your TV.  The type of cables you use will vary based on the type of television you have so you will have to consult your manual.  It should be fairly straight forward.

The Internet connection may be a bit more differcult for most people.  You have a choice of connecting the box using either a wired connection or a wireless connection.  If your television is setup anywhere close to your Internet connection or if you don’t have a problem running cable throughout your house, the wired connection is the way to go.  In most cases this will be faster and more reliable.  Roku supplies …

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I finally got to see Avatar this weekend.  We went to the 3:30PM show thinking that it would be empty, but it was anything but; the place was packed.  When we arrived the theater was about half full, but by the time the movie started it was almost sold out.

The movie is everything they say it is.  The three hours flew by.

Since everyone else has already reviewed Avatar by now, it doesn’t seem a good use of my time to post another review, so I’ll just say that it is definitely worth seeing.  The CGI is amazing, the 3D is a blast and the movie is action packed without going over the top.  The story has been done before a whole bunch of times, but what story hasn’t.  If you go to see it, make sure you see the 3D version.  Although the movie would stand up well without 3D, you’d still be missing a whole lot of the experience.

Before it leaves the theaters, I think I would like to see it one more time at an IMAX theater.  I’m not a big fan of IMAX, but I suspect in this case it might be worth doing.

I recently fixed a bug at work where one of our applications could not shutdown the computer it was running on when the user logged out.  It turned out the problem was introduced when we recently modified the software to run under a non-administrator account.  We had made the system more secure, but the program no longer had sufficient privileges to shutdown the computer.  The fix for this was to have the software invoke the shutdown program using an administrator account.  Since the solution might be useful to someone else, I’m posting the code that I implemented.

Code appears after the break…

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I just installed the latest version of Expression Engine, the backend software used to run this site, and I’m testing to make sure everything is running properly.  If you can see this post, things are working as expected.  If you can’t, then you can’t read this so it doesn’t matter.