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by Dan Fernandez.
Original Post: Can a PC talk to a Mac in under two hours?
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Thanksgiving at my mom's house in DC is a little bit non-traditional
as guests don't arrive until around 8pm, we don't eat until close to 11pm, and
we don't stop partying until 2/3 AM. There were about 30 people at my mom's
house this year in D.C. which made it all the more fun.
My mother's 60th birthday also happened to fall on turkey day this year, and
for a gift, I got her wireless speakers that plug into her PC so that she can
listen to internet radio in the kitchen and radio. Worked like a charm :)
My oldest sister had been secretly recording testimonials from long-time friends and
family to create a birthday collage for my mom. The only problem was that
there were still pictures that we needed to add to the collage, and my sister
uses an OS X mac laptop while I run Windows XP. Oh, and we had to do this all within
two hours (before guests arrived) and we had to do this without my mom finding out.
Below are the options I went through to transfer still pictures from a PC to a Mac:
Floppy Disk - My sister didn't have hers so this was a no-go.
USB Keychain - The USB keychain that I have didn't seem to work on a Mac.
This may be because the keychain has a password app on it that requires you to enter
a password before you can view the files on the keychain.
Network - Network Stumbler found two wireless networks, but my sister couldn't get
on either of these, despite our efforts. XP got on both of these networks without
any problems.
IR Port - Her laptop lacked an IR port.
CD-ROM Burning - This was the last option that I could think of, as my laptop is a
DVD-CD/RW combo I could burn a disk for her pretty easily. Unfortunately we
didn't have blank CD-Rs at my house, so I ran to the local grocery store (the only
thing open on turkey day) and found blank CD-Rs <aside>Back when I first started
burning disks in '98, the only place you could ever find blank CDs was in computer
stores, now you can find them in grocery stores</aside>. After sneaking these
into our house, I ran upstairs only to discover that I didn't have CD burning software,
and after trashing a disk trying to get Windows Media Player to act
as a burner, I started searching the web for burning software. That's when I
remembered that Duncan had
posted Anson's CD
burning code. I downloaded the MSI and installed it. It's a very easy to
use, well-factored API, and below is the actual code I used to burn files to the CD
burner (with inserted comments to explain what's going on)
//Create a new instance
of the XPBurn component XPBurn.XPBurnCD cd =
new XPBurn.XPBurnCD();
//Add files (file path, name of file to use
for CD cd.AddFile(@"c:\pic1.jpg","pic1.jpg");
//...
/*
Record Disc begins the process,
Set 1st param to false if you want to actually burn the disk and not just simulate
a burn
Set 2nd param to true if you want the disc to eject after burn
*/
cd.RecordDisc(false, true);
With the code written, I placed it in a
button click event of a Windows form and presto, it worked! My sister took the
freshly burned CD and was able to read the pictures off the disk with no problem.
My mom loved the video montage and there was much rejoicing.
Lessons learned:
Communicating between Macs and PCs is still way too difficult
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