Category Archives: Software

Music, Software

iTunes 7.1 + Vista = problems (still…)

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They’ve still not sorted how iTunes and Windows Vista work together. There’s bloating, lag, and staggering performance issues that result in skipping and long pauses mid-track. Mind you, I’ve had some of these issues since v7 launched and I was still using XP. So who knows where the cause lies? Causality is problematic enough without introducing a computing layer into it all…

Someone wake me when they fix it, or tell me about another media player (not Winamp, that seems slow with a big media library too – I have 13,000 tracks).

Internet, Software, Technology

I Joost don’t know what to do with myself

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So, first impressions of Joost.

It’s pretty. A very slick application, transparent, dissolving menus, simple, intuitive menu overlays and EPG.

The quality is ok. I guess not everyone can have 8-16 meg broadband to support HD content (the UK’s average is around 2 meg at the moment)… suspect this could come in time. On my 22″ monitor, its a little fuzzy. The TV content isn’t all the same size either; they could add VLC’s ‘crop’ function to make all the content as full screen as possible depending on the picture orientation. That’d be nice.

It’s a little jittery. For me, anyway. Despite my ludicrous broadband connection I found a couple of channels (GameStar and Green Day) had a couple of pauses during the segments of the programmes I was watching.

The content, is, erm, lacking. Don’t seem to be too many channels natively, and my limited surfing isn’t unveiling a lot at the moment. But there’s probably a way to access everything on YouTube or something, so I’m clearly missing something. And its a beta, anyway, so good chance more will come before a public launch. The search function is pretty good.

It’s pretty interactive. The ‘My Joost’ button will make watching random TV channels at home alone an oddly kind of social. Not really my thing, but, hey, I see the value. I love the random pop quiz questions that seem to be coming up around the music videos.

I already wish: there was an easier way to channel surf. That I could blog directly from Joost, embedding videos accordingly. That there was a way to ‘favourite’ videos (just found the ratings widget. And all the other widgets. Gosh this is good).

And that’s it for now. More to come if it occurs to me.

Software, Technology

Windows Vista: not for the tame of spirit

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My big personal tech project over the last couple of weeks has been migrating to Vista. Why, I hear you ask? The answer, I’m afraid, is essentially ‘for the hell or it’. A longer answer: my XP install had been clunkering along since I bought my current desktop PC in early 2005. As Windows is wont to do, it had begun to bloat to an unacceptable level and performance was, not to put too fine a point on it, crap. So; rather than reinstall the 5 year old Windows XP, or the 3 year old XP SP2, I opted to get that new hard drive I’d been needing (a 250GB WD drive with 16 meg cache), Windows Vista Home Premium OEM and some new RAM to manage the transition.

That’s already quite an involved process: I knew an upgrade to Vista wouldn’t be a good thing from a performance perspective so I opted for a fresh new install. When the parts arrived, I hit my first stumbling block – Dell only provided one SATA power cable. So I couldn’t get the new hard drive to work. Much fiddling and one cable purchase further, with everything plugged in, I installed Vista clean on my new hard drive. The Vista advisor had suggested that some of my hardware, including my network card, wouldn’t work, but (some fiddling later) I got it all up and running. Bizarrely, my Soundblaster Audigy 2 (from the most popular manufacturer of sound card hardware in the world?) required me to download beta drivers from the its website. Windows caught most other things.

Given the amount of hardware I have (I have things plugged into 22 USB sockets) it was quite impressive that it managed this. But still; non-trivial for a casual PC user.

Other things that went wrong / require(d) fiddling:

(1) My iPod required the Apple Ipod fix for Vista.
(2) My NAS drive isn’t supported as a NAS drive – will need to get a generic storage network adaptor rather than the proprietary Freecom one I used
(3) I’ll have to reinstall a stack of applications/freeware/etc., which I can’t quite bring myself to do with my PC working this well
(4) RAM demands are big
(5) The permissions thing (that spawned this Mac ad) is annoying as hell, although Lifehacker does have a workaround somewhere.

Things that work really well / much better than under XP:

(1) File system is improved
(2) Search is fantastic
(3) Aero is SO pretty / Flip3D is cute ;-)
(4) Task manager is much more useful
(4) Multimedia / pictures / music etc., are all improved, and Media Player/sharing integration is good

So; in essence, a lot of subtle polishing and some good performance tweaks, but its really not easy to migrate yourself over and probably not worth it for these changes. If you are buying a new PC, for most of your requirements, odds are that things will work and you will be better protected against spyware and potentially self-inflicted damage. Most people shouldn’t even try to upgrade, especially if you’re on a laptop and don’t have scope to upgrade your hardware as well.

Still, if you’re up for a challenge, Vista is damn pretty. And fun. For those curious, the current spec of my PC is a P4 3Ghz (single core), 3GB of RAM, an Nvidia 7950GT graphics card (sadly not DirectX10 compatible), and the aformentioned WD hard drive add up to a performance index of 4.2 (current max is 6, but I vaguely remember reading that its open ended). Simon, thanks for the encouragement – well worth the efforts.

Internet, Software

IE7 has serious memory leak issues

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I mean, bad, bad, bad memory leak issues. FF used to be bad – I’d leave it on for a few hours and it’d suck up 150MB of system RAM and need to be killed. FF2 seems to be much better than that – still some memory bloating, but relatively stable and I can generally close it before I have to kill it.

IE7 just pumped 350MB of RAM into Windows Live Messenger (don’t ask me how, but it was clearly IE that was the issue because when I killed that… well, problem solved).

Come on, MS. I like you guys better than you deserve. IE7 is beginning to feel like a piece of badly designed bloatware. And if you guys have inked some kind of deal with Intel to make me upgrade my PC just so I can cope with IE7, you’ve got another thing coming. I’ll just go FF all the way, baby, and deal with the consequences on Outlook Web Access and my Sharepoint websites.

I can’t believe I installed this piece of £”*$&£($& £$(*…

Software

iTunes 7 sucks

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Sleek, glossy and ‘simple’ as it is, getting iTunes 7 to work on my machine required:

    installing iTunes 7 (error message)
    uninstalling Quicktime
    reinstalling iTunes 7 with quicktime (works, but doesn’t detect iPod)
    uninstalling iTunes 7 AND quicktime
    reinstalling iTunes 7 and quicktime
    restarting machine 3 times

…and breath. No wonder people are complaining. Man, that Steve Jobs really busts my chops.

You wanna fight Steve? You wanna fight? Bringit.

And to all you people saying that this wouldn’t happen if I had a Mac… shutup. I was kinda tempted by Linux after seeing this, though:

Internet, Software, Technology

Windows Live Writer

Windows Live WriterSo I’m checking out Windows Live Writer; in fact this post, and the post before it were written using it. For those not in the know, it’s a ‘super exciting’ (thanks for the tip, Simon ;)) WYSIWIG blog editor. Well, it seems more than that and I’ve only been using it for five minutes – it’s a highly extensible blog publishing application, integrating with a number of blogging engines (including WordPress).

The community around it is impressive; its been around for all of a month and already there are numerous plugins (including one for Flickr, which is already up, running and more stable than my Tantan plugin). I may add more Flickr images to my posts than strictly speaking necessary in the days to come…

In short; excellent. Try it out if you find you’re not a fan of your blogging engines normal back-end. Expect it to do the standard MS trick of inserting random crap into your HTML if you edit in rich text mode, though. One of those inevitabilities.

(ah, I see there’s a problem with the Flickr API that’s messing with theTantan plugin. I should fix that…)

[tags]microsoft, software, internet, blogging, technology, windows, wordpress, flickr[/tags]

Internet, Music, Software

The Public Betas

The studio post public betas recording session Yesterday I initiated a new concept for Saturday night entertainment (well, new for me anyway) – Chris and Tom came around for a few beers and some collaborative creative development.

What, prithee (underused word), is collaborative creative development? Well, apparently its when friends sit around drinking and discussing ideas for, in this case, a song. Chris and Tom being some of the erm, more technologically literate of my friends, this ended up having a moment of epiphany involving Family Guy, and open-source internet browsing. And so the Public Betas were born.

I’ll upload the output once we’re done with the post-production work (and possibly after I’ve found someone else willing to record the vocals), and Chris is working on the music video and myspace page. ‘The FireFox love song’ – coming soon to all good record stores…

We’ll be an internet sensation any minute now.

It was a very entertaining (and different) evening. The latter portion of the evening, once my fingers were too sore to pick up another guitar and we’d lost interest in the song, was spent looking up cool stuff on YouTube, the whys of the mentos/diet coke reaction, and discussing why the ‘sudo make me a sandwich’ webcomic is funny. It was entertaining…

Internet, Meme, Social media, Software, Technology

Social Memedia

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I thought I’d avoided the ‘5 favourite social media’ meme, but Danny kindly tagged me, so I’ll give it ago. The reason for avoidance? Erm, I’m not sure there’s anything particularly clever or interesting about my favourite five (I don’t rip, script, furl OR curl anything at all)… but here we go.

I love WordPress. Unsurprisingly. It powers this blog, and allows integration with all sorts of other cool things – including del.icio.us, Flickr, Last.fm, Amazon and more, thanks to some cool plugins.

I love Wikipedia. I’m one of those people who likes to know a little about a lot of things, most of the time, and occasionally a lot about a few, and the articles on Wikipedia invariably provide a useful starting point.

I love RSS. I love my RSS readers slightly less: Feedreader is good and is my desktop client of choice. What I really want is something that syncs with an online service so that threads I’ve marked as read on one are marked as read on the other, and so that I don’t have to subscribe to the same feed more than once. Does Newsgator do this? I’ll look into it at some point. Oh, my online RSS reader of choice is Bloglines, and I do like the way that public blogrolls can be shared on there. I should get into all this OPML stuff too…

I like del.icio.us a lot — currently more for my own edification than its social nature (I only have two people in my network) — but as someone who’s (1) never bothered to use bookmarks and (2) who likes to blog one-liners, it gives me good scope to find links I want to again and be pithy about amusing websites. The linklog on the right, btw, is powered by del.icio.us.

And for number 5? I guess Skype might win that one; admittedly it’s a long way from perfect, and arguable to what extent it constitutes ‘media’ as its output isn’t necessarily public… but its a great bit of social software, and there’s potential there (I read some good tips on Simon’s blog on how to record Skype conversations – something which may come in handy…!).

So there you have it. Tags? Don’t think Chris, Tom, Gareth, Ben or, erm, Neil Gaiman have done this (why not ask?). Share and enjoy, folks, share and enjoy.