Okay first it is a 65.5mb download and requires 200mb of space. For a piece of software that plays music and video. Even this day and age of bloat, that is a tad excessive.
I have a large music collection on a different machine – it is a slow connection (see previous post) and I told iTunes where it was – now my machine is unusable while it indexed the 2000 tracks in that folder – and I have another two folders to go. You can’t minimize iTunes while this is going on due to the modal dialog, you can’t inform it of other locations that you want indexing. But it doesn’t stop there, once the modal dialog box finally buggers off and you tell it of the next folder you want indexing it has started on a “gapless playback” and now your machine really crawls as it tries to do two things at once. My fault for having a slow network? Maybe that is part of it, but I can set the folders up in Winamp and have it index at the same time and Winamp is a fraction of the size and I would hazard that Apple can afford to hire better programmers.
When you first index your music iTunes claims it is getting album art automatically. Cool – that’s neat. However I have this other folder to index, you can get the art later. So you index the album, let the gapless playback work out its stuff and then select all and then tell it to ‘Get Album art’. No can do – you need to be signed in. What? You didn’t need that a few minutes ago why now?
Now comes the really insiduous part of it. Okay lets’ create an account, and this is what I really don’t agree with. Why does Apple need to know my house address, what I do for a living, and my telephone number? And I am never going to buy stuff at the Apple Store so I don’t want to give you my credit card details but I can’t sign in without handing over my details. So I did a google search for a way and now I definitely don’t want to hand over my credit card details.
Fortunately I found a tutorial on YouTube that details how to get an account without handing over those details.
Update: I’ve now got my account by the above method. Something I didn’t mention was that I indexed my collection with a wired connection, but the wired couldn’t stay as it was laying directly across the living room, so I am back to my slow-ass wireless. Whether this is what is affecting the album art updating and causes it to crash out about the 1200th cover (which happens to be where my compilation albums exist). Perhaps crash was a bad word, how about hang, or just stop. Whatever. The point is it hasn’t finished the albums and there doesn’t seem to be a way of kickstarting it.
Not only that the only way of getting it restarted is to shut down iTunes. This brings up a dialog box telling you that you are get the album art and whether you are sure you want to stop this. Naturally you click yes and as iTunes shuts down a dialog flashes up for the briefest of seconds – looks like one of those ‘Do not show this dialog again’ boxes. But does it get all my albums? No. And the albums it get are pretty varied. Missed The Chemical Brothers, but did get Blutengel.
Final thing: The iPod has an update available a 57.8mb download. What?! It’s a software update!
December 28th, 2008 :: graham.reeds
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Leisure ::
LifeI’ve been checking everything on my network for what seems like the 1000th time. I even bought another no-brand (net-lynx) network controller that supposedly does 54g. Anything to get above the poxy 11mbps that I am barely achieving. Here’s the rundown of items that is currently powering my Network:
- Net-Lynx WP61R2 PCI
- Netgear WG111T 108Mbps Wireless USB2.0 Adapter
- Netgear WGT624T v3 108mbps Wireless Firewall Router
I also have the following from my previous incarnation of my network:
- Belkin Wireless G+ Desktop Card x2
- Belkin High-Speed Mode Wireless G USB Network Adapter
- Belkin Wireless G Plus
- Generic VIA based USB2.0 PCI add-in PCI card.
The problem with my previous network was that original PCI card wouldn’t work in my HTPC, and also being built in 2002 it doesn’t support USB2.0 which limits my transfer severely. So I bought the USB2.0 add-in card. But that didn’t fix my problem.
So I replaced them. And guess what? It still doesn’t work. I’ve gone through the entire network:
- The WGT624T is set to run in ‘g mode’ only, not ‘b only’, ‘Auto 108Mbps’ or ‘g and b’.
- The USB add-in card is detected as Enhanced which means it is running as high-speed USB2.0 – therefore any attached 2.0 devices should run as 2.0 right?
- The Netgear WG111T doesn’t give you any configuration options that pertain to the speed it runs at but looking at the Networking tab of the Task Manager it lists its link speed as 108Mbps.
- The WP61R2 PCI card gives a few options in Configure and they are set to 54g where applicable. The options I don’t understand I haven’t touched. Task manager lists its link speed as 54Mbps.
It still doesn’t work. For the timing I have been using RaccoonWorks SpeedTest.
So if any network guru’s wander across my site please give me a clue what I am missing!!
December 26th, 2008 :: graham.reeds
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Leisure ::
LifeMy network is holding Mrs Bear back. Or rather is holding me back. I bought my wife an iPod for Christmas. So being the geek about the house I installed iTunes (65mb for a music player?) and set it away indexing all 57gb of music we have (two diverse music collections at 256kbs).
That doesn’t seem to bad when I say it outloud. It’s when you start digging it becomes a bit sad. 57gb across a network. Okay that increases the time a bit but across a T100 connection…Nope. Wireless. Okay a 54g connection will be slower but…Nope. The machine that hosts all the music is ancient. No USB2.0 ports, adding a USB 2.0 card failed as well. We are running at 1.5mb a second tops. 57gb at 1.5mb/ps.
I really need to upgrade.
December 26th, 2008 :: graham.reeds
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Leisure ::
LifeRaymond Chen, over at the Old New Thing blog, was talking about how didn’t put himself forward for “How to open the Vista Box” because of his withered hand. The article is quite funny – especially if you follow it all the way back to the image of his withered hand in question.
The funnier thing is he provides a link to the fact that he was number one in google search results for withered hand. He’s no longer top of that search, as he has slipped down to 6th. But why is that funny? The image results that google provides automatically has three famous pictures of Jesus and one of the late Jeremy Beadle.
December 25th, 2008 :: graham.reeds
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Leisure ::
LifeMerry Christmas everybody! I hope Santa and his cronies elves brought you everything you wanted (or partner thought you needed)!
December 21st, 2008 :: graham.reeds
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Leisure ::
LifeI upgraded to WordPress 2.7 less than a week ago. I then left town for a few days to visit my parents (both technophobes) and came back last night. Before, with versions prior to 2.7, I would have about 3 or 4 spam comments per day, caught by Askimet, so over the same period as I was away I should have had 15 or so, maybe even as much as 20. No I had 144. Less than a day later and I have another 30 I need to clear out. Why so much spam since upgrading? Is there something that the spammers have hooked into that makes comment spam really easy?
Still no where near as bad as October 2007 – 1,521 spam comments in a month.
December 12th, 2008 :: graham.reeds
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Leisure ::
LifeJust been (just had 6 hours sleep) to see Slipknot and Machine Head at Newcastle Metro Radio Arena. In my world Machine Head are as big as Slipknot, but hey – who I am I to complain that I saw two great bands for the price of one?
Not really kept up with either band – I liked their early albums but never kept up with them as my tastes changed – but I have to say live they are both really great performers.
I am going to really suffer today after 6 hours sleep, a head full of cold and bunged up nose…
The posts are slowing, due to Christmas arriving (and ’tis the season of parties) and me now working with the Zero Sum Games guys (and gals), the new owners of Space – Glory Through Conquest - the game I was working against with my homage, Galaxy. Galaxy is not off the cards, but it’s definately been put on a back burner now.
You gotta love user written instructions – especially when they are down right wrong and you know it and the person writing it has to know it (since he has enough intelligence to actually create a blog and use it) but it is still put out there for the universe to see. This is even more bizarre when the instructions that come with the software is pretty explicit and correct. Hell I am also guilty of it.
Case in point: Getting Apache2 and PHP4 working together. I generally ignore the given instructions – my experience up until this point is that they are pretty terse and work on their systems and their systems alone. The best way is to ask google and see what the masses think. Well the masses think that this is a good set of instructions. Well they are right, up until the part where they install PHP and then it goes horribly wrong.
Why would you want to copy everything into a directory of another item and then start to copy various files all over the place – makes upgrading a painful experience: I know this as in a previous life a colleague wrote some software using a 3rd party source library – an expensive one at that. I came to work on it and was wondering why we were still using the several year old version despite the fact that everyone got the update messages forwarded to them from the library authors. What about the 30% speed increases that one of the mails raved about, what about the vulnerability that was fixed? Well they went out of the window when the muppet who wrote it took the decision not to bother with fixing the problem with his configuration and make the code fit the configuration. After that it was all down hill from there.
Anyway I eventually decided that the internet is full of muppets and read the actually instructions shipped with PHP. My god – they have instructions for getting it working on webservers I have never heard of and it is all very clear and well written, if a little terse.
So I now have a working installation of Apache2.0 and PHP4.4!