fk.Blog BETA

So, WTF is the deal with iTunes on Vista? Apple, you make good stuff, and I’ve been using iTunes on my Mac Mini for about a year and a half now on that.

Recently, I decided to use my PC for pretty much everything though. Moving my library to the PC was pretty easy, but come on, man: why the hell is iTunes so slow on Windows? If I wanted to change tracks right now, I’d have to click on the iTunes window, wait about 2 seconds for the window to realize that it now has focus. Then I’d click on the “Music” category, wait another 2-3 seconds for the list to come up, and then when the UI finally becomes responsive enough again for me to double-click on the track I want to listen to, I have to deal with the music randomly, every 30 or seconds, skipping because I had the audacity to browse the web a bit; to say nothing about my ability to write this blog post while I’m playing music. I’d love to go back to Windows Media Player or Winamp, because they work perfectly fine. Too bad iTunes is really the only thing that works great with an iPod when it comes to not just music, but also TV shows, podcasts, etc. Too bad it’s slow.

iTunes on Windows sucks, Apple. Are you putting me on?

And for all of you people out there about to comment on this blog that it works absolutely fine on your computer and you have no performance problems whatsoever, you might want to check to make sure you aren’t delusional.

Barracuda has historically had a problem with the order in which block and accept rules are applied on their junk mail filter product. For example, at some point over the past year or so, Barracuda implemented the Barracuda Blacklist and turned it on by default in a firmware update. This is a blacklist of spammers maintained by Barracuda Networks. This worked fine and dandy until we found out that the Barracuda Blacklist was overriding locally configured whitelists. Barracuda might think one of our clients is a spammer, but we know they’re not, and besides, we need their email. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s my rant about Information Superhighway Robbery when it comes to the price of software.

I get this email the other day from the administrative assistant at one of our branch locations. They’re bringing on some part time help in the marketing area .. just a couple of guys to assist the two people doing all the work full time. It turns out they’re going to need to use the a suite of creative design products that includes photo editing, illustration, page layout, and PDF output. These guys are part time, they’re never going to use this software at the same time as each other, and they’re probably going to use it 3 times a month.  How much do you think this is going to cost my company? Read the rest of this entry »

After months of trying to get WPAD (Web Proxy Autodiscovery Protocol) to work and realizing that the implementation in Windows and Internet Explorer is less than reliable, I still needed a way for company laptops to change their proxy settings when the end-user would take it off the network to somewhere with an entirely different proxy situation.

The utility I found that does exactly what I want is called Proxy Monitor and it was written by Jelle Druyts. His blog is at http://jelle.druyts.net/. This program uses a standalone XML configuration file where you define the proxy configuration or autoconfiguration URL and can set up different proxy servers. The software will detect changes to the network and detect which proxy to use automatically or the end-user can set it manually as well through an easy to use tray icon. Be sure to check this out if you have road warrior laptop users who are tired of manually setting their proxy settings back and forth.

While deploying a popular corporate web filtering suite, it became apparent that I would not be able to deploy the client software through Group Policy because some properties needed to be set during installation and Group Policy does not support command line arguments to MSI files. I found this cool utility, though, called appEditor available from Camwood at http://www.camwood.com.

This utility quickly opens MSI files and allows changing of the internal table values, including the properties that I needed altered, then saves it back out quickly. I can now deploy the application without any batch file acrobatics and am able to do it silently during bootup before login. appEditor is inexpensive and for quick modifications to MSI files, it’s really handy.

Happy New Year 2007. Here are some pictures from the New Years festivities in WoW right at this address: http://rommie.org/gallery/main.php/v/WoW/NewYears2007/

I was having a conversation with this guy yesterday about the iPod. He said he didn’t like the iPod’s user interface or iTunes. His reason was because he likes to organize his mp3s into files and folders, and he would prefer that to play them, he browse through files and folders. He even went on to say that he doesn’t like how they have that stupid “Artist, Genre, and Song” stuff. Read the rest of this entry »

This is another thing I like better about this Macintosh than my Windows computer. In Windows, if you’re downloading a file or files, copying a bunch of files, emptying the recycle bin, or doing anything that takes a bit of time, it a) takes longer to open the animation than it takes to perform the operation a lot of the time, or b) gives you absurdly varying estimates of time to complete, c) gives insane progress bars that don’t provide information when it comes right down to it. Read the rest of this entry »

Does anyone agree with me that the file/folder metaphor on computer desktops has outlived its usefulness?  On my computer desktop at work a few days ago, I was in a pinch and I needed to get a remote session up with a Microsoft technician to help me out with a problem on a server. I needed space quick and I needed to give this technician access to my desktop so we could hit multiple servers. I dumped everything on my desktop into a new folder called Temp9999999. It occurred to me, again, that I’ve probably done this a few hundred times since I started working there before Y2K. There are literally thousands of documents and programs of various sorts in there. Read the rest of this entry »

Apparently they only do it to get to the other side, because I’m sitting in the parking lot of the convenience store and I just saw a family of twelve ducks cross the street.  A few cars stopped and waited about a minute and a half while all these ducks crossed.  After they crossed and the cars passed, they all looked back at the road in contemplation for about 10 seconds, then proceeded back across the street.

Quack.