I discovered this one in a state management routine – save the address of the database corresponding to the module that’s loaded. It works until the program is restarted or the operating system is rebooted. I’m going to have to change it to use the name of the module instead of it’s address. The only problem I can forsee is the presence of multiple copies of the same named module in the application path; That’s just another thing to work out.
It’s not just me but security elevation prompts in vista are a pain in the ass
Firstly, it’s cool that they are there. Rather than having to do something surreal involving runas, explorer and a couple of other things to allow you to run an application at a privileged level you now encounter the ubiquitous shield icon, which tells you that to perform this operation you need to acquire the appropriate privileges. It’s a lot like the linux sudo, except by default you just have to click the ‘continue’ prompt instead of a password.
Pretty cool, even if you’re an administrative user, you don’t start with all the privileges that your group memberships provide.
Here comes the rub – I’ve stopped reading the prompts, I just find the one that tells me how to get to the next step and click on it. I’m not positive, but I think this is probably par for the course for other users as well.
Shame that, nice idea, but hamstrung by having too many things need administrative privileges.
Dead power brick on the laptop
The power brick on the laptop died. I have about 4 hours of juice left. It’s the weekend, and support is closed. Thank crap for the warranty and NBD support. Grrrrr.
ID3 tag type was the issue with Media Player 11
When I converted the id3 tags to v2.3 all the album art went to the correct format. Interesting issue that. By noting it here I hope that it will help someone else. iTunes has been great for this as it can convert between various tag types (from v1.1 through). I’ve shoved my collection to version 2.3 tags, and it seems to have solved the problem with the screwed up album art.
Let’s see, a bulk change of many thousands of tracks should take all night.
Windows media player 11 – album art
Interesting thing that Windows Media Player 11 does to the artwork on albums you possess is to place them in a cache directory under %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Media Player\Art Cache\LocalMLS. Each one is names after a guid, which is probably generated for each track in the collection.
I’m just wondering how difficult it would have been to use a hash of the image data as it’s file name, and storing the hash in the media library instead of the pointer to the guid. This way when you have duplicate images (typically 10 per album), they are not replicated into the cache of images.
The other complaint is that I’ve got a bunch of black album art images. It’s completely odd, as they seem to be completely ok inside in the file – other tools have no difficulty in examining them, and show correct icons. Maybe I should feed this back to them – after all it’s a beta of media player 11.
google earth needs a reboot?
What? you’re just some sloppy application.
Leaky email addresses
When I sign up to commercial services I create a specific account for receiving email for that account. When email arrives for that address from a third party I know that the account has been compromised in some way. Today’s offender is audible. I’m not linking them as they don’t deserve it.
Disabling that PC speaker beep once and for all
For some reason the ^G character is not performing a ‘default system sound’ when it happens. No idea why, probably a misconfiguration on my behalf. It makes using a console very annoying – for example every exception on vmware produces an annoying beep when anything wrong happens.
The solution is in, of all places, the MSDN reference for Beep(), which states in small print to type: net stop beep followed by sc config beep start= disabled
Reenabling it involves typing: sc config beep start= system followed by net start beep
I hope you found this as useful as I did.
World Cup arrives…
While the rest of the planet goes crazy I’m painting 🙂
Ubiquitous Networking?
I was at Shannon Airport to collect the sister this morning. Sign up says ‘free internet access’. You just need to register. Two problems with this – registration was be email and I could not connect to my mail server securely until I had registered. Secure web browsing seemed to be unusable – possibly because I was using self-signed certs from my home server (at $200 p/a for a cert when it’s just for me is plain silly).
The other complaint was of course the everyone must use web 2.0. I cough politely, and remind people that not everyone has broadband access from everywhere. Considering that I use the laptop for most of my work, when I need to connect it’s over GPRS, and that’s just expensive from the get-go. You may complain about a 10cent text message (plus VAT) for 160 usable characters (which works out at 0.0625cent a byte), but the phone companies are charging 2cent for 1k of data. Not that I could ever get this working correctly. All those round-robin trips to the server could end up costing a fortune to the on-the-go user.
Well, rant, rant. It’s such a lovely day I think I’ll be outside.