Automation Adventures

Somewhere along the upgrade trail from 7.3 to 7.4.2, I started getting the annoying message “iTunes was not properly installed. If you wish to import or burn CDs, you need to reinstall iTunes” whenever I start iTunes. After following this advice, and restarting iTunes, I got the message “iTunes was not properly installed. If…” – OK, you got the idea…

Apparently a lot of other people seem to be having this problem. And it happens under Vista 32 and 64 bit. Despite the message, people are reporting that importing works fine (I haven’t seen any messages confirming that burning a CD still works).

A discussion thread on the Apple Support forum helped me out: simply installing the GEAR Software drivers seemed to resolve at least the message. In some cases, a new error message pops up saying it can’t find the folder with the CD settings. In that case you have to uninstall iTunes 7.4.x, install 7.3.2, copy the CD folder to a safe location, uninstall iTunes 7.3.2, reinstall iTunes 7.4.x, install the GEAR driver, and copy the CD folder back.

I haven’t tried importing or burning a CD yet, but at least iTunes starts without pausing for me to click OK!

Tags: 64-bit, apple, drivers, GEAR, installation, itunes, vista, Windows

Last Friday an MIT student was arrested for wearing a piece of homemade jewelry (for lack of a better term – it’s NOT a fake bomb) in an airport. The spokesman for the State Police was congratulating her for surviving the incident.

Wow.

Oh, I forgot to mention this happened at Logan Airport in Boston. You might remember Boston from a recent publicity stunt, where the whole city came to a standstill over “mysterious electronic devices”. And I forgot to mention she wasn’t arrested inside the terminal, but she was surrounded by police holding machine guns outside of the terminal. Apparently she wanted to blow up the terminal by being outside it.

One of the explanations dictionary.com gives for “terrorism” is “the state of fear and submission produced by terrorism or terrorization”. When our police force is freaked out by a student wearing a piece of circuit board, LEDs and a battery (it is uncertain if there was a piece of putty involved), to the point that they are ready to use deadly force, they are definitely in a state of fear produced by terrorism. Maybe we need to set up a terror thermometer to measure how freaked out law enforcement is over simple things.

Her choice of clothing was described as “scary” by the arresting officer. Of course, in this day and age anything remotely resembling high-tech equipment is scary. Especially when it involves batteries and LEDs.

So be careful next time you walk around with your laptop or cell phone. It better be clearly marked as a laptop or cell phone, or you might be suspected of attempting to blow up your local Starbucks.

Tags: airport, bomb, boston, jewelry, logan, mit

Yeah, I just got bit by that Vista “feature”… the one where your network slows down when you play music. That one, yeah.

I just added an index to our database, unfortunately from the client side. While I was chastising myself for doing it client-server instead of host-based, I was watching the number of records being updated per second. Hmm, about 400… maybe if I shutdown some programs. First, Sidebar – it displays some RSS feeds and weather information. OK, up to 420-440 records/sec. Not bad…

Then I remembered reading something about the Vista network stack and playing music files. I closed iTunes, and lo and behold: I now was updating about 1800 records/sec! Over 4 times as much??? Me thinks Vista has a problem there. This is on a dual-core 2.4GHz Intel with 2GB RAM.

ZDNet has an article with Microsoft’s response to the Vista network performance issue, and while some of the arguments may be true (only local network operations, two high priority drivers contending for the same resource, etc.), I still think it’s funny that a dual processor system would have its network performance so drastically reduced.

Anyone thinks it’s the DRM…? Anyone…?

Tags: DRM, itunes, Music, Network, performance, vista

The Record has an article describing how Ivan Bowman is spending his days working from home, but still being able to attend meetings, exchanges notes with other developers, and hang out in the kitchen or lounge over coffee and snacks with his co-workers.

He is able to do this 1,350 kilometers from the Waterloo office by way of IvanAnywhere, a robot Bowman uses to interact with his colleagues from his home office.

The robot itself looks a little creepy at first, more resembling a coat rack mounted on a cardboard box, with speakers, a camera and a touch-screen computer. But apparently looks are only skin-deep, and Bowman’s colleagues ignore IvanAnywhere’s looks and work with him like any other robot co-worker. How’s that for an avatar!

Tags: robot, telecommuting

This morning I received an email from Amazon, informing me that Spore is available for pre-order!

The price is $49.99, and the expected release date is March 31st, 2008. Hopefully this will bring an end to the long wait for this game.

Tags: amazon, Games, spore