Automation Adventures

Yesterday Apple had its September presentation, which, as the title “Let’s Rock” may have given away, was focused on iTunes and the various iPod models. Here are the announcements in a nutshell:

HD TV shows added to the iTunes store. $2.99 per episode ($1.99 for standard definition), and you can view them on Apple TV and [...]

A hectic schedule at work and at home has prevented me from reporting on the MacWord announcements Steve Jobs made in his keynote. A quick round-up:

Office 2008 native on Intel
Time Capsule, an external hard drive companion to Time Machine, with a built-in Airport Extreme base station. Two versions, 500GB ($299) and 1TB ($499), ships in [...]

According to MacNN, Apple is set to raise the prices on downloadable movies in iTunes to $15, just a couple of dollars below the retail price of a physical DVD. This means that for $3 more, you can order the same movie, without DRM, with extra content, in a nice box, and probably in better [...]

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…” - [...]

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 [...]