Author: Andrew Huey

Apple TV

I got an Apple TV today. I got it largely so I can watch Battlestar Galactica, season 4, in HD. And so I can watch Torchwood, season 2, which I downloaded back in July but haven’t gotten around to watching yet.

It was relatively easy to set up, but I’ve hit a few snags. The biggest one involves syncing my videos from my PC to the Apple TV. I fully expected that an initial sync between the PC and the Apple TV would take a long time. However, I didn’t expect that the sync would hit some kind of snag and abort after 5 minutes, every time I try to run it. Looking at the forums at Apple’s web site, it seems like this is a fairly common problem. Reading through a few threads, it seems like the only foolproof way to do an initial sync is to use an Ethernet cable. Unfortunately, I don’t have an Ethernet cable long enough to reach from my router to my TV here in the apartment. I’ll have to borrow one from work tomorrow. I think that this is a pretty big problem — syncing with a PC is pretty fundamental to the operation of this thing, and it should really be able to do it wirelessly. I don’t need it to happen fast, but it should *happen*. I can download pretty big files to my PS3 and my Tivo over the wireless network, no problem, so I know it’s not a problem with my network.

iTunes 8, continued

Well, my desktop Vista machine finally finished chugging through its “Genius” stuff. Just for yuks, I hit the Genius button on “Why Henry Drinks”, by Drive-By Truckers, and iTunes gave me a pretty awesome playlist, which I’d like to paste here, but I’m having trouble exporting the playlist to a format that I can easily paste into Blogger’s editor. The best I can do right now is a screenshot:

iTunes 8

I’ve upgraded all of my home computers to iTunes 8 today. My desktop Vista machine is still running through the “Genius” setup, which apparently takes a long time when you run it on a large library. My one pet peeve with iTunes 8 is that there is no longer a preference pane setting to turn off the Genre column in the browser. It can still be turned off though, using this hint. That worked fine on the Mac, but I’m not sure how to translate that to the PC. It’s probably a registry setting or something. I’ll have to play around with it later.

Meanwhile, I can’t seem to download app updates for my iPod Touch from iTunes right now. I’m hoping that’s a temporary glitch related to the iTunes 8 rollout. I’ve got two apps that need to be updated. I’ll have to take a look at that again tomorrow.

One more Apple-related note: I ordered a refurbished Apple TV unit today. I was motivated by the availability of Battlestar Galactica in HD on the iTunes store. I never got around to watching any of BSG season 4 off my Tivo, and now the first few episodes have disappeared. (Apparently, I ran out of room at some point, and they were dropped.) The quality on my Tivo Series 2 isn’t great anyway. I don’t mind paying $30 or so to get the whole season in HD, and without commercials or those annoying crawls for Ghost Hunters or whatever else SciFi is plugging. Oh, and with the Apple TV, I’ll finally be able to watch Torchwood season 2 on my TV. I downloaded that from iTunes while I was in San Diego, and I watched the first episode on my laptop, but I haven’t gotten around to watching any more of them.

Vista – Aero problems?

I’m still trying to get Vista up and running on my desktop PC. I haven’t lost access to the network lately, so that’s a good sign. However, I’m now getting occasional messages saying that the “desktop window manager has stopped working”. This doesn’t cause any serious problems; the screen just blanks for a second, then everything’s fine again. This seems to be happening right after I access my USB Zip drive, which is a little weird. A Google search isn’t turning up much useful. Most reasonable suggestions related to this error point towards the video driver. I’ve got a fairly old, pre-Vista, video card, so maybe I should upgrade to a card that came out post-Vista, and that’s likelier to have good Vista drivers.

Vista – networking, development, etc.

I didn’t touch my home desktop PC at all over the Labor Day weekend, so I didn’t make any more progress on moving to Vista. I’m working on it now, though.

I just installed FolderShare, so I could have access to the shared library that I keep on all my computers. FolderShare works fine under Vista, as far as I can tell.

I’ve been having occasional problems with my network adapter not working under Vista. It started right after I installed Virtual PC. That may have something to do with it, or that may just be a coincidence. If I reboot the machine, that fixes the problem. It’s only happened a couple of times so far, so I’ll have to see if it becomes a real problem or not.

I’m trying to get started porting my Delphi comic book database application to C#. I mentioned this in a previous post. The Delphi app requires BDE, which I’m not keen on trying to install under Vista, though apparently, it’s possible. I’m thinking about using SQL Server Compact for my database. I don’t need anything fancy for this, nor do I need multi-user access to the data. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with SQL Express either.

Vista: almost done

I’m nearly done moving all my stuff over to the Vista install on my desktop machine. I de-authorized iTunes under XP, so I can use it under Vista. I moved my OneNote files over. Almost all of my key programs are installed and working now.

I’m installing Visual Studio 2008 right now. I haven’t used VS 2008 before, so hopefully I can spend some time playing around with it now. I don’t think I’m going to bother installing any older versions of VS. I don’t really have any independent projects in .Net 1.1 or 2.0 that I need to worry about supporting.

I have Delphi 4 on my XP drive, and I have one fairly important program written in it: the database program that I use to manage my comic book collection. This is a program that I first wrote in BASIC on the Commodore 64, and have ported (or rewritten) several times. It’s probably time to rewrite it again, this time as a Windows Forms app in C#, maybe. I’ll have to see if I can even get the existing Delphi program running under Vista. I never really made an installer for it, and I think I may have used a weird library or two.

I think rewriting an old Delphi app in C# is particularly apropos, since I’ll basically be following Anders Hejlsberg from Borland to Microsoft. I considered upgrading the project from Delphi 4 to the newest version of Delphi, but I don’t see much point in spending time on that right now, since Delphi programming doesn’t seem to be a marketable skill anymore. And the new version of Delphi costs a minimum of $400, whereas I got a free copy of VS 2008 from Microsoft when I went to the launch event a few months back.

Vista: point of no return

I think I’ve hit the point of no return on my desktop Vista install now. I’ve moved over my Quicken data file. It’s working OK, so I guess I’m going to start moving over other key stuff, like my Outlook data file, and my OneNote files.

I’m experimenting right now with mapping a drive to my MobileMe iDisk, and backing up my Quicken files to it. It works, but it’s pretty slow. Under XP, I’d been backing up Quicken to a Zip disk, which just seems so out of date now. There’s really nothing wrong with doing that, but I’m probably the last guy on earth still using Zip disks. Given how slow the iDisk backup is, though, maybe I’ll stick with the Zip disks for a while.

Vista progress

As I mentioned about a week back, one of the two drives in my home desktop machine died recently. Luckily, it wasn’t my main drive. I have now removed the dead drive, added a new 500 GB SATA drive, and installed Vista on it. So, now I have my old XP install on my old 250 GB drive, and the new Vista install on the 500 GB drive. I’m gradually migrating my apps and data over to the Vista install. When I’m done, I plan to wipe out the XP install and use the 250 GB drive for backups.

So far, it’s working well. I’ve got a fair number of key apps installed and working. Vista actually seems to be snappier than XP at this point. That may just be because I haven’t installed a few key apps that are probably going to bog the system down a bit. Well, hopefully, it’ll remain usable, regardless.