Monthly Archives: September 2010


GeekStuff

QuickTime in IE

2 Comments

Mostly a note for myself, but something to share – for a couple of years now, whenever I went to http://www.apple.com with Internet Explorer, I found that the majority of the site was painfully slow. And by slow I mean that I thought I was on a modem. Over the last twelve months I tracked the problem down to QuickTime and Apple.com. No other site and no other plug-in caused these issues. Disabling QuickTime in the Manage Add-on dialog didn’t help but uninstalling did. Over the last six months, I’ve attempted different things – like the freakin’ search box being the thing that blocks the longest – but the safest bet was to just keep QT off my box.

Making an even longer story a little shorter, I found that QuickTimeCheck.ocx is cause of all the issues. I have no idea what it does or why it’s useful to anything on Apple.com but if you unregister this piece of shit control, Apple.com speeds back up to, well, usable speeds.

Adding to my list of tweaks for every new PC install: regsvr32 /u “C:\Program Files (x86)\QuickTime\QTSystem\QuickTimeCheck.ocx”

And before anyone jumps on the “Just use a Mac” or “Just use [insert browser that’s not IE here]” the problem was reported on Firefox as well – if you wanted to offer either of those pieces of feedback, please use the time to: ask Apple why they continue to say they support PC’s with such crappy support – do it right or get off the platform.

digital pity

It’s Deja Vu All Over Again. Again. And Again.

Leave a comment

Engadget: Entelligence: Will carriers destroy the Android vision?

I would say that it’s a good article to read, but to be honest, I can already answer the question as the wireless industry has been lamented on this blog many times over: yes.

Carriers can destroy a wet dream without even trying… when they try to make things “better for the customer” you can be sure that they are attempting to increase their profits at the expense for the customer. Trust me. Android is in the same came that Windows Mobile was, and WM followed J2ME which had already followed BREW. This is one of the things that I will praise Apple for, over and over again: they told AT&T no to every little forced integration that AT&T wanted – AT&T is free to put their apps in the App Store (and they do – 5 apps at last count) but they aren’t allowed to junk up the phone out of the box.

It’ll be interesting to see if Windows Phone has learned from the mistakes of Android, WM, J2ME, and BREW – looking forward to seeing how that works out.

GeekStuff

MultiFilez 2.1

Leave a comment

Got an email the other day for a couple of new features for MultiFilez. In all honesty, I always thought of MultiFilez as “done.” I wrote it in Visual Studio 6.0 using MFC for a class library (and string class). Over the years, I found that I didn’t use it as much, especially since I don’t work with web pages anymore and Visual Studio has its own capacity for multi-find/replace. The feature request email mentioned that MultiFilez could handle far more files than the VS Find/Replace did and he had some modest asks, so I thought that maybe it was time to give it an update.

MultiFilez 2.1 doesn’t add many new features but it does now open to a larger dialog now. It made sense to me, since 640 x 480 isn’t the “default” size of most monitors, as it was when I first wrote it. I also tweaked some of the UI so it would support the latest common UI controls from Windows 7 and I cleaned up a couple of UI things. With this change, though, support for earlier versions of Windows has been dropped – because of this I’ve left the 2.0 version online as well as adding the new 2.1 version. After all, it could be another eight or so years for me to get out a new version!

Download: MultiFilez 2.1 | MultiFilez 2.0

Screenshots: MultiFilez 2.1 | MultiFilez 2.0

GeekStuff

Avatar Marketplace: Open 24/7

Leave a comment

Xbox Engineering Blog: “Wait a Minute. Are You Telling Me that My Avatar Gets to Wear Halo Armor and I Don’t?” I actually had this conversation with one of our Program Managers, when I heard about Avatar Marketplace for the first time. Avatar Marketplace — known as AMP to the internal team — was something that had been talked about for a while but hadn’t really started to take form until the summer of 2009. By that point, Xbox already offered multiple forms of downloadable content through the Marketplace — Games, Themes, Gamerpics, videos, and so on — and there was a full closet of existing clothing for Avatars, but we really wanted to make Avatars as customizable as the users who created them. Basically, we wanted a full marketplace.

Just a little cross-post of something I wrote up for the Xbox Engineering Blog a little while ago and just hit the website… some “behind the scenes” views on how the Avatar Marketplace got to where it is today.

Some day soon, I hope to have a little something more on where it goes tomorrow …or more accurately, November 4th.

GeekStuff

iTunes 10: One Welcomed Feature

Leave a comment

I don’t care about Ping and I’m not sure about the “new” interface. I like that they dropped the CD on the icon and all, but the only other UI difference I’ve noticed is that they now selectively show album art in the default view… so selectively, I had to go check to see if I lost album art when I brought over my library. I didn’t but it’s just a difference from iTunes 9 to 10.

One welcome feature, however, is the ability to play content right off a docked device even if the computer you’ve connected to isn’t the Sync’ing computer. For example, I plugged my iPhone 4 into a PC that has none of my content. In the past, iTunes would have tried to take over the phone and eventually tell me to piss off; most I could do was take photos off the thing using Windows Explorer. Now, with iTunes 10, I can browse all of the content that’s on my iPhone. Went to the movies section, played one, and it even started when I had last left off.

No matter what else iTunes does to me this release, this one little perk is worth it.

digital pity

iTunes Ping

Leave a comment

With the introduction of iTunes Ping (and the ongoing existence of Zone Social) I would like us all to visit a favorite topic of mine that’s about to become a very public problem for people, and offer it up as a Public Service Announcement:

iPod Shame

Some things just get better with age.