Could that have been any easier?

Nikki's been talking for a few weeks about what a good idea it would be to take some of our films with us when we go away, just in case (unlikely I know *cough*) the in-flight movies suck. I've been procrastinating, because all our media - both DVDs and BluRays - are ripped to MKV format and this won't play natively on the iPad, but with the trip imminent the time for procrastination ran out yesterday and I started doing some research. It didn't take me more than a minute or so to find GoodPlayer.

With a "best video player for iPhone" recommendation from Lifehacker, many positive forum postings and a price tag of only £1.99 it wasn't a hard purchasing decision. Little did I realise that the traditional simplicity of getting my hands on an app from the App Store was only the start of this easy ride.

I launched GoodPlayer and it instantly found two media sources. Well actually it's the same source but GoodPlayer supports a variety of access formats, so it gave me the option to connect to our film collection via SAMBA/CIFS or UPnP/DLNA (apologies to those of you who don't speak geek).

Clicking on the first took me to the file share list and I navigated quickly down through the folders - multimedia / video / movies - to our list of 400+ movies. Choosing one at random, GoodPlayer asks if I want to stream it, or download it. I chose stream (for now), and the movie started playing.

Just like that.

The whole process from finding the app to watching the movie took less than five minutes. Sometimes, computers and related technology get in your way. Sometimes they can even make you tear your hair out. Other times they *just work* and this was one of those times. Brilliant. Vibrant colours, crisp almost-high-def stream (from a standard definition movie file) and no buffering or streaming problems at all now that our downstairs network has been boosted by the TPLink Powerline adaptors.

It took Nikki less than five seconds to declare she wanted a copy too, and half an hour later we both had a download queue of 4 of 5 films which our NAS was happily serving up to the iPads at 3MB/sec (download time for an average film about half an hour) as well as delivering a film to the TV. Should help the flights pass more enjoyably :o)

iBeer

Here I am in the living room, with an iBeer, doing an iBlog on my new iPad. Crikey. Saturday nights will never be the same.

(Back on the old - well, new - desktop now). We went out shopping today. Nikki wanted to change our pillows. So... four pillows. That's what we needed. We came back with seven movies, Kasabian's new album (it was playing while we were in HMV and we both quite liked it), a funky clever folding chopping board (Chop2Pot by Joseph Joseph) and a set of ice cube trays, two bags of food from M&S for a "picky tea", a 32GB iPad, an Apple TV box, black leather smartcase, camera connection kit, and... four pillows.

These may well be the most expensive pillows I've ever slept on.

Lovin' the iPad though :o)

A-building we will go

But first, a-shopping. To somewhere I didn't even know existed: the Northern Computer Markets held at Bowlers every Saturday. How, you might ask, can any self-respecting geek live in Manchester for ten years and not know that was there? And you might ask. I don't have an answer. But I know it's there now :o)

Wandering round trying to stop the drool from soaking into my beard was hard enough. Then we smelled the bacon and egg baps. Then we looked around a bit more, worked out a buying strategy and started spending. A Gigabyte 3DMars case, power supply, a 22" LG LED monitor (just the one for now), a 2TB hard drive (Western Digital of course) 8GB of Kingston memory, BD rewriter, Gigabyte motherboard, i5 processor, Nvidia graphics card, card reader, wireless card, new keyboard and mouse (why not?) and we were done.

Back home on the double to start assembling and by about 4pm the machine was assembled, booted first time, and I was busy reinstalling software. Bloody brilliant.

The old machine, stripped of its disks (the 1TB to keep, the 250GB installed just long enough to suck its data off) is over there, pretending to be a door stop.

No.1 Chinky Buffy

Diane's been in town unexpectedly this week, so tonight we headed into town for an almost ad-hoc get-together at Manchester's renowned No.1 Oriental Buffet. Or at least it was renowned last time I looked (2-3 years ago maybe). On this particular occasion, although the company was as usual excellent, the meal was a little under par. A bit predictable in choices and some of it not as hot as it could be. Maybe that's what gave me a gippy tummy the next day. Anyway fun was had, drink was quaffed and faces were stuffed.

Then later Annie came back with us and we sat for an hour or two speccing up a replacement for the deceased beased. The death of the old war horse was distinctly to be treated as an opportunity to be grasped, rather than a tragedy to be mourned. Truth be told there had been more grinding of teeth, muttering and swearing in its general direction in recent months (years) than praise and soft words. Slow, error-prone, noisy, slow, many of its application exhibiting less than normal behaviour, and slow.

So one requirement for its replacement stood out from the crowd: Not Slow.

I think an Intel Core i5 and 8GB of memory should be fast enough :o)

Wake up, time to die

The line, for those who don't recognise it (are there any? lol) is from my favourite movie: Blade Runner.

It's posted in honour of my dear old Fujitsu-Siemens PC, which I've had since December 2004 and which didn't wake up this morning. Since I've used it pretty much every day, apart from holidays spent away from home, in almost seven years, its "not waking up" had happened before.

Usually it means a crash has occurred overnight for some reason, prior to the sleep kicking in. This time a warm reboot didn't fix the problem, and neither did a cold reboot, which is usually enough to clear down any hardware registers that have got their knickers in a knot. No, this was more than just a "not waking up." This was the Big Sleep.

Fingers crossed it's just something like the video card, and not a hard disk crash and the loss of all that lovely data. That lovely, unbacked up, data. Who'd have thought I'm a 33-year computer industry veteran who doesn't back up? There must be thousands of us.

Print this

A 6-month-long experiment concluded today. The experiment, if it had enjoyed a title, would have been called something like "How long will printout continue to be usable in the face of dire warnings regarding ink levels from the Lexmark print dialog?"

Some background: Four or five times a year, I print off a set of posters for the Chorlton Players containing groups of the photos I've taken at dress rehearsal. Six pages of A4 in total. Back in January when I was printing the panto photos I had the first warning from Lex (the American guy who makes such handy announcements as "printing started" and "printing complete" just in case, you know, you hadn't noticed that the paper had started being fed through the machine, or stopped, respectively).

"Colour ink is low!" he declared in his pleasant, mid-Atlantic tones.

Well I was near the end of the run back then (why am I talking like a Texan in my head? I almost added "y'all" at the end there) so I didn't worry about it, and I don't print much colour stuff normally anyway. Just those nice little green Asda vouchers that pop out almost every week as a result of their "10% cheaper than every other store" claim.

So I continued to ignore the little red "X" in my colour cartridge silo, until it came time to print the next set of Players' photos, in March. Way back when I first started to do these posters, I'd reckoned on getting 3 sets out of a colour cartridge. The panto posters had been set #3 and that little red X had been glowering at me for a couple of months. But then I figured hey! Paper is cheap. Ink is expensive. Why don't I just carry on printing stuff out until it starts to fade? That way, I've only wasted a sheet of paper, and I'll have made sure that ALL the ink is used up.

The more quick-witted of you will probably have reached this conclusion several years ago. Sometimes, in prosaic matters such as these, I can be a bit slow.

Players Posters Set #4 printed off, in their entirety, without incident. I'd checked the little box to stop Lex warning me weeks before, so not only were the posters just dandy, but I didn't get nagged either.

Fast forward to the Players' annual comedy sketch show (normally known as the Hotpot show, but this year featuring a specially written farce cleverly embedding several sketches within it) and by this time there wasn't much black ink left either. So little, in fact, that I'd been warned several weeks previously that the cartridge was now on its reserve tank! Order your new cartridges immediately!

Naturally I'd bought replacement cartridges several months before, but I'd got the bit between my teeth now. No way I was replacing those damn cartridges now until they'd been bled completely dry. Dagnabbit!

The posters for Hotpot, aka Players Posters Set #5, printed off, in their entirety, without incident. Now THAT was a surprise, I can tell you. By the end of the run the little colour ink marker had been swapped out for a diluted, faded version no doubt intended to offer a compelling visual clue to the impending colourlessness of my printing. The black ink "X" had long since disappeared altogether, the black silo showing completely empty and devoid of any X, faded or otherwise.

That was back in May. Finally, today, I printed a letter and the last paragraph was illegible. So that's an expensive lesson learned. If I'd swapped out the cartridges when first warned, assuming there wasn't enough ink left to complete a poster run, I'd have missed out on almost half a year's worth of printing.

Paper is cheap. Ink is expensive. I'll remember that from now on.

It's the future!

I have a Slashdot widget on my iGoogle home page. Along with most of the other widgets on there, except Google Reader, I don't often pay it much attention, but today it displayed a tantalising headline: Extreme Memory Oversubscription For VMs. Having worked on VME for many years, I still retain an amused, distant interest in the activities of today's virtual machine enthusiasts. Here's a quote from the article...

"Their method is based on a combination of lightweight VM cloning (sort of like fork() for VMs) and on-demand paging. Seems like the 'other half' of resource oversubscription for VMs might finally be here."

Good grief. On-demand paging! Imagine that. Something we were doing in the mainframe world at the end of the 1960s. Next they'll be telling me they've invented a subsystem called Virtual Store Manager.

That's the trouble with the computing industry today. It's staffed with twenty-somethings fresh from college who like to think they're original thinkers and have no concept of, or interest in, history (or reinvention of the wheel). Even if they could be bothered to read up how we did it on mainframes they would probably not think it relevant (as a commenter on the article points out). Sad, really. The truth is high-end PC systems with massive amounts of memory and virtualisation technology look more and more like mainframes every day. They have the same problems, and those problems have the same solutions.

(If you're *really* interested, you can read the original Slashdot story here.)

First night camping

Well, I say camping. We're on the sofa bed in the study - "camped out" for the duration of the work that's going on in our bedroom. The ceiling is due to come down today, for reasons explained earlier.

Our new IKEA sofa bed "LYCKSELE" (??) proved remarkably comfortable. To say we've left a 6-foot bed and moved to what is effectively a "put-you-up" that's only fractionally wider than a traditional double (4 foot 6), the experience felt nowhere near as cramped as I was expecting. We both agreed that it will be fine for the expected five-week hiatus, and more than adequate as an occasional guest bed. The mattress is firm without being hard, there are no creaks or wobbles from the frame, so all in all the camping is going pretty well on the evidence of one night.

Even the eerie blue light from the PIR detector that clicks on whenever either of us moves has its uses. With dark-adapted eyesight, it illuminates the room very well for those essential nightly sojourns to the bathroom.

There is one blue light that I'll have to do something about though, and this will raise a hollow laugh in at least one young lady reader. That flashing blue light from my PC when it's in sleep mode will have to go. But that's OK. I found the BIOS setting for it this morning. I have the power to change the power down mode :o)

Windows 7

We've been running Windows 7 at home for some time, but yesterday I was scheduled to have it installed on my work's laptop as part of an internal pilot. There's been a few horror stories floating around from those who have already undergone the transition, so I wasn't expecting the upgrade to be glitch-free, and I wasn't disappointed. What should have taken a little over three hours turned into an overnight job as the rebuilt machine failed to get its encryption keys from the central server - the request stuck in a queue 11,000 items long with no way of reprioritising. Poor design, which has resulted in me having to go back in (thereby wasting an hour and a half from an already packed day) to collect it this morning.

I can only hope the works build is more stable than that on my home PC. Since upgrading I've been suffering regular blue screens (three or four a day sometimes, but usually at least two on the main occasions I wake it up from a sleep) in a video driver - atikmdag.sys. If you can be bothered, you can Google that for yourselves. I have. Pages and pages of forum entries bemoaning the problem, stretching back as far as Vista's first release in 2007, and still - three years later - no fix. It's a problem with a feature introduced with Vista known as TDR (Timeout Detection and Recovery) which was intended to allow the OS to recover from video card/driver timeouts without blue screening but which, when it fails, er... blue screens.

The failure has been attributed, at various times, to having two memory sticks instead of one (which can increase the risk of memory timeouts), Windows Aero features, hardware overheating (seems strange, because I always experience it either immediately after boot, or on wakeup, when the hardware is cold), hardware fault, or graphical driver errors. I've disabled Aero, but I still have two 1GB memory sticks and I may well have a transient video card fault, but I'd be willing to bet on the driver being the real problem. I had some similar issues on XP before upgrading the driver. Unfortunately I'm already on the latest W7 driver, so if that is the problem, at least for now, I'll have to put up with it. :(

At least W7 loads a heck of a lot faster than XP! (lol - but it's a humourless, hollow lol)

Earlier this month

I lost a spreadsheet today.

I've been keeping track of the artists selected to Storm the Charts at the end of this month and having had an Excel blitz at the end of last week it had dropped off my MRU list. No problem obviously, I'll just open up the folder where I keep all my spreadsheets...

Oh.

Ah! Must've saved it in my "reference" folder.

Um...

OK, how about the folder where I keep everything to do with StC (not to mention the Weird & Wonderful files)?

Nope.

OK, well there's still nowt to worry about (right?) because I've got the good ol' Windows Search facility. Now I *know* I edited this file last week to add the four artists that were chosen last Sunday, so what kind of date filter do I need? Ah yes, here's a handy-dandy one called "files that were edited earlier this month" and I *know* it'll be on my data drive somewhere, so I'll just search the whole damn drive for anything that's been edited "earlier this month."

Er... Shit. Where is it? Not there, apparently. Which is mad, because I know it's there. It was there last week. Everything else is there. Why isn't this there? It has to be there.

So hang on, cos I haven't used Windows Search ON WINDOWS 7 before. And it looks like there's this cool date widget that I can drag across and select "anything that's changed between June 1 and June 14"

Holy Crap!! That's about ten times more files than my first search found! And... yes! There's my spreadsheet! (breathe small sigh of relief). Last edited on... Monday morning.

OK I have to ask. In what dark festering corner of the entire universe is "earlier this month" NOT THE SAME THING as "between June 1 and June 14" ???

Mystery solved

Even after all these years dealing with Microsoft technologies, there are still wrinkles to learn. And more often than not, you can read "bug" where I've written "wrinkle."

A few days ago, shortly after the release of Weird and Wonderful, I changed my standard email sig to include a line directing people to the Beresford & Wallace website. As you'd expect, this worked fine when composing a new email message, but from time to time I decide to include my sig in a reply, and the first time I did this I noticed the extra line was missing.

Huh?

I checked the new sig. Yep, all fine. So where was this copy of the old version coming from? I thought maybe Outlook had cached it somewhere, so I restarted it. Made no difference. I rebooted the whole PC. Nope. So I resorted to a search of my whole disk for "Signatures."

Lo and behold, the default Signature folder had three copies of my standard sig, only one of which had the new date on it (and the new addition in it). I noticed the new one was an RTF file and of the unchanged ones, one was an HTML file and the other a text file. I had no recollection of creating these, but it was clearly no coincidence that the "problem" only occurred when replying to an email, and the two format options for replies are... HTML or text.

With a small light flickering into life in my head, I deleted the rogue files, returned to Outlook, fired up an email reply and inserted a signature. Whaddaya know... Outlook creates the other versions for you. How handy is that? Well... not very handy at all actually, seein' as it's not intelligent enough to spot when the original sig changes, and copy those changes over for you too.

Like I said. A bug.

Progress

iTunes have an offer running from today. "The 12 Days of Christmas" offers a free download every day for... well... you get the idea. So I thought yeah, why not? It's free - what's to complain about? Even if the first track on offer IS by Snow Patrol.

Having subscribed to the email reminders, I get a handy-dandy link to click on. That takes me to a page saying "hang on, we're just loading up iTunes so you can access the iStore."

Now I don't know about you, but whenever there's mention of iTunes I get that watery feeling in my bowels. Earlier versions of this pile of steaming doos used to hang my machine on a regular basis. It's *always* slow, always cumbersome, and the other thing it does nearly every time I use it is tell me there's a new version available, would I like to download it? And then proceeds to fail to download it.

So anyway I ran it. And it told me there's a new version available (9.0.2 or something). With its track record of total fail I replied Nah I'll Leave It Thanks and proceeded to attempt to download my free track.

Network timeout.

I tried again. "This item requires iTunes 9 to download."

You've got to laugh. Even though, every SINGLE time I use iTunes, I'd much rather cry. But, you know, faced with the inevitable, the Zen thing to do is bend with the wind, like the bamboo. Or something. I bent. I downloaded it. HOW big? Ninety-something MEG? Good grief. But hey, the download time was nothing like the install time, and here (finally, I hear you say) we get to the point of this post.

Status: Computing space requirements (a progress bar)
Status: Validating install (another progress bar)

It's a progress bar Jim, but not as we know it. What progress is it measuring? Who knows. How many more stages will there be? Who knows. How long 'til the entire task will be finished? Who, the f***, knows? That progress bar certainly doesn't tell me anything useful, except how far it is away from the next progress bar starting.

Call me old fashioned, but I remember a time when progress bars gave you an indication of... you know... progress. I know! Mad, wasn't it?! If it was half-way across, the job was halfway done. In some rare and wonderful cases, it was even true - ALMOST true - that if it had taken ten minutes to get half way, then there were ten minutes left. No. Hang on. That's false memory talking. Things were never THAT good. Were they? But they were better than this. How many of these damned things am I going to have to sit through?

Sludge

I've been semi-permanently exasperated by the increasingly poor performance of my PC for months now and have been trying, in a low-key way, to track down the culprit. My first suspicion was that I'd picked up a trojan, but after several scans with industry-standard utilities revealed nothing, I realised I'd have to look elsewhere.

That was back in March (did I mention this is a low-key activity?) and since then I've run a registry cleaner, which sped things up a bit after removing almost 500 bits of crap from my registry (quicker than a wholesale reinstall), and checked the memory for errors with the Windows Memory Diagnostic (no problems there). Sad to say, but the main culprit continues to be Firefox.

Read up on Firefox and you'll discover that they invested a lot of time and effort, when version 3 was young, in fixing a pile of memory leaks. What they didn't fix was Firefox's DESIGNED IN behaviour of hanging on to all the memory it has ever allocated, even when it's not using it. The unused memory is returned to Firefox's own heap, but not released back to the OS. The visible effect of this, if you run Firefox like I do (never less than 8 tabs open and occasionally twice that many, and the browser always open - sometimes for days on end), is that I regularly sit down at my PC first thing in the morning to find FF's memory occupancy has ballooned overnight to more than 600MB, which on a system with only a gig of RAM is all it takes to bring the whole thing shuddering to a halt.

And I mean shuddering. As in, it can take several minutes to redraw a window, move from one tab to another, read an email, or launch another app. Until today I thought the only fix was to restart the browser, and even this takes an age. Several minutes for the main browser window to disappear and the process will still hang around in the task list for 10-15 minutes before it releases all that memory. Finding myself at a loose end this afternoon I did a bit more research and discovered RAMBack: an add-on that forces the release of memory.

What a difference! With Task Manager running I can see FF's occupancy plummet when I minimise it from around 200MB (its apparent resting state with my standard eight tabs newly opened) to only 17MB. True, this figure then climbs rapidly back up to ~100MB as the active content of those 8 tabs (Facebook, Google Reader and various other widgets) gradually grabs the resources back, but at least I can now force it to dump its heap and allow the rest of my system to behave normally. It remains to be seen what state it'll be in tomorrow morning, but for now the sludge has been replaced with the slick.

Installing update...

I thought I may have blogged before regarding the frustrations of owning a wireless printer, but a quick search proves me wrong. Well, that's a subject in its own right, but it'll have to wait for another day. It's only tangentially related to today's tale, in that it was the reason I needed to reboot before taking Nikki to work this morning.

Knowing how long it can take my machine to cycle, and wanting to get a letter printed off before we left so I could post it en-route, I started the process with plenty of time to spare. Or what should have been plenty of time.

Sadly my attempt at closing down my PC was greeted with that dreaded message: "Installing update 1 of 21... do not switch off your computer."

1 of TWENTY-ONE? Good grief. How long have they been waiting to be installed? And why the hell doesn't Windows tell you there are so many pending while you're in the middle of a session? Took 45 minutes to close the bloody thing down in the end.

More iTunes madness

When Paul came to stay last year, I took the opportunity to dump his iPod onto my PC. That was 16 MONTHS ago and as yet none of that music has found its way onto mine. Not that I've been doing nothing. It takes a while to listen to 80GB of music and decide whether it's something you'll want to listen to again and, Paul would be the first to admit, he does listen to some weird shit.

Having jettisoned the weirdest of the weird, there's considerably less than 80GB of the original stuff left, but even so what I added to the pile virtually doubled my music collection, and along with the fact that I've bought quite a few new albums recently, I was coming in for some serious nagging (well, exasperated sighs anyway) from some quarters at the fact that *another* car journey was taking place and there was *still* nothing new on the iPod. I'd already ticked the WMA to MP3 conversion box, so I was running out of excuses.

It's been a while since I used iTunes and I soon remembered why. Sure, I'd had some pretty bad experiences with it when I first loaded up the iPod, and since then I've avoided it as much as possible. It didn't help that every time I opened it up it would tell me a newer version was available, and then pretend to download that newer version but never get anywhere.

I decided that upgrade had to be first on the agenda. A newer version *might* be more stable, and if the auto-upgrade wasn't working for some reason, I'd just have to go over there and drag it off the Apple site myself. Installation complete, I set version 8.2.1.6 off on its crawl through my hard drive again, to find all that lovely new stuff from Paul, and those purchases from the last sixteen months.

One of the things I really, really wanted to sort out was the lack of Album Art. I've always had a thing for album covers (I even bought Roger Dean's book ferchrissake), so it was a source of some irritation that almost none of the music I copied over that first time had any art associated with it. I'd done some research and discovered the iTunes Library album art fetching thingy, which looked like an obvious first step since it involved no effort on my part beyond a click or two.

Sadly - a common experience by all accounts - iTunes managed to find less than half the album art I needed. For one thing it's extremely sensitive to naming inconsistencies, and beyond that it simply doesn't have a very extensive collection. So here's where I trip over the first of today's stupid iTunes annoyances. See, being an Apple product, iTunes has to pretend it understands nothing about Windows, or how the Microsoft Media Player rips CDs to your PC. Most CDs come with their album art stored on the disk as JPEG files, and Media Player conveniently copies these to the same folder as the music, and calls the files "album art." That's too subtle for iTunes. It pretends it can't find them. OK, so they're hidden files. Don't get technical on me. If I can see them, so can iTunes.

I reverted to the manual method - dragging the (hidden) Album Art files into iTunes. But what about all those albums from Paul, that I didn't have files for, hidden or otherwise? Two words: Google Images. Just typing the artist and album name into Google Images, in most cases, resulted in several thousand copies of the right picture file being presented for my selection. Brilliant. Brilliant and tedious, but brilliant even so.

Did I say "the first" of the iTunes annoyances? Yes. There's at least one more. Track numbering. iTunes will interpret ID3 tags correctly, and list the tracks in the right order if they're there. If not, tracks are listed alphabetically. But once again iTunes deliberately ignores, or pretends to have no knowledge of, the standard Media Player method of naming the music files it has ripped. "01 First Track Name" "02 Second Track Name" and so on. So even in the absence of correct ID3 tags, there is the smallest CLUE there as to the correct order, and I REALLY didn't want to have to trawl through the majority of my music collection telling iTunes what it should already have been able to work out.

Still, you know, it's not like I've got anything else to do.

I've been converted

Or perhaps, I should say, I'm being converted.

Several years ago when my PC was young, I decided to rip my music collection to it. After all, I reasoned, I spent many of my waking hours in front of the PC, we have no means of playing music in the living room, and the "media centre" idea was beginning to be established as the way to go. Intoxicated by the vastness of the space available to me (I had an almost-empty 250GB disk - luxury!) I chose to rip my collection to the superior, but slightly more space hungry, Windows Media Audio (wma) format, rather than the, perhaps more traditional, MP3.

The more tech-savvy of you will have predicted what comes next, and long-standing readers of this blog will already know.

I bought an iPod.

iPods don't play WMA format music files.

The frustrations of grappling with iTunes, expressed in that blog post linked above, have stayed with me for so long that I've only ever synced it once. That first time. You might even say I'd been traumatised. It did change my behaviour though. As soon as I discovered the WMA restriction I changed my rip options, and have been ripping in MP3 ever since. But still, more than half of my original music collection remained inaccessible, and none of my newer albums, despite having been ripped in the right format, have been synced.

This has long been a source of disappointment to regular travellers, as they discover nothing new on the iPod, but recently came to a head with my purchase of the Best of Nightwish, which both Natalie and Blythe wanted to listen to almost continuously. We even had to resort to the CD player!

Finally reaching the end of Procrastination Road, I sought out a file converter and pointed it at my music collection early this morning. It initially found almost 6,000 files, but after running it for an hour or so I realised it was wasting time analysing the MP3 files to detect that they didn't need converting, so I stopped it and removed everything from the list except WMAs, thereby reducing the number to 2,670 files. A few minutes progress monitoring suggested the conversion process would take almost 48 hours to complete, and when I checked a few minutes ago, this was still true.

You'd have thought with all my experience I'd know better than to use proprietary formats for *anything*. Maybe this will be the final lesson on that subject.

Scan fail

When discussing the merits of Aunt Bessie's cooking instructions a few days ago, I did intend giving you the pleasure of a pictorial representation of said pie, which looks every bit as delicious on the box as it did in real life. Sadly a quick reccie of the AB website turned up only a tiny thumbnail, so reluctantly I decided there was nothing for it but to scan the box.

We are the proud owners of a wireless Lexmark printer. The X4580.

A sexy looking beast, I think you'll agree, and it comes with an impressive list of features. Printer, fax, copier and scanner. I don't *quite* believe its stated speed of 18ppm full colour, but to be fair that claim is caveated by the all-important words "up to." Personally I've never known it print a page with any appreciable amount of colour in anything less than 20 seconds, but for our purposes that's fine, and its great benefit is, naturally, that it can sit over there atop the filing cabinet without any physical LAN connection. With just its little wireless indicator glowing a happy green.

True, it does tend to drop the odd packet while printing, at which point both printer and driver are prone to getting totally and utterly confused, requiring a complete reboot of either the printer, or the PC, or occasionally both. But this is a relatively rare occurrence and is nowhere near as annoying as its rather idiosyncratic behaviour when scanning. Which is the point of this tale. I know, I know, you were beginning to wonder whether I'd ever get there.

So there I was with my empty cherry pie box sitting on the glass, and the Lexmark printer - sorry, Multifunction Device - set to 'Scan'. At this point the device offers a list of PCs that it knows about and invites you to select the one you'd like to scan to. So far, so sensible. But then it goes into "Downloading Application List" mode. Yes, it interrogates the chosen PC to find out what apps are installed, so that it can scan your object and launch the right app. You can scan to Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Paintshop Pro, PDF, JPEG, or basically anything you have installed that can cope with an image file.

But, see, my problem is, it downloads this application list EVERY TIME.

Now I don't know about you, but once I've got my PC set up it very rarely changes in terms of installed apps. When I can do my documents, websites, email and so on, I'm not one for constantly downloading new apps. But this damned thing will interrogate my PC for each individual scan. It can't even remember the application list DURING a scanning session. But the worst thing of all - and the point of this post (and the reason for the lack of a picture on my cherry pie cooking instructions post) - is that on around 50% of its attempts, it will FAIL to download the list. And guess what? Failure then requires a complete reboot of either the printer, or the PC, or occasionally both.

So in the end, I couldn't be arsed.

Hey, Lexmark? Are you listening? Memory is cheap, in case you hadn't noticed. Download the frigging list ONCE and SAVE it. And then offer an option to refresh the list as and when necessary. Then maybe I'll stand a better chance of decorating my blog, and keep my blood pressure down at the same time.

Team work and The Wire

BBC Two recently (beginning of last week) began showing HBO's The Wire in its entirety, starting at season one, in a graveyard slot on weekday nights. 11.20pm to be precise.

Having heard a lot about this show in one way or another (from colleagues on TV Scoop, various Internet forums and reviews, and fanboy family members *vbg*) I was keen to see what all the fuss was about, but 11.20?? Old farts like me have usually been in bed an hour by then. So we did the only thing possible: set a weekday schedule on the PVR and sat back while the episodes were sucked in.

I tried to approach the show with no preconceptions, despite my natural inclination to dislike anything that "everyone else" likes. This is not to disrespect anyone's opinion, it's just that in my experience entertainment surrounded by steaming piles of hype usually resembles steaming piles of something else when you eventually get to see it. I should have detected a subtle difference in the hype associated with The Wire: it's generated by the people who actually watched the show, rather than the people who made it and WANT you to watch it so they can make more money.

Anyway, we caught the first five episodes back-to-back last weekend, and the first two of this week's last night. Seven hours in and we're enjoying it immensely. So far I wouldn't be as fulsome as many have been with my praise - I wouldn't say I'm 'hooked' or that it's 'the best TV show ever, bar none' etc - but hey, it's still only the first season, and still only the first seven eps. It's certainly different, credible, realistic, interesting, involving and dramatic.

But this isn't strictly a post about The Wire (although so far it's doing a good impersonation of one, lol). It's about something that occurred to me while I was watching the show last night. There's a character in the cops' team called Prez. Roland Pryzbylewski, actually, which explains why they call him Prez. He's well known in the police department for being totally incompetent and inept. Despite being bounced around several units he never fits in anywhere, and he only ends up on the "wire" team because the Deputy Commissioner tells all his people to dump their useless jerks there.

But slowly, working in the team's basement office, something happens. Prez finds his niche and turns into the team's code-breaker, first with the gang's pager codes and later with other complex number and letter combinations. He makes a major contribution to the case.

This is classic team work. A team - a good team that is - comprises a group of people whose skills are complementary. A leader. An ideas man. Someone who pays attention to the details and doesn't miss the finer points. Someone who energises the whole team with enthusiasm. A problem solver. And so on. Occasionally, people perform more than one role, but all roles are essential and the team flies best when they're all done well.

But here's the thing. Each one, on their own, can't cut it. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And that's why Prez is such a good example. Outside of the team he's a jerk. A square wheel. But he's like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle left out of the box. Once you slot him into place, the whole thing looks right.

And it came to me, finally, that this is why I used to love my job, and why I hate it now. I used to be part of - and ENJOY being part of - a team. We could fly. We could do anything. And we did. But now there are no teams; there are only individuals. Everyone is expected to do their own thing. To be able to pick up any piece of work and do it just as effectively as any other piece of work. I mean, it's all technical stuff, right? That's how the managers look at it. We're technical people, doing technical work, so we're all just as good at any of it as anyone else. Which, as I hope you can appreciate, is a crock of shit.

There is no teamwork any more, and it sucks.

Argy-bargy

Yesterday we went to Liverpool for the day.

Quite frankly it wouldn't bother me overmuch if I never saw that drab, uninteresting place ever again. I'm not one for "city breaks" at the best of times, and Liverpool has the added disadvantage of being populated by Liverpudlians who in my experience are all weighed down by enormous chips on their shoulders, but Paul wanted to see it, and I didn't have anything better to do, so off we went.

At least the day started well. I didn't have to drive. We took the train, which gave us the opportunity to breakfast on bagels from The Bagel Factory. It was around then that things took a turn for the worse though, as I hit the wrong button on the ticket machine (by millimetres) and bought us three SINGLE tickets to Lime Street. Which, as it turned out, was only ten PENCE cheaper per ticket than three returns, thereby costing us an extra thirty quid. An expensive mistake which didn't do much for my mood, especially bearing in mind the destination.

Arriving at Lime Street around 11am, we trudged off to visit Paddy's wig-wam, and from there went down to the Albert Dock to mooch disconsolately around the rusting hulks and newly refurbished visitors centre selling the same tired old tat you always get at these places, along with the usual assortment of coffees and fast food.

From there we hiked the five hundred and eighty miles to the St John Centre, a stunningly original shopping centre with no roof and an array of shops never before seen like Gap, M&S, William Hill's, Dolcis and Waterstones. You begin to get a flavour of why I think visiting cities is largely pointless. Even a late lunch in Wetherspoons did little to alleviate my feelings of impending doom. Mainly because we revisited The Richard John Blackler, which has just about the worst online reviews of any Wetherspoons I've ever visited, and lived up to its poor reputation for dirty tables, late food and disinterested staff.

Somewhere along the line we also wandered past the Cavern Club, and took the concrete steps down into its dingy interior. The air was redolent of years of sweaty bodies packed into what is effectively an underground toilet, the acid rock stage reminiscent of my student days when we would hump such a construction from one end of the student union to another to accommodate some random event or other, and every available surface is covered with graffiti from those strange people who think it's important to record the fact that they've visited a place like this. In that respect, maybe this blog is like a slightly more sophisticated form of graffiti. The differences being that I'm not really bothered whether anyone knows I've been there or not - it was just another stop - and, of course, that this graffiti is here, rather than there. Anyway, it's a dump. Famous only because one of the world's most recognised bands played there a few times, still living on that reflected glory fifty years later, and now hosting bands that just want to be able to tick the box that says "we played the Cavern Club." Sad.

The highlight of the day proved to be a visit to the Apple store, which unusually for us turned into much more than a quick wander round and a drool. For once we did talk to one of the demo guys and learned quite a lot about what you can do with an iMac, what's in the box, etc. They're still expensive for what you get, but they're bloody fast, almost virus-free and beautiful to look at. I know that description will sound a lot like Linux to at least one of you (apart from the expensive bit), but it was an interesting hour for all that.

Today Nikki & Paul headed off for a walk around the Salford Quays/Castlefield canals, so I took the opportunity to stay at home and do not very much. Our day was rounded off with another evening meal at Wetherspoons followed by some TV. Perfect.

And I have to thank...

... Microsoft, Netgear and Symantec, any or all of whom have conspired to force me to waste *the entire day* today searching for a trojan infection I don't actually have.

I've been suffering blue screens (Wikipedia if you don't know what this is) for weeks now, either in the Netgear Wireless driver, or the Symantec Intrusion Detection System driver. That, coupled with appalling performance, led me to suspect some sort of infection lurking on my PC somewhere, even though it sits behind a firewalled router, also runs Norton Smart Firewall, has always had anti-virus protection, and never goes anywhere near any dodgy websites.

My suspicions were heightened by Internet research suggesting that the market leaders McAfee (which I used until January) and Norton (which I'm using now) only provide protection against 23% of the threats "out there." WHAT?? Forty quid a year to be protected against ONE IN FOUR viruses, trojans, etc?? As if that wasn't bad enough, Googling the driver name and "blue screen" came up with links to several forums suggesting the worst had happened.

Sooo... I cleaned out all the unnecessary processes that run, removed a load of unwanted software, ran a deep scan of Malwarebytes Anti-Malware (that took 3 hours and found nothing more serious than a few tracking cookies) followed by Kaspersky's online scanner (that took 30 minutes to download all its updates and a further 5 hours to scan the whole machine and found nothing more serious than the odd phishing email in an old archived copy of my PST file).

All in all, as I said above, I've done almost nothing today apart from this crap, and it found nothing. Nothing! I supposed I should be glad there wasn't any keystroke grabbing goblin lurking under my keyboard learning all my online banking passwords and wotnot, but really. What a pisser.

To cap it all I then found another solution to one of the BSODs in another forum. Verify your drivers, it said, and all will be well. So I have. And now I wait with bated breath to see if I get another blue screen. Bloody computers. I think I'll go back to more traditional pastimes. Right now knitting sounds attractive.