iTunes is lacking one key feature, the ability to delete songs you don’t like when you aren’t letting it manage your music library. The way I use iTunes is I have a network share where my music lives, and the various computers that I use to play music all import the music from there. Letting [...]
I tried to connect to my Vista desktop at work using Remote Desktop, and got this message: The message appeared on the remote system, and I was able to see it. I wonder how the data got to me.
Doc Searls is blogging about what he’s calling Vendor Relationship Management (VRM), basically the inverse of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). CRM is when a company stores information about you; VRM would technically be you storing information about the vendors you deal with, but really it’s more like you’re storing things on behalf of the vendors you [...]
Here’s how bad spam has gotten: My host, DreamHost, sent me an email saying they’d disabled comment posting on my blog, because it was getting hammered. I checked and boy were they right - I had over 2000 messages in the moderation queue, most of it from yesterday. I was going to add CAPTCHA to comment posting, [...]
I’ve never really shared the opinion that a released version of Windows was “buggy” in the past. Maybe not everything was perfect – but stuff generally worked, and if it didn’t, often it was because of a non-obvious design or something else that you could explain away. But with Vista, I’ve been finding things that [...]
Started to see “You must install WPF/E to view this page” messages? You’ll probably see more of them in the future, as Microsoft employees start pushing the world to install their take on Flash. Check out the top line of simplegeek.com for a gratuitous example. WPF/E is good technology, but suffers from a serious problem: Launch lag. [...]
Curious about how much Vista actually uses the .NET framework, I wrote a little Ruby script that walks the Windows directory looking for managed assemblies. Of the 8969 (*.exe|*.dll) files found, 824 of them have managed code in them, or just over 9%. What makes it worse is that most of the managed code that [...]
A few interesting things I came across while looking around Vista… digitalx.exe sounds like DRM for software downloads colorcpl.exe lets you configure colour profiles dfrggui.exe is the defragmenter GUI (which now doesn’t have any visualization of the defrag process… bummer) edlin.exe is still there! getmac.exe shows the MAC addresses for your installed network adapters. iexpress.exe is a [...]
I just found this great blog post by Greg Schechter, about the Desktop Window Manager in Vista. Read it if you haven’t. One of the key bits is that really there’s no such thing as external window invalidation anymore. When you move a window and reveal a portion of the window behind it, the application that [...]
I’ve always been into cool lighting. I wired my old apartment for X10, and had a wireless key fob that I’d use to turn all the lights off as I was leaving; cool and useful. X10 is a protocol developed in 1975 for controlling devices via the power line. The Wikipedia entry for X10 covers it [...]