Happy new year!

Woohoo its 2008!

I got my self totally drunk on a Dutch drink called bessen, which is like a black current lacquer.

These last few days have been ones of lots of coding… working on iDumpPro.

Went out today and bought another iPod, a 160gb Classic.

Now I have available to test a 2nd gen nano, 3rd gen nano, 2nd gen mini, 5th gen iPod video, iTouch and classic. Still not able to get into the iTouch because Apple wants to be hardball.

I have to confess a few things…. I love Apple’s history, I love the way Woz built the apple I,II,Iie systems…. They were the first systems I wrote commercial software on. J Thank you Woz. I love the way Woz left Apple and became a teacher and still is…. Teaching students the wonders of computers and he even buys Macs for them out of his own money. I hate the way Steve Jobs became a tyrant and treated people like shit. Being a person who believed (or still does) in Karma, he has a lot of payback to do but thank God he now recognises his own daughter Lisa. If Jobs did not come back to Apple, they probably would have sunk by now. I used to own a Mac, could not get over the fact it did not have a right mouse button. Sold it within 6 months of ownership. The only thing I think I have in common with Steve is the view that programmers are artists. When we first think of a program to write, we see the finished article in our minds eye; a fully usable program and then we do the boring bit of coding the thing. A friend of mine is a professor in Computer Science and he like me sees everything in 3D within the mind, its like creating models in full colour, rather nice.

Ok update on iDumpPro, have now been able to work out how to get the FirewireGuid value from the iPods when mounted (connected) and can now correctly hash the iTunesDb on the iPod when songs are copied and db updated. Today I ran a test by importing 1400 songs to the Nano 3g and 7108 songs to the Classic model. After disconnecting the iPod, all entries appeared in the iPod menus…. So much relief…

The big problem now is getting the Artwork album covers over to the new iPods. On using existing Unix code converted to run under windows, it does not seem to want to play. Still trying to figure out why the iPods will not display the cover artwork. When a user rips a cd into aac or mp3 format, I could imbed the album cover in the music file and this would appear in iTunes when you select the track and “GetInfo” and also will display on the iPod video but I want this image in the “Cover Flow” on new iPods. I will spend the next week on this but need to release the new version with new iPod support ASAP and it would be a shame if I missed out the cover art in this release.

What else has been happening this last week…… Brother in-laws father died last Friday and was buried on new-years eve (31st Dec 2007). Makes you think about people you love when someone dies. Make sure you have no problems with people you love as you cant say sorry when they are gone. I still miss my dad who died in 1995. The most touching moments of the day of his funeral were when the funeral cars stopped outside his office and all his work colleagues stood in front of the building giving their respects and then when in the church and looking at the RAF flag over his coffin. So much more I should have done when he was alive and I never spent time discussing current affairs and other interesting topics as I was too busy chasing woman and drinking/hacking.

So what’s new for 2008….. Once I get a good stable version of iDumpPro running for a while, I will complete the version, which is like windows explorer and also work on the .net update. I want to get a version running from the iPod without an installer.

Films I watched this week were: Star Dust, which was really good… A fantastic story of romance, fantasy and fun. I especially like Robert Deniro playing the part of tough ships captain who liked to wear woman’s pink dresses. I am Legend… A new twist on Vampire type film. Will Smith just gets better and better. Also watched American Gangster…. A little slow and not as good a Casino or Good Fellows.
Its 03:05 am now so nite nite and another update in a few days.

Week up to 22nd Jan and other bits

It’s the Saturday before Christmas and no more work for a few days!!! I will be coding as I always do but no corporate misery until 2^nd of Jan 2008.

Events of the past week and other things on my mind:

I do 2 jobs, one for a Bank and the other for EscSoft.

On Monday I had a big argument with my manager at the Bank as she rated my performance for the last 6 months as poor but then said my performances has been great for the last 3. In the last six months I have lost four members of my family which, anyone with any emotion who has been in the same position would feel the pain of loss. Looks like this manager has no heart and is a ruthless getter of performance stats. I am sorry I can’t be a robot with no emotion, I am human.

In the corporate world of Information Technology it is very rare to get a manager who is both technically competent and a good people person. My current manager was a normal member of our team who took the senior position because no-one else wanted it and it would probably be better than to get an external person who could be a real bastard. Managers have to do meetings and shuffle paper, us geek techies have fun solving problems and also keep being techies. I always say “What goes around, comes around” so I will wait and see what karma befalls this person.

Previous managers in Banks were Harry who came from a senior position at the IBM labs in Hursley, England. Phil who was a really cool geek and loved to race yachts but went crazy if anyone modified his code (he was a purest in coding – talk to any obsessed Perl coder who loves regular expressions). Then before that there wars Phil the bastard who had no technical knowledge and tried to change everything to “His Logic” and screwed everything up. He eventually was booted out. The manager before him was Steve the Jehovah Witness who attended his church every week and used to keep gifts sent to him by companies at Christmas, stating they were social gifts and not Christmas gifts. This is odd for a so called serious Jehovah Witness as they do not believe in Christmas. Then one year, his wife made him buy a bigger house and one day he came home, the door locks were changed and his best friend had moved in. A few months later, he moved in and married the now ex-wife of his ex-best friend who was far more beautiful so in the end it worked out well.

On a happier note, sales of iDumpPro are constant which is nice and we can now pay the hosting company for the website from the registrations. It’s so nice to (1) have people use your product and enjoy it and (2) not make a huge loss.

On the subject of programming in Windows….. When you write a program which has to perform many functions for example, in iDumpPro, it has its own internal media player, CD reading and writing code, audio conversion code and so-on. There will be systems which it will not work on. A lot of programs will hook into Microsoft Media player but I did not want to do this because each version of Windows is different and having your own audio code should mean more consistency across Windows 2000, XP and Vista.

I have been lucky so far because people have reported bugs and I then work with them to resolve the issue. While the same bug may not appear for other users, it would at some time pop up unless fixed. Thanks to you all.

People who do not program have no idea how hard it is to make software bug free as there are so many factors which can affect the software. When working with 50-60,000 lines of code, there will always be something which will (under certain conditions) misbehave. When I first had a beta of iDumpPro ready, I packed the entire application into 1 exe file so that it could become portable and carried on the iPod. I then tested it under Vista and the whole thing broke. I had to resort to using an installer. I have seen some tools which will install on-the-fly to the PC like a silent installer so that the user will see only the app running and nothing in the background but these tools are $1000+ and not currently in my budget. I started writing iDumpPro on 1^st Jan 2007 and expected it would take less than 6 months but so far its been almost a year. I think my programming estimating formula should be Expected development time (EDT) *2 + 30%.

I will be starting to lean .net programming this week and will create a windows explorer type app first will allow you to drag/drop music files between folders and iPods/CD’s/iTunes. I’ll be keeping it simple so that anyone could use it. If possible I will aim for this to be portable and carried on the iPod.

I am in the process installing Vista/Visual Studio 2005 on my Intel 4 core extreme machine which has 150gb Raptor boot disk, BFG 8800 GTX graphics card, X-F1 Audio and 22 inch 19200x1200 flat screen. I have been playing a lot of “Call of Duty 4” and “Quake Wars”. As Vista runs half the speed of Windows XP, it will be interesting to see if I can play these games with all special effects turned on.

Andie (who wrote iDump) has now moved to Australia and is staying with friends in Sydney over Christmas before going off to Adelaide at the beginning of Jan. I expect he will not be doing much email during Jan so I will monitor the forums.

After Christmas I will put a couple of my laptops on eBay to raise cash to buy the new HTC Shift which is due out in the UK first week of Jan 2008. It has both Windows Mobile which runs for 7 days and Also Windows Vista and all this for less than 1kg in weight. See this link for more info: http://www.expansys.com/p.aspx?i=151160

Welcome

Hi and welcome to my Blog. Due to my poor memory and age, and having to remember 1000's of things like code and the shopping list, I thought I would put my personal thoughts down in a blog. Not that I expect anyone other than me to read this, but its a good way to archive thoughts remotely as I always seem to be loosing data due to dodgy backups or server/NAS failures. :-)