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.