Naquada

I hate it when people do this… looking through my weblogs tonight after some increased activity on the bandwidth front I managed to work out why..

it seems a few other sites are stealing bandwidth.. that is, linking to images I have on here and not storing them on their own website.. whys this bad ? well when anyone accesses their page rather than the bandwidth of their own server, it counts against ours.. Theres a good simple article here on what bandwidth stealinng is..

I’ve had to turn on ip banning and hotlink protection, something I dislike doing becuase it can cause issues within my own site, maybe the people using my images will get the hint when thier pages appear with broken image links..

All the sites I found this evening dont have email contacts on their sites so I can’t email them and politely ask them to remove the links.. oh well…

Well i am still about.. I’m just locked into doing a Siebel 99 to Siebel 7.5 migration… Its about 13 days work.. so that should free me up the end of next week…

So dont expect too many updates until then… Although I have lots of ideas and thoughts, the 2 hour drive there and the 2 hours back, along with the work doesnt really give me much time to post…

see you towards the end of the week!!

Its definately been an iTunes weekend, and to top it I’ve just managed to set up something pretty cool..

We now have remote control of iTunes from any web browser (the main interest here is the PocketPC browser)

Mark Burgess has an application called browserTunes which allows you to remotely control iTunes from any web browser. It allows playing of songs, pausing, displaying information about the song playing, as well as viewing and playing playlists.

Its a nice interface that works well with the PocketPC

It doesnt quite fit into the pocketpc’s screen size when you select shrink to fit, but its pretty close.
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Apple has filed for a European design trademark which may provide a tantalising glimpse of the company’s long-awaited tablet computer. The filing, made in May this year but only published this week, covers a “handheld computer” and contains sketches of what look like an iBook screen minus the body of the computer.

In 2003 sources claims that Quanta had been hired buy Apple to build a ‘wireless display’

Jobs has always downplayed any claims that Apple were working on a PDA as well as any sort of ‘video’ iPod.

In 2003 eWeek reported that they had a hunch that Apple had produced prototype table Macs with some of their developers. Its not a well known fact but Apple OSX has somethign called Inkwell, a technology born out of the development done on the Newton OS.

The device eWeek was hinting at was described as ‘..a device that superficially resembles a large iPod with an 8in diagonal screen, lacks a keyboard, packs USB and FireWire ports, and runs Mac OS X along with a variety of multimedia goodies..’.

I love Mac OSX, its just so much better and more flexible than Windows. I currently use a Fujitsu Tablet PC for my office applications, and a normal Dell D600 for my non office tasks (software demo’s etc). If Apple did bring out a Tablet Mac I’d swap like a shot, although the Tablet Mac would have to have some sort of docking system, something like the Compaq TCxxxx range with its detachable screen or the Toshiba twist and close.

The Apple Expo Paris may prove exciting… Time to start saving just in case…

Now I’ve worked out how to have multiple mac and windows iTunes all sharing the same central iTunes folder I’m convinced I’m going to need one hell of a lot of extra storage.

I listen to Groove Salad radio quite alot, its a chilled commerical free radio station from Soma FM, and last night I found Radio Lover, an application for Mac OSX that takes internet radio streams and encodes them to MP3 (adding the song names etc to the ID tags). Add the AirTunes system thats working like a dream now, and we could be heading for major audio junkie heaven..

I put an extra 250gig drive into one of the machines a few weeks ago and I’m fast filling it up with the encoded versions of all my CD’s and the streams from Groove Salad wont help!!!
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Now the AirPort Express with AirTunes is up and running, I need the ability to remotely control what music is playing without having to run up stairs to the Mac and select something new..

Apple produce an SDK for iTunes allowing developers to interface with it. The iTunesCOMSdk provides access to the underlying component model of iTunes. You can navigate audio sources and playlists, initiate format conversions, add artwork, create playlists and so on

Jeff at ManicWave has shown some teasers for something called ‘eyeTuner’ the current codename for his PocketPC based iTunes remote control. Allowing access to a list of iTunes sources (cd, playlists, ipod, etc), selecting a track or artist, and selecting next, previous, or pause. eyeTuner also will stream back album art to display on the now playing display as well. Now the ideas of this along with AirTunes is something worth dribbling over…

Although hes talking about being able to skin eyeTuner now, the project still seems to be unreleased.. which is a shame..

It seems that the airtunes encryption has already been cracked. This keeps non Apple applications from using the Airtunes hardware.

Jim a friend of mine was particularly annoyed since he was just beated to the post by Jon Lech Johansen who decrypted and published the key that Apple’s wireless hi-fi bridge, Airport Express, uses to protect music streams. Jonansen also released the source code to a small Windows command-line tool in essence opening the door for other applications to broadcast music to the airport express.

Unfortuantly Jim had already cracked the keys as was tidying up his code to release, but was beaten at the 11th hour… hes not in a great mood tonight!!!

Today I spent the day at Thruxton Race Circuit having a ‘Ferarri Experence’. The circuit is 2.3 miles in total and is the UK’s fastest race track.

Started the day by having an introduction to the track in an MG SZ, followed by 3 laps driving it with an instructor.

Then moved onto the main event. The Ferrari F355, Ferrari’s flagship sportscar. It has a top speed of 183 mph and accelerates from 0 to 60 in 4.6 seconds. This is a truly impressive car with an 8 cylinder engine that can generate 375 horsepower. I got the red one

There is NOTHING better than getting into one of these with an instructor that greets you with “Welcome to my office… thats the accelerator, when theres nothing in front of you push it, if its not on the floor, push it harder.. this is a Ferrari and you can do up to 187 mph..’

I didnt get into the lamborgini, although it looked fast

the next car was the brand new shape Mercedes SLK, another four laps driving round the course at high speed.

After the SLK I got given an Porsche 911 Turbo to take round the track for another four laps.

you can see from my score card I was the more ‘cautious’ driver

It was an amazing day

Well my bright shiney Airport Extreme arrived today (whilst we were out racing ferarri’s but thats another story!).

Unfortuantly it didnt seem to want to connect into the network. just flashing that horrible orange / yellow light.

Running the Airport Express Assistant just returned “An error occurred when trying to access the wireless networking sub system.” It seems microsoft strikes again. In Windows you need the Wireless Zero Configuration (WZC) service running. Windows XP doesnt have this installed by default and you need it to correctly configure an AirPort Extreme or AirPort Express base station.

Now on my system it was actually installed, BUT you also need version 5.1.2600.1276 or later of the wzcsapi.dll, wzcsvc.dll, or wzcdlg.dll in C:\WINDOWS\system32\ to make everything talk..

The microsoft knowledge base artcle 826942 contains a link to the newest version of the WZC service. Installing that then fixed the problem, and my airport express is merrily streaming from iTunes…

Thursday I’m taking a Ferrari 355 for a spin round Thruxton Circuit, Hants. Get to drive a Ferrari 355 and an F1-style single-seater at speed.Obvisouly you have to get through driving the ‘hot hatches’ round the circuit first.. such a bind!!!

Expect pictures Friday!!!!