IT Werkz Sometimes

RSS Feed Homepage

Articles: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Silisoft extraction & a great reason to fail at an interview
2008-06-04 16:21:00
I got a copy of Xilisoft’s Audio DVD Ripper and used it to extract the music, into mp3, from the Led Zeppelin Seattle DVD and that worked well. Of course there is no indexing so the music from the first DVD is a single track 109 minutes long. I could use Cooledit Pro to create tracks but that ...
More About: Great , Interview , Reason

Led Zeppelin live in Seattle DVD from 1977, and it?s great
2008-06-04 13:21:00
The Zeppelin double DVD of a gig of theirs in Seattle in 1977 - Kingdome Seattle Washington - came the other day and it is professionally shot though I’d say about 3rd generation. It’s great to watch on the PC with a relatively small screen, not sure it’ll be much good on a hi-def 42″ ...
More About: Great , Led Zeppelin , Live

2 interviews for 2 different positions for 2 different agents for the same
2008-05-28 16:37:00
The other day I had two interviews for two different positions with two different groups of two interviewers through two agents at the same (one) company. The first interview was at 10.30 and the second interview at 11.30. If that ain’t a recipe for disaster I don’t know what is. The first interview went OK. I got ...
More About: Interviews , Agents

2000 spam emails & playing iTunes through the stereo
2008-05-22 18:47:00
My spam email daily count has recently increased to about 500 messages daily. I was getting a spam email every minute one day last week so I contacted my ISP and they showed me how to tweak the settings on their email server so that I could get it automatically rejected at the server rather than ...
More About: Pod , Spam , Itunes , Emails

COD 4 and checking the registry after installing SP3
2008-05-14 18:29:00
I started playing Call Of Duty 4 again the other day after a break of several months. The last time I had played I’d got stuck. This time I restarted the level and got passed the stuck bit. In fact I eventually got right to the end. What a great game it is too. I didn’t ...
More About: Registry

Wasting time with interviews
2008-05-12 14:30:00
I heard from the agent about the insurance company interview last Friday and why it didn’t work out was that the interviewer had to consider ‘who I can work with’. Fair enough. He was a little inexperienced and he couldn’t have worked with me too well as I would have been brain dumping on him a lot of ...
More About: Interviews , Time

XP SP3, more junk email confirmed
2008-05-09 10:19:00
Just downloaded XP’s SP3 which appeared to install OK. Dunno what’s changed and listening to Windows Weekly hasn’t been much help as all Paul Thurrott has ever said is that it is a roll up of all the XP updates that have been available since SP2 I assume. I already had all of those XP updates so ...
More About: Email , Junk

Unstoppable Metal Machine - Led Zeppelin at Earls Court 1975
2008-05-08 12:07:00
I just got a DVD of Led Zeppelin playing at Earls Court in London in 1975 and the picture quality is surprisingly good. Not quite Blu-ray but it appears to be professionally edited. The sound is good and I think it includes the whole show as it’s 3 1/2 hours long ferchrissakes. Hopefully someone’s working on ...
More About: Metal , Machine

Vista repairing itself, again and again and again
2008-05-06 19:26:00
When my Vista PC disconnects itself from the net I’ve noticed recently that it can’t be reconnected manually. I’ve tried the Diagnose and repair function which didn’t diagnose or repair anything. I also tried the Connect to a network function and that failed to do what it said on the side of the tin. Logging off ...

Linksys DHCP Client Table does make sense to someone
2008-05-01 11:05:00
When I logon to my router to see what is connected I use the Linksys DHCP Client Table screen which displays all the connected PC’s, wireless radios and the iPhone. Well that’s the idea. There’s a refresh control as well but that doesn’t appear to work. What is displayed though is never quite right. The columns ...
More About: Sense , Make

Checking hotel availability on the web, all full up
2008-04-30 12:38:00
A friend of mine is coming down to London in the summer for a week with his family and tried booking a hotel for his stay via the web. He tried several on-line web hotel search engines and for the week that he wanted every one said there was no room availability. I wasn’t convinced as ...
More About: Hotel , Availability , Full

Windows Update Agent done gone wrong
2008-04-27 19:35:00
My XP machine, which I had recently restored to initial XP Home state and had had to apply 2 years worth of XP updates to, was running a bit slow so I ran SFC on it so that I could Windows repaired. Within 15 seconds it asked for me to insert the XP disc, so it ...
More About: Agent , Update , Wrong , Windows Update

Mobile phone network coverage & iPhone call forwarding
2008-04-21 16:17:00
We have terrible mobile phone coverage where we live and it’s unlikely to get better for a long time. I rang the mobile phone network people and told them about the lack of coverage. The support person went away and had a look at their system to see what sort of coverage I really had and confirmed that we have good coverage. Hello, no we don’t. She dug a bit deeper and found that there are areas of black spots where we live. Yup, that’s the one and I’m stuck firmly in the middle of it. The trouble is that their network engineers don’t do any of this digging through their systems to see what the coverage really is, they just look at the system that says we have good coverage. So I know we have lousy coverage, the support person knows we have lousy coverage but the network engineers don’t know we have lousy coverage. The support person said that there was nothing that could be done to improve coverage in the foreseable future. I said naively &lsquo...
More About: Mobile , Phone , Mobile Phone , Iphone , Network

Is iTunes deleting music?
2008-04-14 13:01:00
I’ve lost some confidence in iTunes’s ability at managing music as it appears to be deleting some of it. No doubt it’s got something to do with DRM so I’ve decided to convert everything to mp3 and triple back that up. I bet Apple have told the music business all kinds of stuff to put their ...
More About: Pod , Music , Itunes , Vista

A confused job spec, who?s testing what and where?
2008-04-11 16:01:00
I’ve been phoned a couple of times about a position where the testing involves and needs experience of Windows active directory, and specifically for Windows 2003. Needless to say I wasn’t interested as I don’t know anything about it. This morning I had a third call about this same position and this agent sounded a bit ...
More About: Testing

Point this at that and multiplay by a couple of million and waddayaget?
2008-04-10 19:20:00
I was given a demo of a Loadrunner type application today and it looked quite useful and very powerful Apparently you don’t need to do any coding at all, but I find that hard to believe. All you have to do is point it at a URL and get testing. I asked the guy giving the demo ...
More About: Couple , Point , Million

iTunes DRM, I don?t get it
2008-04-09 16:33:00
iTunes is playing havoc with some of my ripped music, it appears to be deleting it. All of the older music on iTunes seems to be OK but a lot of the music I have ripped in the last year keeps getting deleted. I have everything backed up in triplicate but it’s still a pain when ...
More About: Pod , Apple , Itunes

Mouse locking on Vista, wait for Windows 7 & why I can?t test software
2008-04-08 15:56:00
Why does Vista disconnect from the net if I’ve left the PC alone for a while? Also, why does the mouse lock up when not used? When I return and move the mouse, it takes about 15 seconds before it wakes up and you can actually see any mouse movement on the screen. Will SP1 cure ...
More About: Software , Windows , Test , Mouse

Broadband routers for Vista, found one and it?s flaky, back to XP
2008-04-01 18:23:00
I exchanged the Belkin Wireless router for a Netgear RangeMax router which was Vista compatible. I installed the router software OK on the Vista laptop and that worked fine even when I disconnected the ethernet cable. The Netgear router came with it’s own USB Range Max adapter so I installed that on the XP desktop PC. ...
More About: Broadband , Back , Routers

Cable modem installed OK, and the wireless router?
2008-03-28 20:45:00
The cable modem was installed this morning and worked straight away on the Vista laptop. In fact it was installed so quick after ordering that I haven’t even received any documentation on the DNS or mail servers or any other setup stuff through the regular mail yet. TV programs seemed to be loaded within seconds but as ...
More About: Wireless , Modem , Router , Cable , Cable Modem

Installing a couple of months worth of Vista updates on an underpowered lap
2008-03-28 08:01:00
In preparation for the installation of the broadband cable modem I thought I’d throw the laptop to the wolves and unleash a Windows update at it and see if it had any luck in installing anything. This is an underpowered laptop running Vista Ultimate so I wasn’t expecting anything like SP1 to get installed. If a ...
More About: Updates , Couple , Worth , Months

Vista?s View Missing Updates and View Update History links, left hand right
2008-03-21 11:24:00
Instead of using the 450mg Vista SP1 download file I ran Windows Update from Vista to see if it could find SP1, which it did. I attempted to install it and it failed, after about 15 minutes. I had a look at what else Vista thought I needed to update from the View Missing Updates link ...
More About: History , Links

Installing Vista SP1 from a USB stick and a big ball of mud
2008-03-21 10:54:00
I downloaded Vista SP1 onto a USB stick today and was planning to install it tonight but someone on the project, one of the better developers, has told me all of the problems he’s been having with it. It fails to fully install but does back its way out afterwards. Not sure if I want ...
More About: Stick , Ball

What does iTunes do with AAC files?
2008-03-13 00:07:00
A couple of weeks ago after upgrading to a new version of iTunes it went and zapped a load of my AAC files. I had numerous backups so it wasn’t the end of the world and all I had to do was reload them, after converting them to mp3. But why does it only delete some ...
More About: Pod , Itunes , Files

Developers testing the testers, you sure that bug?s closed?
2008-03-04 16:57:00
The project stumbles on. We seem to be non-stop either smoke testing or regression testing as there are so many attempts at software builds. We must have tested on about 5 different test environments so far. As one gets mashed to bits and is left to sulk unused another variation of a test environment is cobbled ...
More About: Testing , Developers , Closed

iPhone 1.1.4 and a failing power supply
2008-03-04 15:38:00
After the mess of installing v1.1.3 of the iPhone software, which ended up with me getting the iPhone replaced as the upgrade didn’t complete and I was left with an iPhone with no working speaker or microphone, I took my life in my hands and upgraded the new iPhone from v1.1.2 to v1.1.4, and it worked. Seems ...
More About: Power , Iphone

iTunes 7.6.1 and some missing AAC songs
2008-02-26 21:43:00
I downloaded the latest version of iTunes yesterday, version 7.6.1, and I shouldn’t have. It installed OK, but afterwards when I tried to update some tracks, by adding artwork or adding a rating I received the error message ‘The song …… could not be used because the original file could not be found…..’. I got this message ...
More About: Pod , Apple , Songs , Itunes , Missing

Listening to English soccer on an Internet radio in the UK - sometimes & re
2008-02-20 20:12:00
Our project office has moved and for the better. We are now in a much larger open plan office with a lot of other IT people so if nothing else it does stop some of the juvenile behaviour. We’ve just had 3 days to regression test the system and the part I was responsible for was by ...
More About: Radio , Internet , Soccer , English , Internet radio

Another week another build, I didn’t know it was supposed to do that
2008-02-16 11:10:00
We’ve had a lousy week on the project with the usual constant screw ups in deployment, bug fixing that introduce more issues than they clear, and more. Yesterday we had yet another final build that even the developers got to help smoke test. We had some rudimentary scripts for them to run and some of them were run far too quickly. These guys hadn’t used the test harness before, with all of its quirks and foibles, so it was a bit odd that they were able to complete running the scripts so fast. There was the usual deployment issue where half a dozen screens fell straight over. The problem was found within 10 minutes, but it does make you wonder why they don’t have a check list of every single thing that has gone wrong in deployment before to ensure that these issues don’t reappear. Somebody did tell me that they do sometimes write that kind of checklist, but it’s not kept up to date and rarely used. Lessons learnt? Nope. There is no doubt a difference in ...
More About: Week , Build

Processes hammering CPU and how not to stop them
2008-02-08 18:29:00
Yesterday when I fired up the project software it was running at a crawl. That’s even crawlier than it normally crawls. This system isn’t so much sluggish as comatose. I logged onto the server and there was the cute little CPU being pummelled for 100% usage. So what the heck is chewing it up? Had a ...
More About: Stop , Processes