I was trying to copy a DVD the other day and though it went through the motions nothing was written to disk, this was on the XP machine.

That disk was a DVD of photos someone had had created, from a shop, from their digital camera and the DVD included Kodak Photoshare. I tried copying it a second time, on the Vista PC, and noticed this time that a message was displayed about the photographs being copyrighted. This time the disc was copied apart from the photos.

This morning I tried to write a disk, on the XP machine again, of (opensource) software for someone and again it went through the motions of writing the disk but afterwards the disk was empty. This time it was a CD not a DVD. Bells started ringing. I remember that a year or two ago I had a similar problem in that I couldn’t write to any CD or DVD. That time it was something to do with a missing aspi.sys file, which I think is responsible for the actual writing to a disk. I did a search for that file and couldn’t find it so I ran sfc and that immediately wanted the XP disc so that the O/S could repair itself. Half an hour later, when that had finished, I did another search for the aspi.sys file and it still didn’t exist.

The software I use for writing CD’s and DVD’s is Nero, that nice little neat bit of software. I ran the Nero software disc and let it repair itself and it still wouldn’t record. I then ran the Nero Infotool app which tells you all about the CD/DVD writing software and hardware on the PC. On the ASPI tab, for System ASPI, it said ‘ASPI installation is corrupted’. That’s probably because the aspi.sys file doesn’t exist on the PC. The status for the Nero ASPI installation is ‘ASPI is installed and working properly’. So why do I have trouble writing CD’s and DVD’s with the Nero recording software?

I’ve got a feeling the AnyDVD software drivers are getting in the way somewhere and messing up the recording process.

I’ve downloaded a whole bunch of the iPhone free apps and some are OK, some are a bit week and some just don’t work.

Shazam: This works really well. It has a fairly good stab at identifying music. You click on it’s tag control, which opens the iPhones mic and then point it at the speakers. It samples between 5 and 10 seconds music and then sends it to a server for comparison. Having found the track it displays to you the singer/band, the song title and the option to purchase the music. I was impressed.

Google Mobile App: Enter a term to search for and it first has a look at your address book then searches locally, via GPS, for any matches. So you search for pizza and it’ll display any entries in your address book which contain ‘pizza’ then it’ll search and display pizza joints local to where you are. I tried ‘pub’ when I was standing in one and oddly the one pub it didn’t display was the pub I was actually standing in. I assume it knew I was standing in it, as my GPS position would have been at one of the founds pubs, and it therefore thought I didn’t need to be told about the pub I was actually in. Dddrrrrrrhhhhh.

Compass Free: It does display the four points of a compass with a light, signifying direction, currently showing north east. The demo shows a finger touching the compass screen dead centre. I tried it and nothing happened. I turned around and faced a different direction and restarted Compass Free and it was still showing north east. I rebooted the iPhone and restarted Compass Free and it was still north east.

Flashlight: Displays a white screen. Underwhelming.

SimStapler: Displays a picture of a stapler. Touch it with your finger and it makes the sound of a stapler stapling. Do it 10 times and a voice says ’splendid’. Some people have got too much time on their hands.

Warcraft Characters: I entered my World of Warcraft character and realm and it didn’t find me.

Phonesaber: Makes a tinny Starwars inspired vvvuuuuuuummmmmmppppppphhh sound and displays an iddy-biddy little light. If you use the iPhone as a saber then it makes the right synchronised sound. Life is too short…..

Break(out) Classic: Does what it says on the tin. Works well.

JawBreaker: Looks and plays well.

iWant: Looks for local garages, hotels, restaurants, banks etc via GPS. Except it didn’t. I tried all of them and it didn’t find anything. I even increased the searchable radius to 10 miles and it still found squat.

Shakespeare: I downloaded the complete works in about 10 seconds. Good experiment, unlikely ever to be read.

PCMobilizr: Supposed to ‘provide remote acces to your desktop computer from your iPhone’. It didn’t. No doubt the next version will. Heaven knows what I’ll ever use it for – start World of Warcraft on the iPhone and hope you can get to the computer before you get killed.

Rotary Dialler: Looks like an old phone’s dialler. Not easy to use. I can’t see this being downloaded much after the first month.

I started playing with Selenium Core the other day just to see what it does and if nothing else it does do record and playback OK.

Beyond that it’s either finding some documentation on the web or doing some exploratory testing on it to figure out what’s under the hood. I always prefer reading a book on a subject when I trying to learn new stuff and I’ve just had a look on Amazon and there doesn’t seem to be any books on it at all.

I also downloaded Selenium Remote Control which acts as some kind of server and comes with client drivers for Perl, Python, Ruby and Java. I unzipped the download file, installed the server software and started up the (Java) server which actually started two servers. I then created a Python script to get Selenium to open Firefox and login, with Notepad and then came to a shuddering halt. OK I’ve got a Python script how the heck do I run it as Windows doesn’t interpret .py files. I had a quick look at Wikipedia and, of course, I had to download a Python shell. Installed that OK and tried running my noddy script but got a load of syntax errors. Well what do you expect, there is only so much you can do without reading a manual. So get a Python manual.

The iPhone store icon displayed a number on it this morning. They were for updates to a couple of the free apps I had downloaded. I clicked to update both apps and in an area where I had only 1 bar and 3G starting and stopping like billy-o the darn think still downloaded and installed both of the updated apps. Neat.

Quote of the day

“Men are generally idle, and ready to satisfy themselves, and intimidate the industry of others, by calling that impossible which is only difficult” Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)