IT Werkz Sometimes

I’m starting to notice some odd things happening with Vista (And you thought you’d left all that behind with XP. Ed). I tried downloading the Office 2007 ‘plug-in’ that allows you to save a document as a PDF, and though the software downloaded, it didn’t install. Just sat there morosely doing diddly-squat till I clicked on the cancel control.

Also Vista keeps reminding me that it needs to install a Belkin wireless adapter driver. The Vista PC is actually connected to the router with an Ethernet cable, and when I need a good connection on the XP PC then it gets the Ethernet cable, so the Belkin driver is needed on Vista when that happens. The first time I tried installing it it sat there for 20 minutes again doing nothing before I cancelled it. I think I ended up having to reboot. When I did all I got was a dark screen, Vista would not start. Restarted and it wanted to run a restore. Which I let it. The other day I tried again to install the Belkin driver and this time nothing happened and I was able to cancel it.

I also have trouble with iTunes in that sometimes when it starts it doesn’t connect to the net, and does it take a long time before I get any notice why. Eventually it tells me that the Bonjour service isn’t running. I did think that this might be connected to the fact that recently I have been using Synctoy to backup the iTunesmusic folder and as that took so long, the first time I ran it, and it was obviously reading the iTunesmusic folder, maybe both apps trying to access the same folder at the same time resulted in some kind of deadlock and Bonjour switching itself off out of a sense of pique. The trouble with this thinking is that I’m getting the Bonjour service problem even when I’m not using Synctoy and haven’t even in that logged in session.

If I go to Services to switch on the Bonjour service I always find that it shows ‘Started’ anyway. Hmm… When I then come out of Services iTunes has picked itself up and is invariably syncing up podcasts or downloading iPhone app upgrades. Seems that just opening up Services is enough to scare Bonjour into kicking itself into gear.

Another app that didn’t install to well was Synctoy itself. I think that originally resulted in a restore. Sounds like everything is tickety-boo in Windows land then.

Give me strength.

My resume, which I had seriously rewritten recently and which needed to be displayed with the same look on my own domain’s web site, needed to be created in Dreamweaver and uploaded. I have my own domain but the company that provides me with that domain I don’t actually have any web space with but instead I use the web space provided by my ISP (Confusing or what. Ed).

How it works is that anyone that goes to my domain is forwarded to my ISP’s provided web space. For instance if anyone went to www.johnsmith.com they would be routed to and displayed page www.isp.com/johnsmith/index.htm. I checked my own domain’s URL to see what was displayed and it was my old resume that was on my web space hosted by my old ISP, which we stopped using a year ago.

I could try and phone them and get them to lose my old web space but I wasn’t sure how easy that would be bearing in mind that I was likely to get put through to a very confused call centre in another country. To stop the old resume being displayed I pointed my own domain’s URL at my web space with the current ISP, and finding that wasn’t easy. I set that up and then when I went to www.johnsmith.com I was displayed a default web page displayed by my current ISP. The default web page was displayed because I hadn’t yet uploaded a page to my web space.

I started Dreamweaver CS3, set up a site and told it about my current IPS’s web space, username and password. Created a ‘site under maintenance’ web site and attached a picture to it and uploaded it from within DW to the web space. On the 2nd attempt it worked. Dunno why it didn’t work the first time, just nothing happened. My other PC was showing the web space with the current default page. Hit F5 on that PC to refresh the page and, yippee, it showed my ‘site under maintenance’ web site with the picture.

Flushed with that success I thought I’d use Synctoy v2 to synchronise my iTunesmusic folder with another drive. My old iTunesmusic folder was on my XP PC and iTunes on that had been painful for several months as it kept showing missing music and podcasts, not that they were actually missing. I think this was probably an XP problem dealing with 40,000 files. Having moved iTunesmusic with its tracks, movies, podcasts and applications from the XP to the Vista PC, and it working for the last month, I’ve started uninstalling non-essential stuff on the XP PC. I had already uninstalled iTunes and the music folder was on its own 450gig USB drive so I formatted that and plugged that drive into the Vista PC with no problems. Now I had an empty drive to backup my iTunesmusic folder with Synctoy.

Downloaded Synctoy and let it install itself and the setup stalled. In fact the setup failed so badly I had to reboot Vista. Except it wouldn’t reboot, except in a restore mode. I ran the restore, which worked and retried installing Synctoy and this time it worked OK. Started it up and created a couple of folder pairs to sync. The first folder pair didn’t contain much data so ran that which sync’d ok. Started the 2nd folder pair, which was the iTunesmusic folder and that started OK and so far has sync’d 12,000 files. Couple more days to go.

The project suffered some almost terminal news the other day when the client, that was more of a guinea pig that it new, pulled out. The official reason, and it was described to us as if it was something negligble if not cosmetic, was that they had no confidence that we could deliver the product.

Now the client had put a lot of time and resources into the project, had been instrumental in helping the company with customisations that they wanted and had put forward a significant number of people to perform user acceptance testing. And they’ve walked away, and that’s a big deal. Of course some of our arrogant lot laughed it off and made out that it wasn’t significant and that we have several other possible customers, all in the same industry. But what about the word of mouth thing. Do they think that the client is going to sing our companies praises in developing software. Don’t think so.

What’s even worse is that the client wasn’t even paying for the software. By acting as guinea pigs and helping out with the development process they were going to get the final release version for free and they didn’t even want it for that price. Fat chance of them actually wanting to pay for it.

The client did get a bit trigger happy in the last few weeks when they took a new build and decided to reopen over 100 of the 140 fixed defects in a final effort at throttling the project which obviously worked. When I had a look at these reopened defects which I had been responsible for they were working correctly but in our projects continual desire to muddy the waters and generate yet more confusion I was not allowed to actually close them but instead they were alloted to some hapless developer to yet again fix the defect. Go figue.

I’ve been using Synctoy, version 1.4 I think, for the last year to backup my iTunesmusic folder, on one external USB drive to another external drive and its always worked OK till a few days ago when it suddenly displayed a message that it couldn’t copy about 5,000 files. When running Synctoy I have been just hitting the Run control which immediately synchronises the 2 drives, but you can also do a preview first which will analyse the 2 drives and let you know how many actions are needed to synchronise the 2 drives. After the failure I ran Synctoy in preview mode and eventually it displayed a message that there were too many files to compare and that it was best just to run the synchronisation, or words to that effect. I OK’d that and straight away it crashed. Retested in both modes several times with the same result each time. Odd, as Synctoy has been working fine for about a year then suddenly it doesn’t work at all.

I downloaded the beta v2 of Synctoy and ran that and it worked OK.