Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Spotify headed for the US

Sunday, February 7th, 2010

In an interview with Billboard this week, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek confirmed that Spotify are just a month or two from launching Spotify in the US. Apparently they have got a data center set up, and are in the final stages of setting up agreements and educating US record companies about the Spotify concept. He also announces that they are in the process of expanding the capabilities and integration that Spotify has to help drive the all important purchases that they need to make their business profitable.

Personally I’m bracing myself for the mass of new Songler users when this launches in the US. I’m sure Spotify have a similar sense of dread – it’s not easy launching a popular product in the worlds largest market.

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Spotify banned at Oxford University

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

Shocking news from the worlds top university – Oxford University have banned the use of Spotify on their network. The justification is that it is a P2P bandwidth hog. There is of course something in that – it does use P2P technology, and it does need at least a 256kbit connection while it is running. If every student tried to run Spotify at once, it would undoubtedly cripple the network. That’s a very big if though.

The reason this is shocking is that for years the music industry has been chasing universities to get them to stop students from stealing music, and then along comes a legal service and the university blocks it. These students (except the PPE ones) are smart people who will find other less legal ways to get their music if the legal ones are blocked, and that doesn’t help anyone.

Update: Manchester University bans Spotify too. Could be a bad trend for fans of free legal music.

Anyway, if you are currently at Oxford missing Spotify, why not try listening to last.fm through Songler. Fantastic way to get your music, and not blocked!

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Windows Home Server Cannot Even Mount Backups

Saturday, September 12th, 2009

backup

Windows Home Server has had it’s fair share of embarrassing issues that really shouldn’t happen to a server. First of all, it didn’t really support the sort of home power users who were buying it, because it didn’t support backing up 64bit systems for the first year after launch. Secondly, it was corrupting files (I personally lost a few photos to that when they were corrupted while rotating them). Thirdly, until recently you couldn’t back up the server itself, so it was a fairly lousy place to store files.

Now a new issue is becoming more common, which is the inability to recover backups. More and more users are reporting that when trying to mount a backup, the process gets to 81% and then gives the error “Cannot mount the backup”. This was meant to be resolved with Power Pack 3, but from personal experience, I can tell you that it is not, even in the final version. To make matters worse, the symptoms are that you can mount a backup once on each client machine, and then never again. So you get the false sense of security that everything is working fine if you check the backups, but it fails as soon as you really need it. (more…)

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Auto Play DVDs in Media Center in Windows 7

Monday, September 7th, 2009

autoplay7

One of my great annoyances with Windows 7 is that you don’t have the option to auto-play DVDs with Media Center. I logged it as a bug during the testing phase, and was informed that it was intentional – something along the lines of if you wanted to use Media Center, it would be open already, so auto-play wasn’t appropriate.

Anyway, I disagree, and fortunatly someone has come up with a fix for the problem. Mikinho over at Seven Forums has produced a simple registry change to get Media Center added to the DVD movie auto play options. I tested it out, and it all works great; (more…)

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Fix table rendering problems in IE8

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

Those of you who do any serious web design know that using tables to define the layout of your page is so 1995. The only way to design your page is with css.

Those of you who actually really do any serious web site coding also know that you will sooner or later be asked to work on a site that makes heave use of tables, and when faced with re-coding the whole system to use css or sticking with tables, it’s often going to be stick with tables.

Unfortunatly, IE8 has a nasty habit of simply ignoring any table cell widths you specify and rendering them as whatever size it sees fit on a truly random basis (refresh the page and see a different layout!). Fortunatly I found a solution to get IE to behave nice again. You can use the table-layout: fixed style to get it behaving well again, so just stick the following in your stylesheet (you do at least have one stylesheet don’t you?);

table{
  table-layout:fixed;
}

And there you have it – freedom to continue coding like it’s Web 1.0 time!

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Lovefilm suspiciously helpful support

Monday, May 11th, 2009

Lovefilm have started using a new style envelope. Compared to the old ones (above), they are a pain to use. I thought I would let them know, and sent them this e-mail;

I just got one of your new style envelopes. They are dreadful! The zip part shreds, the tear off bit doesn’t tear off, and there is sticky bits left on it. Bring back the old ones.

and within 10 minutes I got back the following response;

We would like to inform you that we have forwarded your concern regarding the envelopes to our relevant department and they will do this for you as soon as possible.

I know I am influential, but I didn’t expect to get a promise that the company would do a U-turn and ditch the new packaging quite so easily! I’ll have to use my powers more wisely next time.

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Get TortoiseCVS working in Vista

Saturday, May 9th, 2009

tortoise

I’m sure that there are many developers completley frustrated by TortoiseCVS’s inability to work with Vista. Tortoise is easily the best open source CVS integration too, essential for any serious developer who needs to use a proper revision control system (no, creating an occasional backup, or relying on Vista’s “Previous Versions” feature is not source control). The problem though is that it just constantly seems to crash when using Vista, giving errors like “TortoisePlink has stopped working”. After a lot of googling turning up dubious solutions about disabling UAC and other equally dubious solutions. Finally I found a good workaround though. Go to C:\Program Files\CVS Suite\TortoiseCVS and edit the properties of TortoisePlink.exe to set it to run with Windows XP compatability mode. Now it’ll run with much more success. (more…)

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Creating nice buttons

Thursday, March 12th, 2009

Buttons

I wanted to add some nice buttons to my web site, but didn’t really know how to draw them very well. After quite a bit of hunting, I found this fantastic tutorial on drawing buttons in GIMP (my favorite photoshop alternative). It’s a small number of easy steps that are excellently documented, so that even I could follow it with no problem at all to produce buttons like this;

vista-download-button

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Hello world!

Sunday, February 1st, 2009

Hello! It’s my first post on the MillieSoft blog. I decided that I wanted a forum where I could write a bit more about my media center experiences that lead me to develop the software that I do, and also share the information about the other gadgets and technology.

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