The Day Today

(photo credit - jonbro)

I can get angry. Angry at a major lack of innovation in the computer industry. Sure, we have our terabyte hard drives, 100″ screens, and quad core CPUs, but still our operating systems and hardware fail to respond to simple commands in a timely manner. I’m talking about stopping and ejecting when the computer is confused.

It’s happened to everyone. You’ve put a scratched up CD in the drive, and the CD drive decides to whir the disc around at high speed to figure out what’s up. All fine so far. Then you press eject and… more times than not, the drive will keep spinning the CD, freeze up the computer, and generally make your life a misery. Eject should mean.. spin down and eject that disc now.

Even worse is when the disc starts out okay, you begin to copy a file across from it, but then it hits trouble. Rather than being able to press the stop or cancel button and get an immediate resolution, it’s more common to have it freeze up your operating system (or at least the shell aspect of it, on the Mac Finder will freeze but other apps run okay) but still not actually “stop”.

What’s up with all of this? Make stuff happen when we tell it to happen.

I managed to get Urchin 6 installed on my machine. The MySQL database needs to exist before you run the installation. Providing an account with enough privileges to create the database is not enough. I have now run into another problem with the Slave Scheduler service, which refuses to start. The Urchin team are aware of this problem as it has been reported by several beta testers but are currently unable to replicate the problem.

A late post today as I’ve been away from the computer and am now about to get about 3 hours sleep before driving to Reading for the music festival. I have already queued up a post for Friday and will also write another short one for tomorrow.

Whilst at my parents earlier today I solved an issue my mum was having with iTunes. Basically she installed the latest version and since doing so it refused to load and instead gave the error message “iTunes has detected an audio configuration problem”. Initially she just thought to uninstall iTunes and reinstall however this failed to resolve the issue.

Fortunately Apple have acknowledged this issue as a fault with QuickTime. After following the advise given by Apple (uninstall and reinstall QuickTime) the problem went away and mum was happy!