Tony’s Web Design <blog / >

The other day I filled my primary hard drive. As such,

1. Go to your c:/users/<yourname>/ folder. (C:/Documents and Settings/<yourname>/ on XP and earlier)
2. Right click properties.
3. Click Location (Target on XP and earlier)
4. Click Move
5. 
6. Select the folder to move to.
7. Click Apply
8. Click Yes on this dialog
   

The next steps are not neccesary but highly reccomended.

1. Open a command prompt (as administrator on Vista)
2. Go to the containing folder of the original location.
3. Type mklink /D oldlocation newlocation

Make sure you use a forward slash ahead of the D and a backslash in the paths.

One thing that alwasy gets on my nerves is when I go to a website to read an article is when the web page turns out to just be a summary of the article with the full article in a PDF. 99/100 times, this results in me leaving the page and finding the information elsewhere.

If I did click on the PDF, what would happen? The adobe reader would open up (slowly, sometimes taking as long as 5 minutes), then the PDF file would start loading. If I was lucky, it’d be in a browser tab. If I was unlucky, it’d be in a whole new window.

Why would anyone supply on the web, a page that needs an external application to run outside the web browser and call it part of the site? Especially when said application has had security problems in the past.

One of the justifications is PDF’s advanced design features. Which I have yet to see used beyond the capibilitys of HTML. In fact many of the PDFs I have seen are much less complicated than the average web page.

So the twitter round up was a terrible idea and has been removed. It flooded the blog with posts.

Microsoft. The corporate monolith that is totally unconcerned about it’s customers wishes and needs. Relying on it’s market dominance to push in inferior products and destroying competition.

Or at least that is the image you get from fans of Macs, Linux, iPods, Java, PHP, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Google Chrome, Perl, Python… You get the idea. Up until last year that was also basically my own personal view.

However, apart from the travesty that is Internet Explorer 6, most of Microsoft’s products are as good as, if not better than their competitors. For example, this Christmas, I got a new iPod Touch to replace my aging iriver H10 6GB. While the iPod Touch was good, I’m not comparing that to the Zune (because I don’t have a Zune) but I will compare iTunes to Windows Media Player.

iRiver H10, -the model of mp3 player I used for many years

The H10 was a really good MP3 player which I have had for the last 3 years and it survived nearly every knock I put it through for that time. However after 3 years of abuse, it was starting to fail (you had to keep rebuilding the database if it was more than 1/3 full after I left it on the windowsill and it overheated one very sunny day).

I had used it for the past few years with Windows Media Player, versions 10 and 11. It player MP3s and WMAs. Whenever I ripped a CD, I ripped it as MP3 320kbps. This worked without fail in WMP and the player.

However iTunes ignored the 320kbps files. It offered to (and did) convert all the WMAs to AACs to sync. This left the vast majority of my music library unusable on my new iPod. This is despite iTunes definitely being compatible with 320kbps and my iPod Touch allegedly being compatible.

Since Christmas, I have slowly re-ripped some of the songs but until the other day, most of the songs were still unusable. I later found the problem to be with the ID3 tags and see my previous post for how it was fixed. However, everything else compensated for it, so why couldn’t Apple?

I’m probably going to have audiophiles give me a list of reasons why iTunes is so much better than Windows Media Player but for my uses, Windows Media Player blows iTunes away. The one concession I’m willing to give it, is I’ve talked to some Mac users who agree with me that Windows iTunes is crap but assure me it’s better on a Mac.

Also iTunes locks you into the iTunes Store-iTunes-iPod market. If you want to use any of these, you need at least 2/3 and you can’t use it with competing stores/software/devices. This is far more anti-competitive than Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. How would Apple like it if Microsoft patched Windows to break Safari? I’m sure there would be a lawsuit with record-breaking speed. With WMP, it’s a any store-WMP-80% of players choice.

While we’re on the subject of comparing Apple to Microsoft’s reputation and competition, what about the iPhone apps? How many were refused for “duplicating pre-existing functionality”?.

Another case where MS has got bad publicity is with C#. Until recently, I was one of those who dismissed C# as “that MS java clone”. However after learning C# for a while, I have come to the conclusion that it is a much more powerful language. While the .NET framework from MS is Windows only, there is a open source implementation called Mono that reaches many platforms including the big three of Windows, Mac and Linux. Now many will argue that the increased power will allow people to write crap code but some people will write crap code in any language.

New feature on the blog. Every day, a summary of my twitter activity will be posted on my blog. This may or may not stay but I’ve noticed it does break the layout on the iPhone.

This Christmas I got a new iPod Touch. Over the last 2 or 3 years, I have accumalated a large collection of MP3 files. However, when I first started using iTunes, around 30-40% of my files would not import. They played fine. In WMP, VLC and Quicktime. After a while I just gave up on getting these on my iPod but recently I found if I used a converter to convert from MP3 to MP3, they started to work fine.

I suscribe to a lot of RSS feeds. On any given day I might have 100 updates. However I can’t and don’t read all of these. The ones who I often don’t read usually get removed within a week or two. The biggest problems I notice are:

• Too long. If your blog posts usually extend beyond two pages in my RSS reader, I won’t bother to read them and will just scroll past them unless you have a good mix of images and text. I don’t have the time to read too much text and as for posts consisting entirely of 30-50 images, I get bored.
• Too short. The opposite is also through. If your post is a one line comment, it should probably be on twitter or another similar site.
• Teasers. This is the most annoying problem I come accross. If your RSS feed is just a heading and a description of a post, I won’t click through to read it. I’ll actually delete your feed from my RSS reader. If you won’t put the whole post in the feed, have at least 1/3 of the content in the feed.
• Too many posts. If you post 9-10 articles a day, I will delete your feed from my reader. In my opinion 1-2 is a good amount per day. Some people do like posts that many times a day but for me, once my feeds go above 100 a day, I can’t read them all and start feeling like blogs with loads of posts are spamming my feed reader.
• Don’t post all your social network info to your blog as soon as you post it. If you must put your twitter post, flickr photos or other content on your blog, do it as a weekly summary, not an on the spot post.

Smashing Magazine article on project management tools.

The post linked to there is very interesting. It does however leave out my personal favourite, the free PHP and MySQL Mantis Bug Tracker which I have installed on my testing server which I use becasue

• It’s free
• It uses programming languages I’m familiar in
• and it took about 1 minute total to install.

The next version of Wordpress, 2.7 is close to its release date. The biggest feature is the automatic update for wordpress which will save a lot of hassle.

I’ve noticed a few threads on every Linux forum where people complained about Linux hardware compatibility so I thought I’d write this.

I had a Linux boot on my computer and my laptop. I uninstalled it on my laptop as it only has a 60GB hard drive and I bought the sims 2 with a good few expansions, completly filling the remaining free space on my windows partition. My computer’s hard drive failed on me last Thursday.

Every computer I have ever installed Linux (Dell Dimension 8300, Inspiron 8600, Precision M60 and some 2001 HP computer) on has just worked with no driver issues. I have 5 discs with drivers that need to be installed for Windows to use things like my printer, graphics card, speakers, network card etc. These all worked perfectly after Linux was installed (which only took 20 minutes average compared to XP’s 1-2 hours).

The only thing I couldn’t get to work was a Netgear WPN111, wireless network dongle that is hit and miss on Windows aswell.

What is everyone else’s experiences with Linux and compatibilty. The distro I use is PCLinuxOS.