People love Apple, and they love iTunes, but I continue to believe that iTunesis the worst piece of widely used software out there.

Today I was trying to add a podcast to iTunes, and like months before, I ran into the problem of not being able to find anywhere that I could click to add a podcast.

It seemed the only way to add a podcast was to do so through the iTunes store.

Last time I gave up and was lucky enough to find the podcasts I wanted through iTunes, but this time the one I wanted to add wasn’t listed there (or at least I couldn’t find it).

After even more searching I finally found how to do it.  You need the URL as a link, and then you need to drag the link from your browser window, onto the “Podcasts” navigation link that is on the left hand side of iTunes.

Totally… stupid.  There is no other way to describe it.

This is pretty cool: http://www.jwirc.com/chat.html.

One one of my dasBlog sites that was built before Akismet was supported, I accientally allowed for pingbacks to be tracked.

Ping backs are supposed to happen between blogs whenver you link to another blog article.

It’s really a great idea!  If you are reading a blog post, you might see a list of 4 ping backs at the end.  These URLs are the locations of other blog articles that reference the article you are reading, so you might want to check some of those out to get those authors poing of view on whatever topic is being discussed.

But, of course, spammers ruin it for everyone.

Yesterday I got 18,000 pingbacks from sites selling prescription drugs in a matter of a hour or 2.

So I turned off ping backs, but that left me with a ton of spam to clean up.

Lucky for me, someone else has already run into this, and built a tool for stripping it out!

Really nice!  The only problem I found was that it didn’t report issues with my config file (I had a bad character in there).  Actually, it WOULD report them, but would immediately begin processing the files (with no patterns to match against) so you couldn’t tell that it was reporting it.

So if you run into a problem with this tool, try putting in a bad content path.  This was throw an exception and you will have time to read any debug info in the command terminal indicating if there was a problem with your config file earlier in the process.

After I fixed this issue, it worked great!

Thanks!

I recently wrote about some issues I was running into with Lenovo computers losing drive space.

I detailed it in this article:

What happened to my drive space (on my Lenovo laptop)?

Well, I think I found the solution.   My Lenovo came with built in Rescue and Recovery software (Under Thinkvantage).

This software tries to make local backups so you can rollback if you get a virus or something.

The problem is, it is very tricky, and doesn’t let you know that it is eating up your hard drive. 

The files never show up on your C:.  So, right now your C drive might show 80 GB total, 500 MB free… but if you show all files on the C drive, and select the properties of them, they all only add up to 45 GB (where is the rest?).

Well IBM hides these backup files somewhere.  I just noticed now that mine, even though I have never knowingly clicked “OK” when prompted to do a Rescue and Recovery backup, is saving 30GB of backup data.

So if you want to delete these, you can do the following:

1. Run Rescue and Recovery
2. Click on Advanced in the lower left hand corner
3. Click on Advanced (again) in the title bar
4. Select “Delete backups”
5. Select some backups to delete.

Thats it!
 

When Google Desktop first came out, I loved it.

It gave quick search results searching across multiple categories on my machine, and it was fast.

But the more I used it, the more I noticed things I didn’t like.  Links to files that didn’t exist.  Missing search results.  Incomplete results.

So even though I had a bad experience when I first tried Windows Desktop Search when it was in beta, I decided to try it again.

There is no quesiton, this is a clear cut total win for Microsoft.

Windows Desktop is fast, gives much more complete results (espically from my email), and has a much nicer user interface when compared with Google Desktop.

I have to say, I am suprised, but happy that it works as well as it does.

Give it a shot, cross your eyes just right and see the words that pop out.

Do you need to come up with some Use Cases?  Maybe you need to create a Software Requirements Specification document.  Or, how about something as simple as writing up some test cases.

ReadySET provides (for free) a set of software engineering document templates to help you come up with these articles.

Just select the type of document you are interested in and customize as needed.

Chances are I will never get time to do this, but still it would be nice.

Very funny:

http://garfieldminusgarfield.tumblr.com/

“Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?

Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against lonliness and methamphetamine addiction in a quiet American suburb.”

Just a few of them:

Craigslist is good for laugh every now and then.

Usually it comes in the form of someone looking to hire someone to develop a site “Just like MySpace” with a budget of $500.  Or “I have a great way to run auctions online, a real Ebay killer.  Need you to implement my ideas.  Budget $1000 plus equity in the new company.”  LOL.

But you can get a good laugh too by posting your own listing and reading the responses.  For example, I posted recently looking for someone with experience integrating business systems with quickbooks.  I wrote that, initially, I just wanted to sit with the person for a few hours to point me in the right direction, and to talk about some of the best practices for doing tihs type of work, but I might have them do some of the development work.

Here is one of the responses I got:

** CRAIGSLIST ADVISORY — AVOID SCAMS BY DEALING LOCALLY
** Avoid: wiring money, cross-border deals, work-at-home
** Beware: cashier checks, money orders, escrow, shipping
** More Info: http://www.craigslist.org/about/scams.html

That is a hard program to automate, but I do have some experience with it when I worked for a large union construction company. You are better off not using it, I have some better methods of keeping your affairs in order using Excel. Call me if you want at XXX-XXX-XXXX for any questions. Marty

LOL