Today I started back at uni after what seems like forever, it's pretty weird how much has changed over the break. This semester I'll be doing some more C, some Java and apparently some Unix Scripting. So they will hopefully keep me occupied.

I found out today that a friend of mine is doing a subject in Ye Olde English. How awesome is that?
It was a bit dissapointing though cos the first thing she told me about it is that you shouldn't use "Ye" for stuff, it should just be "The". Something to do with some old letters that don't exist any more, I guess they look like a "Y" but translate better into "Th" or somesuch (apparently it requires a whiteboard to be explained fully)...

At the moment I'm kinda tired, but I needed some way to complain about my iPod. It's dead you see.

It didn't seem to be updating through iTunes, so i just disconnected it using the safely disconnect hardware device thing in windows.... But it still thinks it's connected, and also thinks it's on hold - so there's no way to reset it. I guess I have to now wait until the batteries die, and failing that I'll have to take it back to the shop. It'll still be under warranty and whatever, but its a hell of an inconvenience...

It seems like my site has been revolving around apple products lately (and how much they dislike me). I don't mean to turn it all Apple-centric, it's just that when I'm busy I don't do much cool stuff... Hopefully this shall change soon when I get back into the swing of things. I should also cull my RSS intake, but it's hard to decide what to get rid of. Does anyone else feel obligated to read or at least skim over every single item that appears in their RSS reader? It shouldn't be this way...

Update: The battery died as I slept, and now it seems to be back to normal :)

iTunes for windows has never been a stunning success. It's slow, resource-intensive, and often erratic. But I've learned to live with this, because I love my iPod dearly.

Recently I got worried when iTunes complained that "The software required for communicating with the iPod is not installed correctly. Please reinstall iTunes to reinstall iPod's software."
Thankfully, a reinstall did fix the problem. But the error happened a few more times, and I realised that it happened every single time I restarted my computer. I usually hibernate instead of restarting, but I was dumbfounded as to why a restart would cause iTunes to stop working with my iPod (it still played music fine...)

Well, after some reasearch I know exactly why it was complaining. The iTunes installation, much to my disgust, insists on installing Quicktime without even asking you. I don't have a problem with quicktime itself, but I do have a problem with "qttask.exe", the useless program that runs at startup and sits in the system tray just in case you need it. Thankfully, I know how to turn this annoying behavior off (using msconfig).

It turns out that disabling qttask at startup was the reason for iTunes' complaints. Despite the fact that these programs are entirely different entities (or at least they should be), iTunes claims that removing this from the startup options prevents it from talking to my iPod. However, iTunes can talk to my iPod just fine if I kill the qttask manually before i connect the iPod.

My conclusion? iTunes scans the registry to make sure "qttask.exe" is set to run at startup and requires a reinstall if it has been removed, even though the program is irrelevant and unnecessary for the operation of iTunes. The only other software I know of which employs these tactics has a name. It's called "Spyware".

What does iTunes need?
Customiseable fields similar to "My Rating", as illustrated on the right.

Why?
Lots of people create playlists to suit different moods / occasions. But this is lots of manual work every time you want to create a new playlist. If you rank each song once on a set of custom criteria, you could create new playlists without having to go through your library again. It's basically an extension of the existing ratings system, but it would allow you to group your music in more dimensions than just how "good" a song is.

Want a relaxing playlist that other people will know songs from? Just get all the songs where "Softness" is above 2, and "Pop" is above 3.
Want a hardcore mix of your favourite unique music to rock out to all alone? Select songs where "Softness" is below 3, "My Rating" is above 2, and "Pop" is below 3.

There are boundless possibilities, and you could create your own attributes that suit your style of organising your music.

How?
Well that's the tricky part, I don't know yet. If Apple worked on it, I imagine it would be very easy to add this into the program. The menu option shown on the right could open a small dialog box, allowing you to select what sort of data you want (ie value / text), and give the field a name - it would then act just like the regular fields. I'm going to submit this to apple as a suggestion, but I can't imagine them being too speedy about implementing it, if they ever do.

The other option is to make some sort of plugin to accomplish it. I'd be more than happy to code it myself, but I don't think there's enough freedom in the COM SDK and Visualisation Plugin SDK to alter the interface as would be necessary. I guess it would also be theoritcially possible to hack the actual program itself to add this functionality, but that's an ugly approach which is undoubtedly illegal and would break when iTunes is next updated. Also, it's hard ;)

So here's where you come in. If you have any idea how this could be implemented, leave a comment. I'm very enthusiastic to make this work, but don't really know how it would be possible. Also if you have any improvements on my idea then post them here as well...

You may have noticed I added some google adwords on the right over there, and I for one am astonished by the number of ninja ads I see there. None, however are as wonderfully targetted as this one from eBay:

Discount High Scores
New & used High scores. aff Check out the huge selection now!

I know these sorts of ridiculous ads have been spotted everywhere, but I can't help giggling when it's on my own site...

In other news, I'm currently doing a very cool 4-week internship at Atari Melbourne House. So I've been very busy with that, but it's lots of fun. It's been forever since I did animation work, it feels really good to be doing stuff that's actually going to be in games.
For the animation work I managed to pick up Softimage very quickly, it seems to me to be quite a lot better than Max for character animation, although I still don't even know how to texture or render - funny how you only pick up what you need...