IE7 Will Be An Automatic Update
According to this report Microsoft will be making IE7 a “high priority” update due to it’s security upgrades. This means that IE7 will be automatically updated on all computer running IE7 that has automatic updates turned on. Let the Microsoft bashing begin… again.
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Owen Wilson Pisses Off Steely Dan
The founders of the band Steely Dan are upset with Owen Wilson over his new movie You, Me and Dupree and it’s similarities to the song “Cousin Dupree” off their 2000 album Two Against Nature. The band posted an open letter to Owen’s brother, Luke Wilson in which they rip Owen for his part in the movie and invite him to come on stage for a public apology.
I’m a big Dan fan but I think that even with the similarities it’s a reach.
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Windows Defender Madness!
Recently Windows Defender (formerly Windows Antispyware, formerly Giant Software Company Antispyware) prompted me to install a new version. I have a Windows 2000 laptop I keep around to play and test with so I figured I’d try it there forst and see if it’s worth doing on my other systems that have Windows Defender installed. Toward the end of the install I get the following message:
“Error 1920. Windows Defender Service (windefend) failed to start. Verify that you have sufficient privileges to start system services.”
Problem is that I was installing with an account that already had admin privileges. The only way to have more privilege would be to have Bill Gates himself give his blessing.
I did some searching on the web and found a couple of different things that most people seem to think works to fix this issue. They are as follows:
- Make sure you have the GDI+ update installed.
- Install the update rollup for Windows 2000 SP4.
Needless to say neither of these worked for me. As I continued my search I chanced upon this link which offered the following solution.
- While the installation is in it’s error state (in other words, while the error message is up) open up your services (Go to Start->Run, type Services.msc in the Open field and click OK).
- Then open the defender service and change it from local account to an administrator account on your network.
- Try to start the service. (It’ll probably give an “access denied” error”.)
- Change it back to local account and it should work.
Problem is that when I use this machine at home I’m not on a network so I can’t log in as a network administrator. So I just changed the account. The account I use has admin rights but isn’t the admin. So I just changed to the admin of the machine, tried to start the service, got the error message then switched it back to the original account (with admin privileges) and it worked!
People have reported that you need to reapply these steps every time you reboot but I can’t vouch for that yet. I don’t shut down this computer very often opting instead to out it in Hibernate mote so I can boot it faster when I need it. But with the way I use this machine I’m bound to need a re-boot in the next few days so I’ll post an update when that happens.
Update: I have confirmed that the steps for remedying this situation outlined above must be repeated after every re-boot.
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Song Displayer Rewrite?
The Now Playing section I recently added to the sidebar shows the song I currently have playing in WinAmp on my desktop. To add this functionality I am using a version of Song Displayer that I had to massively rewrite to get working for me. Before I explain why I had to rewrite it let me first explain how this (and most other similar plugins) work.
These plugins work in a 3 step process:
- Your media player outputs the currently playing track to a file on your desktop.
- This file automatically gets uploaded (via FTP or HTTP) to a location on your webspace.
- WordPress reads the file and puts the song information on the blog.
The first two steps are done by a plugin to your media player (in my case WinAmp). The third step is done by a plugin to your blog (in my case WordPress). The Song Displayer plugin for WordPress works together with a WinAmp plugin called DoSomething to cover these three steps.
Song Displayer does a nice job and has a small footprint to get the job done. So why did I have to rewrite it? Song Displayer assumes that the MP3s you play will come from your hard drive. Based on that it assumes that the ID3 tags for each track (information like artist and song title) are formatted as they normally should be (artist, album, track, songname). But in my case I’m streaming my MP3’s from my MP3 player. As a result the only information WinAmp has access to is the filename of my MP3s. Editing the template that DoSomething uses to output it’s file was easy. But Song Displayer had to be edited to handle the new way information was being formatted.
While working on this I came accross several things about Song Displayer that could be improved.
- Song Displayer requires you to edit the PHP code of the plugin in order to get it to work with your setup. There are 3 things is requires you to change. This could be handled much better by adding an Options page to the WordPress Admin interface. That way you could make the changes on a form within WordPress and not have to make the changes directly in the code.
- Some of the logic that parses the input is not correct. It doesn’t properly take into account all of the possible combinations of ID3 tags it may encounter. In other words, if it’s missing the name of the artist it will only list the song name. But what if you want it to show the album in that situation (as I would).
- The instructions are lacking information that would make implementing the plugin alot easier. The end user is left to themselves far too much. It took me a whole day to figure out the 1 detail that was keeping the plugin from running.
- DoSomething crashes WinAmp too often.
The second issue is a personal preference that could make the plugin unwieldy if not implemented properly. The other three issues are valid. To that end I was thinking of doing a complete rewrite of the plugin for the general public. The plugin as it stands now (and even more so if I complete a rewrite) would look very little like the original. The only functionality that would be exactly the same is how it reads in the file and how it uses the options.
Is anyone interested in such a plugin? If so then please let me know in the comments. I’m also open to suggestions for a different WinAmp plugin to work with my new vesrions of Song Displayer so you can leave that in the comments too.
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Syd Barrett In His Prime
This video clip features Syd Barrett in his prime performing with Pink Floyd in 1967. He’s the lead guitarist and singer.
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