It’s been a frustrating night. Well, not the whole night; Kristy and I dined at a (very) local pub called Murphys, where I had some of the best pork ribs I’ve ever tasted. Not only did all the meat fall entirely off the bone (hence no ribsy fingers), but the meat was absolutely delicious – it tasted more like roast pork than rib pork. Amazing!
Anyway, the frustrations. I recently upgraded my iTunes to Version 5. Let me state right up front here that I hate iTunes; especially I hate that when you install iTunes, you also have to install QuickTime (which I also hate). In total, that’s 3 extra services that start at boot time, and hang around chewing up my precious memory. Well, with iTunes 5 the story is even worse; Apple, in all their wisdom, have decided that they will also install Bonjour – some type of networking multimedia protocol that I don’t want – along with iTunes and QuickTime. Thanks for nothing!
So why don’t I ditch iTunes, you ask? Because up until now, it has been the easiest (albeit the only for a long time) way to sync your music collection with your iPod. But – thankfully – there is now a plugin for Winamp (my very much preferred media player) which you can use instead. To quote the winamp staff:
Kiss iTunes goodbye. Send music to and from your iPod directly from the Winamp Media Library. Nothing could be easier.
Sounds perfect to me! I’ll give it a whirl tomorrow.
The other major frustration that I’ve had tonight concerns NHibernate, and Nullable Types. Why-oh-why they don’t just use the magic null value approach is beyond me. Instead, you have to use one of the Contrib libraries, which I’ve had no end of trouble getting working. At 11 PM I decided it had beaten me, so with a post to the forum, I’m off to bed as a very disgruntled man.
11 comments
In regards to your iTunes gripes…<br><br>I agree that in Windoze it is a memory/process nightmare but you have to remember that iTunes is designed for Mac OS X and ported across to Windoze.<br><br>On the Mac, the OS is smarter and we don’t have those problems. <br>So Apple have had to weigh up the problems of keeping consistency among their app and performance. Obviously they can’t re-write itunes to be like winamp and lose their market opportunity of bring customers across to glitzy world of Mac.<br><br>Anyways, iTunes rocks. Such a simple interface. I much prefer it over Winamp and definitely over Windoze Media Player. All a matter of choice really
Hi mate,<br><br>I work with a guy from Holland so if you don’t get an answer from the forum then I can ask him to translate the dutch post for you.<br><br>Andrew
Andrew – thanks very much for the offer! I managed to use <a href="http://translator.dictionary.com/" target="_blank">a translator</a> to do a partial job on the posts; from what I could gather the guy’s problem was that he had an old NHibernate dll with a new Nullables dll, and upgrading his NHibernate did the trick. Unfortunately for me, I have the newest release of both, so I need some more suggestions!<br><br>Bender – I had expected an iTunes defense from you
. It’s like you said – it’s all a matter of choice. So, why doesn’t Apple give me the choice to ONLY install iTunes, and not QuickTime or Bonjour? Or even better, why don’t they give me the choice to use whatever media player I like, and allow sync’ing via file explorer instead?<br><br>And though you say it’s not a problem on Mac OS, I daresay it probably is; perhaps you just don’t see it. Though they may not be called "services", I’m guessing they still have some sort of monitor processes that are running in the background. Otherwise, how does it know when you plug in your iPod, or to fire up QuickTime to watch a video, etc? Perhaps it’s just a little more integrated with the OS so its more transparent to the end user.
I was going to suggest babelfish but I assumed that you had read hitchhiker and knew of it already. <br><br>In case you are not as big a nerd as I am : babelfish.altavista.com/<br><br>I also have had luck with freetranslator.com (the only one that I have found that translates english to norwegian)
correction, that should have been http://www.freetranslation.com not freetranslator.com
Hey Gerrod
you should google Anapod Explorer.<br><br>Oh and I hope you get NHibernate working – we’ve had Hibernate in production for over a year now and it’s just brilliant.
The operating system has listening services for all devices etc. and hence doesn’t need a special one to load up iTunes. Hence once less service.<br><br>I do agree that quicktime is just sucky. I don’t even like it on the Mac but it’s so bloody tied into everything. There’s no way to remove it.<br><br>There’s reasons why they tie you to a product and those reasons are always money. It seems to be working for them at the moment
<br><br>Ease of use, and radical new ideas are for crazy software developers – I think they are called innovators. Only once an idea is succesful and provided free will a corporate then follow along, copy (read: steal), and then patent the idea as their own. Call me a cynic.
Off topic, but it was actually Parnell’s we went to G, not Murphy’s.
On another side note, <a href=’http://www.tripadvisor.com/Restaurant_Review-g60763-d480876-Reviews-Brothers_Barbeque-New_York_City_New_York.html’ rel=’nofollow’ target="_blank">Brother’s BBQ</a> is pretty good for southern type food. I highly recommend the beef brisket.
Also, try Blue Smoke, as well. You can get the menu from menupages.com.(which is a site you should bookmark anyway, if you haven’t already done so.)
Blue Smoke!! Thank you bronxelf; I’ve been trying to think of the name of that place for the last 2 weeks. I knew it was "Blue" something…