Nofuture.org.uk

So, I’ve already relocated my entire media library to my new NAS box, so it’s about time to set up MediaMonkey to access it all again.

Configuration

First off, edit MediaMonkey.ini. Insert the DBName property and modify the PreviewDir one:

[System]
DBName=\\server\music\MediaMonkey\MM.DB
TempDir=C:\MediaMonkey\Temp\
CacheDir=C:\MediaMonkey\Cache\
PreviewDir=\\server\music\MediaMonkey\Previews\

Move the existing MediaMonkey database to the network location specified, alongside a copy of the ini file which will serve as a template for subsequent MediaMonkey installs on other machines.

Relocating the Library

I should have moved the files using MediaMonkey’s AutoOrganise function so that all the links were updated in the database at the same time. Fortunately there is an alternative; fire up MediaMonkey and install the SQL-Viewer script, which will allow us to work directly with the database using SQL.

1. Find out the IDMedia of both the current and new locations. To find out the new location IDMedia (Y) (together with the current IDMedia locator), add a duplicate test track from the new (UNC) location. and run:

select * from Songs where songtitle = "example song title"

2. Now we know the IDMedia, run the path change query:

update Songs set SongPath = replace(SongPath, "M:\", "\\server\music\Library") WHERE IDMedia = "X"

3. Update the IDMedia to the new location for all songs:

update Songs set IDMedia = "Y" WHERE IDMedia = "X"

References

1. Portable MediaMonkey
2. Changing the default database Location
3. Convert mapped drive to UNC
4. SQL-Viewer

A timely strip from Dilbert this weekend. Honestly, the majority of my week was spent modifying PowerPoint slides so that they more accurately represented our status as it should look, without actually changing the underlying data. This week I made some PowerPoint slides that have no particular use.

MCV today released the results of a survey into salaries in the gaming industry. Perhaps naively I figured there’d be big money in developing video-games, however I got a surprise when I read that the average salary for those working in development is only £31,964. I know my work isn’t directly comparable to the gaming industry, but at the end of the day it’s the same skill set, and the final deliverable is still a piece of software — so I’m officially better than average, and a bit less disgruntled about my own job despite no meaningful pay rise for the past 2 years.

Depressingly, people in “marketing and publishing” reported that they earned £12,500 more, on average, than those in development jobs — I’m definitely in the wrong profession.

Good marketing doesn’t make a good product, but that’s the world we live in — style over substance. Why invest in making something of such high quality that people will want it when it’s easier to convince people they want it through marketing. Just take a look at all the biggest selling products these days – Wii, iPod, X-Factor winners — perfect examples of style over substance!

Maybe I should post today’s Dilbert on my manager’s door. I’m so bored with my current project, it’s monkey work I could do in my sleep but someone has to do it I suppose. I’ve been wondering how to bring it up …

Clarkson is the archetypal grumpy old man, and he’s really excelled himself this week in his column in the Times

Then you have the chaps and chapesses who can’t stand the constant raids on their wallets and their privacy. They can’t understand why they are taxed at 50% on their income and then taxed again for driving into the nation’s capital. They can’t understand what happened to the hunt for the weapons of mass destruction. They can’t understand anything. They see the Highway Wombles in those brand new 4×4s that they paid for, and they see the M4 bus lane and they see the speed cameras and the community support officers and they see the Albanians stealing their wheelbarrows and nothing can be done because it’s racist. And they see Alistair Darling handing over £4,350 of their money to not sort out the banking crisis that he doesn’t understand because he’s a small-town solicitor, and they see the stupid war on drugs and the war on drink and the war on smoking and the war on hunting and the war on fun and the war on scientists and the obsession with the climate and the price of train fares soaring past £1,000 and the Guardian power-brokers getting uppity about one shot baboon and not uppity at all about all the dead soldiers in Afghanistan, and how they got rid of Blair only to find the lying twerp is now going to come back even more powerful than ever, and they think, “I’ve had enough of this. I’m off.”

What a completely fucked up country we live in, I can’t even summon the words to describe how depressing this is; five years seems a lot given the pathetic sentences you hear being handed out to real criminals.

A former soldier who handed a discarded shotgun in to police faces at least five years imprisonment for “doing his duty”. Paul Clarke, 27, was found guilty of possessing a firearm at Guildford Crown Court on Tuesday – after finding the gun and handing it personally to police officers on March 20 this year.

The jury took 20 minutes to make its conviction, and Mr Clarke now faces a minimum of five year’s imprisonment for handing in the weapon. In a statement read out in court, Mr Clarke said: “I didn’t think for one moment I would be arrested. “I thought it was my duty to hand it in and get it off the streets.”

Prosecuting, Brian Stalk, explained to the jury that possession of a firearm was a “strict liability” charge – therefore Mr Clarke’s allegedly honest intent was irrelevant. Just by having the gun in his possession he was guilty of the charge, and has no defence in law against it, he added. But despite this, Mr Blackman urged members of the jury to consider how they would respond if they found a gun.

He said: “This is a very small case with a very big principle. You could be walking to a railway station on the way to work and find a firearm in a bin in the park. Is it unreasonable to take it to the police station?” Paul Clarke will be sentenced on December 11. Judge Christopher Critchlow said: “This is an unusual case, but in law there is no dispute that Mr Clarke has no defence to this charge. The intention of anybody possessing a firearm is irrelevant.”

Last night I finally gave up on Vista and reverted back to my XP installation, but WMP Media Sharing was still broken — luckily I stumbled on a error message from WMPNetworkSvc in the Event log when I was actually looking for something else:

A new media server was not initialized because WMCreateDeviceRegistration() encountered error ‘0×80070057′. The Windows Media DRM components on your computer might be corrupted. Verify that protected files play correctly in Windows Media Player, and then restart the WMPNetworkSvc service.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Unsurprisingly the Help and Support Centre was no help at all, but simply plugging that entire error into Google turned up a lot of people having the exact same problem, and I found the solution to my troubles here: http://www.ureader.com/msg/15751792.aspx

I searched the net for this, and found this: http://forums.techarena.in/showthread.php?t=686560

After checking the registry I found that on my machine the setting pointed to:

C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\DRM

This folder was there, but maybe one of the files was corrupted? I moved everything from the folder to a temp folder and then restarted the service, and Voila! Now everything works again.

-Mikko

Finally I can stream video from the PC to the 360 again.

It hit me today that I’ve been at IBM for five years now; and when I looked at my performance reviews I see three years in a row with the top rating, and 2 years with the second highest rating. Despite all this my career hasn’t exactly progressed very much. I guess it’s my own fault though, I foolishly thought that if I excel at my job I’d be rewarded with increased pay, bonuses & eventually promotions. As it turns out, I haven’t done too bad on the first two, but when it comes to promotions it’s most definitely a case of “you don’t get what you don’t ask for”, and as much as I hate blowing my own trumpet, it appears that if I want to get anywhere in this business I’m going to have to do just that.

While I was contemplating “where is my career going?” yesterday I decided to start building a CV on Monster.co.uk to see if perhaps I’d be better served looking at a new role in another company. What I certainly didn’t expect was for my phone to be ringing every 20 minutes with agencies offering me various roles and/or requesting my CV for the files. Some seemed to have not even read the information I’d put on Monster before calling. By the end of the day I had pulled my contact details from Monster as it had got to the point where I couldn’t actually get any work done for all the phone calls!

One or two interesting roles were mentioned, whether anything comes of them is another matter. As I explained the the few agents that seemed to have at least read my Monster profile I wasn’t looking for any job as I already have a very good job; I’m looking for something special.

Well, this is it — the end of our holiday. Mercifully the return flight was a lot less painful than the flight out there. Having the shorter trip first made a big difference I think; after 10 hours on a plane the last thing you want to do is step right onto another one, but it doesn’t seem as bad after “just” 3 1/2 hours!

We left Vegas at 6am local time and arrived back in London at 8am local time; that’s over 24 hours travelling with the time difference thrown into the mix! But the week away was well worth it