All posts tagged Software

Duplicate Files

 Martin · 2 years

A week ago, my phone's data storage maxed out, and I needed to unload my photos and videos to clear up space.

Actually, scratch that - my photos and videos were already backed up via OneDrive, but somewhere along the line, the app lost the ability to automatically delete media that's already been uploaded. I wanted to make sure I had everything backed up before deleting it all from my phone, so I had to find a solution to compare the phone's storage to my OneDrive copy. I have a Samsung Galaxy S10e, and it lets you plug a USB cable in and browse the files just like an external hard drive.

After some research, I settled on software called Beyond Compare. The interface was easy enough to figure out, and it quickly churned through all of my media. It also let me use all the features in the demo, without buying. After an hour or two of working through my pictures I was done! Beyond Compare aligns duplicate (or similar) files by name, so it was simple to find the discrepancies. I was able to clear up over 30GB of data!

I purchased a copy of Beyond Compare after I finished, since I felt like the tool may be handy in the future and I appreciated what it'd done for me.

Yesterday, my wife had a similar issue, but with slightly different circumstances. She needed to upgrade her phone, which was also about out of space, and wanted to make sure everything was backed up before swapping over to the new device. I've got her on OneDrive as well, so the backup has been happening, but she has an iPhone and weirdly, the files on the phone were not named the same as the files backed up in the cloud.

I loaded up Beyond Compare, thinking I might solve the problem as easily as my own, but I forgot that without the file names being the same there was no practical way for the software to show duplicates side-by-side.

I spent the next hour creating a PowerShell script that would go through all the images from the phone and rename them to match the files on OneDrive, which appeared to be just the date the photo was taken in this format: "YearMonthDay_HourMinuteSecond_iOS.jpg". Once I got the script working however, I realized two things: first, the hours were off by 8 - an easy fix - and second, that the "date taken" property in Windows Explorer did not include seconds, so I couldn't recreate the file names exactly as they were on OneDrive. So Beyond Compare would, sadly, be useless here.

After spending a bit more time looking at other duplicate file checkers, I tried out dupeGuru. It took a long time to analyze all the photos from the phone and the OneDrive backup - about an hour to get through 18,000 photos. Once that was done, however, it was pretty easy to sort out which files we wanted to keep and which were duplicates.

In addition to the 3,000 duplicates it found between the phone and the OneDrive storage, it also found 2,000 duplicates within OneDrive - a happy surprise! It took me a few hours to go through everything, but it wasn't too difficult - just a little tedious (and with a few random hiccups, probably because OneDrive didn't like the software trying to delete hundreds of items at once).

We still have to get all the media she has in her iMessages out somehow, but that shouldn't be too hard.

In the meantime, I'm wondering why Windows (or OneDrive) doesn't have built-in tools for this sort of thing. We're almost all digital hoarders in some capacity, with the inevitable duplicate file here and there, and Windows has tools for comparing and hashing files included in the Command Prompt/PowerShell. It seems like an easy, obvious thing to have.

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Windows 8

 Martin · 11 years

I have to admit: I'm curious about Windows 8. This probably doesn't come as that big of a surprise, since Windows has been my primary OS since my family first got a computer about two decades ago, but I still consider it significant, seeing as Win 8 is looking to be such a departure from previous incarnations of the software.

I'm not particularly excited about the metro interface, since I've been using it on my phone for a long time now. I'm actually more interested to see what kind of tablet devices manufacturers will come up with for it, and how they will factor into the flow of all the other devices we already use.

I'm still of mind that a tablet is a pretty pointless addition to a lineup which already includes a desktop computer, a laptop, and a smart phone. But I think that if it becomes possible to use a tablet as tablets are used today, but also dock it to a workstation to use a laptop/desktop type machine, it makes much more sense than a tablet-only device, like an iPad. Especially for someone looking to replace an aging laptop, but who hasn't yet bought into the whole tablet thing.

That's not necessarily my situation; I'm still pretty happy with the continued performance of my years-old laptop. But I have to admit that a Win 8 tablet might be enticing, if it turns out to be as versatile as it seems it could.

We'll see in the coming months, I guess!

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Windows Phone 7

 Martin · 12 years

It's been a couple of weeks since I picked up my HTC Trophy, a Windows Phone 7 handset, and I'm back to report how things have been.

The verdict so far? So far, so good. Only a few bumps in the road. Read on for more detail on what I like, what I don't, and how things have been!

Things I like

The interface. Though the WP7 UI (named Metro) looks simple at first glance, it is actually quite slick. Animation is used throughout and goes far to enhance the interactivity of the touch interface. Particularly nice are the Live Tiles (large, customizable icons on the main screen of the phone), which display animations while the phone idles, and fly in and out of the screen fluidly.

Text is also given a lot of good treatment in WP7, with menus using large headers that often extend off the screen, and smaller bits of text being animated as you flip through different screens.

It's actually kind of funny; though I've always liked the understated design of the WP7 interface, I've also felt that it would have a hard time competing with all the gloss, shadow, and animations used in iOS. After spending time with WP7 though, my iPod Touch feels very dry. The animation feels rigid, and all the gloss and shadow applied to the on-screen items just seems overdone. I'm not saying that iOS is bad, just that a lot of the things that made the OS shine have started to look stale to me after using WP7 for some time. Perhaps iOS 5 will change that, but that's how things stand to me for now.

Of course, the WP7 interface is a bit nuanced, and it's clear that while Microsoft has a good grip on how to lay out apps in an intelligent way while adhering to the design standards of Metro, third party developers still struggle with it. It's quite obvious when devs have made an effort to stick to the principles of Metro, however, and these efforts usually go far in making their apps seem more legitimate than others.

Integration of services. One of the prime reasons for owning a smart phone is to utilize the internet in various ways, and WP7 integrates social media and information services smartly in various ways.

For example, one of the first things you see on the phone is the People Hub, a Live Tile that shows you various thumbnails of the people you know (pulled from your Windows Live and Facebook contacts), and with a touch, gives you easy access to their status updates, allowing you to quickly see what all your contacts are up to. You can also pin individual people from your contacts to your menu as an individual Live Tile, which will automatically update now and then to show you snippets of their most recent posts, pictures, etc. I like this because it makes it easy to personalize the phone and keep up with people you're interested in talking to more frequently.

Another neat feature is that, like the Zune application for Windows, the Zune music player in WP7 also loads up supplemental information about the music you listen to (when available). Pictures of the current/last-played musician load up in the background of the app, and biographical information becomes available for you to read. Links to buy more content from the artist appear, of course. The Live Tile also updates to show pictures of the latest artist played, further personalizing the home screen's appearance, and with no additional effort from the user.

One of my few major gripes with WP7 also involves the integration of services, but I'll get to that later. Overall, the WP7 experience is highly enjoyable in this regard.

Speedy access to information. This isn't to say that other phones don't do the same job just as good, but I've really been impressed with the ease and speed at which I have access to the things that I find important to check, like text messages, email, and appointments/events.

Displayed prominently on the lock screen, available by pressing the hold/power button, is the time, date, and any upcoming events you've got in your calendar. Below that, icons are displayed for your text messages and various email accounts, followed by a number showing how many new messages you have. This makes it extremely easy to see if you've got any unread messages waiting, and quick to put away if you don't.

Care has also been taken to make the capturing of photos and video efficient, with each WP7 handset being required to have a dedicated camera button which, when pressed and held (even when the phone is locked) loads up the camera app and lets the user quickly start taking pictures. It's a small feature that's easy to overlook, but for me, most of the time when I wanted to take picture with my previous phone, it was a pain to have to unlock the phone and then wait a few more moments for the camera to start. By the time everything was ray, the ideal moment to take a good picture had often already passed. I suspect this will not be the case with WP7.

Build quality. I can't speak for other WP7 phones, but for my HTC Trophy, the build quality is great. The phone isn't heavy, but doesn't feel so light that it's cheap. All the buttons feel solid, and the rubberized casing feels good in your hand. The screen has a slightly different feel to it than my iPod Touch, but works well and generally feels good to touch.

The Trophy feels good in your hand, doesn't feel cheap, and isn't too big. There's not much else to say about the build of the phone, really.

Things that take a little getting used to

Internet Explorer Mobile. I understand this is going to get better this fall with the upcoming "Mango" OS update, which will include a mobile version of IE9, but for now, the current mobile version of Internet Explorer (resting somewhere around versions 7 and 8) is serviceable, but clunky at times. To mobile IE's credit, it's just about as snappy as Apple's mobile version of Safari for rooting around pages, but page rendering feels a bit slow sometimes, and some websites which seem like they ought to work simply don't.

I'm hoping that IE9 will help keep WP7's browser in a more modern space than the originally included browser. It'll help the platform keep parity with other mobile operating systems, and will help web designers by giving them a consistent mobile platform to develop for.

Still, even if IE9 doesn't turn out to be a game changer, mobile IE, in its current state, is definitely useable. It just takes a little time to adjust to it.

Context sensitive buttons. With most of my mobile OS experience centering around to my iPod Touch and its solitary hardware button, the addition of a dedicated Back and Search button with WP7 took a little bit of learning to get used to. Instead of using an on-screen button (typically in the upper left corner of the screen in iOS) for going backward, all WP7 phones are required to have a hardware button at the bottom left of the device for going back.

This, in itself, is not too hard a transition to make, since the functionality is very similar to that of other mobile operating systems. But then comes the tricky part: when you've reached the end of going backward through pages in the current app, pressing the Back button again will bring you back to the home screen, or back into whatever app you had open before. The Back button acts on a more global level than you might first think.

Once you get used to this behavior, it's actually quite easy to use it to skip around between what you're doing on the phone. It's especially useful in light of the fact that there's still no real multi-tasking support, though this is another feature coming in Mango.

The Search button has similar behavior, but since I don't use it that much, it hasn't caused me as many problems yet. It is handy to be able to access search in apps, like Marketplace (the WP7 equivalent of the iTunes App Store), but in almost all other situations, it merely loads the Bing search tool. The often-beautiful photography on Bing is a nice surprise as times, but I'd still appreciate more of an explanation now and then as to exactly what I'm going to get when I press the Search button.

Battery life. Other people who have been using smart phones for a lot longer than I have will probably think me silly for complaining, but if there's one thing I miss about my old LG Chcolate phone, it's the battery life. If I didn't make many calls, it would sometimes last two or three days without a charge. My new phone lasts a little over a day to a day and a half, depending on usage and where I take it. Sadly, my current work building, a steel and concrete industrial warehouse, seems to make the phone strain for a signal, and thus drains the battery quickly.

Even then, it's not been a huge inconvenience yet… but in the future, when I am traveling or when I am off hiking or something, it worries me that my phone might wind up dead rather quickly, and those are the situations where I would need it most.

Zune. Figuring out how the Zune music (and video) player works is a little confusing after having spent so much time using my iPod Touch, but I'm getting the hang of it. Generally, the functionality is identical to the iPod; the hardest part is just finding where all the same controls are.

I also find it a bit strange that Zune handles music and videos, but images are handled by a separate app. I'm not sure exactly why I find this weird, but it just seems like if it's going to handle more than one type of media, it might as well handle all of it.

Things I don't like

Missing apps. It seems that every few weeks we see another press release about the growing number of apps in the WP7 Marketplace. That's great, but I'm still missing a few of the apps that I've been using on iOS for a long time now, like Tweetdeck, and the small handful of financial apps I used. Sure, I can do most of this stuff via similar, lower quality apps, or through the web browser, but it'd be great if more companies would get on board with WP7 and publish official apps. Millions of people are using this OS, after all.

This isn't really Microsoft's fault, and I'm sure it'll get better over time, but for now it's still a little disappointing that so many companies out there are courting users on other platforms and virtually ignoring Windows Phone 7.

Marketplace content. This is a small gripe, but it's still something I don't much like, and feel is worth mentioning. The amount of adult content in the Marketplace, and the randomness in which it crops up in search results is stupid. Searching for "Twitter", the sixth result in the list of results is "Sexy Babes FREE". That's just idiotic.

I'm not some kind of prude, and I think people definitely be able to create and sell whatever kinds of apps they choose, but there needs to be some way to filter this kind of content out of search results, or even from the default view of the Marketplace to begin with. I don't think most people are going to the WP7 Marketplace looking for these sorts of cheap thrills, especially when they have a perfectly capable browser at their disposal.

I'm certainly going to have a hard time recommending WP7 to anyone with a vagina when even a casual visit to the app Marketplace involves sorting through dozens of apps showcasing "sexy babes". For the same reason that a bookstore doesn't place adult magazines between every other book on the shelf, the WP7 Marketplace needs to filter out this stuff and put it in its own special place, away from everything else.

The way the default Live ID is handled. Probably my single biggest annoyance with Windows Phone 7 so far has had to do with the way the OS handles your Live ID when you first activate the phone. Upon first startup, WP7 asks you to create or use an existing Live ID (a Windows Live, Xbox, or Hotmail account) for the phone. This is mandatory, and is used to sync contacts, get you an email account, make payments, etc. It makes sense, it's easy, and I like it. So far, so good.

But then, if you used a Live ID you've had for years (like I did) you'll load up your contact list and find that it's been populated with all sorts of random people- many of which are just casual contacts from Messenger or Xbox Live who you would never want to call, and really shouldn't be in your contact list by default. Once you've done this though, there's only one way to fix the problem: reset the phone to factory default and start over. Unwilling to do this, I ended up purging a lot of random people from my contacts… something I probably should have done a long time ago anyway, but which I still found annoying to have to do just to get the phone's contact list set up correctly.

If I were to do it over again, knowing what I know now, I would definitely recommend creating a new Live ID and using that for your new phone, rather than importing an old one.

Final thoughts

That's about all I have to rant and rave about for now. Windows Phone 7 is a solid choice for anyone who wants to "think different" from the Android masses, or who is looking for something flashy, but not confined to the Apple ecosystem. I would definitely recommend the platform, and as long as Microsoft continues to support it, I think there are a lot of good things in the future for Windows Phone 7. If you're in the market for a new smart phone, give it a try!

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I Got God Damned Malware

 Martin · 15 years

And I'm almost ashamed to admit it. My various Win XP installs have been virus free for about 7 years now, but now the streak has finally been broken. The strange thing is, I'm still not entirely sure how, or where, my computer got infected.

I've looked back on the events that have led up to this unfortunate incident, and I have pieced together what I think has happened, which I present to you below.

Two nights ago, I was browsing the net with Google's Chrome. I had a few tabs open, and I was bouncing back and forth between them. In one of them I was working on downloading a file from a file-sharing site, kind of like RapidShare, but not quite as official (if you can call RapidShare "official" by any stretch). I had jumped through all the rings, skipping two ads and waiting 60 seconds for the download link to appear. Once the link was ready, I began downloading (it was a RAR file).

About 5 minutes later, while the RAR file was still downloading, I noticed that I had left the tab open with the file share site on it. With no reason to keep it open, I switched to it to close it, but as soon as I selected it, Chrome became unresponsive. Not wanting to cancel my downloading file, I let the program sit, hoping that whatever was slowing down that page would resolve itself. After a minute or two, the tab finally showed up, but the whole browser was acting slow and slightly unresponsive, so I closed out that tab and a few others that I wasn't using anymore.

I turned away from the computer for a second to look at something, but out of the corner of my eye I saw the screen change. I looked back at the display, and it took me a moment to realize that Chrome wasn't on the screen anymore - not in a window or on the taskbar. So I opened it back up, and began trying to restore the tabs I had open. About 30 seconds into this, all of my tabs (even those that had already loaded and stopped), switched to show the Chrome error page. A minute later Chrome disappeared from my screen again with no warning or error message. Opening the program again resulted in a similar outcome.

By this time, it had gotten pretty late, so I attributed this to Chrome's beta status, turned off the computer, and went to sleep.The next day I got home from work and fired up the computer again. I browsed around the web a little, got up to go eat dinner with my girlfriend, and later came back to the computer to play some games. I noticed that FireFox (my default browser) had opened a window in the background - an ad for some idiotic anti-virus program. I assumed I had overlooked it from using FireFox earlier in the evening, and closed it. A minute later it was back, and this time I was sure that I hadn't initiated it's arrival.

My troubles with Chrome the night before came back to me, and instantly, I suspected something might be wrong.A quick look through the computer's running processes yielded nothing. Everything that was supposed to be running was. I checked the startup folder in the Start Menu; still nothing.

Finally, I opened up msconfig to check and see if anything had been added to my list of boot items. Sure enough, there were four oddly named dll's there that I did not recognize. I unchecked their boxes so they wouldn't be run when my computer started, and immediately went hunting for information on the problem.

I found out that my computer was infected with a few pieces of malware, all of the same origin, and all of which had a nasty habit of renaming themselves and latching onto legitimate processes to run. I wasn't entirely sure if their only function was to show me anti-virus ads however, so I figured the best course of action would be to remove the infection and then re-install Windows, just to be safe.

I tried to start up AdAware, but after waiting a few seconds, a cryptic error message appeared on the screen about a server error, and the program refused to load. So, I looked up NOD32, an anti-virus program which I've heard about on "The Tech Guy" radio show, installed it, and ran it. 10 minutes later, after I'd watched the program cycle through all the known areas of the infection, the program reported that it had found nothing. Lame.

A quick Google search returned a few more promising pieces of software; upon further investigation, I decided to try out a program called Anti-Malware by Malware Bytes. This program zipped through my drive and found about 14 infected files and registry entries. I quarantined and deleted all of these, restarted, and ran the program again. The second search turned up nothing. I checked msconfig and my processes list for similar results. I made a mental note that I should purchase the full version of Anti-Malware when this was all over with, as a token of my thanks.

With that, the pre-re-install process began: check, backup, delete, and restore. I checked the software on my computer to make sure I had all the install files I needed and read up on how to properly save my email and saved games. I copied everything from my main hard drive to the (much larger) second hard drive. I uninstalled everything that pointed to files on the second drive, and then rebooted with my trusty Windows XP disc in the tray.

About 30 minutes later I found myself staring blankly at the rolling green hills of the default Windows XP wallpaper. I turned off the machine and went to sleep.

Now it's time for me to get all my programs, games, and files back in their rightful places – just what I wanted to do this weekend.

Thanks malware. Thanks a lot.

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WordPress 2.7 Looming

 Martin · 15 years

With the upcoming release of WordPress 2.7, I'm considering redesigning the look of this blog - especially if the current theme fails to be compatible.

The official release of 2.7 will be in 5 days (on December 10th), but I'll probably change over to Release Candidate 1 before that, at which point I will disable themes and plug-ins so as to determine which will work and which will not without affecting the uptime of the site too much. So if Marty Blog goes "vanilla" and reverts back to the default WordPress theme for a while in the coming days, don't worry - it's just Marty tinkerin' with the new WordPress.

It's funny how these sorts of things grow on you - a few years ago I had neither the time nor the interest in maintaining a blog. When I finally came around and felt it might be an interesting endeavor, I entered into it a bit timidly, and spent lots of time trying to figure out which software would be the most versatile, and the easiest to use. WordPress had a nice, clean look to it, and looking over the feature list and stumbling upon many sites that used it helped push me over the edge to try it out.

It turned out that my investigating paid off - and I've been enjoying WordPress for over a year now. The number of updates and the quality of the plug-ins available has always impressed me, and I hope that I can say the same moving forward into the big changes with version 2.7 over the coming weeks.

If you're interested in blogging, I recommend giving WordPress a shot. You'll probably like it!

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New Xbox Experience Brief

 Martin · 15 years

Before hopping into my car and heading off to work this morning, I powered up my Xbox to chance a brief encounter with the New Xbox Experience, a brand new dashboard for the three-year-old console. Based on my short time with it, my only complaint is that I wish I had gotten up earlier this morning. Well, that and I wish I had a bigger hard drive on my Xbox.

Updating to the new dashboard was easy and much faster than I thought it would be. Upon booting up, my console showed me the normal update blade informing me that I a system update was available, and that I had to install it in order to continue using Xbox Live. I accepted, the download took only a few seconds, and the Xbox restarted.

When the power came back on, a new update screen awaited, this time telling me that the NXE was downloading, and giving me the option to cancel the update (which I was relieved to see, because at this point, I still wasn't sure if I'd have time to check it out before leaving for work). The progress bar began moving, and the onscreen text changed to reflect this - 5 minutes remaining.

I was quite surprised at this. Not only did I expect the update to be quite large and subsequently take 10-20 minutes to download, but I also assumed the Xbox Live network might be bogged down by all the traffic. Not so. Not at six in the morning, anyway. I hear the Xbox Live Marketplace is having trouble today, however.

I ducked into the bathroom and did my usual morning grooming, and returned with only 2 minutes left for the download. I watched the progress tick by. When the NXE was finished, I was treated to a neat intro video featuring the familiar Xbox 360 sphere taking different forms, flying around all sorts of games and media, and finally coming to rest in the corner of the screen where it resides in the new dashboard. I wasn't able to hear any of this unfortunately, since I didn't want to wake up my girlfriend, but I can say that the visuals were neat.

Once the video was over, the NXE prompted me to select a profile, and then to create an avatar for it. A selection of random avatars rushed onto the screen, and I was given the option to use one as a base for my own or to usher in a new group. I randomized the group a few times, found one that looked like a good place to start, and began crafting my virtual Xbox self (pictured above).

The avatar editor is easy to use, loads everything relatively fast, and was quick and responsive. I fiddled around with it for a few minutes, leaving a lot to check out later today when I have more time to play with it. My avatar actually looks kind of like me, but only when you see him from an angle, since he's got a pony tail.

I spent the remainder of my time buzzing through the menus just looking at stuff - which was quite confusing. It's probably going to take me a while to get used to the new menu hierarchy, but the system seems so much more responsive now, especially in the guide, I think I'll manage with that just fine.

As I mentioned above, the only thing I really feel like I need to do now is pick up a larger hard drive. The 20gb hard drive that came with the system has served me well, but with the new NXE option to install games, I'd like a little more space than what I have now. I can't see myself installing every game I own, but newer/frequently played games wouldn't hurt.

Aside from that minor gripe however, the NXE is looking to be a great improvement over the blades of old, and I'll be using it and writing about it more soon. Thanks for reading, and hopefully your Xbox update is as enjoyable as mine was, however brief it might be.

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The Software Ninja Returns

 Martin · 15 years

As you probably heard, Apple recently announced a new version of iTunes, iTunes 8. The new version adds a feature called "Genius," which is sort of a Pandora's Box/Last.fm rip-off that recommends more iTunes purchases based on your past iTunes purchases. The new update also serves to further bloat the iTunes + QuickTime package, to the tune of about 4mb, though I'll admit I don't quite remember how big prior iTunes + QuickTime downloads have been. 75mb seems excessive for a music player and a media format I care nothing about, though.

Oh, and don't forget about the pre-checked Safari in the "New Software" box. Nice try (again) Apple.

But wait, there's more! After my install, Apple Software Update re-checked for updates, and now it wants to add further garbage to my computer:

MobileMe Control Panel? What?

I don't own an iPhone or an iPod Touch. Why would I want (or need) a MobileMe control panel on my computer?

This is even further baffling because after the last iTunes update, I had MobileMe Control Panel installed in my Windows Control Panel, and I had not been informed or let alone, agreed to, any sort of MobileMe software installation. Now it has been covertly removed from my computer, and then added to the Apple Software Update utility.

Maybe other people share my feelings and don't like Apple sneaking their software onto my computer? Is Apple trying to assimilate my computer by adding small bits of it's software here and there, until one day I turn on my computer and I find I'm running Mac OS?

Either way, Apple is quickly overstaying its welcome on my computer, and I don't appreciate it. The next time I find random Apple software floating running in and out of my computer all willy-nilly, I'm uninstalling iTunes and using WinAmp.

Oh, and when I closed Apple Software Update, I we met with this gem:

Icing on the cake.

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The Trojan Browser

 Martin · 15 years

I've mentioned this in a few other places around the internet, but up until tonight, I've gone mostly unaffected by it. I made every attempt to avoid it, and it was all in vain. Tonight, I was attacked by the Trojan browser, and I am angry about it.

It all started with a simple software update I've been putting off. About a week ago, iTunes complained about updating - but since I don't use it all that often, and I don't have or want an iPhone, I had no reason to update. I also hate it when Quicktime installs with iTunes, and I have to go into the settings and disable the tray icon. So, I ignored the update, and the reminder didn't come back up for me until this afternoon.

I was in the middle of some gameage when it popped up, so I continued to play, ALT+TAB-ing back to Windows when I needed to. iTunes loaded, and told me I needed an upgrade. I clicked Okay, signalling my willingness to download said upgrade, and got back to my game. A second later, the Apple Software Update utility pops up, does a quick check, and informs me that it needs to be upgraded before my iTunes upgrade can go through. I probably should have just stopped here.

Instead of stopping though, I allowed the program to update, and after it got done, it told me I needed to restart my computer. I usually ignore these messages, because half the time they are complete lies, and continued on to check for updates to the software on my computer with it. It returned with two items on the software update list, Safari and iTunes/Quicktime. Oddly, both were defaulted to being checked for update. The problem? I don't have Safari installed on my computer, and I don't want it installed on my computer. But there it was, bold as brass, and ready to try to install itself on my computer.

I unchecked the box next to Safari and went ahead with the upgrade. 10 minutes later the package had finished downloading and began installing, and I was taken out of my game again for a warning from the Apple Software Update utility: the upgrade experienced some errors and could not continue. It needed to be performed again. I set it to do the upgrade dance again, got back to my game. A few minutes later, the same warning sound played, and I jumped back into windows. Sure enough, the same error message had appeared above the Apple Software Update utility. I took a brief moment to look at the program window more thoroughly; there didn't seem to be any way to find out more about what was causing this error. Typical Apple.

I told the update program to try again, went back to my game again, and got the same error again. Frustrated, I closed the Apple Software Update utility, re-opened it, and tried again. I made sure to uncheck the Safari install again. The program went about on its fourth attempt at downloading the update, and I got back to my gaming.

10 muntes later, some frantic hard drive activity cued to me that the upgrade had actually worked this time, and I ALT+TAB-ed back to Windows just to make sure. Everything appeared fine, iTunes was updating. Back to gaming for me.

An hour later I stopped playing games and finally closed out to inspect my newly upgraded iTunes installation, and clean up the usual mess that an Apple software upgrade makes on my machine. Imagine my surprise when I not only found three unwelcome icons on my desktop, but when one of them was a shiny little compass icon...

The Safari icon.

I know I unchecked it. I did it every time I attempted to install the iTunes upgrade. And yet there it was, laying right there on my desktop, taunting me in all its smug insolence.

I popped open the Control Panel and as quickly as possible, uninstalled that piece of crap.

Seriously - this is bullshit. A software updater should not sneak in an unwanted browser masquerading as a software upgrade. You should not have to "opt-out" of the Safari browser by unchecking the box for it. If the only Apple software I have installed on my computer is iTunes and Quicktime, then those are the only programs that should even have the possibility of appearing in the Apple Software Updater's list.

This is a sneaky, deceitful practice on Apple's behalf. It's a cheap way to try to shore up market share for an unnecessary piece of software, and it insults my intelligence that Apple would assume that I am too stupid to look over a list of software before installing it on my computer.

I've sung praise for Apple before, most notably for their excellent handling of a bad PR move involving South Park and iTunes, but this makes me regret that. It's pathetic to me that Apple acts so smug about how great their products are, all while trying to sneak some of them onto your computer through a Trojan Horse of their very own design. If your stuff is so great, you shouldn't need to silently drop it into a software update and hope nobody notices.

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Update: TrueSpace 7.6 Now Available for Free!

 Martin · 15 years

I checked my email this morning and found a nice little nugget of goodness deep within: a message from Caligari informing me that the newest version of TrueSpace has now been made available for free!

You can use this link to register at Caligari.com, after which you'll be able to download the program, the manual, and some quick start videos. Make sure you've got your downloadin' gloves on; in total you'll be grabbing about 313Mb of stuff.

There are a good collection of free video courses available here as well.

I've not even used version 7.6 yet, but from what I have read so far, it seems to be a huge upgrade from 5, which is what I currently use for everything.

I finally had a chance to play around with version 7.6 this morning, and though it is very different from 5, it's also much more powerful. The editor features a realtime rendering engine that can do shadows, reflections, and a lot of other neat effects as you work in the editor... which opens up some great opportunities for fine tuning scenes to look just right before doing a final rendering. I've not been able to get the included offline rendering engine to load up in TS7 yet, but when I get home from work later today I'll play around with it some more and see if I can get it to work.

You'll probably need a pretty decent computer to run everything in real-time, but I've been running the program on the laptop we have here at work, and it seems to run reasonably on that, so most near-modern desktops should be fine.

All in all, this is very exciting for fans of TrueSpace, newcomers looking for a powerful, free 3D package, or anyone who's just yearning for a new design experience. If I wore hats, my hat would be off to Caligari for making such a wonderful tool, and then making it free. Hopefully this is the start of something big (and good) for the company.

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