If like me you have been experiencing issues with the new iTunes 8.1 Windows release then this might help you out.

For me at least iTunes crashes during the transmission of Genious data to Apple, stopping this process with the “X” that appears in the notification area resulted in an immediate crash, if it was left it would simply crash a few minutes later.

If you really can’t wait for Apple to fix this issue and aren’t really bothered about using Genious then the most obvious solution would be to turn off the Genious feature until a fix is released, unfortunatly for me the Store > Turn Off Genious option was unavailiable so here is how I managed to get round it:

1. Go to your iTunes folder (mine was in C:/Users/Myles/Music/iTunes but yours may be somewhere else)
2. Find “iTunes Library Genius.itdb” and rename it to something like iTunes Library Genius.itdb.old (Make sure you can see file extenstion – if not untick the “Hide extensions for known file types” option in the Folder and Search Options Menu)
3. Start iTunes
4. iTunes will still try to generate Genious Data but after renaming the file you should be able to stop the process by clicking on the “x” in the notification area at the top without it resulting in an immediate crash.
5. Then Select Store > Turn Off Genious from the menu at the top

For some reason that seemed to sort the problem for me, or atleast long enough for me to disable the Genious Feature, it may not work for anyone else, but its worth a shot – iTunes has been running for about 10 minutes so far and no crash as of yet.

Hope this works for you!

EDIT: Didn’t realise this fix had already been suggested on the Apple Support Forums, you can follow the discussion at: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1938223&tstart=0

The advantage of using three machines at once is that you achieve 300% more productivity than you do with a single machine with a single monitor…or at least that was my excuse.

Remote Desktop has its uses but nothing beats 3 screens to make yourself look busy

So yesterday I got given a corrupt SD card to recover. It was from Kim’s new camera which arrived a few days ago, she bought a 1GB card from the London Camera Exchange before we went to take some photos the same day. While we were out the SD card died and the camera wouldn’t read it.

So I took it home to my underground laboratory and started the pain staking procedure of recovering the data from the card.

After analysing the card it turns out that the card didn’t have a file system structure, something must have corrupted it, I tried Ontrack EasyRecovery Professional but it only found 5 of the photos and could only find 7MB of unpartitioned space on the card. So I pulled out PhotoRec and scanned it. If you need to get photos off of a camera memory card PhotoRec is the app to do it, it works like a treat and has earned a place in my arsenal of applications.

It took about 30 minutes to scan the card fully, all 115 photos that Kim took were recovered, but here’s where the weirdness starts, along with the 115 photos I expected to be recovered there were also 50 or so photos of people I’ve never seen before at Goodrington and other locations…

The sealed SD card bought from the London Camera Exchange contained OTHER PEOPLES photos and videos!

Obviously they had been wiped from it previously, but even though it had been formatted, a low level scan of the data revealed photos in the sectors that hadn’t been overwritten. Below is one of the photos I found on there…It looks like someones holiday snaps.

One of the photos on the SD card

Looking at the EXIF data they were taken between April and May 2007 on a Nikon Coolpix S6 Camera, I have no idea why they were on the card and I have no idea why the London Camera Exchange sold a card that was sealed and apparently ‘new’ but obviously wasn’t.

It just goes to show what these companies get up to, recycling what is probably a useless card that had been returned into something they can sell again.

The technology industry doesn’t do too well when thinking about standards, many people have got together and tried to sort the problems out, the World Wide Web Consortium is one of those groups. Don’t get me wrong, they’re doing great work, but the time it takes them to ratify the standards and then the time it takes for the standards to get implemented into browsers is just way too long.

In the photography industry there is almost the same problem, for those of you who don’t know, for the past few years camera manufacturers have created their own proprietary RAW formats, RAW is much better than conventional JPEG images because it takes the data directly from the cameras sensor and allows you to manipulate the exact image the camera saw, JPEG on the other hand compresses the image which in turn loses quality and also doesn’t allow you the same granular control.

Canon have their CR2 format, Nikon has their NEF format and Adobe has their DNG format, each company supports their own format with the exception of Adobe who provide the Camera RAW plug-in for Photoshop to convert RAW images to other formats.

A few weeks ago Canon released plans to research the feasibility of changing their current format (CR2) and move towards another proprietary format, so far they assure people that it’s only an idea, but it will be inevitable that they change it at some point.

As much as I like progress and welcome new features and better quality images, is there really a need to change the format yet again, beyond of course annoying customers and rendering all current cameras outdated? Some of my previous posts have touched on the topic of organising my many photos and making sure they are accessible in years to come, this throws even more turmoil into a problem that already has enough.

I already have to contend with some photos in JPEG format, some in CR2 format and then, if I want to make my images a bit more future proof I’m going to have to convert all my CR2 images into DNG images. Why do camera manufacturers make it hard for people to future proof their photos, in 10 years time none of these formats will be supported and people who haven’t spent hours of their lives converting their entire collection won’t be able to enjoy looking back at the memories – which is after all what we’re taking them for. Most of the problems have been occurring with RAW formats, however JPEG’s could be a thing of the past as well. Microsoft HD Photo format is the JPEG killer that Microsoft has submitted to become the standard image format used in digital cameras, although reading the press release it also allows data to be stored directly from the cameras sensor, which means that it’s also a contender in the RAW format war. On the face of it I like it – the retention of dynamic range data is a definite plus, and let’s face it, any better quality alternative to JPEG is always a good thing, but I can sense this being yet another nightmare to deal with, what do I do with the old JPEG’s that I have, do I convert them? Leave them as they are? And why can’t all these different formats be combined to give consumers a super format that will last?

In my opinion there needs to be some path for people to follow, applications to covert and manage all these different formats won’t be supported forever either, so if you’re going to rely on something like Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (which is an awesome app) then you’re going to have a very bad headache in years to come when the product may not exist anymore.

I think Adobe have got a good position, each format may have its own killer set of features, but it may as well be a piece of paper if there isn’t going to be the software to deal with it in a decade, Adobe’s DNG I hope does exactly what it says on the tin…Allow Digital Photographers to create archival versions of their images that aren’t going to be replaced by something new.

I’ve been using the Beta of Windows Live Messenger for a few days now, and I have to say I’m pretty impressed with the quality of the build. Earlier beta versions (from the WLM8 beta) were overly buggy and didn’t play too well on Vista. Among the problems were sign-in issues, missing contacts, undelivered messages and spectacular crashes. This time however they’ve released a much more stable beta, so far I have had no problems with it (and the problem I thought I had was in fact the Messenger Network not WLM 8.5 beta). I won’t give a list of what’s new, the Team’s Blog does a very good job of explaining the improvements so I’ll just let you have a look for yourself (if you don’t know them already).

The UI update is nice, personally I think it fits in more with the rest of the live products, I’m glad to see the team change the close and minimise buttons to a more vista-like design rather than having the small white ones in WLM 8.1. The performance is just like an RTM build, and the improvements to the conversation windows are nice too.

I’m not the only one who thinks that this beta is a significant improvement, Brandon LeBlanc’s response to my comment says it all:

I am glad you like the beta. My personal thoughts behind it is in sync with yours. 8.5 is very stable especially on Windows Vista and has some fantastic performance improvements. 8.5 *feels* right.

The only problem I’ve found so far with it is a white bar appears when you close the main or conversation windows, not sure if it’s a bug or a result of hiding the menu bar, but I’ve filled a bug report anyway.

I’d like to say congratulations to the Messenger Team for releasing such a stable beta, and I am looking forward to using the RTM build.

A few days ago Microsoft released an update to maps.live.com adding New York to their Virtual Earth service. Whilst looking around I had a brain wave (as I’m famous for doing), I decided to look through my archives and grab a photo that I took at the top of the Rockefeller Centre of the New York skyline (the same that happens to be at the top of this blog) and try and match the location in Virtual Earth to see what the differences are.

View from the Rockefeller Center, New York City

View from the Rockefeller Center in Virtual Earth

I got the view as close as I could, and I’m pleased to say that it’s a pretty close match, the Met Life building is almost in exactly the same position.

It got me thinking about a cool mash up that could be made, I’ve seen geotagging and applications like Mappr but something that would take it to the next level would be an application that utilises the Virtual Earth API and allows you to create a virtual tour around a city while looking at photos you’ve taken long the way. I guess it’s a bit like the Microsoft Live Labs Photosynth app that was previewed a while back, but with more of an emphasis on photos that you have taken.

Scenario: You’ve just been on holiday, say New York for example. When you get back and show them to friends and family you load up your favourite app and show them the boiler plate slideshow.

My Idea: You get back, load up the virtual tour app that shows you the Virtual Earth representation of New York, then you go around every location that you want to show photos of, mark them and create a ‘virtual tour’ while tagging what photos should be shown at each point. This not only gives you a more interesting thing to show people but it also allows them to visualise where exactly you visited.

If I could I would try to build a prototype, maybe one day I’ll learn how.