I was pretty excited about upgrading to iTunes 9.  My main reasons to be excited were the updated iTunes Store and the management of the iPod Touch/iPhone pages.  Truth is that I wasn’t really expecting much from iTunes 9.  It wasn’t until I watched Steve Jobs’ keynote about the release that I learned about things like Home Sharing and Genius Mixes.  That’s when I got really excited.

Here’s the good news, especially for me: the Store and the iPod page management are all they were hyped up to be.  The Store has received a facelift that makes sense, like the toolbar at the top of the page, and things like the Top Song lists got major UI improvements.  It is such an advantage to be able to preview songs right in the list and to see all 200.  I also like the ability to add to a wishlist, post to Twitter, or gift the song again, right in the list.  Page management is as simple as it should be.  No real surprise it was just missing for a long time.  I’d still like to be able to password-protect pages so that I could keep some apps away from my kids.

The bad news is that the other two features I looked forward to have some bugs to work out.  I’ll start with Home Sharing.  It sounds like an awesome idea for anyone with more than one computer in the house.  You’re tired of having to transfer tunes from one machine to another and then having to reauthorize.  Well, Home Sharing purports to allow anyone using the same iTunes account, on the same network, to simply access the others library.  And it sort of works.  My first attempt went off without a hitch.  I enabled HS on both machines and the libraries showed up.  I could play tunes and even copy them into the other’s library (this costs you an authorized machine but I’m assuming everyone here has less than 5 machines in the house).  The second time I tried it the Home Sharing section in iTunes was completely absent.  I noticed that the other machine was asleep so I woke it up but the link didn’t reappear.  I disabled and reenabled HS on both machines and the link reappeared.  But seconds later it disappeared again.  It hasn’t worked right since.  Boo.

Genius Mixes on the other hand is an extension of the Genius Playlists which I’ve been touting since their arrival.  The Genius Playlist is, well, genius.  You’re playing a song and you’re really into the vibe so you hit the Genius icon.  Instantly a list of 25 ‘like’ songs appear in a playlist with the current song at the top.  I’ve found that these playlists are 99% right on.  I’m never disappointed with the playlist.  Genius Mixes, on the other hand, are 12 ‘endless’ playlists of supposed like artists and songs.  In theory it would work the same as the Genius Playlists.  On the surface it does, but I wasn’t 4 tracks into my mixes when really disjointed tracks started appearing.  About 10 tracks in it was clear that the mix wasn’t contained at all to like tracks.  I’ve tried it several times and been disappointed every time.  (And yes, I have updated my genius database several times since upgrading.)

So there you have it, the things I was looking forward to initially have been done well.  The things I was surprised by but looking forward to need a lot of work.  That’s too bad because normally things don’t come out of Apple until they’re really working well.  And for the Mac-lovers out there who will blame my PC, I tried this on my Macbook too – same result.  I still love iTunes, regardless of the bloat and bugs.

So I was poking around on my MacBook and noticed that there was a chess game (aptly named “Chess”).  I decided to give it a go even though I last played chess in, oh, probably elementary school.  After a few humiliating games I tried to get semi-serious and actually put some thought into my moves.  I was just starting to think that I’d gained the upper hand when the Mac cheated!  I thought it was a fluke so I “undid” my move and tried it again but the darn thing cheated again!  It’s hard to really show it without video but I promise you, it happened.  Below are my screenshots to prove it:

Before moving my pawn into F4:

After moving my pawn and before the computer’s retaliation:

Now here’s where the computer cheats.  Pawns may only take pieces moving diagonally and here he takes my pawn, sitting in F4, by moving to F3!  Even if it was checkers this jump wouldn’t count for anything.

No more Chess for me.  The game’s hard enough without the computer cheating to beat me.  Good night, Irene.

And yes, it counts towards the World Record attempt.

The Mozilla servers serving the web pages have all crashed but the files themselves are still being served.  I don’t think this is well known…

Firefox 3.0 (EN-US)

Update: Mozilla has fixed their web pages and now all of the links that, earlier today, showed version 2.0 are properly showing version 3.0.  SO GO GET IT!

Yep, it’s true.  It appears that one hand of Microsoft doesn’t know what the other is doing.  I haven’t found a lot of hits on this but apparently both sides of this bug confirm its existence and both claim it’s not their problem.

Symptom:

• Microsoft Excel cannot find the references inside a pivot table that references the same workbook when opened from Internet Explorer

Cause:

• Internet Explorer adds ‘[X]‘ to the end of the file name when storing the file in the IE temp folder, where X represents an incrementing integer based on the number of downloads of the same file, and the square brackets are illegal characters for file names in Windows

Steps to reproduce:

• Browsing with Internet Explorer
• Clicking on a link to an Excel spreadsheet with a pivot table in it that references itself
• Clicking on "Open" rather than "Save"

The only solution I could think of was to write a VBA macro to rename the file and reattach all of the pivot tables.  I hope this saves someone else some trouble in the future.  When you think of me, think of me fondly…

( You’ll have to add a reference to Microsoft VBScript Regular Expressions 5.5 or better. )

 Sub Auto_Open()
    
    Dim sFilename As String   ' the corrected filename
    Dim oASheet As Worksheet  ' the worksheet object
    Dim oPT As PivotTable     ' the pivot table object
    Dim sTempSource As String ' the pivot table temporary source variable
    Dim sNewRange As String   ' the new pivot table source variable
    Dim reg As New RegExp     ' a regular expression for matching wildcards
    Dim i As Integer          ' looping integer
    Dim j As Integer          ' looping integer
    
    ' Set a regex to test whether this is a temp spreadsheet from IE.
    ' Only a temp spreadsheet from IE will have square brackets in the filename.
    reg.Pattern = "[[\]]"
    
    If reg.Test(ActiveWorkbook.FullName) Then
        ' the temp filename has square brackets in it
        
        ' just a little message telling the user what's going on
        MsgBox "Renaming temp file and reattaching pivot tables..."
        
        ' The .Name property already has the brackets stripped out of it so
        ' we can build the new path using it and the .Path property.
        sFilename = ActiveWorkbook.Path & "\" & ActiveWorkbook.Name
        
        ' Now we save the file so that the assignment of source data to the
        ' pivot tables won't fail.
        ActiveWorkbook.SaveAs Filename:=sFilename
            
        ' The range for the pivot table requires a square bracket
        ' just before the file name so we rebuild the path, less the drive letter.
        sNewRange = Replace(ActiveWorkbook.Path, "C:", "") & "\[" & ActiveWorkbook.Name & "]"
        
        ' now set the regex for the tail end of the spreadsheet, including the trailing "]"
        reg.IgnoreCase = True
        reg.Pattern = ".*\.xls\]"
        
        ' now loop through all of the sheets looking for pivot tables
        For j = 1 To ActiveWorkbook.Worksheets.Count
            Set oASheet = ActiveWorkbook.Worksheets(j)
        
            ' now loop through any pivot tables on the worksheet
            For i = 1 To oASheet.PivotTables.Count
                Set oPT = oASheet.PivotTables(i)
            
                sTempSource = oPT.SourceData
                
                ' go ahead and replace the invalid path with the new path
                sTempSource = "'" & reg.Replace(sTempSource, sNewRange)
            
                'oPT.PivotTableWizard SourceType:=xlDatabase, SourceData:=sTempSource
                
                ' assign the new path to the sourcedata property
                oPT.SourceData = sTempSource
                
                ' release the object
                Set oPT = Nothing
            Next i
            
            ' release the object
            Set oASheet = Nothing
        Next j
        
        ' Save the workbook, just to be thorough.
        ' Without saving a user would be able to close the workbook without saving
        ' and then open the workbook from the
        ' recent documents list and have broken pivot tables.
        ActiveWorkbook.Save
    Else
        ' Not a spreadsheet with square brackets in the filename
        'MsgBox "No renaming required"
    End If

End Sub

Has your company’s IT department locked you out of surfing the web? There may be hope for you yet.

• Open up the Windows Calculator
• Click Help –> Help Topics
• In the Contents pane on the left side of the window, right click, then select Jump to URL.
• Enter the site you wish to peruse (most likely Sears.ca ), then click OK, and away you go.