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Apple iTMS TV show quality review

This is an old review I wrote and never posted, but it’s still relevant today. My conclusion is up to date for 2011.

Having just purchased and watched seasons 1 and 2 of The Tudors from iTunes (I missed them on Showtime), I was searching the net for other peoples thoughts on the quality of these TV shows. One review I came across was from AllForces.com, concering iTunes quality vs Bit Torrent. Since their blog post in 2005, Apple seems to have upped the standard of their TV show offerings.

I’m be the first to admit that I’m an Apple fan, with my Mac laptop the primary downloader of these TV Shows, syncing to my iPhone and also viewing the shows via front row on my Mac Mini. It’s the viewing of these on the Mac Mini I will review.

The tale of BizTalk & BPMS

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything, so here goes. I’m currently working for a client who wants BizTalk installed as an ESB. They don’t know why they want it, they just know that they want it. Since they are a Microsoft shop it’s an assumption on their behalf, but a good one in this case. They are dealing with external agencies who will submit data on a daily basis to be consumed within the organisation.

How to try Linux

Download and try the following OS, and give it a go. I’m actually using Ubuntu to host this website and a number of other clients sites, although I’m using the 10.04 LTS edition. LTS editions have longer lifecycles, which saves you having to rebuild your server so often – and patches are supplied for the life of the edition. Ubuntu Linux v10.10 Ubuntu is a Linux 2.6 based Operating system, and is, simple and well supported with “Graphical based” installers and tools.

Airport Extreme

What a difference a new router makes. I’ve been using the old Apple Airport extreme, 2nd generation, for about 8 years now. It’s been rock solid, and provided wireless access almost 24×7 for the whole 8 years. Lately, things have been getting flakey. Trying to control my Mac Mini Boxee on the TV was laggy – and remoting to other desktops flaky. So today, I purchased an upgrade. I was looking at the Cisco/Linksys offerings as I use a few at work, but when using a NAS device I would have had to reformat my existing HFS+ drives.

MacBook vs. MacBookPro

Does CPU speed matter for gaming on a Mac Laptop? The difference between, for example, 2.4 Ghz and 2.6 Ghz will be negligible when running the games. What will contribute to the smoothness and quality of the games the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) and to an extent bus speed, CPU cache and RAM. When it comes to RAM, the more the merrier – to avoid the Hard Drive being used to swap applications when your memory is full.

MAMP vhost and WordPress

I’ve setup MAMP to do some local web development on my MacBookPro, and the XDebug plugin is awesome for stepping through PHP code. However, I had a problem with MAMP and a vhost I setup for local development. The wordpress front page and /wp-admin/ worked but any sub pages, etc. failed to load. When trying to access a WordPress page at url http://site.local/music/ The error in the apache logs was:

Whyday comes and goes

If you’re a tech head, and you’ve been around Object Orientated languages – then you’ve surely heard of Ruby. I’ve been around people who are passionate about Ruby, but never caught the bug. What I did do whilst others were programming away, was read about ruby. One day whilst reading I came across the name of an online persona Why the lucky stiff, also known as _why. Whilst _why was/is considered a prolific and influential programmer of Ruby, what was fascinating was his disappearance.