Napster Media Center Plugin on Vista

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Since upgrading from xp windows media center to vista home premium I have been unable to get Napster to work using its media center plugin the one that allows you to download and listen to music through the media center with the tv remote.  The normal napster application works fine but not the plugin.  It was provided free with windows xp media center edition but it doesnt appear to be there in vista meda center.

Looking on the internet it looks like this is the case that microsoft are not providing it free with media center probably because they have their own music download site now.

So thought I would ring Napster to see what thay had to say about it, hoping they were going tell me not to worry as they would be releasing it soon.  I hoped this because I believe it was rather good and used it rather a lot.

Ringing Napster you are prompted with an automated message about which OS do you run press 1 for XP press 2 for Vista etc etc.  So pressed the appropriate number for vista and the phone got answered by a nice chap with an american accent guess he was in america – lol.  I explain my predicament and he is unsure what I am on about as he has no experience of XP media center, when I pressed him about a similar version for Vista he admitted to me that he hadnt even seen vista now what the hell is he doing on the end of a line where you have to press buttons to appropriate support staff when they havent even seen the basics like operating system. 

Ah well, I immediately cancelled my subscription.  If any one has any news about the media center plugin for vista I would be grateful not to mention restarting my subscription to Napster as I really did like it.

Trouble with that Pesky Mouse

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Not This Mouse

Vista, A Microsoft Wireless Mouse And Intellipoint

Ok since I installed Vista Ultimate about 2 months ago my microsoft wireless optical mouse 2 and keyboard has behaved strangely.  I run dual screens and when clicking from one screen to the other it would sometimes have to be a four or five times double click before it recongised that I wanted to change focus.

After much trawling and swearing found this knowlegebase article – 321122 from microsoft.

After I did the above it seemed to cure the majority of my problems although I must say its still a little twitchy sometimes but mostly it is fixed. 

Visual Studio 2005, Pushok and CVS on Vista / Linux

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Ok I previously blogged how to get visual studio 2003 talking to cvs using putty and pushok.  This is an update to that, which can be found previous to this entry.

Pre-cursor to this is that you have putty working with your linux / unix machine and that you can open a session using ssh without using a password.

I downloaded the version 1.3 of the cvsscc from pushok, I believe thats the one for unix as they have split their programs from unix and windows cvs since I last bought software from them.

I then opened visual studio 2005 and clicked open from source control which presents you with a cvsroot options dialog in the cvsroot just type :ext:paulfarrow@cvs_server:/500gb1/cvsdata now ext depicts the protocol and the pushok program knows to use putty which you should already have set up and running in the tray with your certificates etc (not covered in this blog entry) and then the userid @ the putty saved session, you can see mine is called cvs_server and then the path for the root here mine is /500gb1/cvsdata.

then once you have put that in click check and it should authenticate against the linux server.  You should then be able to clicke elipse next ot cvs module and it will give you a list of directories / modules in your cvs server.

Glad I got that going took me a little while, my next quest is to upgrade to svn and try the pushok plugin for that, will keep you all informed on how it goes.

ah forgot to mention one thing you need an environment variable to point to plink.exe which comes with putty that is CVS_RSH just set that to where plink resides in my case thats CVS_RSH=c:\ssh\plink.exe then pushok knows to use that for the ext protocol.

Mini Adventure to Berlin – May 2007

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Well it all started about two months ago, when my mate Chris reckoned to go to Berlin for a weekend.  As soon as he said that I thought “YES” but instead of flying I would suggest driving, I thought it would be a blast and due to my last excursion in Brittany France was well up for it.

We left on Thursday 24th May 2007 and caught the tunnel train at around 10pm.  Just as we got on the train a couple of lads from Epsom parked behind us with their Aston Martin DB9 now me being me and Ken being Ken !! thought we would chat to them and get a sit in the DB9.  But before I could say anything Ken was demonstrating how to use their TomTom.  They were on their way to Marbella for the week and were unsure how many miles it was.

Ken giving a lesson on how to use TomTomsneeked a sit in the DB9
And while Ken explained how to program in the complete opposite of how to get to Marbella I sneaked a ride in the DB9.
Ready To GoOn Our Way

It was soon time to get back in the cars ready to get out on the french roads, Ken had a bit of business to attend to in the back of the mini and was heard ranting Buy, Sell etc etc ….

Then once off the train trundled along to the formula one hotel in Calais to stay the night so we would be refreshed for the journey to Berlin in the morning. Once near to the hotel ran into (not literally) the DB9 going around and around, Ken had obviously done the business on the TomTom ho ho … !!! Dumped our stuff and got off to the only place left open in Calais, a disco. Which in the end was actually quite good and we got a few beers in before heading back to the hotel about 3am.

While driving into the locked hotel complex via a coded gate a van decides to follow us in.  Its a bloke driving and he appears to pick a lady up and then realises he cant get out of the gated complex.  He then jumps out and starts banging on the door, its at this point that Ken and Chris decide to wind him up as they knew they were safe on the inside of the locked door.  Eventually after much banging from this guy Chris goes and lets him out.

We finally get to sleep about 3.30 / 4 am after Chris and Ken have sampled the delights of the vending machine.  We all go to sleep, Chris and Ken sharing a double bed – oooolala.  Then next I remember is that I was woken around 6am by a couple of growling tigers, was very frightened until I realised it was just Ken and Chris snoring their heads off.

To be Continued….

Quick Plug For FEL Communications and Nick Roast

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Right was after some 3.5 mm socket savers for my media center and found FEL Communications in Sunbury.   Think they are about the only people that do them as couldnt find anything like it else where on the net.  Very nice chap and collected them personally from his house which incidently was down the same road my friend from Brooklands Technical College used to live – Adrian Turner.

Right so the website is http://www.felmicamps.co.uk.

Thanks again Nick

Accessing Vista with smbclient

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Just bought a new machine and decided to put VISTA on it.  Now biggest problem was accessing the shares via smbclient or Samba.  Hunted high and low on the net couldnt find anything not specific for VISTA and smbclient.

I then looked for windows xp and smbclient and found a post about changing a registry entry.  Up to this point I had tried everything everyone else was saying like enable file sharing, private sharing etc and couldnt get any of that too work at all.

Probably works via another vista machine but not from linux or my apple.

I upgraded samba to the latest version before doing this.  I then added a registry entry in \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

called LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy which a hexadecimal value of 1 and bobs your uncle you should be able to access shares and admin shares such as C$ on the vista machine from smbclient or mounting it in the fstab.

Hope that helped you, it helped me no end as I was getting very frustrated about it.  And samba is key to my machines here.

 

Scruffy Died

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Well for all those fans of Scruffy, unfortunately he died back in February.  He was breathing deeply one day and turned out he had a tumor in his lungs so had to have him put down.  Very sad day indeed as he was my mate.

Here is a nice picture to remember him by…

Upgraded to Subtext 1.9

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Right havent blogged for ages as was getting loads of spam under the old .text blogging software.

But just upgraded to SubText and looks very good, I think the guys on this project have done extremely well.

Was a fairly easy upgrade from .text only problem I did have was primary key violations on the conversion scripts. After lots of digging and scratching heads just re-ran the script and it worked which I am not sure why, only thing I can think is someone else was creating blogs while I was trying to do the conversion.

But no love it, used water theme and added my disclaimer at the bottom.