Webmongering on the Mac

Happier with my Mac today - I have got Apache, PHP, MySQL and PHPMySQLAdmin all working, so my web development environment I used on my old Linux laptop is now restablished on this Macbook :-)

World of Waitcraft

I spent about 8 hours downloading the 10 day trial version of World of Warcraft yesterday, leaving it running overnight. I come home from work tonight looking forward to giving it a try, but on starting it up, it tells me it needs another 871Mb (5 hours) worth of patch downloads. So I guess thats another day lost of my 10 day trial. By the time it has everything it needs to let me play the game, my trial period will be over! Do they want people to play this thing or what?

Telly on the computer

Having rebuilt my machine back to its original XP Media Center Edition 2005, I've been playing with the TV tuner (a WinTV Nova-T DVB-T USB stick). I kept getting the error the video decoder has either malfunctioned or is not installed, but after some Googling, I found the answer was to install a MPEG2 decoder such as this GPL-licensed one available at http://www.deskshare.com/download/mpeg2decoder.exe.

Got my indoor aerial plugged in (strangely, we don't have an outdoor aerial), and it seems to be working. Now its time to work out how to record Primeval tonight!

Worst default setting. Ever.

iTunes has just wiped out over 3 years of collected music on my iPod. By default it attempts to sync the iTunes database on the computer with that on the iPod. I just installed an iTunes update today (cos it was listed in the Software Updates on my MacBook) and it reverted the setting that I had previously changed, telling it *not* to do this.

A lot of this music I'll not be able to replace. Very disappointed with Apple's choice of default setting.