cazmockett.com

Upgrades, gotta love ‘em.

As it turned out, I foolishly accepted the offer of an upgrade to Windows Media Player 11 a couple of days ago. It all looked to have gone smoothly to begin with, and in fact I like the look of it – seems easier to find things and is a much nicer interface, all in all.

So I ripped a couple of CD’s I’d been meaning to put on my PC for a while, then connected my MP3 player. And… nada. Well, the helpful error message said words to the effect that my player was using an old USB driver which was no longer supported, and I should go get a new one. Great! It was getting very late, so I decided not to wrestle with it and left it til the next day.

The player in question is a Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen NX (nice and snappy that, ha), so I hopped over to Creative Europe’s website and downloaded the latest USB driver and installed that. Still the same error message.

A bit of Googling later, and I found that WMP11 has “known issues” with Zen portable devices. It would have been nice to have been told this before I did the upgrade, Microsoft! The suggested bodge fix is to roll back to WMP10, upgrade the firmware on the Jukebox and reinstall WMP11.

OK, I’ll give that a go. Except that, having trawled around Creative’s support site (again) and found the supposedly correct firmware upgrade, I get this lovely little error message when trying to run it:
Brilliant! So I send off an email to Creative’s Support asking just which file I should be using, and sit back to wait for a reply.

Meanwhile, there’s a troubleshooting bit on Creative’s site which suggests another possible bodge fix if the device is seen in Device Manager (it is) but not recognised by WMP10 (it isn’t). I follow the instructions which get me to mess about with the registry! And it still does nada.

Last resort is the section of Microsoft’s Readme for WMP11 which says your player might have problems after rolling back to v10; uninstall the USB device in Device Mangler™, disconnect device and reconnect, forcing Windows to reinstall. Still five parts of you know what.

So now I’ve got the (un)shiny Media Player 10 back on my system but I’m not even back to square one as the Jukebox is still not being recognised.

Thank you Creative Labs, and Microsoft, for wasting at least three hours of my time. And I’m still not done. You need your collective heads banging together. I don’t care who’s problem it is, but it shouldn’t be mine.

As well as problems generating my own RSS feeds, I’ve been banging my head against the Adobe brick wall as far as consuming RSS is concerned.

Dreamweaver8 is my weapon of choice for development (so shoot me), and I tried a few months ago to get the BBC’s Rugby Union RSS feed added to my rugbypix.com page. Adobe have a tutorial which explains a lot. Trouble was, I did everything they said, and on my localhost test environment, I kept getting an error message:

MM_XSLTransform error:
“http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/sportonline_uk_edition/rugby_union/rss.xml” is not a valid XML document.
The underlying connection was closed: Unable to connect to the remote server.

The claim that it wasn’t a valid XML document was obviously rubbish, since the BBC’s feed works in all the feed readers I’ve tried! Googling for the error didn’t produce anything sensible, so I shelved the project and put it on the back burner for a while.

Returning to it this afternoon, I tried uploading the XSL fragment (which does the data repeat for the feed) and the page in which the transformation is called, onto my live server. I got a different message – the MM_XSLTransform.cs file was missing – progress! I knew that on my previous attempts, the only transform I could find available was the MM_XSLTransform.vb file, which was the wrong server model for my site.

Another quick google for the C# transform got me to this page. And, voilà! a link to download the missing MM_XSLTransform.cs. Bung it in the includes/MM_XSLTransform/ folder and upload it to the site, and Bob’s your uncle… BBC Sport Rugby Union feed at rugbypix.com

Great, another niggling problem ticked off my list!

Two new browsers have launched in the same week. As Olly says, it’s a bit like London Buses. First a drought, and then they all come at once.

Firefox 2 – first impressions

As a regular user of FF1.5, I was keen to get the 2.0 release and like the slightly “shinier” look of the browser – someone’s polished the chrome!

I found an excellent article on tweaking Firefox, and have done a little customisation to make myself happy with it. One thing I was having trouble with – the new version put an “X” on every tab to close it, whereas 1.5 just had the one at the righ hand end of the tab bar.

Fiddling with the browser.tabs.closeButtons parameter, and setting it to “0″ just gives you the close button on the active tab. Much better!

The browser.tabs.tabMinWidth default is 100[px]. If you have many tabs open at once, you end up with scroll arrows in the tab bar, and only get about 7 tabs across by default before this happens. Changing this parameter to 75 gives you about 10 tabs before they start scrolling.

I like the “Recently closed tabs” in the History menu too – how many times have you closed a tab, only to think, “damn, I wanted that one”? Restore it quickly via this menu, and voilà!

Setting browser.urlbar.hideGoButton to “true” (default false) will get rid of the annoying green arrow next to the address bar. Personally, I never use it, I’m in the habit of bashing “return” once I’ve typed in a URL.

There are other new features, but I’ve yet to fully explore them.

IE7 – first impressions

I’ve been waiting in trepidation for Microsoft’s latest browser to be released. Yet ANOTHER browser us poor web developers will have to take into account when testing our sites. Yesterday, I bit the bullet.

No troubles in downloading the update, or installing it (thankfully!). Similarly, I went and trawled the evolt.org browser archive for a standalone version of IE6. I’ve heard some people have had problems with these standalone versions, but thankfully, no aggro as yet. So I’ve now got IE6, IE5.5 and IE5.01 on my PC too. Along with Opera, that has most of the major PC browsers covered.

Looks like none of my sites have major issues in IE7 – thank heavens! But I would have been surprised if they did – most were designed with standards in mind (IE7 is just catching up with the standards used by Firefox for years), and I haven’t got loads of IE-specific hacks lurking in my code.

Two things about IE7 I do like, and don’t think Firefox2 has (let me know if I’ve missed these options buried in FF somewhere):

1. Page thumbnails
2. Whole-page zoom

Page Thumbnails

If you click the thumbnails tab at the LHS of the tab bar (outlined in red) –
the browser gives you a large thumbnail of what each tab’s page looks like. A bit trivial if you have lots of different sites open, perhaps, but useful if you quickly want to tell the difference between several pages from the same site. The thumbnail display looks like this:

Whole-Page Zoom

And secondly, with accessibility in mind, IE7 will actually zoom the whole page, rather than just text. So if your standard page looks like this:

Once the page is zoomed, even up to 400%, it makes a pretty decent job of rendering text in graphics at this larger size (click the image below to see an actual-pixels version):

I’m sure there will be little niggles and glitches which become apparent as the web community gets used to these new browsers. For the moment, although I see IE7 as a massive improvement over the crusty old IE6, I don’t think it’s quite persuded me to swich from Firefox as my default browser. And that’s largely to do with the developer extensions and addons I use. Perhaps for a regular surfer, it would be enough.

Finally, A Night At The Opera

Lastly, I’ve just downloaded the upgrade for Opera, now version 9. The Opera website details what’s new in Opera9. Haven’t really had a chance to look at this in depth, but it’s always good to have another browser option to test.