I’ve spent the majority of my recent career working on fairly complex systems. Integrated services across disparate business units with different data centers. Full multitenancy for SaaS hosted solutions (remember all that Ray Ozzie hubbub back around MIX 07?)… that can also be deployed on-premise for larger customers who want to customize more than the configurable abilities in the hosted environment allow. It’s not The Most Complex System Ever, but it’s not what I’d consider your entry-level project, either.

The thing is, a lot of time gets spent doing things like…  Trying to pull configuration out of XML files and into a central service-based configuration store. Localizing for multitenancy where there’s not just culture fallback to consider but also default values and per-tenant overrides (sort of content management-ish). Correlating logs that run from the end user all the way through to the [disparate business unit] back end systems and back to the user.

Where are all the tools that are supposed to support larger apps and more complex use cases like that?

Based on my personal views and having no scientific data whatsoever to back it up, here’s what it feels like is going on:

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There seems to be a ton of stuff trying to get people “just starting out” up to speed… but once you get past a web site that uses LINQ to SQL or whatever to display products out of the Northwind database, where’s my tooling? Where are the solutions to the distributed configuration problem? Where’s the solution to getting resources out of .resx files? Where’s all the multitenancy support? How about even the ability to change the web.config without restarting the application?

I just feel like I spend a ton of time on infrastructure, something we all know Product Management doesn’t want to pay for because it’s not something you can see or click on, and not much time on more visible features. And I’ve mentioned stuff like this before.

Venting? Sure. But am I alone in wondering where this stuff is? I don’t think so.

My iTunes library is currently around 160GB, much of which is stored in Apple Lossless format. I also have podcasts, TV shows, and movies in the library. I have a 160GB iPod Classic. I want all of it on the iPod.

Luckily, iTunes has this nifty option “Convert higher bit rate songs to 128 kbps AAC” which will, on the fly, convert the Apple Lossless stuff to smaller (and lower quality) files so it all fits. This is fine for my iPod since my major use case there is middle-of-the-road earphones at work and podcasts anyway.

The problem is, syncing that much and doing the conversion literally takes days. And if iTunes crashes in the middle… you basically get to start over.

What I’d find is about a day and a half in, I’d get a little dialog that would pop up and say “iTunes has stopped working.” From there, if I tried to start things running again, I’d get “Verifying iPod…” and nothing would happen. (I figured out how to get past the “Verifying iPod” message, but it still restarted the sync from the beginning.)

After a long process involving syncing small blocks of the library one at a time onto the iPod and which I’m now referring to as The Great iPod Sync of ‘10, I found the culprit: One. Single. Bad. Track.

See that track where Windows can’t pick up the metadata information? Of the over 14,500 tracks in the library, iTunes encountered this one bad track and died. Blammo.

(I didn’t discover it earlier because I wasn’t compressing and apparently iTunes will just blindly copy the bad track over without checking.)

Once I removed this track from the library, everything synchronized fine.

So… if you’re finding iTunes crashing in the middle of your sync over and over… go look to see if you have a bad track.

I’m a contributor to the Autofac project and recently they switched their repository from Subversion to Mercurial which means I have to learn Mercurial. I’ve been working with it a little and the workflow process is… not quite as intuitive to me as Subversion, but then, it’s a pretty big mental shift and I’m still working on it.

These sites have helped me get up to speed and start understanding a bit better. Maybe they’ll help you, too:

• Hg Init
• Mercurial Kick Start
• A Guide to Branching in Mercurial

Got other good ones? Leave ‘em in the comments!

I admit I’m not the “standard” use case. I have a 160GB iPod Classic and it’s not big enough. My iTunes music library is up in the 150GB range and much of my music is stored in Apple Lossless format. It’s enough now that if I sync the iPod and include the list of podcasts I listen to, it’s more than 160GB.

At this point, I basically have three options:

1. Resample everything so it’s not lossless. Not on your life. I have it in lossless so I can back up the original quality and, if need be, create lower bit rate versions as needed. Plus, hello, too much work.
2. Don’t include everything in the sync. This is actually plan B, but I do like having everything on there. I find I get in weird moods and always seem to want to listen to the stuff I don’t have.
3. Check that “Convert higher bit rate songs to 128 kbps AAC” box and sync the whole library. This is what I’m trying to do. I wish they had a 256 kbps option, but my primary iPod use case is listening with reasonably cheap headphones, so 128 isn’t killing me.

When you check that “convert” box, iTunes recompresses anything higher than 128 kbps on the fly. The source stays intact, the iPod gets the converted version. Saves space, and I get to keep my library.

Problem is, iTunes also doesn’t really handle a ton of data well, nor does it handle it well if your music is stored on a network drive. All of these factors mean the sync takes literally days to finish.

I have been lucky enough to have the sync fail on me pretty constantly. I go to work, leave it running, come home and see “iTunes has stopped working.” Then when I restart iTunes and plug the iPod in, I get the message “Verifying iPod…” and it just verifies… infinitely. Previously the only way I could figure out how to fix it was to do a full restore on the iPod and start over. Yeah, I’ve been doing this for a week or so now.

But I did find something that seems to get me up and running, past the “Verifying iPod,” without having to fully wipe the iPod.

1. Plug in the iPod and wait until the “Verifying iPod” message shows up.

2. Eject the iPod. It’ll warn you that the sync’s not done, and that’s fine. Eject and disconnect the iPod.

   Steps 1 and 2 are important. If you skip them and go straight for the reset sync history bit, things don’t get fixed.

3. Go into Edit -> Preferences and look at the “Devices” tab.

4. Click the “Reset Sync History” button. You’ll get a little warning.

   

5. Click the “Reset Sync History” button on the warning.
6. Plug the iPod back in. It will start syncing again.

Now, something I’ve noticed - if it fails in the middle of a sync, after doing this it won’t remember any of the stuff it already completed. For me, that means I’m breaking up my library into 1000 - 3000 song chunks and syncing bit by bit.

YMMV; This has worked for me a few times now so hopefully it’ll work for you.

After you update Android on your phone (or whatever) you should recalibrate the compass so it, literally, knows which end is up. This involves flipping the phone around along all axes so it can figure things out. After a while, the little on-screen compass thing turns green and lets you know it’s calibrated.

Except when it turns red and never turns green, which is what happened to me.

I looked around in forums and it turns out this is reasonably common. I fixed it in the same way other people have fixed it, which was:

1. Uninstall any compass-related applications. This includes fancy on-screen compasses as well as apps like GPS Test Plus, which is a great app for helping you test out your GPS reception/settings but also has an on-screen compass component.
2. Power cycle the phone. Turn it all the way off and back on again.
3. Sit in the middle of the room. Well, you don’t have to sit smack in the middle of the room, just make sure you’re not sitting next to speakers, or an MRI machine, or something that’s going to create magnetic interference.
4. Start the calibration. Settings -> Location and Security -> Calibrate Compass.
5. Rotate the phone slowly. Don’t fling it around really fast. Take about two seconds to complete a full rotation of the phone in any direction. Flip it around all different ways. It should take around a minute to turn green.
6. If it doesn’t turn green, or if it turns red, go look and make double sure you don’t have any compass apps installed. I didn’t even think about GPS Test Plus until I remembered there was one screen in there that did, in fact, deal with the compass. It may be a game, it may be a utility… whatever. The compass app thing was, I think, the real key for me, though it does sound like some folks are moving the phone around too fast as well.
7. Reinstall your app(s) after calibration. Done and done.

This was really annoying for a few hours while I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why the compass calibrator kept turning red and never completing. I followed the above steps (which is an amalgamation of things that worked for different people) and had no issues. Hopefully it’ll help you, too.