http://www.digg.com/politics/90_Million_Americans_Believe_Government_Behind_9_11

Ahh, the internet. It makes everyone a certifiable structural engineer, fireman, policeman, etc…

Forget Occam’s Razor. It’s clearly a government conspiracy! OMGZ!!!

Do a little research before using the conspiracy card, eh guys? And no, “Loose Change” doesn’t count. Check out “Screw Loose Change” to counter that. Next, please?

http://www.filmz.ru/pub/8/7626_1.htm has six photos from Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End. They’re pretty much the same outfits and very “teasery”, but cool non-the-less. My favorite shot is the one to the right… click it to make it bigger.

F-Secure writes about a brand new MySpace worm that is making its way like crazy throughout profiles. It spreads by executing a bit of JavaScript embedded in a Quicktime file. And of course, users can embed whatever objects they want on their pages!

Spyware Sucks has a write-up sharing my same thoughts of MySpace: block it from your networks now. If you have kids, educate them about the badness of the site and get them off of it. If you’re in charge of IT at a company, filter it out.

Unless you want to stick with a website that sends password information unencrypted, lets its usernames and passwords get phished, and semi-knowingly exposes (and possibly infects) a million users to an old exploit via a banner ad.

Sheesh.

I’m almost at my wit’s end with iTunes. Syncing my iPod for the first time this week (with just music and pictures) took all day (~8 hours.) Totally unacceptable. I don’t believe this is problem is specific to Vista, because XP was slow as well for me; it just wasn’t this slow.

My installation of Vista has the latest Intel chipset drivers, ensuring my hard drive is reading/writing as fast as possible, so that’s not the problem. Check out my Vista experience rating to confirm this… 5.7 out of 6 for hard disk speed:

Furthermore, none of the other “heavy” applications I run have experienced a slowdown in going from XP to Vista. In fact, Photoshop seems to be running faster, as do my video games (Oblivion’s level transitions are super fast now!)

Looking around the web for iTunes+slow posts, I came up with this forum post from someone experiencing very-slow network share access under iTunes. Funny enough, I had this exact problem a year or so ago, and ended up ditching my network audio drive, instead copying all the files to my local hard drive. When that still wasn’t speedy enough, I reconfigured my hard drives into RAID0, with very little improvement in speed.

Scott Hanselman also recently wrote a post about iTunes 7 and slowness. He comments more on the UI aspect of iTunes sucking more under Windows/Vista, and I have to agree. Re-sizing the iTunes window is terribly slow, as is the “filtering on the fly” of search results, etc. — in general, iTunes’s speed is a joke.

So what can Apple do to speed things up?

• Implement a real database back-end that will keep track of your files, metadata and thumbnails, making searches more “realtime”.
• Utilize the new Windows Presentation Framework (it’s what gives Vista its flashy interfaces) to make the interface. WPF will even work on XP (via .NET 3.0) so I don’t know why Apple is holding out on this one. Resizing delays, window redraws, etc. would become a thing of the past.
• Optimize the code for Windows. I have a hard time believing that Apple is doing all they can to squeeze performance out of Windows. This might be off-topic a bit, but even though my machine exceeds the minimum requirements put forth by Apple, my machine still cannot play 1080p Quicktime7 video without “pausing” every couple of seconds, yet my machine can handle 1080p WMV-HD just fine. Something is wrong with that picture.

So clearly, iTunes is doing something wrong here and Apple needs to address it. Apple has a feedback form for Vista and Quicktime, so if you’re having problems too, you should fill it out, cross your fingers, and hope your e-mail actually goes to someone who gives a darn.

Apparently disabling UAC had a weird side-effect: Onfolio doesn't work anymore! Onfolio is a Windows Live Toolbar add-on that displays RSS feeds in a "newspaper" format inside of Internet Explorer. If you turn off UAC, Onfolio's newspapers no longer work, and show script errors. Arg... why!?

So I guess UAC will have to be on for now, and I'll just deal with the iTunes problems for now, and hope Apple fixes it soon.

Update: Please check out my other entry involving poor speed in general with iTunes 7 and Vista.

Running with the default Vista installation, you get a feature called User Account Control, which basically lets you be an Administrator on the machine (like you were by default in XP), but every program you run will run in the context of a normal user, in order to prevent programs from having too much access to parts of the operating system, say, a virus or spyware.

It seemed to work okay, only running into a problem with a few programs. There's an option for programs that won't behave that can force the program to run as an administrator, and that usually takes care of the problem. iTunes, though, complains that it's in "compatability mode". Also, every now and then inside of iTunes, it will pop up an error saying that it could not write to the iTunes library. This causes you to lose any new files you just added, etc.-- major bummer.

Searching Google for iTunes and Vista doesn't really yield any valuable results, and I have to run iTunes.. just no way around it for my iPod.. so I had to disable UAC. I probably was going to disable it anyway, being a "advanced user", but for typical PC users, I can see UAC being a great tool in preventing bad software from affecting your operating system.

Anyway, hopefully this blog entry is helpful to anyone else who stumbles on this problem, and hopefully Apple's next version of iTunes takes care of the problems..

This past weekend, I wiped my laptop and main machine clean at home and installed the final version of Vista, available from MSDN if you have a subscription.

I'm loving it so far, but I ran into some hard drive problems along the way.. namely one of my hard drives dying in the middle of installing iTunes. Joy! Not Vista's fault, though.

Anyway, Vista's start menu is completely different from XP, and by default always shows the top used applications. You have to click "All Programs" to see your full start menu. And the view then switches to a single scrolling list, with folders that expand inside this list. What's been driving me crazy is that clicking/hovering to open the start menu folders takes seconds. CPU usage goes to 100%, and the start menu becomes sluggish while this happens. Then the folder opens. Unacceptable.

I did a search on Google, and funny enough, people have been having this problem since early betas of Vista. It's crazy that it hasn't been fixed in the final, but here's hoping Microsoft releases some quick fix later on, and preferably before the January public release, hrm?

In the meantime, like that forum post suggests, if you go into your start menu options and turn off the highlighting of new programs, it solves the problem. I'm guessing that Vista is trying to look up the "last modified date" of every start menu item on the fly, and that's causing the delay?