object type: rant

[One from the vaults. This post was originally written 2005-08-04. It was not a good day for me.]

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I have seriously tried everything I know to do in order to get this one Windows Server 2003 up and running on port 3389/tcp. Nothing has worked. I'm about ready to apply a shotgun to the problem. I have some offsite people who call themselves "techs" who are probably going to complain about this lack of Remote Desktop access to the machine. I'm going to suggest they use VNC, and if they balk at the idea, I might just apply the shotgun to them instead.

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I want to like iTunes, but I just can't. I've tried. It sucks. I guess iTunes is just the thing for you if you want bloated MP3-playing software that also installs QuickTime on your machine, fucks up the names and categories of your existing music, takes up a huge amount of disk space compared to, say, Winamp, and doesn't even play Ogg Vorbis files. It does podcasts, which would be useful if I didn't know what I was doing, or if I couldn't get the ones I like faster and more easily by using an Azureus plugin, Bloglines, and/or Net Transport. iTunes tries to do everything, and in a way it can — it just does it poorly. I mean it's so terrible that I am amazed it's an Apple product. Such poor quality and poor UI just isn't at all like them. I'll admit one thing: iTunes appears to make burning your own CDs pretty easy, and if ever need to do that I'll let you know.

Now for the hard part: migrating my tunes out of iTunes and back into the way I like them. This is gonna be rough.

(In the interest of full disclosure, this rant was induced today by my uninstalling Winamp and installing iTunes on my system at work: I only have a few songs on it, and I want to be able to say I gave iTunes's podcast feature an honest chance, which is what I usually end up listening to now these days anyway. iTunes surprises me with its ability to play Digitally Imported's playlists. So it isn't all bad, just mostly bad.)

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This is where I put my next "Windows Notworking" joke. Windows network file sharing is miserable and I hate it. I shit you not I had a PC with a network name like "821b42b2055" with a shared folder named "shared" and I tried to change the hostname to "Arsenic" and neither name would actually connect me to the share after numerous restarts on both client and server. Typing "\\arsenic" worked, but the system was in all other ways invisible. Fuck, Windows. If you included an rsync implementation I'd have been finished an hour ago. I imagine my problem had something to do with NetBIOS over TCP, or Active Directory or Computer Browser or some such bullshit like that. Since when did I ever need more than an open port and an IP address?

Mac OS X Tiger has some interesting Windows networking integration features. Today I learned that connecting to a Windows share requires me to compose a URL along the lines of "cifs://toby@hostname/sharename". This is news to me, but hey, if it works, I'll keep it. It is two orders of magnitude easier for me to create a two-way Windows share on OS X than it is to do the same on a Windows machine. From the looks of it, Redmond has a looong way to go before they get networking right.

(Again, in the interest of full disclosure, my networking problems are probably the direct result of something I did. I usually disable the Server service on most workstations. And there is no guarantee that Remote Registry isn't somehow critical in connecting to a Windows file share. You know what? If it is, fuck 'em. I'll go back to a Cygwin port of OpenSSH and scp the files I need to move where I need to move them.)

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