December 2005

NBC brings Law & Order to iTunes

December 6, 2005

NBC Universal announced today that the company will distribute 11 television shows through the iTunes music store. The shows include classic television shows Dragnet and Knight Rider and newer titles including Law & Order and The Tonight Show.

As with the Disney titles in the store, each title will be priced at $1.99 per show.

In just over a month since introduction Apple reports more than 3 million videos have been purchased through the music store. It could be very interesting to look back on this time in a few decades. As prime-time television became an American mainstay family time decreased significantly. With the increasing ease of watching one's favorite shows on ever longer commute there just might be some extra time on a cold winter's eve. Who knows we might all even be forced to learn a musical instrument to pass the time.

Finally

December 6, 2005

Hard to believe but finals are here once more. As so often is the case the fall finals there are many students who haven't quite prepared properly. Somewhere along the line the message that certain preparation must be done 48-hours in advance means it will turn into IT's crisis 30-minutes before the exam starts. Hopefully these same folk will determine to start preparing for the bar exam a little further in advance.

Audible.com makeover

December 5, 2005

Audible.com received a makeover recently. The new site is much more compact. The big difference I noticed right off is a greatly improved download page. It is now possible to initiate multiple downloads from the My Library page. Very nice.

Proving the adage that nothing is perfect the previous My Next Listen feature seems to be gone. Not a big deal with the new plans, but a pain when the list of programs I wanted to hear is now gone. Too bad they didn't migrate it into a wish list or other list.

Update: According to Audible.com tech support the My Next Listen feature will return in the days to come. Good news.

Software Update problem not with DirecWay

December 5, 2005

After setting up a new iMac G5 recently there were a plethora of software updates to be downloaded. The problem is that after the first time where the update window showed two pages of available updates it subsequently refused to show any at all.

Thinking that the problem might have to do withDirecWay as the DirecWay XML-RPC does.

However, the fault seems to be with OS X instead. If there is a cache file in the following directory remove it and all should be well:

/Users/yourname/Library/Caches/com.apple.softwareupdate/00/14

Apple issues security update

November 30, 2005

Apple Computer today released a security update for its Mac OS X 10.3 and 10.4 operating systems. The update addresses several potential vulnerabilities. The worst of these allow a malicious website to execute code on a browser's computer through the Safari web browser. With the quick patching of these issues the chances of exploitation are low. However, this provides a great reminder why one should limit browsing from a server computer as much as possible.

Pages