Hills House of GAIN

Looking to solve iTunes iPhone or iPad update errors? read on.

There are 5 apple iDevices in my family now – of which I own an iPhone 4 and an iPad. Ever since I’ve had them (in fact from my very first 3G) I’ve had problems with that eternal turd that is iTunes updating my devices. I’ve only ever managed to get iTunes to successfully update my phone ONCE, and to be honest I’m not even sure I’m remembering that event correctly. I might have been somewhere different entirely in order to get it to update.

Given I’m now pretty heavily invested in the Jobsian ecosystem, I thought I should really solve the problem of updating my hardware using my current kit.

So, I Googled. I Binged. I read and read and read. Nothing solved my problem. EVERY time I updated my phone or my iPad the progress bar would either shoot up and error immediately, or it would spend 20 minutes creeping up and then hang 4 pixels from the end of the bar for what seemed like eternity. All iTunes would give back would be a standard windows error box with a hex error code. Just another reason to hate iTunes. Each subsequent fail brought me closer to decapitating myself in a fit of depression.

Then I noticed something. When my fingers didn’t quite hit the keys properly and I ended up typing a non existent URL into my browser instead of the usual browser’s error page about not finding the URL, I was getting a Virgin Media search page, helpfully asking if I’d meant to type a more sensible URL and would I like to visit any of the pages below. No Virgin. I wouldn’t.

But that set me thinking on two paths.

1) apple software is seriously CRAP given it should verify the update can complete BEFORE trashing your phone and leaving unusable in restore mode.

2) Virgin’s DNS is messing with resolving an apple server late in the update process.

So, with a bit of Google love and the help of their DNS servers, I switched over my router to use the free DNS and tried updating again.

SUCCESS!

So, it looks like Virgins ultra helpful DNS redirection on failure is messing up my apple iDevice update. Bad Virgin. Bad Apple for not checking whether it can actually call home properly

I suspect that many people would be having the same problem, so folks, update your DNS’s to Google’s free DNS and solve the iDevice update problem!

Unfortunately that wont rewrite apples crap software.

check out : Google’s DNS information

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I think i’m seeing the benefit. I’ve looked at the other eBook readers and up to now stuck with the paper on shelves. However, handling the iPad, reading the sample pdf’s and seeing how much it looks , well, just ‘right’ Im beginning to like it more than i should for an overgrown iPhone.

help. I’m being assimilated!

I think we need a bit of a refresh & a new start. New theme & updates, coming very shortly.

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Since its been a fair while since I posted anything with technical content, I thought I’d lighten the atmosphere with some hardcore XAML extending 😉

I was asked this question a while back, how to parameterize an XPath query in a binding. Well, it is a bit of problem, you know, ranking right up there with global warming, world peace, North Korean space program crisis etc, and like most lazy developer’s (that’s a good thing btw!) I googled first to see what I could turn up.

There were plenty of scams for solving global warming, but not one for Dynamic XPaths in XAML bindings.

Nothing. Zilch. Nada. Zip. There was one post that made me think that it may well be a bit more difficult that I was expecting.

This post by Karl Hulme almost did what I wanted but not quite. it still wasn’t flexible enough to perform the type of binding I wanted to solve this particular problem, which was, to basically externalise rich tool tip data that was held in an external file, so the client could easily update the data to be shown based on control names on a form. The tool tip had to show not only text, but other rich content that was configured from an XML data source.

So after much head scratching, I came up with what I thought was quite a neat solution. Although it doesn’t solve global warming I think it’s quite a neat solution to the XAML problem. It’s a combination of a Value Converter and a Markup Extension, which allows you to specify XPath bound data in a clean way right in the XAML. The tooltip is then templated using these two classes to display the additional content as well as its original content if any.

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I’m a big fan of automating anything that can be automated. Those of you that may know me, might even call me a bit of a fanatic. That’s the reason I got married, automatic dishwasher on the cheap. There’s a reason for my fanaticism, I believe that the more of me you remove from the loop, the less problems will occur. Well, not me in particular, I don’t think I’m that crap. Well, ok, I’d prefer it if you didn’t ask anyone’s opinion on that 😉 Especially the wife.

The largest source of problems in a project is us bumbling humans, and we’re not just talking about the bugs that we introduce!. Damn those pesky humans.

Automate Everything

Ok, so how do we help obsolete ourselves? Build automation is a really good start. As Steve McConnell once said “The build is the heartbeat of the project. If the hearts not beating the project is dead.” If that metaphor’s good enough for Steve, its good enough for me. Automated building is one of the best tools to keep that heart beating.

So, one of the keys to having a project run as smoothly as possible is automating the builds. There are many reasons for wanting to automate the build :

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Well, not a big one, but one of my blogless friends has pointed out that I probably mean the Real Time scanner – but I’m 99% sure its called the On Demand scanner.

Here’s the courtesy link to his website 😉

Either way, its the one that checks files as they’re accessed.

McAfee.. helping keep files clean, and product deadlines away.

😉

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What week, I’ve managed about 4 hours of actual development. The problem? McAfee’s on demand scanner.

It all started Monday, whilst I was writing a templated ASP.Net control similar to the inbuilt Logon panel. The difference was that this control respects the privileges of the logged on user, using the Oracle security model that we’re deep into.

Anyway, on using the panel I started getting unrecognised tag errors, and then Devstudio wouldn’t compile the project. At all. So, after a bit of cleaning and the usual go to the dos prompt, i really cleaned the project and tried again. Success.

All the errors went away. Hmm, i thought to myself. must be some cruft from left from the other day when one of the other office staff mistakenly unplugged my PC instead of the electric heater at her feet. Twice.

Any I’d scan-disked the PC and found nothing wrong so off I went merrily coding away. Then odd little errors started creeping in. Tags not recognised, xml schema errors from files I’d not touched for days. It never occurred to me that the On Demand scanner from McAfee could be the culprit. So after blaming myself first for a day, then DevStudio for a day, I started looking at all the other corporate software that was running on the PC. Keep in mind that it takes a day for this because these aren’t the worlds fastest PC’s (the fast ones are on order 🙂 ).

So finally I examine the McAfee On Demand logs. Holy smoke. over 4000 blocked actions in the last hour. Yes I work fast. Either that or there’s a lot of files making up our project 😉

Not only that, but the file it seemed to be scanning was the .ASPX file i just so happened to be working on. I’ll take that as the smoking gun.

So I think I’ve found the culprit, but trying to sort out what to do about it is a whole different story!

Remember that we’re dealing with a corporate IT department. Can I get rid of McAfee? No. I tried that already. Not enough rights. So I ring the IT department. Waivers for developers? modifications to the policies, different virus killer? No, No and NO. So, I’m kind of stuck here. It’s out of my hands now, but given that I’m on a daily rate, this could be getting expensive, and its only when the costs start mounting up that people notice. Nothing I try seems to stop the interference with VS2008, and meanwhile the project is kind of stood still. I haven’t been idle (of course!) I’ve installed a full automated build system whilst I’m waiting for this to get solved, but that’s in a VM where I can guarantee that its running exactly what I want, not what someone else thinks I need 😉

I’ll keep y’all posted.

In the mean time, might I suggest :

1) Don’t use on demand scanners with development environments. Its not worth the hassle. This is the second time McAfee’s bitten me.

2) if you have to use on demand scanners, don’t use McAfee!.

If only real life development was that simple.