What does this solve?

If you have any of these issue, this article will most likely help you.

1. You use Windows 2003 and iTunesSetup.exe refuses to run on it (it’s touting only XP or Vista/Windows 7 as supported OSes).
2. At the end of the iTunes install, when dialog says “Starting services” it failes to start iPodService.exe with the following message: “Service ‘iPodService’ (iPodService) failed to start. Verify that you have sufficient privileges to start system service.”
3. You have trouble starting iTunes.exe after install.
4. You see dialog boxes telling iTunesHelper.exe failed to start.

My wife uses Windows 2003 as development machine and I had all of these happening.

iTunes refuses to install due to OS mismatch

Apple is — like many other companies do in the last year or two — touting iTunes 9 as compatible only with Windows XP and Vista or Windows 7. This is safe net for them. If you run Windows 2003, this is just about the same thing as XP, regarding ordinary software.

Thus, solution here is to kill the OS-based launch conditions, which good people at WebKeyDesign have already explained how to do. The solution goes like this:

1. Unpack iTunesSetup.exe so you have all the various .msi files inside it copied to some folder. Use Winzip, Total Commander or any other de-archiver to open iTunesSetup.exe and extract the files
2. Download free tool called InstED and start it
3. Drag all .msi files into InstED
4. For each of them, find the LaunchCondition key in the left panel and then in the right-panel look for ((VersionNT=501 And ServicePackLevel>=2) OR VersionNT>501) and delete it. Then save the file.

InstEd — removing launch conditions

QuickTime has two conditions, remove both

Once you’re done with all of them, install them, one by one. Start with AppleApplicationSupport, then AppleMobileDeviceSupport and then continue until iTunes as the last. Ignore SetupAdmin.exe

iPodService.exe failed to start

At the end of iTunes installation, it will try to start iPodService.exe. This fails and manifests in a variety of ways. There’s an amazing number of “solutions” on the net, but remarkably none has pinpointed the actual cause.

It’s Data Execution Prevention feature of the Windows — it will kill the process as soon as it tries to run. DEP is made to prevent malicious software using private or undocumented API or doing any sort of suspected malicious activity. iPodService.exe falls into this trap according to DEP, so we need to tell DEP to let it go as exception to the rule.
Here’s how:

1. Right-click My computer, choose Properties
2. Go to Advanced tab, click on Settings under Performance, then onto the DEP tab
3. Click Add, go to Program Files\iPod\bin and choose iPodService.exe
4. Retry/continue the iTunes installation and it will finish it up very quickly.

Data Execution Prevention is what kills iPodService.exe

iTunes.exe or iTunesHelper.exe don’t start

You click, they appear to start but then fail. The reason is the same as above: DEP. Add both .exe files (they are in Program Files\iTunes folder) to the DEP exception window and they will start just fine afterwards.

To expand this a bit — every time you have a known, valid software failing to start, always add them to DEP and see if they work. Most likely they would.

Hmm…say again?

This is in Windows Explorer, copying/moving files across networked disks.

Given my experience so far in big software projects, this kind of bad UI is direct consequence of the background API being done before front-end people had any say. At the moment when front-end work came to play, there was probably no info to determine is the current operation a copy or move, so they did what they could. Or it could be sloppy FE work, but I somehow believe it’s the former.

Funny bit is that in this case it sounded almost completely legit. They missed the “hello” at the start. :)

The data entered is correct. Error message is far from helpful and tells me nothing useful. Sending web site feedback also yields nothing, as they don’t answer it.

Jolly. :(

I mean, really…it lasts close to forever, and is the only thing able to drive my Core Duo 1.83GHz close to 70 degrees Celsius.

Here’s what some long-time Windows users say…

The always-opinionated Joel Spolsky says this:

Safari even managed to bring the inferior font rendering of the OS X platform to Windows, no easy trick.

On another hand, this post is perfect example of “I fucked up writing on impulse, realized my main argument is mute and then dug my self even deeper trying to cover my mistake with half-ass attempts to irony”. On my office computer (Pentium 4 3GHz, 2GB RAM) 1st time Safari startup took 5s. Joel later wrote a quality post on font rendering, which is usually his norm.

Jeff Atwood obviously agrees with Joel:

I’m curious why Apple’s default font rendering strategies, to my eye — and to the eyes of at least two other people — are visibly inferior to Microsoft’s on typical LCD displays

Jeff also wrote a great article on font smoothing.

Mac users are another story

Jeffrey Zeldman uses examples to drive his point:

It’s worth pointing out that these tests were done on Macintosh computers, which are known for their superior handling of text…

Jon Hicks clearly agrees:

Its wonderful looking at a website on XP, and seeing gorgeous text smoothing.

Truth is somewhere in the middle

Me, as a long time Windows user who have long time ago fallen in love with ClearType but am increasingly using Mac, agree in parts with both.

Non-italic font smoothing is better with ClearType, but is ugly with most sans-serif italics, like Verdana or Tahoma. Mac handles this much better. Here are few examples, made using Firefox 2 and Safari 3 beta, on Windows:

Tahoma rendering in Firefox and Safari

Mac rendering to me looks better. Which is the reason why on this site I use different fonts for italic and non-italic styles.

But, like I said, it’s a matter of habit. I even know few people who disable all font smoothing and use blocky fonts. They are usually non-front-end programmers. ;)

Exposition all wrong, overblown highlights, details buried…blaaah

You have certainly had those moments. You’re abroad, excited to be where you are and do not pay much attention to status display. You just shoot and shoot, trying to capture as much atmosphere as possible.
Only after you get home you see that some very dear photos are…well, not that good. Despair often ensues, when you realize that there is no going back – you may get there again, but that one moment, that single memory is gone and can’t be recreated.

I used to fix this in Photoshop, but it was tiresome to do it and took way too much time. And I never really mastered the photo re-touch in Photoshop, all that I did was mostly stumbling in the dark until the sudden light.
Lightroom on the other hand, is a miracle in simplicity and power; in under 10s, with just few mouse moves in the histogram palette – et voila.

Look, there is color in the sky!

Add-in fantastic crop tool and this alone is well worth the price. There will be a whole post or two about this honeyweek of ours ;) but I had to share my joy about Lightroom. I’m so happy going through 1500+ images I took in Paris – it’s a joy to develop them.

There are many of these. Delicious Library gets a lot of praise and good word of mouth, mostly due to its iSight barcode scanning and lovely interface. Equivalent software in the Windows world is MediaMan, although it’s far from finished, if I may say. Although they are nice, they seriously lack one crucial thing once you go past the interface: sources.

They both work with just Amazon, and pardon me – but Amazon just does not cut it. It does not have too many data about the movies, often lacks non-US movies and/or non-US DVD editions. Those apps can be beautiful as Eye Nebula – they don’t have the substance.

Collectorz.com’s MovieCollector does. A lot of it.

It has truck-load of features, of which multiple data sources are the most important one:

• Collectorz.com Movie Database
• IMDB
• Amazon US
• Amazon UK
• Amazon CA
• Amazon DE
• Amazon FR
• Amazon JP
  …

Adding movies is dead-easy: you run the wizard, type-in any number of movie names (even part of it), check the sources you want to search and click the button. It will look for all possible data about the movie through all the sources and present you with the result list of candidates. You then need to pick the correct items and MovieCollector will merge all found data.
Really easy to use, works really well.

There is one problem though: interface is…well, ugly. The toolbar icons are so horrible that I turn all toolbars off (I use menu items). It has list item view for browsing the collection and (from recently) thumbnail view. List view has ugly checkmark icon which I can’t remove, otherwise it’s just plain old list control.

Thumbnail view

The thumbnail view is…brrr! Each thumbnail has this deep-shadowy look, so web’95-like. There is some sort of gradient as well. The thumbnails are blur-fiesta, forced into predefined-size, regardless of original image’s aspect ratio.

Default detailed view (see larger)

The default view for details is not much better, plain and unimaginative. But, there is hope, sparks right here.

Templates

Detailed view is actually a XSL template, which means: HTML + CSS. After few hours of work, I managed to replicate iTunes store layout for the movies:

iTunes store-like detailed view (see larger)

Much better, isn’t it? :) This is available for download in my Deliver section (there will be more).

Did I say HTML+CSS? If you thought that you can whip up your web-standardy skillz – think again. MovieCollector seems to use some internal renderer – I expected it to use IE/win control, but it is not. It supports some CSS properties, but many in rather weird ways. margin and padding can use only one or two value forms, float and clear acts totally crazy etc.
Much of those few hours was spent in trial and error, while I was tweaking properties to achieve what I wanted. In the end, I simply gave up and used layout tables. They should embed some browser control in there – current state of Mozilla would be nice, or installed IE if Mozilla is complicated to use. I’m not sure how things stand in Mac world. Another thing that is needed is some sort of image processing, so I could specify that image is cropped, or resized and sharpened, or something similar.

I really hope collectorz guys will realize how huge this feature is and thus give us the ability to create custom templates for the list/browse views as well. As it stands, those are parts of the interface which I use because I must.

In general, I’m pretty happy about the whole application and it has a Mac version as well, which will be crucial for me, around summer. ;) Most of my favourite Windows apps do not exists on Mac – this one is one of the few that does.

Update (May 14, 2010): Richard Hemby sent me a link to his ultimate guide of cataloging software. Check that out, as this article of mine is rather old.

Here is the procedure that worked for the apps I had at the time. You mileage may vary…

1. Do not touch the original folder
2. Create new user, give him the same rights as the old one
3. Login with new user
4. Log off new user
5. Login as administrator
6. Rename Documents and Settings\NEWUSER to something unique (add 2 before NEWUSER)
7. Rename Documents and Settings\OLDUSER to Documents and Settings\NEWUSER
8. Login as NEWUSER
9. Open registry
10. Replace all occurences of OLDUSER with NEWUSER

Firefox tweaks

Do the step 10 (search & replace) in these files:

• c:\Documents and Settings\OLDUSER\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\nw97e6on.default\compreg.dat
• c:\Documents and Settings\OLDUSER\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\nw97e6on.default\extensions.ini
• c:\Documents and Settings\OLDUSER\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\nw97e6on.default\secmod.db

Profile name will of course be different for you.

Thunderbird tweaks

Do the step 10 (search & replace) in this file:

• c:\Documents and Settings\OLDUSER\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\gmclkm48.default\extensions.ini

Profile name will of course be different for you.

MSN Messenger tweaks

Do the step 10 (search & replace) in these files:

• c:\Documents and Settings\OLDUSER\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Messenger\EMAIL\SharingMetadata\Logs\Dfsr.log
• c:\Documents and Settings\OLDUSER\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Messenger\EMAIL\SharingMetadata\volume.xml
• c:\Documents and Settings\OLDUSER\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Messenger\EMAIL\SharingMetadata\volume.xml~
• c:\Documents and Settings\OLDUSER\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Messenger\EMAIL\SharingMetadata\Working\database_4C54_A5A2_54A5_8EF0\fsr.chk
• c:\Documents and Settings\OLDUSER\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Messenger\EMAIL\SharingMetadata\Working\database_4C54_A5A2_54A5_8EF0\fsr.log
• c:\Documents and Settings\OLDUSER\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Messenger\EMAIL\SharingMetadata\Working\database_4C54_A5A2_54A5_8EF0\fsr00002.log

database_XX will of course be different in your case.

General idea is to look where the old username might be used and if that resembles a file path, change it into new path. If you have done the similar, for some other app, please let me know, it might be useful at some point in the future.