<rant>iTunes and Windows x64; WTF?</rant>

I was looking for a song that I heard while listening to Pandora on Lala, Amazon.com, Yahoo music and couldn't find it. Pandora implied that it was available for purchase on iTunes so I decided to install iTunes and see.

The first question from website, are you running Windows 64 bit operating system? Why yes, as a matter of fact, I am. Windows XP x64. So I download the 64 bit version as instructed. On installation, I get a popup error saying "Oops, you can't use this version of iTunes because you're not running Windows Vista x64". +10 aggravation points Apple!

So I download the 32 bit version. And guess what happens now... iTunes installer tells me "Oops, you shouldn't be using this version since you have a 64 bit operating system; we recommend you download and use the 64 bit version of iTunes". +10 aggravation points again!

So I ignore the warning and continue with the 32 bit version. Once it's installed I search for the track I'm interested in and ... you guessed it, it's not even on iTunes. +10 aggravation points for pandora.com.

It's all making sense now why people go postal. I wonder how many people I've taken to the edge with software I've written. If you are one of those people, please forgive me and don't do a home invasion or drive-by on me!

Things I've found in and around my 100+ year old house

Most of these items were found during remodeling and landscaping. Ordered by value

1. 1856 Nickle found in the yard while building a retaining wall on my side of the Erie Canal bed.
2. 1907 Dime found when replacing a door to a second floor porch
3. Miscellaneous blue-glass bottles found while working on retaining wall.
4. Rolex silver baby spoon
5. Postcard from 1924 advertising a boxing match at the Rochester Athletic Club (found while I was still working at the unrelated Rochester Athletic Club)
6. Rusty old horseshoe
7. Bottle of Mercurochrome.
8. Old knitting needle

Fixing rendering problems with checkbox and radio on Firefox 3 with KDE 4

I've been living with a rendering problem on Firefox 3 under KDE 4 with Kubuntu 8.10 for some time but today I decided to try to fix it.

The problem was that the checkbox, radio and sometimes buttons and input fields on web pages under Firefox 3 didn't render properly until I did a hover over them. Once I scrolled the page those widgets got hosed again until I hovered over them again.

I had tried installing latest video drivers and tweaking KDE 4 look and feel settings to no avail. After a little digging, I found that the problem isn't with KDE 4 settings, but the settings for "GTK Styles and Fonts". Access these settings under "System Settings".

The page has a radio selector for "Use my KDE style in GTK applications" that was selected. Changing this to "Use another style" and selecting "Raleigh" made this problem go away but had a negative overall effect on how Firefox looked. I was on the right path though.

A little more digging made mentions of a common GTK style called "QtCurve". I installed this via Adept, closed the System Settings window and reopened it. Now "QtCurve" appeared in my "Use Another Style" dropdown. I selected it, pressed apply, then restarted Firefox.

And it was beautiful.

It also fixed my checkbox rendering problems in Eclipse (where the right edge didn't display).

Before:


After: