We had 16 more trick-or-treaters this year than we had last year and the most popular time to visit was between 6:30p and 7:00p, which is earlier than the last couple of years. We had seen a trend where kids were coming out later, but Halloween was on a Sunday so I’m thinking the kids had to be home earlier on a “school night.”

Here’s the graph:

And the cumulative data from this year and the other years we’ve tracked:

As mentioned, Halloween was on a Sunday and we did the two giant bags of candy from Costco like we did last year. We had a little left over, maybe a third of a bag, so it seems two Costco bags is the magic number.

I had intended to decorate more than last year, but I ended up with only putting out the projector again. We’ve had a lot going on lately so I had to skip on the heavier decorating. I was pretty pleased with my costume this year, though, which was Sherlock Holmes:

I made the hat, coat, and vest myself. I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. I did a decent job matching up all the plaids at the seams and got several compliments, which is always nice when you put in a ton of effort.

Over the past couple of years I’ve noticed a lot more of what I’ll call “Halloween Bullshit” going on. I ended up tweeting about it as it was happening, and while it’s not like “Holy crap, this is a huge problem” or anything, people are doing stuff that, well, I feel is probably less than in the spirit of the holiday.

• If I see a big group of kids leave your house to go trick-or-treating, you’d best leave someone at home to hand out candy. I watched as a huge family with at least five trick-or-treat age kids left the house, shut off the lights, locked the doors, and went out to harvest candy without leaving anyone at home. That’s leeching, folks, and no one likes a leech. If you’re going to go out into the neighborhood and take candy, have the common decency to leave someone at home to hand out candy, too.
• If you couldn’t be bothered to wear a costume, you shouldn’t bother to trick-or-treat. I see this mostly in the older kids who probably shouldn’t be out trick-or-treating in the first place. Plenty of jeans + sweatshirt + flip-flops showing up with a pillowcase demanding candy. The “I’m a student” or “I’m a regular person” line to try and justify it isn’t clever or funny, it’s just bullshit. You don’t have to have some elaborate get-up, but at least put in some effort or just stay home.
• If your kid can’t walk and/or talk, they’re not old enough to trick-or-treat. I’m not stupid. I know the candy’s for you. That kid doesn’t even have teeth with which to chew this peanut butter cup. Go buy your own damn candy and stop freeloading off the neighborhood. We actually had two ladies - not in costume - wheel a toddler - in costume - up to the door in a stroller and hold out two bags for candy. Really? There’s only one kid here. Two bags? You’re not even trying to hide it. (There was a very specific demographic of people who did this. I won’t comment on exactly what that demographic is, but experience in the last couple of years says it’s definitely this demographic that thinks this sort of thing is OK.)

Looks like Halloween is on a Monday next year so I anticipate attendance will be down slightly, and possibly shifted into the earlier times the way it was this year.

I’ve spent the majority of my recent career working on fairly complex systems. Integrated services across disparate business units with different data centers. Full multitenancy for SaaS hosted solutions (remember all that Ray Ozzie hubbub back around MIX 07?)… that can also be deployed on-premise for larger customers who want to customize more than the configurable abilities in the hosted environment allow. It’s not The Most Complex System Ever, but it’s not what I’d consider your entry-level project, either.

The thing is, a lot of time gets spent doing things like…  Trying to pull configuration out of XML files and into a central service-based configuration store. Localizing for multitenancy where there’s not just culture fallback to consider but also default values and per-tenant overrides (sort of content management-ish). Correlating logs that run from the end user all the way through to the [disparate business unit] back end systems and back to the user.

Where are all the tools that are supposed to support larger apps and more complex use cases like that?

Based on my personal views and having no scientific data whatsoever to back it up, here’s what it feels like is going on:

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There seems to be a ton of stuff trying to get people “just starting out” up to speed… but once you get past a web site that uses LINQ to SQL or whatever to display products out of the Northwind database, where’s my tooling? Where are the solutions to the distributed configuration problem? Where’s the solution to getting resources out of .resx files? Where’s all the multitenancy support? How about even the ability to change the web.config without restarting the application?

I just feel like I spend a ton of time on infrastructure, something we all know Product Management doesn’t want to pay for because it’s not something you can see or click on, and not much time on more visible features. And I’ve mentioned stuff like this before.

Venting? Sure. But am I alone in wondering where this stuff is? I don’t think so.

My iTunes library is currently around 160GB, much of which is stored in Apple Lossless format. I also have podcasts, TV shows, and movies in the library. I have a 160GB iPod Classic. I want all of it on the iPod.

Luckily, iTunes has this nifty option “Convert higher bit rate songs to 128 kbps AAC” which will, on the fly, convert the Apple Lossless stuff to smaller (and lower quality) files so it all fits. This is fine for my iPod since my major use case there is middle-of-the-road earphones at work and podcasts anyway.

The problem is, syncing that much and doing the conversion literally takes days. And if iTunes crashes in the middle… you basically get to start over.

What I’d find is about a day and a half in, I’d get a little dialog that would pop up and say “iTunes has stopped working.” From there, if I tried to start things running again, I’d get “Verifying iPod…” and nothing would happen. (I figured out how to get past the “Verifying iPod” message, but it still restarted the sync from the beginning.)

After a long process involving syncing small blocks of the library one at a time onto the iPod and which I’m now referring to as The Great iPod Sync of ‘10, I found the culprit: One. Single. Bad. Track.

See that track where Windows can’t pick up the metadata information? Of the over 14,500 tracks in the library, iTunes encountered this one bad track and died. Blammo.

(I didn’t discover it earlier because I wasn’t compressing and apparently iTunes will just blindly copy the bad track over without checking.)

Once I removed this track from the library, everything synchronized fine.

So… if you’re finding iTunes crashing in the middle of your sync over and over… go look to see if you have a bad track.

I’m a contributor to the Autofac project and recently they switched their repository from Subversion to Mercurial which means I have to learn Mercurial. I’ve been working with it a little and the workflow process is… not quite as intuitive to me as Subversion, but then, it’s a pretty big mental shift and I’m still working on it.

These sites have helped me get up to speed and start understanding a bit better. Maybe they’ll help you, too:

• Hg Init
• Mercurial Kick Start
• A Guide to Branching in Mercurial

Got other good ones? Leave ‘em in the comments!

I admit I’m not the “standard” use case. I have a 160GB iPod Classic and it’s not big enough. My iTunes music library is up in the 150GB range and much of my music is stored in Apple Lossless format. It’s enough now that if I sync the iPod and include the list of podcasts I listen to, it’s more than 160GB.

At this point, I basically have three options:

1. Resample everything so it’s not lossless. Not on your life. I have it in lossless so I can back up the original quality and, if need be, create lower bit rate versions as needed. Plus, hello, too much work.
2. Don’t include everything in the sync. This is actually plan B, but I do like having everything on there. I find I get in weird moods and always seem to want to listen to the stuff I don’t have.
3. Check that “Convert higher bit rate songs to 128 kbps AAC” box and sync the whole library. This is what I’m trying to do. I wish they had a 256 kbps option, but my primary iPod use case is listening with reasonably cheap headphones, so 128 isn’t killing me.

When you check that “convert” box, iTunes recompresses anything higher than 128 kbps on the fly. The source stays intact, the iPod gets the converted version. Saves space, and I get to keep my library.

Problem is, iTunes also doesn’t really handle a ton of data well, nor does it handle it well if your music is stored on a network drive. All of these factors mean the sync takes literally days to finish.

I have been lucky enough to have the sync fail on me pretty constantly. I go to work, leave it running, come home and see “iTunes has stopped working.” Then when I restart iTunes and plug the iPod in, I get the message “Verifying iPod…” and it just verifies… infinitely. Previously the only way I could figure out how to fix it was to do a full restore on the iPod and start over. Yeah, I’ve been doing this for a week or so now.

But I did find something that seems to get me up and running, past the “Verifying iPod,” without having to fully wipe the iPod.

1. Plug in the iPod and wait until the “Verifying iPod” message shows up.

2. Eject the iPod. It’ll warn you that the sync’s not done, and that’s fine. Eject and disconnect the iPod.

   Steps 1 and 2 are important. If you skip them and go straight for the reset sync history bit, things don’t get fixed.

3. Go into Edit -> Preferences and look at the “Devices” tab.

4. Click the “Reset Sync History” button. You’ll get a little warning.

   

5. Click the “Reset Sync History” button on the warning.
6. Plug the iPod back in. It will start syncing again.

Now, something I’ve noticed - if it fails in the middle of a sync, after doing this it won’t remember any of the stuff it already completed. For me, that means I’m breaking up my library into 1000 - 3000 song chunks and syncing bit by bit.

YMMV; This has worked for me a few times now so hopefully it’ll work for you.