This has nothing to do with technical writing, but it took me a while to find this, so I'm noting it down here just to increase its visibility on the internet.

I installed Apple iTunes last night on my Windows XP PC. The install went OK, but when I downloaded a track it didn't play back well - in fact the sound quality was so bad you could barely make out what the track was. After lots of Google searching (there's a lot of pages out there about iTunes) I eventually stumbled upon the solution in a Quick Tip article on the About web site, contributed by Rachael Smithey:

Troubleshooting iTunes Playback on a Windows PC

Just in case this page disappears, the fix Rachael describes is as follows:

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This week's Computer Weekly has an interesting opinion article by Laurent Séraphin. In Bring discipline to software development he argues that “Software development needs to evolve from being a ‘black art’ to more of a managed business process. Despite the billions invested in software, its development is not scrutinised as any other business processes.”

He's right. My experience of software development is that there is often a lack planning and defined procedures, particularly at the early stages, where most other businesses make sure they know exactly what work they are going to do (down to the last detail), what this involves in terms of person-days of work (i.e. cost/investment) and what constitutes a successful outcome of the project.

The article contains the following astonishing statistics:

“A Standish Group report, released this year, found that 30% of software projects are cancelled, 44% are too expensive, 60% are not considered a success and 90% are delivered late.”

I haven't posted much to this weblog over the past few months. There are good reasons for this. In that period I have taken my website away from the ISP who were hosting it and I am now hosting itauthor.com myself.

This has taken quite a while to sort out, partly because wresting the domain away from my old ISP was not easy and took prolonged efforts and a not insubstantial amount of cash. The moral of this is that you should never enter into a relationship without first thoroughly researching your exit options.

I will describe my hosting setup in full elsewhere, but I'll just outline the things that make this possible:

• A cable broadband Internet connection
• An old 233MHz PC that now acts as a dedicated hardware firewall
• A slightly less old Pentium II, 333MHz PC, running Fedore Core 3, on a network of its own, that acts as my web server
• ZoneEdit, to whom I transferred registration of my domain, and whose online forms allow me to control domain name mapping

Both of the old PCs sit in my basement, without monitors or keyboards and are accessible via SSH from my main PC (running XP) on my home network. The firewall and web server machines obviously have to be on all the time, but they have low-spec processors and don't generate much heat, so they only have power supply fans and therefore don't use up much electricity. A smoke detector and circuit breaker give me some peace of mind about leaving these machines on all the time.
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This is the first entry in the new incarnation of this weblog.

I've uploaded my old 2002 Radio weblog Thoughts from a technical author onto this site. The pages had been sitting, undeleted on a Userland server since my try-out of Radio expired in August 2002.

Thoughts from a technical author was my first experiment in blogging and, like so many weblogs, it doesn't exactly make riveting reading. But, if I haven't put you off, you can step back in time to 19 July 2002 when I posted my first entry.