Paul Hammond's Blog

Having purged over 1Gb of Temp Files after writing my last blog post about iTunes using lots of disk space, 5 days later I was back up to 1Gb again.

This time I noticed that the Temp Files were all timed at either 2 or 3 minutes past the hour, which made me suspect something specific was triggering the new file creation.  I checked my PodCast update schedule, and found it was set to run hourly, at 2 minutes past the hour.  Coincidence?  I think not.

I set PodCast updates to be daily, and the Temp File creation has become more of a daily occurrence.  Still annoying, but at least I won't have to purge the files so often.

As you can probably tell (unless you are reading this in a feed reader) I have spent the last few evenings in my Shanghai hotel room creating a new layout for dasBlog.  It has been a while since I coded any HTML or CSS, but it was great fun.  I need to go back and clean up a few things (too many bad habits from wanting to rush to the finish line!) but I am pretty happy with the results.  It is nicer than the very plain white at least.

Let me know if you like it.  And let me know if you find any display bugs in your favourite browser...

Enjoy!

[4:53am, Shanghai - jet lag can be nasty sometimes]

I discovered an issue with iTunes a little while ago while performing a routine clean-up of my hard disks.  Essentially, when iTunes tries to save your "iTunes Music Library.xml" file, it appears to create a temporary file first that it renames once it is successfully saved.

The issue is that iTunes doesn't clean up these temporary files, for some reason.  When I didn't have many songs in iTunes, that didn't seem to matter so much, but now I have 65 Gigs of music (approximately 12,000 songs and counting) my Library XML file is 20Mb in size.  Every temporary file it creates is the same size - 20Mb - and that soon adds up.  iTunes is supposed to delete these files when you exit the software, but (a) it doesn't and (b) I never quit iTunes anyway as I leave it running to download PodCasts.

What is worse, is that it seems to be adding between 5 and 8 copies of this file every day.  Here is a screen shot of my current iTunes folder.  I cleaned it up 5 or 6 days ago.  I am already back up to 1 Gig of used space in "Temp File X" files already.

I have had to set up a nightly job that emails me the size of this folder so that I know when to go and purge it.  Ridiculous.

There is an Apple help file on this that you can find here: "iTunes: Multiple Temp Files in iTunes Folder".  Incredibly, this has been happening since version 3 of iTunes.  *Surely* iTunes knows when it isn't using a particular "Temp File X" and can just go and delete it for me?  Oh well.

So, go and check your "My Music\iTunes" folder to see if you can reclaim any of your disk space!

It is good to know that I have brought up my baby girl with a well-rounded approach to Christmas.

Well, after 29 days of writing, I submitted a 50,025 word novel to the NaNoWriMo website and their word-count bots verified my masterpiece.  Then they let me pick up my "Winner" award.  That's right, I get a small graphic that I can post to my blog and send to my mum and dad.  Oh, and of course, I get the satisfaction of having succeeded at something.

For those who are interested, I used an Agile approach to my writing.  To prove it, here is my burn-up chart for the month.  As you can see, I had a nerve-wracking few days around the 23rd due to sickness.  The 28th was a word frenzy as I caught up!