Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Forget your iPod or MP3 Player? Fear Not, The Grooveshark is Here

I'm not sure about how they get away with this legally, but it sure is cool. Live mp3 streaming from Grooveshark.

http://www.grooveshark.com

I found some tunes on the shark that I couldn't find on Amazon. Pretty cool. Use and abuse before the site goes offline.

Monday, August 24, 2009

Windows 7: First Impressions

So far Windows 7 has been great. I installed Windows 7 ultimate on an older laptop that I would never attempt to install Vista on. The only immediate bummer was driver support. But that is when I found out something very cool about Windows 7. It supports drivers written for older versions of Windows! Way cool, especially if you are trying to resurrect older computers. Just right click the installer, set the compatibility mode, and install. I got the sound and video working with XP drivers. I am impressed.

I pretty much could care less about graphical UI (kinda Office 2007 ribbon-ish), but under the hood Windows 7 appears to run very fast even on older machines.

I'm digging my old computer with Windows 7. I've got a bunch of older 3D software programs that I'd like to try out on this laptop to see how they run. I will post results as they arise.

So far, if you can get Windows 7, I'd say install it.

FYI, the specs of my older laptop if interested.

* 3.2 Gig p4 w Hyper Threading
* 64 Meg ATI 9600 Video Card
* 1 Gig of Memory
* 80 Gig HD

So far the laptop seems very responsive with Windows 7. Good job Microsoft.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Open Source Non MS Tech

In looking at this word press theme-

http://www.inanis.net/blog/

I am blown away. With my experience with Word Press, you pretty much can add a theme and get it working in a few minutes. Not so with many MS tech open source projects out there. You will encounter some sort of obscure configuration detail that needs to be worked out, and waste time messing with arcana obscura to get things up and running.

Look what folks have done with "crappy" PHP and MySQL.


Makes me wonder.

Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Winamp Music Tip: Stream Those MP3's

When I code, I almost always have music or some sort of talk radio show streaming in the background. One thing that is bugging me is that I've noticed a lot of folks who offer podcast are starting to offer it in two formats, one a Flash web interface that streams, and the other a direct MP3 download.

That doesn't work for me. I've got so many web browser windows open I often times accidental close the one streaming music, and even if I am careful and don't I have to think about why the window is open and remember not to close it, which I don't like.

Downloading the whole MP3 sometimes isn't practical (i.e. a four hour show MP3).

So I remembered a solution to this problem from my audio editing days.

1) Copy the link to the actual download version of the MP3 file.
2) Open a text editor like notepad, paste the link, and save the file with an m3u extension, like "someradioshow.m3u".
3) Now click on the m3u file. If you have Winamp installed, it will begin to stream the mp3 file instead of download it. Cool huh?

Now we have our music app streaming, and web browser windows can open and close without hassle.

Tuesday, August 04, 2009

I Might Have To Get One Of These

Apple is coming out with a really cool little device the will be marketed as a console game platform, home computer, and home server rolled into one.

http://www.edge-online.com/news/apple-tablet-computer-to-double-as-a-game-console-analyst

I might have to get me one of these, and apparently, Bill Gates agrees (he was just a little early in agreement, perhaps).

http://gizmodo.com/5324866/vintage-bill-gates-predicts-tablets-to-be-the-most-popular-form-of-pc-sold-in-america

I might have to shift more time over to Unity 3D and Object-C development . I think Microsoft has made a few epic screw ups (Vista anyone?). One is they are listening to nerds as to what new features to offer rather then rank and file programmers. Coding on the MS stack is becoming too top heavy, maybe Unity 3D dev and Object-C will be a welcome breath of development fresh air, and a little competition will force MS to listen to everyone who uses their products rather than just enterprise developing geeks. No I'm not bitter!

Serious though, always remember there are no good guys. Apple sells crap hardware, so make sure you get those extended warranties. MS treats their development community well, but you pay a premium for their products that as time goes by, and open source stuff becomes better and better, I'm not sure is warranted. Linux is the only psuedo good guy out there, but since you can use many open source Linux apps on Mac's, might as well cough up a little extra cash for the Apple wow factor and mailine product (like Photoshop and 3D Packages) support.

Wake up MS, time to truely innovate, and innovate where the consumer can see the change, not the nerd army of developers behind the scenes. Bill understands, but he is taking more of a back seat now. Wow us Balmber, before MS becomes the next depreciated giant that rages on without knowing it is dead...

Monday, August 03, 2009

Tip: When/How Your Microsoft User Password

Not a major issue, but many of my work resources are some how tied to my domain authentication. So my password expired, so I changed it, but I didn't log off. Over the next several hours I noticed that I was loosing access to resources as my updated password propagaded through the network, but my local credentials hadn't been updated because I hadn't relogged yet. I had a lot of stuff open so I was trying to avoid a relog. I started off closing and reopening programs, but after a while it became such a hassle that I finally shut everything down and logged off/logged on back onto the domain. Problems solved, but I had to restart all my apps again.

So just a tip. Change your domain password at the end of the day, or change it and log off and log back on. If you are like me and have a ton of stuff open, the former is better then the later.