TechProsaic

I’m glad to see bbPress, the forum used at the Wordpress site, released as a separate project. Good can only come of that, it’s a nice and simple forum script. However, read the site and you’ll see the focus is on simplicity. No avatars, no attachments. If you find web standards important, and are looking for a forum with an active community, and all the latest features, check out Unclassified Newsboard. I’ve scoped out a lot of forums to replace Invision PB on a site that I run, and UNB is the one I decided to implement. The author is very interested in keeping the board standards-compliant, and his board includes Jabber notification, which is important to me.

“Photomatt has written (the day after Christmas, nonetheless) and released a small footprint Bulletting board software called bbPress. ”
–Weblog Tools Collection - bbPress

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This came from a friend today:

> I uninstalled Winamp today.  Installed Quintessential player.
>  Its GOOD.  check it out:
>
> www.quinnware.com

Here’s my review:

I hesitate to give it a “GOOD” in all caps. I’d never tried it before, really giving it a shot because of your all caps-ness. I installed it and the following plugins to get it close to where I was with Winamp.

* enc_LAMEMP3encoder.exe: the built-in encoder sucks ass, lame is a req if you were gonna use this. don’t know if I will, I don’t encode that often and when I do I’ll usually use EAC or something.
* enc_OggVorbisEncoderPlugin.exe
* gen_Alpha.exe: for alpha blending the display
* gen_QCDBillboard.exe: flash song title “on-screen-display” style when switching songs. I haven’t gotten it working yet but I have a plugin like it on winamp that I like a lot.
* gen_QCDResumer.exe: will restart exact m:s where you left off when you start player
* gen_QCDScrobbler.exe: ? looked interesting
* gen_ShoutcastLister.exe: vastly inferior to winamp’s browser
* in_FLAC.exe, in_MonkeysAudioPlug-in.zip, in_MP4Plug-in.exe, in_WinampInputplug-insManager.exe: so I can get all my formats. I needn’t've (is that a word?) bothered with anything besides the winamp plugin mgr, that one seems to work fine

cons:

* NO LIBRARY! This sucks, might not use it because of this. Saw a couple of lib plugins, they sucked.
* Hotkey config won’t allow the WIN key as a modifier
* Changing window styles is awkward. I only use a minimal display, some skins didn’t seem to have one
* The mp3 icon in Windows Explorer is kinda lame
* Not a lot of plugins and skins. I went through the plugins in about five minutes.
* Default skin is not my cup of tea

pros:

* Their website design is really nice. I mean, really nice. I like it a lot.
* The UI is snazzy, there are lots of sliding and flashing going on in the right places, it works well, even though I hate the default skin. I changed it and now I feel better about the whole thing.

default skin, hal is not a fan

playlist

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This bears repeating, although I have mentioned it here before. If you have not checked out the game “N”, do yourself a favor and grab it. Here’s a great review I just stumbled across.

gotoAndPlay() Game reviews: N

Download it now

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I shoulda wrote about this when I first heard about it some months ago, but I forgot, and now a /. article has reminded me. Do check out Paint.NET if you are on Windows and have a need for a nice and free graphic editor. It’s also got a red-eye removal tool so would be good for the quick touchups to your photos.

It has some nice features like history and layers, like Photoshop, and the interface is vastly superior to The Gimp. It’s not a replacement for Photoshop by any means, but you can’t beat free. The Gimp is also free, and is more powerful, but if all you need is in Paint.NET I would say use it rather than The Gimp which in my experience isn’t extremely stable on Windows, and it’s awkward interface really puts me off.

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Ok, I saw the Lemon Snickers movie this past Sunday. I don’t know the real title, but that’s suggestive of it. Oh crap, I have to put the title in or nobody will find my blog entry…hold on…wait for it…ahh! Lemony Snicket, that’s the name.

Anyway, what a disappointing movie! I use the word very deliberately. This movie could have been so much more. I like well-made moves, no matter the intended audience (e.g. Pixar movies), so it wasnt’ a case of me not being the right age to appreciate the movie. I liked each and every actor chosen to play a role in this movie; Jim Carey was great, as were the child actors, and the tiny role John Cleese had. The plot was even headed in the right drection, but then it stopped!

This movie was a story of a wonderfully imaginative casting director, screenwriter and set designer, afflicted by a horrible producer. Or maybe the screenwriter died 1/3 through the moviemaking. Hard to tell.

Continue reading to see plot discussion that some may consider spoilers.
Read the rest of this entry »

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I’ve been testing CSPAM for a while now and it’s been working great. Or so I thought. Ahem. Turns out sometime in the past couple of weeks I accidentally disabled comments entirely and didn’t realize it.

Doh!

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The sad state of Jabber

I hear ya Justin, but don’t think it’s quite as bad. I don’t think it’s good, mind you. I think a jabfab (psa’s jabbercon idea) would be a good thing. I think a bigger “lab face” would be a good thing. I think you are correct about the public not caring about that, nor the corporate face.

I would like to see more developers join the Psi project. I won’t speak for Kev, but we’ve discussed this. There is much to do with Psi, and nobody(*) to do the coding.

* By nobody, I don’t mean to slight the contributors we have, which are a great group. I’m talking about core ppl who can crank out the code. We have one, and he’s on leave.

If you want to help move Jabber forward, join the Psi development team. Check the homepage, read the dev section, join the mailing list, browse the forum, submit some code. Or just stick around for the forum, we’ve got a nice little community.

Or learn Erlang, that seems hot right about now. I think with enough momentum ejabberd could replace jabberd as a de facto standard server.

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Oooh, interesting Jabber & Wordpress possibilities arise.

Pixelcort, the PHP library to choose is class.jabber.php.

PixelCort � Jabber Subscription WordPress Plugin

Also see St Pete’s post.

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This is required reading for all Jabber developers and contributors, and to users interested in helping the effort along.

julian/blog - Jabber Vision

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Did something cool with my [Sony Ericsson T610][1] the other day. The little joystick was broken on it, had been for months actually, and I finally got tired of working around it and called [T-Mobile][2]. Turns out they replace handsets for free within the first 12 months. Cool!

So, got the new handset pretty quickly, swapped out SIM cards (I love [GSM][3]!) and viola, done. Wait! No, not done. Most of my contacts were not stored on the SIM card because I had chosen to sync the phone with my Outlook contacts. My phone came with some software called XTNDConnect which seemed to work fine, but my laptop doesn’t have Bluetooth so I had to use IR.

Well, IR is boring and backwards. It’s 2004, hey almost 2005, I must use Bluetooth! Plus the web rumor mill says XTNDConnect is as likely to wipe out your contacts in Outlook as it is to sync them to your phone. So, I enabled Bluetooth on my phone and iPaq and messed with the options. Turns out that you can select multiple contacts and send them via Bluetooth in Windows Mobile 2003. They make it a pain though, there is no “select all” option, so I had to click and drag down through 236 contacts.

Then I found another problem. My phone prompts to add every contact. I had to click “yes” two-hundred and thirty-six times. Ugh. I never found a way to disable that prompting.

Then I remembered that I had downloaded some ringtones and themes and such from [myt610.net][4]. It was a simple matter to push those files from my PC to iPaq to phone. There is a slightly better way, I can grab them via WAP, but I’ve pretty much determined WAP is slow and useless, and at $4.99 a month, while cheap, makes no sense for that added expense.

[1]: http://www.sonyericsson.com/t610/
[2]: http://www.tmobile.com
[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM
[4]: http://www.myt610.net/

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