TechProsaic

Hamachi : Stay Connected
Hamachi is a zero-configuration virtual private networking (VPN) application.

In other words Hamachi is a program that allows you to arrange multiple computers into their own secure network just as if they were connected by a physical network cable.

Reminds me of the old Nullsoft WASTE thing. So this is for creating a VPN ‘twixt friends for sharing files or running little private gaming networks. Neat stuff. Slick GUI, runs as a Windows service. I haven’t tried it out yet but I’m very intrigued.

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As seen on JDEV today, Peter has forwarded a discussion that happened on the microformats.org mailing list to the Jabber community. Apparently this dude in the MF camp heard that the Adium project was working on standardizing an IM chat log format that *gasp* didn’t use microformats! (Melodrama mine.) Of course in the Jabber world we would do it in XML and just define a common set of terms and publish it as a JEP. Happens all the time.

I’m sorry, I don’t get where these MF guys are going. It seems to me that they are trying to make the web more semantic. Fine and good. Took me a while to grok and then find a concrete example. Here’s a draft spec for “adr” or physical address information.

<div class="adr">
 <div class="street-address">665 3rd St.</div>
 <div class="extended-address">Suite 207</div>
 <span class="locality">San Francisco</span>,
 <span class="region">CA</span>
 <span class="postal-code">94107</span>
 <div class="country-name">U.S.A.</div>
</div>

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this just a superfluous layer of XHTML on top of XML? What they have done is set up a straw man argument–a world in which XML does not exist–and declared there is a problem that they must solve by “building upon existing and widely adopted standards“.

Some other choice marketing-speak used on the site:

Designed for humans first and machines second

highly correlated with semantic XHTML

[using principles of] modularity / embeddability

All of these things perfectly describe XML. They go on to say what Microformats are not, and essentially you can translate the statements as “not XML”. So which is it guys?

Let me provide an equivalent XML (XMPP actually) example:

    <ADR>
      <WORK/>
      <EXTADD>Suite 600</EXTADD>
      <STREET>1899 Wynkoop Street</STREET>
      <LOCALITY>Denver</LOCALITY>
      <REGION>CO</REGION>
      <PCODE>80202</PCODE>
      <CTRY>USA</CTRY>
    </ADR>

Ok. Does the above semantically describe a physical address? Is it easily parseable by both humans and machines? Is it a simple? Built on existing standard? An open way to think about data? It’s even less to type!

You just gotta love standards. There are so freakin’ many to choose from!

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So, Winamp just decided to stop working for me lately. Long stalls at startup, random crashes and more. I still care a lot for you Winamp, and we’ve known each other a long long time, but I think we need to start seeing other people.

I’ve actually been using Foobar2000

for a while now. But it’s been sort of a special-purpose tool rather than a media player. I found some useful live show tagging utilities in it, as well as an AAC encoding method which I liked.

Well, I decided to give FB2K some more time. It is very configurable, and I like that. OTOH, it’s probably one of the most confusing applications I’ve ever used; mostly due to that flexibility. It has support for plugins, which they call “components”. They have a strange way of manipulating the appearance. The screenshot here shows something that took me probably a couple of hours to figure out. But sometimes that is ok. After all, I am a software junkie. This certainly gives me my fix!

Winamp is all about the flash. Foobar2000 is more of a minimalist approach. And it’s made for power users. What does that remind you of? That’s right, it’s very similar to the goals of the Psi project of which I am a part. So, with that in mind, I think I’m going to keep messing around with FB2k and see what all it can do.

(P.S. Try telnet://home.halr9000.com:3333 for fun.)

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I like this one!

Windows Mobile Team Blog : WM Geek Fun (PM+SDE/T match wits with a smart SDE)

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