Second year and a new Spring Semester begin from today. best part is that friday’s are off 🙂

back to blogpatrol 🙂 their features are too good !!!!!

any who started on my own webapge/posting software thing. written in php with mysql as the db. Will post later when post worthy.

a small and maybe even useless update, moved back to onestat for statistics since blogpatrol has gone down once again. They have been out for a couple of days now. One stat does offer the same things and is way more reliable. I may have to post an updated script everytime i modify the html, but i think its worth it. so hopefully i stick with onestat for a very very long time

Winamp 5 Review

The most highly anticipated winamp 5 is finally out. After the major let down of version 3, the guys at winamp decided to take the fibonacci route, which meant that the next version would include the best of both worlds (2+ 3). After downloading it the first day it came out, and playing with it for a while it does meet up to the expetations. It combines with ease the stability of the winamp 2 core engine and the skinnabilibity of winamp 3. This long wait between updates has lead to some new competition from iTunes and other major players.

Installation was a breeze and even if you dont take the “customized” installation it is very easy to assign or take back file associations, incase you like to play certain files with a different player. I prefer that

people take the customized installation since this gives you the option of not adding all those painful AOL icons.

Start up time for the program is lightning fast which was one of the trademarks of the older versions. The default skin is the new blue look which kind of looks like music match, which is very easy to get used to. But I prefer the old school look and that is also their recommendation for slower computers.

First off we start with the good features:-

One of its main functions is playing music, and this it does very well. Users should have no trouble organizing

their music and tweaking the equalizer to achieve the perfect sound for your system. Like before it also comes pre

loaded with a number of presets.

With winamp 3 many people couldnt use their old plugins which was a big let down, but winamp 5 not only allows you

to use all your winamp 2 plugins, you can also use the old skins with no issues whatsoever. This gives users a huge

number of plugins, visualizations that can be used.

The video player can handle a plethora of formats, but in most cases users would stick to their default players as

far as video is concerned.

Here are some of the new features:-

The “more info” which gets biographical information of the artist and also an option to buy cd’s online.

A better media library, which organizes all your media ( audio and video ), and has sub categories like “most-played”, “top rated” etc. The “rescan files” and “remove duplicate files.” options really stand out.

Now come some of the things which i found were not that great:-

Although it does support AAC files it doesnt play back songs that are recorded with Itunes or Nero.

Also if you want mp3 encoding and full speed burning you have to upgrade to the pro version which will set you back $14.95, this is an option that is available in iTunes for free!!

The video player is good, but doesnt pack enough control features like color adjustment etc.

Despite some minor setbacks, winamp 5 is a real breakthrough and without a doubt races ahead of winamp 3. This time it really does whip the llama’s ass !!

You can get your copy from winamp.com

next major update will be about winamp 5. i have been playing with it for a few fays and have been very impressed, but more in next major entry.

Wow it has been a while since I have updated. Also been more than a year since i started to blog and this year I think i deciced to make this a vehicle for my opinion on all things technology. I started off with some reviews and tips (just one but what the heck). But this semester was terrible, that I hardly updated. But now that winter is here I will update more stuff, and will keep the general direction of a tech based blog.

hmm anything else, FINALS OVER ON THe 16th wohooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Gary Kasparov won game 3 in the Kasparov vs. X3d Fritz chess match pitting man vs humans. The score now is 1.5 each and Gary had to win yesterdays match in order to move on. The final match is on Tuesday, wohoo!!!!

On another note, I am going to talk about protonic.com . I joined this place in march and since then have helped over 400 people and have also posted various times about the volunteer work that I do. For those geeks out there who would like to join in on the action you can head on over to protonic.com and click on become a tech. Good luck 🙂

Simpsons rule

Yesterday day Apple released iTunes, its highly acclaimed application for managing/playing mp3’s and also buying legal mp3’s from their online store. I too downloaded it the very first day and here is my take, after playing with it yesterday and a little bit in the morning when I booted the laptop:-

The good:-

The installation was painless and with a simple reboot of the computer I was ready to go. First impression was the looks, it wins in that department hands down, amazing and at the same time simple enough for someone to maneuver their way through it. It also looked just like the iTune on Mac right down to the little check marks next to the songs , very nice. A little messing with the equalizer settings and the sound was perfect. Recording songs was also very simple, and the aac format( the default ripping format) was surprisingly very good though I didn’t see any difference between audio quality or file size for that matter between mp3’s or wma’s. It takes up hardly any hard disk space, about 7 mb which is quite appealing.

The bad:-

Now for the downside, I found it to be a very intrusive and pushy application. During the install it doesn’t prompt you that it will add itself and quick time tasks to the start up folder and also makes itself the default cd player. Even the player options there is no way to turn it off and I had to remove them from the start up folder using RegCleaner. Being a small application it took up a lot of ram and played songs choppy even though my machine is quite powerful with a 1.6 GHz processor and 256mb of ram and when you would close the application it would still keep ipod services and gearsec services running in the background. Only way to get rid of them was to use the 3 finger salute and kill them individually. It also makes it self the default player for various audio files and default player for the cd’s everytime you started the application , a major pet peeve for me.

Verdict:-

A lot of work is needed in the port, especially the memory bugs and it assuming default player every time you start it up. Hopefully it should be patched up soon. CD and file associations broke the deal for me and I uninstalled it right before making this entry. I would definitely stick with music match or windows media player for ripping and burning cd’s until any radical changes are made to iTunes.For people having issues with iTunes, you guys should visit the discussion board at apple’s website and hopefully you can find a solution to your problem.

mozilla seems to be getting more kick ass with each update….and the new version is finally out and can be downloaded from here http://www.mozilla.org . It is packed with more features and more compatibility with websites !!!!!

i havent used IE (except for windows updates) since the whole thing about security issues with it, and I dont think ill be going back to IE for sure!!!! 🙂

Today when I clicked on the little windows media player icon in the quick launch bar this message popped up in my face “The file wmp.dll has a version number of 9.0.0.2980 where 9.0.0.3008 was expected.

Windows Media Player is not installed properly and must be reinstalled. Do you want to install the Player from the Microsoft Web site? ”

Solution:-

The deal here is click on no, do not re-install because you will end up with the problem all over again. Goto this Microsoft link and download that little package file over

there . This will update your windows media player to version 9.0.0.3014 and also cure that problem.