Songbird 1.0 Finally Released!

After years and years of beta testing and many drastic roadmap changes, the day has finally arrived.

Songbird 1.0 has officially been released.

It features the advanced GStreamer playback backend, the same used in Rhythmbox and Banshee. Addon-compliant and trouble free
New Features:
* Drastically Faster Search: Searching in Songbird is now anywhere from 10x faster for small libraries to 1000x for large ones.
* Reduced RAM Usage: There’s a 70% reduction in RAM usage when importing and using large (100,000 track) libraries.
* Faster Media Importing: Importing media into Songbird is now 2-4x faster.
* Reduced Startup Times: Large library users (10,000 tracks or more) will notice that Songbird startup times are now twice as fast.
* Efficient Scrolling: Scrolling through your library now uses half the amount of CPU.
* Snappier Sorting: Sorting your library is now 3-4x faster, which adds up to significantly smoother browsing when scrolling and filtering.
* Optimized DB Size: We’ve optimized the database in Songbird and reduced its size by, on average, 60%. This leads to a variety of performance improvements throughout the application.
* Fewer Crashers: We’ve worked hard to identify and fix 11 of the most common crashes in Songbird.
Did I mention last.fm support?

Download it here!
Download Songbird 1.0!

Pownce: Shut Down December 15!

Ladies and Gentleman,

I have very sad news… Pownce is being shut down.

Yes, you heard it. One hour ago, I received an email from my beloved Pownce admins.

We are sad to announce that Pownce is shutting down on December 15,
2008. As of today, Pownce will no longer be accepting new users or new
pro accounts.

To help with your transition, we have built an export tool so you can
save your content. You can find the export tool at Settings > Export.
Please export your content by December 15, 2008, as the site will not
be accessible after this date.

Please visit our new home to find out more:
http://www.sixapart.com/pownce

Our thanks go out to everyone who contributed to the Pownce community,

The Pownce Crew

Chances are, this news will either have you screaming at the top of your lungs or making you shake your head saying “Wah”?

And to the Web 2.0 world/micro-blogosphere, shame on you.

Shame.

This is a wonderful internet startup that was built on a framework framework and has more features than you can shake a stick at, yet still you use Twitter.

Pownce is being Shut Down!

Ladies and Gentleman,

I have very sad news… Pownce is being shut down.

Yes, you heard it. One hour ago, I received an email from my beloved Pownce admins.

We are sad to announce that Pownce is shutting down on December 15,
2008. As of today, Pownce will no longer be accepting new users or new
pro accounts.

To help with your transition, we have built an export tool so you can
save your content. You can find the export tool at Settings > Export.
Please export your content by December 15, 2008, as the site will not
be accessible after this date.

Please visit our new home to find out more:
http://www.sixapart.com/pownce

Our thanks go out to everyone who contributed to the Pownce community,

The Pownce Crew

Chances are, this news will either have you screaming at the top of your lungs or making you shake your head saying “Wah”?

And to the Web 2.0 world/micro-blogosphere, shame on you.

Shame.

This is a wonderful internet startup that was built on a framework framework and has more features than you can shake a stick at, yet still you use Twitter.

Microsoft Office 2007 Running in Linux via WINE

Yes, I said it. I have gotten Microsoft Office 2007 (ANY EDITION) to run successfully and thoroughly in WINE within Linux. IT CAN BE DONE!!!!!

And, shockingly, it’s very very easy.

Care to know how? It’s surprisingly simple…

Running MS Office 2007 in Linux via WINE:

Install Wine:

Wine 1.1.9 is required. It is currently in a development release. If you don’t have it already, here’s a quick guide.

wget -q http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/387EE263.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

sudo wget http://wine.budgetdedicated.com/apt/sources.list.d/intrepid.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winehq.list

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install wine

Install winetricks:

Winetricks is a small sh script which allows you to install a large variety of library and support files, and is available here. To download directly, type the following command:

wget http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks

chmod +x ./winetricks

Use winetricks:

This will setup all neccesary libraries that Office will need to run.

./winetricks gdiplus riched20 riched30 msxml3 msxml4 msxml6 corefonts tahoma vb6run vcrun6 msi2

Download Office

If you read this post, you’ll see some wonderful resources for downloading Office 2007 (just in case you can’t  find your cd).

wget -c http://download.microsoft.com/download/7/c/4/7c49b09b-d6f9-431d-9738-4c00aff11fc7/Enterprise.exe

Install Office

wine ./Enterprise.exe

Enjoy!

This install worked absolutley perfectly for me! Please feel free to comment if this worked for you, if you have any questions or comments, or if you need any help.

Lunascape: Browser Mashup

What happens when you take hundreds of thousands of manhours of coding from different applications (and competing ones at that) and mash them all up together?

Actually, as a developer’s tool, this seems like a wonderful idea. I think that the rending of a page should be separate from the browser itself. I always dreamed of a day when I could run Webkit within Firefox…
Ehh, I suppose this is the next best thing.

So, here’s the rundown so far:

• Looks promising,  I’ll admit. Nothing like Google Chrome-promising, but still, promising nonetheless.
• Needs some severe polishing. Then again, this is a very early alpha release. This is to be expected. I bet they would have waited longer if Google didn’t release Chrome so suddenly and so far in development. They’d look like copycats.
• Keep up the good work, guys. Thanks for making life easier for us web developers. Never again shall I have to open up a website within three different browsers to test their various rendering engines. Now I can just test with one!
• I hope that one day this will have more use than just for testing.

Also, HINT: If you are going to make something that’s  quite this… versatile… Why scope it out to only Windows users?

*cough* c r o s s p l a t f o r m *cough*

Yes, I said it. Please consider making this cross platform. It just makes sense; the world would be a better place for all of us.

Technorati Tags: Lunascape, Browser, Web, Web2.0, Web 2.0, Browser Wars, Internet, Software

Microsoft Office 2007 Free Download

Yes, you heard it. Microsoft Office is offered a free download by Microsoft! Who knew!?
Of course, simple because it is a download does not mean that it is a full working copy… at least not after 30 days
Anyway, here’s some links for you.  I hope you find them as innately useful as I have.

Office 2007 Direct Download Links

• Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007
• Microsoft Office Professional 2007
• Microsoft Office Small Business 2007
• Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007
• Microsoft Office Standard 2007
• Microsoft Office Accounting Professional 2007
• Microsoft Office Groove 2007
• Microsoft Office OneNote 2007
• Microsoft Office Publisher 2007
• Microsoft Office Visio Professional 2007

I certainly hope that these installers will work in Wine. 11 minutes left… I’m keeping my fingers crossed. Supposedly it should.

UPDATE: OneNote’s Installer freezes. Apparently. Maybe I’m just not patient enough.
UPDATE: SUCCESS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ASUS Eee PC: Netbook on-the-go.

OK, so I must take back what I said in this post, regarding the Acer Aspire One. It looks great, but I have a new favorite. Why, you ask? Namely size. For about a year and a half now, the Acer Eee PC has been available worldwide, and changed the world of mobile computing as we know it forever. The newer 10″ laptop (as opposed to an overly-small 7″), can sport a standard SATA hard disk in place of the small and over-priced SSD drives.

What I’ve noticed so far:

The screen is quite usable at 10 inches. Very, very small and space-saving, but you can still get alot done. Web browsing is quite a joy with such a small package.
The left-shift key is half the size of a standard key… which isn’t that bad, except that the usual half of the key (the part I always press), is mapped to the up key, which is really annoying.
Very high marks on the multi-touch touchpad. Perfect addition.
The buttons that accompany said touchpad are hard to press, but this encourages the use of the multi-touch features. Wonderful idea.
Overall design is very sleek and almost sexy.
Surprisingly sturdy chasis.

So, overall, I’m very pleased with my new laptop, now sporting Ubuntu. I recommend it to anyone on the go.

Twitter vs. Pownce

I am a heavy user of the micro-blogging site Twitter. When I first discovered it, I didn’t see any reason for using it at all, but then I realized how much of a time-waster it could be. And, of course, me being the college student that I am, decided to give it a shot. I liked it. I liked it alot. It allowed me to read all of the latest and greatest about absolutely nothing at all.
How neat.
And then I realized how much time I was wasting. I could be using that time to actually do something remotely productive.
So anyway, here’s the rundown. Pownce is a wonderful alternative to Twitter.

• It’s fast, its much cleaner, it has less people ranting about things that noone cares about.
• It has significantly less downtime than Twitter.
• It has a great number of features Twitter does not (including File Uploads)
• Its designed significantly better.

So what’s the deal here? I don’t seem to understand why people like Twitter so much. Pownce is better is essentially what I’m trying to say. I see no benefit to Twitter. At all.

buckpost @ Twitterrati makes a good point here: What’s New with Pownce?

Act Utilitarianism: Part II

If one was to ask a room full of people about advice in a certain situation, they would receive a large number of different answers. Very rarely would they gather a unanimous set of solutions to the problem at hand. What is it that causes these differences in the answers of those questioned?
The obvious differences in background, culture, and experience result in the principal
differences in ethical theory in each person. Every participant would decide to utilize their own ethical theory in order to come to their certain conclusion. All other factors involved, such as biasness, either directly or indirectly effect course of action that would be decided within the ethical theory chosen. For example, two people could agree with each other upon what is right or wrong, but another person choose to ignore the fact that something is deemed wrong to do, and will partake in an activity that both parties knows is forbidden.
The theory of ethics with which I find myself utilizing most often in my everyday life is act
utilitarianism. Basically, on a decision?to?decision basis, if the good outweighs the bad, then any act is generally justifiable. Of course, the value that each underlying variable holds in a given situation varies immensely, and is based upon an innumerable set of factors, so no definitive set of rules can be established as an all?in?all way of justifying means (this is called rule utilitarianism). Therefore, each decision must be thought out in advance in order to be ethically justifiable.

Let’s take, for example, the first of the given scenarios. Here is the basic premise of the
situation:

A system administrator, Nick Klaws, catches a student, Joe Blow, doing some “unorthodox” things with his account. After investigating the usage, Nick suspends Joe’s account. Joe protests vehemently. As it turns out, the “unorthodox” activity that Joe Blow has been partaking in was the accounting being done for a private company

Personally, I do not see the problem here in any way. The bad most certainly does not outweigh the good here. Joe can conveniently do work for his company using university recourses upon occasion. He does pay a great deal for their use, so I see no reason for him not being able to use them for any legitimate purpose that he sees fit. Nick Klaws states:

I found that he was doing accounting for a private company. I deleted the files and suspended his account. The computers at school are school resources and are supposed to be used only for classes. There is no law against what I did. It is my job to maintain computer operation at the school and make sure school resources are available for everyone for legitimate purposes.

I disagree with Nick Klaws’s method of action, and believe that, while he did find the infringing
evidence legitimately, I do not see the reason for this to be infringing in any way.
In order to resolve this issue, Joe’s account should be restored and records of the incident removed permanently. What he was doing was not only legitimate, but it was honest and wholesome. There is no law against it either; on the contrary, what he was doing benefits all but the competing companies of course. Furthermore, the system administrator was searching for signs of cheating, not this. He had no business going through Joe’s personal files in the first place.
Hindering Joe’s professional development is clearly against the code of ethics. According to the
IEEE standards of ethics (section 10), the best course of action is clearly the one given:

“We agree…to assist colleagues and coworkers in their professional development and to support them in following this code of ethics”

To look on the other side of things, the IEEE Code of ethics (Section 2) also states:

“We agree…to avoid real or perceived conflicts of interest whenever possible, and to disclose them to affected parties when they do exist.”

Joe did go outside of a set standard that is clearly defined within the rules and regulations of the school, and therefore the actions taken could be deemed appropriate. This is certainly a conflict of interest. I do believe that such rules should not be in place in the first place. No one is being hurt in this situation.
A good, ethical compromise would be for the school to formally request Joe to stop, while not suspending his account.  This allows for the following of both ethic code statements as well as no rule
changes.

2008 Election: Finally Over