Ceasing qualities

It has been ages since Sonique and it's forums went down, currently accessible only in Gcache. As a regular forum poster and religious Sonique user it was disappointing to see this unique player never get out of it's 2.0 Alpha stages. This version was the last development of the player, way ahead in terms of it's interface eye-candy compared to it's direct competitor Winamp. Even today some of Soniques's visual plugins are still unique compared to Winamp's offerings. Admittedly Winamp has always been more extensible and efficient. After the original Sonique team got kicked out including Tony Million (straight after the Lycos merger) and replaced by an internal team, Sonique went down the drain. This is when i fell back to Winamp, my previously hated (and now loved) media player. Even the official website has been shut down without any official announcements. Now switch to 2006:

• Sonique gone...
• Winamp's original core team (including Justin Frankel) are now gone, some time after the AOL/Nullsoft merger
• Winamp3 was developed without the original team's involvement (what a great release that was, Not). Sometimes i think the only reason they bothered with it was to have MP3 in the name (Winamp3)
• Have no fear, Justin rightfully comes back in and finishes off Winamp 5, his efforts can be clearly seen across the versions he developed and worked on
• As of right now Winamp5 is not being developed by the original team who are no longer on the project and Justin is out of the game once again
• Newer revisions of Winamp5 seem to be already deviating from the usual Nullsoft way (now there's more crashes, glitches and options/addons that nobody wants included)

Still Winamp5 remains the media player of choice for me and many many others out there.

Sanders lives!

Ever had that situation where you are just driving along in a car and something interesting comes along? Certainly not an frequent situation. This is where those phone cameras come in very handy . . .

Sanders!

Opera 9 Tech Preview #2

What can I say, Opera just keeps improving itself. It's the best browser around that makes heavy, frequent and intermittent web surfing much easier to deal with... My picks from the latest release (still not officially out of testing) would have to be:

• Updated about:config - great way to customise those browser internals
• Highlighted page search - This has been long time coming, just like in FireFox every search within the current page will be highlighted at once, for better search overview.
• Integrated BitTorrent client - sticking with uTorrent for now
• Tab hover page previews - might come in handy, although it takes a while to load, it's often just faster clicking on the tab and seeing the actual page. Probably useful as the number of tabs increases.
• Per site customisations - turn off that popup blocker for a site where you want popups ;)
• AJAX based Widgets - kindof don't see much of a point in these as being a part of a web browser so far since I use Y'z Dock. It certainly seems to be a step closer to Opera's missing Extension like interface that FireFox already has.
• RSS Aggregator and archiver - yes I know it's not new in this version but I use it rather extensively. Best thing about it is it's house keeping of previous articles, basically if you delete one article from an RSS feed it won't show up there again when the RSS feed updates. And also all of the RSS items ever received are kept there until deletion (the archiving system).
• Session saving - Continue your browsing from where you left off. Crash proof feature that's been around for a long time.
• Font rendering - still not good enough when pages are zoomed in/out. It's probably due to it's page rendering system, which seems to cause 2D acceleration troubles on my Nvidia 6600GT Graphics Card. Basically I have to reload the display settings by for example changing to another resolution and switching back, while Opera is still open

What is surprising to me is the fact that Opera installer (for Windows at least) is still under 4MB in size. Even It's HTML rendering engine performs far better than Firefox and IE on the Acid2 test. Still this does not stop Blogger post editor to become "less functional" when opened within Opera, even with browser identification spoofing set to Mozilla or IE (browser what you say? Press F12 within Opera, it's the last 3 options).

No I didn't like IE 7...

Solaris 9+ and Nohup

How to deattach a long and already running process from it's shell (or parent process in general) so that it can be left running on the system intact, even if the user who triggered the process logs out? Nohup does it (assuming it's the right version):

 $ nohup -a -F -p [PID] 

These nohup(1) extensions seem to be only available on Sun Solaris 9 and up.

Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla 10 July 1856 - 7 January 1943. The importance of this man is often overlooked by many of us. Scientific and Engineering ideas pioneered by Tesla have changed the course of technological development and have indeed shaped the world as we see it today. It is unfortunate to see that Tesla's work progress has been put back by numerous manifestations of reality. His ideas have all emerged from his endless search to change the world for the better. A pioneering mind of his nature comes along once in a long time.

Futurama - Godfellas

~19:00 Min into the episode:

God: Earth? Which way is that...? --silence--

--bender looks around--

Bender B. R.: I don't know...

Sengor's General Tool Set

Looking at how much time I spend looking for useful software utilities, here is an essential list, all of them are freely available on the internet:

(In no particular order or category)

• AVG Free
• Great free antivirus software, thanks Jones
• Sonique
• Formerly my favourite audio player, development of it these days is next to none
• GX::Transcoder
• Convert those audio files to and from multiple formats
• EAC - Exact Audio Copy
• Accurate and quality focused free CD -> MP3 ripper
• PowerToys for Win XP
• Tweak UI & Enhanced Alt+Tab & ClearType Tuner & Image Resizer & Virtual Desktop Manager are the most useful ones
• SciTE
• Syntax aware Code/Text editor with ability to expand/collapse code sections, very useful for large code viewing
• Dev C++
• C/C++ IDE for Windows platform
• WinAMP
• Still with classic skin, still the best media player out there ;)
• PeerGuardian
• Block/Filter out internet traffic from preselected IP address ranges, thanks Jones
• The GIMP
• Free photo editor/creator like Photoshop. Wind32 and Linux
• WinRAR
• best file archiver out there, light and fast, opens many formats
• 3D Mark
• Test out that Gfx Card, yes I know it's now called Futuremark - Hey I'm old fashioned!
• BurnAtOnce
• Burn those ISO images
• OneWorld Time
• What time is it in --insert place-- ?
• PowerOff
• Turn that PC off when you want and how you want, thanks Jones for the tip
• GameArena COGS
• Keep track of all of those local gaming servers for all of your games, GA account required
• WordWeb
• Uhh Ohh what does this and that fancy word mean? Free disctionary, I wish they had more internet jargon in there
• Windows Uptime
• How long did your Windows PC manage to stay up for so far?
• RefreshForce
• Fix all of those games/[resolutions] that run in low refresh rates
• SuperScan & Nmap
• See what TCP/IP ports are open on a remote computer
• Y'z Dock
• Mac OS Like docking bar for Windows, attractive eye candy, no official page since development ceased
• TCPview
• kindof like netstat but in GUI and real time
• Process Explorer
• See ALL processes that Windows is running, Task Manager hides some
• Riva Tuner
• Tweaker for nVidia based video cards
• Resource Hacker
• See what those Win32 binaries contain, Pictures, cursors, resources, classes...
• WinSCP
• The best SCP/SFTP client out there
• TightVNC
• Cross platform remote graphcal computer access, great for slow links, session resuming and situations where you don't have admin access to the remote box
• FreeNX
• I blogged about this a while ago. Similar to VNC but faster
• PuTTY
• SSH/Tenet/RAW client, for all of the remote access needs
• Cygwin
• unix shell for windows along with all of the usefull GNU tools, best way to get X11 working under Windows
• gVim
• advanced text editor, only for the brave!
• Real Alternative
• aka Media Player Classic with Plugins
• VLC Media Player
• ... and also preview/stream those corrupt/incomplete videos
• Net Transport
• download manager, even downloads streams into a file, thanks Jones
• uTorrent
• Light and small BitTorrent client with all the features you might need
• WinRipper
• Extract various multimedia segments from any file. Useful for extracting content from game files
• GkrellM
• System statistics monitoring panel, one of my long time favourites. Comes both in Unix and Win32 ports
• CPU-z
• Detailed info on CPU, M/B and RAM for PCs, can produce great summaries of a PC config.
• BartPE
• Make a bootable Windows XP based CD. There's lots of plugins for it available out there. Great for troubleshooting Windows issues (viruses, disks, spyware...)
• Knoppix
• Best live Linux CD/DVD out there. Useful feature is booting Memtest86 for troubleshooting memory related problems.
• Slackware
• Not a single tool, but a great selection of useful tools atop of a great build of Linux ketrnels (Yes that does constitute an OS).

That's enough for now, I'll probably update this list at a later stage...

Version: 1.4

Flash and Web Design

This is what it is all about, effective ideas with simplicity in mind: ertdfgcvb.ch idea.hr

Web Browsers Update

Opera 8.51 and FireFox 1.5 were released almost on the same day. Coincidence? Who knows . . . Anyway seems like FireFox has finally sped up their GUI which got annoyingly slow in previous versions (especially as the number of tags opened increased while browsing). My recommendation: Opera for everyday browsing and FireFox for all the tech/web development tasks.

Bye, Bye Optus Game Servers . . .

. . . it's been a long time and finally on December 1st 2005 Optus has officially closed down all of their gaming servers. :( Local RtCW: ET Alternatives:

• Internode (aka Intern00b)
• GameArena

Update: rtcw-4.games.internode.on.net:27960 seems to be gaining popularity, about time. :)

FreeNX

Just discovered FreeNX (and here) and it became an instant favourite of mine. NX comes in various distributions and is VNC like. However what surprised me is the speed at which graphical logins are forwarded to the client with so little network overhead. Now I can finally run a virtual desktop from my Slackware machine and view it within any windows box on the LAN with much faster speeds than VNC or X11 forwarding. Further more the applications feel like being ran locally rathen than remotely, even copy-pasting works to/from windows desktop to Linux desktop with no extra effort. Finally feels like I'm back on the Linux machine locally. :) Winamp and Eterm side by side on the same monitor. Time to redesign my Linux desktop...! More info over at freenx.berlios.de & www.nomachine.com Grab the Slackware package over from linuxpackages.net

WH 40K: Winter Assault

Finally got my hands on the new expansion pack for DoW. After few hours of game play and few levels past me I can certainly say it's a definitive improvement to the original game. Levels aren't as linear as previously, allowing the player to collaborate with multiple teams within the same match. Game difficulty has also been improved, directly affecting a large time portion of my weekend. Still more levels remain to be conquered ... Update: Short, way too short...

Opera is free

Yes no more ads. Grab it here, it's free and it's packed with features! Did I mention it's light, fast & secure ?

Been browsing with it for years but only recently has it become my default browser. Still have FireFox on the side for all the useful plugins & web development (Internet Explorer is well hidden these days ;) ). My only complaint is the way fonts are rendered which is sometimes buggy when resizing text and does not look as good as native font smoothing of the OS on LCD monitors.

Max Power

That's it, I finally did it. All awards and all skills to the maximum!

The real Sander

A portrait by / MegA /

Spud

Spud is (or was) a web server running on Linux and 5 potatoes, serving the Internet at 0.2 hits/second! I've always seen an integration of biology and digital electronics coming, but definitely not in this shape & form. Blame my (lack of) imagination...

Ibrahim Ferrer (1927 - 2005)

Sad news of Ibrahim Ferrer passing away have caught my attention on news earlier today. Ibrahim was one of the founders of Buena Vista Social Club from Cuba and will be remembered by many as one of the major musical influences in the '90s.