collapsable link list thanks to shey

Oh yeah, and black friday is around the corner

Cake is delicios !!! But it would be interesting to see what Zend can come up with ==> http://zend.com/collaboration/

I also have 2 more wordpress.com invites to giveaway, so you know what to do.

Who will buy AOL ???? Microsoft, Google, Yahoo ,Comcast or I ;) ????

AOL up for sale

For the past couple of years I have been using Crimson Editor to do most of my php coding ( and it does a fine job), but recently I have felt the need for more features such as auto completion, intellisense etc........ What are some other ( preferably freeware) editors out there that other php coders prefer ?

Google Reader is terrible, its confusing to use, the UI is terrible. It took forever to load my blogs from the OPML file and the feed lists tend to disappear. This one from google has a lot of problems.

What a waste !!!!

Wordpress.com Invite

Most of us know about FREE blog hosting provided by wordpress.com . I was lucky enough to get an invite today . So far the interface is amazing and is really simple to use.

Now I also happen to have 1 invite to give away. The person to get is the one who leaves the best comment at to what they would do with their wordpress.com blog :)

UPDATE: I will be emailing the lucky winner the invite tomorrow.

Post Rita pics , thankfully nothing major happened and right now we are having beautiful weather.











Finally some sunshine

Since PHP and Security have been in the limelight these past couple of days, here is an excellent little flash tutorial that gives you hands on experience with some common security lapses that can occur when coding.

GNU Prolog is driving me nuts !!!! They need more tutorials

UPDATE: A good tutorial http://cui.unige.ch/DI/cours/1804/GNU%20Prolog%20manual.html

i need to post more

In other news I have moved all my pictures from textamerica to flickr.

Although I have yet to have that trouble here, but it is nice to see blogger implement word verification for comments. I have had this problem at my f2o site , but have curbed it with comment moderation.

Lets see what other features are going to be packed in.

Wow, some radical changes are being proposed for PHP 6.0, some of which are

Remove register_globals completely
Remove magic_quotes_*
Remove safe_mode
Remove some stuff that has been marked deprecated since PHP 3/4
Remove various function aliases

One thing is for sure, this means people will have to change their code radically in order for it to work on php 6.0 .....

Should be interesting to see how things shape up

http://shiflett.org/archive/135

I just finished redesigning my f2o site and one the "new" things that I wanted to add was AJAX. Since for my site the only place that it seemed obvious was the forms . After some searching here is a nice tutorial that shows you how to mix php and ajax and use it to validate forms: http://particletree.com/features/smart-validation-with-ajax

I am definitely impressed with MSN maps on first use.

First thing that comes across is the load speed, it definitely kicks google out of the water, even though im pretty sure their servers must be loaded since they just launched. Another aspect that stands out is the smooth scrolling, another +1 for virtual earth.

They have also included some features such as "locate me":- ( cant say much since both google and microsoft cant find my house and simply give me the map of houston ), "scratch pad":- which remembers all the places you searched for and also keeps track of where you last left off using cookies.

MSN maps is brilliant, though I dont see myself completely switching to either service I will surely be using them both side by side while comparing the results.

As most of us know msn's virtual earth will be releasing tomorrow. Thanks to the google cache you can have a look at the web page here

After coding in C and C++ for such a long time , it really takes some effort to keep in mind that there is a quite a big difference as how strings are evaluated in languages such as PHP or javascript when enclosed in double quotes as compared to single quotes. Proper use can definitely help in performance wise.

I think its safe to say the general rule of thumb when it comes to deciding when to use what is use single quotes when outputting plain strings and html with no variables since the PHP parser wont have to look for variable, and use double quotes when there are variables, special characters, symbols .

Here is a nice PHP benchmarking site http://www.blueshoes.org/phpBench.php

Something that would be cool is to have the complete map of the USA ( google map) with major highway intersection cams. Basically all the cams on one map.

I so hope they dont screw up the transformers like how they do with everything else

With the Google Maps API release, I definitely wanted to play around with it and come up with something fun. First thing that came to mind was to show the various highway cameras on the maps and in those small boxes show a screenshot of the current conditions. I now present to you Houston Traffican Cams powered by the Google Maps API which can be found here http://kashif.f2o.org/gHoustonTraffic.html . The maps shows about 10 popular intersections with little markers. Click on the little markers to show a little camera shot .

These are the intersections that it is currently showing ( If you would like to see more, leave me a comment :) ):-

I-10 at Heights.

I-10 at TC Jester.

I-610 West Loop at Bellaire Blvd.

I-610 West Loop at Beechnut

I-45 at Cross Timbers.

I-45 at Tidwell .

I-45 at Little York.

59 at Hillcroft.

59 at Weslayan.

59 at Shepherd

59 at Beechnut.

Please let me know if there are any improvement that I can make to it. If there are other intersections that you would like to see you can visit the Houston Transtar and drop me a line at kashif-khan at excite dot com.

Excellent little tip to use your gmail account as an organizer

http://www.tipmonkies.com/2005/05/12/use-gmail-as-a-personal-organizer/

After a simple little test, seems like yahoo maps have the most up to date information. They were able to locate my place while the other services like google, a9 didnt even know that it existed. +1 Yahoo

Is anyone actually surprised that yahoo released its maps api soon after google ??? http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000136.html

Anywho, this will surely lead to some amazing applications using the power of AJAX

Finally !!!

An excellent guide for PHP programmers who wish to make their code more secure

http://phpsec.org/projects/guide/

Some of the most powerful functions implemented in PHP are those involving regular expressions. They make common procedures like file parsing, string extraction etc really quick and easy. But actually learning to use them successfully is not that easy. Here are a couple of my favorite links that do an excellent job of going over regular expressions

http://www.phpfreaks.com/tutorials/52/0.php
PHP Freaks

The new msn maps looks awesome, screenshots available here http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/050523-125208

* Satellite images with 45-degree-angle views of buildings and neighborhoods

* Satellite images with street map overlays

* Ability to add local data layers, such as showing local businesses or restaurants

From the screenshots the image quality is definitely awesome. Hopefully they have updated their maps, since google maps still cannot locate my house. Impressive stuff !!

Its good to be back to a zippier blogger :)

As for other news, the semester is over and I have been busy adding features to my blog at f2o.org . I just recently added a rss feed for the sucker and am distributing it using feedburner, so lets see how that turns out.

Oh yes, the Sony Playstation looks awesome

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000620043567/

Just two more weeks !!!!

Go rockets !!!!!!

A nice little article to implement captcha using php on your website - > Image based verification tutorial

Next semester i am taking a class that definitely sounds so cool ... mobile programming -> my latest interest.

Class descripton:

Have you ever wished you know more about programming your smart phone, your web camera, your VCR, or your Tablet PC. Have you ever noticed that computing has slipped away from the desktop and even from the laptop and has gone ubiquitous? Do you know that 'gadget computing' is the fastest growing area in our tech sector and where most of the new computing jobs are created? If your answer is yes to all the above, you like 'cool programming,' and you have an affection for 'bluetooth,' then you are perfect candidate for the "Multimedia Programming" class offered in fall 2005.

Syllabus


Component Object Modeling (COM)

Microsoft DirectShow SDK

Video and audio programming and applications

Programming and applications of serial devices

Embedded Visual C++ and Pocket PC

PDA programming and applications

Smart phone SDK

Cell phone programming and applications

Tablet PC SDK

Programming and applications of Tablet PC

Sure does sound exciting !!

My old excite account has been receiving a lot of spam lately, despite having spam filtering level set to high .... I also dont think anything really happens when i report spam since i tend to receive the same mail in my inbox without fail !!!!! I have turned the filters on to max and implemented my own custom filters ... lets see if that has any effect on it.

Is it just me, or is the total post count on the dashboard broken ???? It has been showing the same number for quite some time now

A little more coding, I was able to modify the S5 : A simple standards-based slide show system and added yahoo image search results using the Yahoo Image Api. So your image queries come out in the form of a nice little slide show.

You can demo it here http://kashif.dotgeek.org/YahooImage.php

I finally got a yahoo 360 invite from Nathan Weinberg ....Thanks a lot ....now to do some exploring of the features and if you would like an invite just leave me a comment :)

Wow, nice new service from Google called the Google Ride Finder ..... an excellent service that lets a person find taxi services to various places around the city.

This is such a cool wallpaper, Im so gonna do this with my laptop

Click the picture for a better view.

PHP 5 has some handy new functions but two that really stand out are date_sunrise and date_sunset ..... I can see some potential uses such as a weather channel, or a counter for a competition or for religious prayers but asides from that, are there are any other important uses that had to be implemented as a function ?

what I also dont like about it is the type of input data it needs to return an answer

mixed date_sunrise ( int timestamp [, int format [, float latitude [, float longitude [, float zenith [, float gmt_offset]]]]] )

other than that little "rant" I think PHP 5 is definitely a major step from 4.0

.

Well my first experiment with PHP5 was using the new SimpleXML extension , and I was definitely blown away as to how simple it makes parsing xml files and accessing the data.

I decided to implement something with the new yahoo api, and I decided to go with a simple spell checker. Now I coming across a little problem with this, yahoo only provides spelling suggestions if it can actually find something with that query, so that you can query with the correction. If it cant , no spelling suggestions are offered. I am hosting it here http://kashif.dotgeek.org/YahooSpellCheck.php and the source can be seen here http://kashif.dotgeek.org/YahooSpellCheck.php.txt

Can anyone offer some tips or further suggestions ?

Finally I got my dotgeek account, which boasts of free PHP 5 web hosting. Now to start some fun projects !!!! Got any suggestions ?

oh and something totally random, someone came to this page after querying for this on google: " *Kashif Beattie* " .. How weird is that ??

I saw this google text ad in my gmail account while having a conversation with a buddy .... now why would someone want to buy a bad movie ??

I remember reading somewhere that adding six slashes at the end of www.google.com changes the way the page look. So, I decided to check on some other sites that I frequently visit and so far have come up with one page. If you put one more slash at the end of yahoo.com ( http://www.yahoo.com// ) the date and time on "in the news" section changes to 6:00pm Wed December 31.

Here is a screenshot(click for a better view):

.



Got any others ?

PC Magazine has a review of that funky looking Nokia 7280 that i was talking about the other day .... http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1772513,00.asp

I saw the mac mini today, and my jaw just dropped at the size of the little thing .... just amazing.....thats all i have to say

Apple has upgraded its lines of photo ipods by increasing the hard disk size to 30gb and 60gb and slashing prices --> http://www.datafuse.net/page.php?news=503.

With so much space available now, how hard would it be for Apple to incorporate video playing capabilities to the next generation of ipods . I definitely think that will be one of the key features , especially with all the video on demand services going around these days.

The TrafficCam now was a wiki which you can visit herehttp://postneo.com/postwiki/moin.cgi/TrafficCam

It all started at Russell Beattie's website where he demonstrated a cool little flash application which showed the New York Traffic Cameras. It lead to Christopher Schmidt building his own little app in Nokia's Series 60 Python. And from there people starting hacking his script to represent their own cities. I added Houston and the script can be downloaded from here. Chris has updated his script to incorporate all the cities, and can be found here

UPDATE: since f2o.org is down at the moment I have also uploaded the script at this location http://www2.cs.uh.edu/~kkhan/houston_traffic.txt

I came across this story on boing boing that everquest players can now order pizza online while playing their game. The headline speaks for itself and I can just picture a Jay Leno monologue along the lines of "How fat are we getting ? .."

in my opinion - Unbelievably Ridiculous

Doesnt the Nokia 7280 look a lot like the new Apple Ipod Shuffle ??? Either ways it looks so cool

Came across this story on slashdot while back tracking for a certain article, about a person "experimenting" with google adsense by centering his blog solely around high paying keywords , in this case being asbestos. Excellent idea to make money, but isnt this against the TOS of Google Adsense ?

Finally the comments of blogger have been updated and about time as well. It was just so pointless that only other blogger members could comment.

Now I think one of the major fixes would be the whole rebuilding of the site whenever you edit anything. Its okay if you have a small blog, but couple of hundred posts and you could be sitting for quite a while before all the changes take place. And thats if you are lucky and dont suffer a time out in between, in which case you are stuck with partially working site. Something should be done about that so that it is more dynamic.

End of rebuilding rant

Bloglines is awesome !!!!

For people looking for rss feeds for xanga users , this is the link to their feeds http://www.xanga.com/rss.aspx?user= username . Just replace username with their xanga id and it should point to their site feed. For some reason it doesnt show up on the xanga site itself.

Joel Webber has an excellent description as to the behind the scenes work of google maps http://jgwebber.blogspot.com/2005/02/mapping-google.html ..... definitely a good read.

MSN music has announced that it will be offering one free music download per day . The tracks will be the ones that the MSN Music team think will win grammy's. Not bad for FREE !!

One of my favorite programs Sunbird has a new release, 2RC for Sunbird .2 . The software is very much in beta and is quite buggy , but it is excellent nonetheless. Definitely worth a try and one to keep an eye out for.

To download Sunbird visit here

[UPDATE]: The official .2 version has come out today.

Wow it has been more than a month since the last post. Definitely need to breathe life into this place again ...... just been so busy with so many things :)

Mostly people find my site by searching for my name, or the windows media player issue fix ( which is here btw here)

But I found this to be the most random search query to my blog Jackie Chan SNl download

:)

Wow, this is cool stuff ... presents for people who display google ads, hope I get one too :)

its good to be back

MSN has rolled out its own blogger service offering features such as picture sharing etc. There is also expected integration with msn messenger, for example a user can be notified when a particular blog is updates.

The site is located here http://spaces.msn-int.com/ and I will definitely try it out and post a review. Definitely looks interesting.

damn the archive thingee isnt working .... must fix that ..... what a semester so far, I cant wait for it to end

well I just went ahead and changed the template and that has fixed the template problem ..... I guess it was time for a change. Now to add the old stuff back into this

Now this is the dumbest thing ever, Scientists Define Murphys Law ....... I mean math is really helpful and can provide a lot of answers, but this is totally useless ...... How can one even go about testing this ??

Firefox is trying to get 2 million dowloads before the release version 1.0, help them out by downloading firefox from here http://spreadfirefox.com/

Freeipods.com update:

3 confirmed .... 2 to go.

here is my link http://www.freeiPods.com/default.aspx?referer=8921896

Well according to a slashdot article there is a vulnerability in Mozilla and Thunderbird that takes advantage of a buffer overflow exploit. This is quite similar to the jpeg parsing vulnerability in windows that was revealed recently.

Luckily if you have updated Mozilla, Firefox and Thunderbird. If you havent head over here and get the updates.

As for the windows vulnerabilites, patches are available on windowsupdate.com

Well in order to get ad sense I have to stop offering gmail invites.

But you can still sign up , using my link if you wanna try for the free ipod.

http://www.freeiPods.com/default.aspx?referer=8921896




UPDATE:

3 confirmed.

I dont know about the rest of you guys, but I am once again starting to see the "nigerian money scam" emails in the inbox of my non-primary accounts .... somethings never die.

wow every single time I log on blogger gets a new feature. Cool

So FALL 2004 has started, awesome. The semesters seem to fly by. Only sad thing is the TTh getting up at 6. I havent gotten up this early since i was in high school ( and that seems such a long time back ).

A nice new application from the folks at mozilla. Its called calendar , and can be downloaded from here . I downloaded it in the morning and so far pretty impressed. Features are pretty basic since it is .2 and in beta , but it is also quite solid at the same time. Definitely a a must download.

wow , i must really update more often

Want a gmail account, head here
link dead

Thanks to John "Ken" Garrity, i have 4 more gmail accounts to giveaway .....

all gone, once again thanks John

oooh, my first slashdot article that got accepted http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/18/0058259&mode=thread&tid=126&tid=154&tid=95

2 more gmail accounts , same rules, first 2 comments get the invites ..... good luck :)

Update: The first 2 ppl who commeted on the blog are getting the invites ... congrats .... keep your eyes open for more opps :)

wow , gmail is giving away invites like crazy ...... I guess the public release is around the corner


UPDATE: both of the invites have been given away. I will be giving out more once i get more invites, so check this space. Congrats to the lucky ones.

Well 2 weeks back, Nabil, Anirudh met at Anirudhs place for the Geek Project 2004 to install Slackware 9.1 on his spare machine. The installation was a failure after 2 attempts, once due to corrupted tar files and the other due to some installation mishap. The installation was really horrible :( ...... So now we are going to try SuSe 9.1 and hopefully that goes well .....

aaah new phone now, the beautiful Sony Ericsson T616 . Price paid 12 bucks wohooo

I have been lucky enough to have been given a gmail account by blogger, and have been using it for about a month now.
So far I have been very impressed with the simplicity and features that this service has to offer.Even though still in Beta
I have started to slowly move all my mail here. The gig of space is awesome. Here are some things that really stand out:



Conversations: This is something that is really unique. Suppose you and friends are exchanging emails, you can view all the mails so far in the form of chat conversation, which makes it so easy to keep track of stuff.

Labels : A better way to organize your mail. Just create a label like "family", "friends" etc and just mark the mails
and once you click on a label it organizes them in that particular order. This way all your mail is right in front of you
instead of folders.

Spam Filtering: I have no spam as yet *crosses fingers*, which is good. You can set upto 20 filters and you can set up
in a number of ways using labels, header information, subject lines etc.

Keystrokes: Since the site is also heavily based on javascript, you can turn on keystrokes that do various things like
compose new mail etc. It is just like windows shortcuts, but very very nice

New Mail: No need to hit refresh to check for new mail, the page refershes every so often to bring in the new mail if there
is any.

Search: Since you never have to delete any mail, keeping track of them becomes tiresome. But the search function used is excellent using the proprietary search algorithms , and makes finding emails very very easy.

Though still in Beta , the service is more than ready. The contacts is a little to basic, but will definitely be worked upon on later versions. There are also talks of RSS/XML feeds for the mail service

All in all 10/10

I felt it was time for a change for this blog. That look was kinda getting old, and this one definitely makes it easier on the eyes and has a little professional feel to it.

edit:
some more changes to go, which will be after the exams, and this template will be customized :)

edt:
I decided to go back, since I had stuck with this design for such a long time , lmao.

cant wait for the 13th, when i can finally uninstall masm of this machine. Final project completed, some tweaks left. Pity it doesnt work on any other machines at home.

Finally comments have come to blogger, since haloscan started to remove the old comments which kinda sucked. Plus other new features wohooo

wow just a couple of days with google mail , and it has blown me away, what to do with all that space :) . though still very much in beta it has some features which are quite unique, like chat view etc. More of a review once these finals are over

awrite free gmail account ..... looks very interesting so far :)

i hate dislike assembly

code has suddenly stopped working, cant figure it out over here, http://kashif.f2o.org ..... driving me up the wall.

edit:

bug squashed !!!!! :)

I couldnt agree any further with this article http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,115071,00.asp

Paper does rule !!!!!

I am still contemplating posting all my programs from my classes on my website. For one i could showcase my skills, but on the other hand it could provide others with an easy solution without having to put in any hardwork at all. So I dunno ?????

Wow ill be a JUNIOR in a couple of months !!!!

its been ages since I have posted. Well spring break is over, a very disappointing one since I was working on a paper and a program ..... :( more in need of a break now more than ever

spring break is right around the corner, but it is hardly going to be any fun. A human situation paper and an assembly program are due right after the break.

Assembly programming is fun, but gimme c/c++ anytime, cant wait for this class to get over :)

back in business I am . I will be bringing back my personal website back up again , thanks to the guys at f2o.org :) This means more adventures with the magic of PHP and MySQL

use IE for a second and something bad is sure to happen. Some how because of a microsoft vm exploit a trojan was installed on my machine which actually caused a lot of havoc. My website was taken down, my brothers email pw changed , my emails deleted etc. Well thankfully it wasnt something major and removal was a piece of cake with only one file being infected. It was the v.byte virus. I have now updated my sun vm and made it the default vm for IE as well.

with all this happening I sure do hope this doesnt happen http://slashdot.org/articles/04/02/12/2114228.shtml?tid=109&tid=187 . Coz then the crap will really hit the ceiling

The patch that fixes the major IE url spoofing bug is out . go here for more info and to download http://www.microsoft.com/security/security_bulletins/20040202_windows.asp

after installation you can head off to this link to test if all installed well http://www.secunia.com/internet_explorer_address_bar_spoofing_test/ .

if it does go well, when you perform the test IE should have the follwing error in its header "invalid syntax error"

in other news my little project has advanced more, kinda like my own blogging software, so have a look here http://kashif.pcplayground.com

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.

I have gotten the MoBlog up , and is at http://k4shif.textamerica.com . At the moment there are only 2 pictures, but I will be adding more. Its really fun.
Maybe will have it update the new pictures in left frame.

what better than a whole new host of features from blogger. Wow!!! now only if we could get a xml file for syndication.......

its been busy since day one almost, but im having fun with math and computer science. I dsilike human situation, but then again it gets rid of a lot of core requirements so in that way its not bad. Only thing is that its essay time again. I also have a moblog now, now i have to figure out how to set the sucker up. Once done ill post a link.

feels good to be back

wohoo so many featurs can it get any better. more later