My Geek Notes

Well, for the next week my entries will be pretty short, but I’ll still try to post something each day. I have one week to complete a huge website project and it will have me working late each night. Looking forward to getting it over with, well, at least getting through the first deadline. There will definitely be other versions once it’s live.

My quick plug today will be about MPlayer, a very powerful media player for Linux. It may have been ported to Windows by now, but I’ve been using it for the last few years on Linux. The other popular media player is Xine, but I have little experience with that one. Anyway, the cool thing about MPlayer is that it lets me play Quicktime files along with all Windows types and many, many other codecs (avi, etc.) It also lets me stream dump (record) streaming media (asx, etc.) Oh, and it plays DVDs too. Great app, check it out.

One big item in the news that made me chuckle. Microsoft is being sued over Windows Vista marketing. Here’s the opening text of the article. “A lawsuit alleges that Microsoft Corp. engaged in deceptive practices by letting PC makers promote computers as “Windows Vista Capable” even if they couldn’t run the new operating system’s “signature” features.” Now that’s pretty funny. Many reviews have emerged stating that aside from cosmetic changes, Vista isn’t any better than XP, but this new article is the icing on the cake. Don’t get me wrong, I like Windows for what it’s good for; gaming and distracting hackers away from other OS’s.