WMP wasn't streaming properly. So I re-installed WMP 10. That took ages and required a restart. Then my Creative Zen Xtra with PFS stopped being available. It only half worked and sat there without fully connecting.

So I installed WMP11, which again took ages, required a restart, grabbed a load of file associations and left icons everywhere without asking. At least the Zen now connects ok. Although Sync is slightly better in WMP11, I still won't use it, because I have neat file structures both in the music library and on the Zen which I don't want screwed up. Amazingly, you still can't play music off the Zen in WMP11 although this works in Winamp 5.3 mostly OK. For some unknown reason, the Winamp playlist editor lost the connection and the streaming stopped working, although starting again from an existing playlist was ok. This morning I discover that the Zen connection didn't survive putting the laptop into standby. I had to pull the USB plug and put it back in again.

So tired of all this. Yet again, MS seems to have a huge pile of bloated crap which I'm forced to use because they're business people did a deal with the 2nd market share PMP maker. And they've then reneged on that deal by going into competition with them.

I'm stuck in this loop because nobody makes the PMP I want to own. It's a redesigned and updated Zen Xtra with a 2.5" disk, plain old USB Mass storage for sync, no DRM support and a half way decent firmware system or RockBox. The 2.5" disk is the killer. 1.8" disks are neat, small, energy efficient. But they're also expensive and don't have enough capacity. The new top of the range 80Gb iPod is *just* big enough capacity for my needs. But god it's expensive for what it is; an essentially disposable piece of electronics. And taking an old iPod with a broken disk drive and fitting an 80Gb 1.8" disk isn't really an option for price reasons even if Apple's usual hardware lock ins actually allow it.

Go back to that mythical perfect PMP. Now that MS is dumping on their PFS partners, maybe it's time for Creative, Samsung, Toshiba, Cowon, Achos, iRiver, et al to just turn their backs on this whole sorry mess and produce the PMP we want to buy. Forget about all that DRM, downloadable music store nonsense. You can't compete in that area with Apple anyway. Just build a better PMP. And one that doesn't depend on WMP to get the music on and off it.

Grrr.

I actually bought a second hand ancient Archos Studio 20. to see if I could create my own version of this, given that PC World are now selling 120Gb 2.5" disks for under a 100 quid. I've installed the latest RockBox on it. and it does kind of work. But the tiny screen, military industrial design and the crappy buttons mean it's not really usable and a bit embarrassing. And only having USB 1.1 is a show stopper. I've thought about whether it's hackable into something usable, but I probably can't do anything about the screen or USB so I don't think so.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=joinpublicchat Looks like it will work for finding pages with a link to a Skype public chat. As long as the author used the redirect via Skype. Still haven't found a way of searching for the short link skype:?chat&blob=yadayada

I have a requirement for an unusual Google search. Does anyone know how to search for a link like this:-

skype:?chat&blob= *

I want to find all web pages that contain a link to a Skype Public chat.

Answers to julian_bond at voidstar.com

The final episode of the very wonderful "Spooks" posed some interesting questions.

Let's say for a moment, that :-

1) Global Climate change is real. And because it's a laggy, exponential system with some tipping points, it's too late to do anything about it. Even if we drastically change our behaviour, it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

2) Sooner or later and perhaps sooner, oil demand is going to seriously outstrip oil supply. Exponential growth in the West, much faster exponential growth in the East and supply that is growing linearly.

3) As for 2) but also for a range of other raw materials. Like Tungsten. Or water.

and

4) A small number of extremely powerful and extremely wealthy western nations.

Now what should the governments of those Western nations do? It's very difficult to imagine their populations giving up their taste for cheap air travel, air conditioners and personal transport. They can

a) Follow Kyoto and try to turn their consumption habits around, leading to a world wide economic slump or
b) Take any and all steps to protect their current way of life and head off potential widespread panic and insurrection.

So that means an aggressive, nuclear backed external policy of securing control of raw materials allied to a repressive domestic regime designed to maintain control.

The fight for control of the Earth is just beginning. It's the 19th century "Great Game" but another loop up the spiral.

Private Copy : We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to create a new exception to copyright law that gives individuals the right to create a private copy of copyrighted materials for their own personal use, including back-ups, archiving and shifting format.

Submitted by Suw Charman - Deadline to sign up by:26 December 2006 - Signatures: 788

How's this:-
- Creative Zen Xtra with an 80gb disk using PFS firmware containing my complete music collection.
- Massive chillout playlist.
- Played into Winamp 5.3 with the latest PMP plugin with the playlist random shuffled rather running on winamp shuffle mode so nothing gets repeated. I've been playing it for weeks and am still only 50% through.
- Reported to Last.fm by hacking the old Last.fm winamp plugin so that it reports streamed music.
- Which then ends up here.
- Meanwhile while winamp is playing music it modifies my Skype Mood to show what's currently playing via a custom skype API plugin written in Delphi.
- The Last.fm last tracks RSS feed ends up on my blog in a sidebar box.
- It also gets grabbed and put into my Ecademy "External content" page on my profile.

It's all good! If you want some recommendations for Chillout/Downbeat tracks you could do worse than just work through the list of tracks on my last.fm page. There's hardly a bad one between them.

I've just read a story from Jim Courtney about Skype PR and the Beta 3 release. He's got a large number of snippets mostly from tech bloggers.

Cynical old me read the review snippets and had read some of them in full and thought this. The New, New, Blog driven journalism is every bit as bad as the Old, Old Mainstream journalism. The pressure to get the story out and write the review means that the analysis is very superficial and misses whole chunks of the story.

It's not just Skype. The blog view of the Zune and analysis of what it means is every bit as bad.

Seems like every time you read a story about something you actually know about, it's full of half truths and apparently written by a hack with no deep knowledge under extreme time pressure. Makes you wonder about all the stories you read on subjects you don't about in detail. And just as importantly, the world view you build up from these (intentional or unintentional) half truths, lies and mistakes.

Home - Unofficial Skype Chat Directory
Skype 3 Public chats [from: del.icio.us]

Void.Bot Skype Chat Bot is a proof of concept chat bot for group chats in Skype. It's written in PHP5 connected to Skype4Com to Skype Beta 3 running on a headless server on Windows Server 2003. It's more or less stable now.

To use it, just add it to a Skype chat and type #help in the chat.

One of the bigger problems has been to keep it running. COM failures tend to crash it. And at random times it seems to just stop running. I've now got it running in a looping batch file so that if it falls over, it gets restarted.

The only other real issue with the setup is that Skype still wants the user interface on the client to recat to activity. The worst issue is requests to share details. I've dealt with this with a small Windows automation tool which watches for the request dialog and hits OK.

PHP under windows is probably not the best tool for the job. I've heard that the Bitchun folks have a native Ruby client which talks direct to the API and can be used with Skype under Windows, Mac and Linux. The Bitchun Whuffie client on Windows is written in Ruby. Even with Ruby runtime, SqlLite and the Skype i/f code it's still under 1.5 Mb. Nice.

In the last week, I've upgraded Firefox and IE. Firefox 1.5 to 2.0 went very smoothly. It took about 5 minutes to upgrade. I spent the rest of the evening tweaking it, but it basically just worked.

IE6 to IE7 took an hour including a restart of the machine. Why, Why is it such a bloated pile of ****? And why did it leave icons all over the place, grab default browser, install frontpage which then grabbed a whole load of file association defaults? That's all just rude!

But that's not the whole story. I need a copy of IE6 as well to check web pages so I went looking for standalone versions. Needless to say MS doesn't help here. The first call was Evolt. They've hacked, zipped copies that mostly work. Except that cookies didn't work at all. Next stop was Tredosoft, and the Multiie installer. It's basically the same as Evolt but with an old copy of wininet.dll in the same directory. So now I've got a working browser, except that every time a frame loads I get a popup dialog. Luckily I have a windows automation utility I've been using for years and that auto hits "OK" every time the dialog appears.

While doing all this, and trying to debug the cookie problem I went all round the new security settings in IE7. Jeez' there's a lot of them!

Frankly I can't stand the new IE7 UI. But thanks to the wonders of Firefox extensions, I can use the IE7 rendering engine in a Firefox tab. I've then got a cut down IE6 that works just well enough to check CSS layouts in IE6.

Now we get to the real reason for doing this. I've got some fake tabs in the Ecademy web pages that work fine in E6 and Firefox after I discovered a CSS hack to provide different parameters to the two browsers. Like this.

This line is for all non-mozilla browsers
padding: 5px 0px 3px 0px;

This line is for all Mozilla browsers only and overrides the previous line
padding /* */: 3px 0px 1px 0px ;

Except that IE7 executes the second line. But also still disagrees with Firefox about the box model and is a pixel off. Another couple of hours later and I've finally managed to find settings that work identically in IE7 and Firefox. But ferchrisake, why do I have to? CSS is a bloody standard that's well documented. Why can't IE7 and Firefox agree about font sizes and pixel positions in something as simple as height, border, padding and margin? If I spec Arial at 70% and both browsers are using the same Arial font file on my machine, why are the font renderings different sizes?

Developers extravaganza with 3.0 beta - Skype Developer Zone Blog

Trying to get my head round this. It feels to me like a Mobile-Telco business model. Make it really easy and frictionless to buy widgets, ringtones, games, wallpaper using Skype credit from a shop front embedded in the client. Instead of "TXT POLY3 to 810023" It's choose an entry and click on buy.

Now this is potentially great for Extra developers. They have a route to market, a shop front and somebody doing the money collection (for a price of course). My problem is that I'm their worst customer. I'm not going to spend money on ringtones and wallpaper, I don't play trivial little games, and I'm not about to buy a WeeMee. I can just about imagine buying a Premium edition of Skylook or Pamela if I have a real business need for some of their functionality. But mostly I'd use Extras because they're cool and there's source available so I can hack them into something a bit better.

So at the moment, I'm not convinced.

With Bush in retreat and Rumsfeld now gone, what does this mean for Blair?

Blair Out. Blair Out.

And can we then have the inquiry into Afghanistan, Iraq and 7-7 ?

Have Skype re-invented IRC?

Here's a group chat about Skype 3.

Apologies to those of you who have received large numbers of emails from Ecademy containing an "EAP Report".

This report went live at the weekend and should have sent one report each week. A glitch in the code meant that the servers resent a copy every half hour or so. This has now been stopped.

Unfortunately this coincided with a problem with the mail server which meant there was a large backlog of email waiting to go out which included these multiple copies. Consequently we didn't catch the problem quickly enough. Sorting out the mail server and clearing the backlog then released the waiting copies.

The mail server is now delivering mail correctly. There may still be some mail from the backlog going out where remote mail servers were temporarily unavailable.

We're working on finding out why multiple copies of the report were sent to avoid this happening again in the future.

Apologies again for the inconvenience. [from: JB Ecademy]

Cory nails it.

Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.

This was in an article about a Disney Exec saying,

"We understand now that piracy is a business model," said Sweeney, twice voted Hollywood's most powerful woman by the Hollywood Reporter. "It exists to serve a need in the market for consumers who want TV content on demand. Pirates compete the same way we do - through quality, price and availability. We don't like the model but we realise it's competitive enough to make it a major competitor going forward."

So how do you compete with "Free"? The answer is by providing "Easy" or "More". Hence I believe there is a market for 10c music tracks and music DVDs where the DVD is packed with extras. But there is no market for low quality, DRM infested $1 tracks or $10 CDs.

Free Will: Just the mind's way of estimating what it thinks it did

Consciousness: At some point in our evolution, we started to make decisions consciously and we're not very good at it.

Consciousness costs. Compared to non-conscious processing, self-awareness is slow and expensive. So how does it make us more fit to survive?

Leaders: Interesting to note how often sociopaths show up in the world's top echelons. The ones who succeed have become adept at blending in. But once they get there, they no longer need to try since people aspire to emulate them, making them perfect actors who's surroundings blend into them. (Hollyweird, then he acted like he was president of the United States)

That last one is disturbing. Pack Leaders appear to be fundamentally sociopathic, selfish and self obsessed. Like teenage males they lack empathy so perhaps they are teenage males that never grew up. While their ethics coincide with the packs ethics they make the pack more fit to survive. But when the two ethical drives diverge, the pack should kick them out and if necessary kill them.

Re: [xml-dev] XML has arrived :

Brother: "There, I've done the school news web page and I used Web 2.0"

Sister: "But the screen is blank!"

Brother: "Well, duh! You have to type the news in before you can read it!"

Offline messages : As you'd expect, this enables you to send messages to Google Talk friends who are offline. The messages will be delivered to your friends the next time they sign in with Google Talk or a third-party client. And when they sign in to Gmail, offline messages will be displayed as unread messages in their inbox. In Gmail, offline messages can be searched and organized -- just like instant messages in your chat history.

The guys at GoogleTalk development just don't get it and this is another example. One of the best things about Skype and in the current MSN Messenger is that you can send a message when the other party is offline and it arrives *in their* IM client when they come online. Routing messages into Gmail is not the same. Especially when you no longer need a Gmail account to run Googletalk.

It turns out Google can accept OPML for the Coop Search. Go to the admin page and choose Advanced. What they don't do is collect it automatically. You have to upload it.

Dene Schonknecht, the company's (Microsoft) media and entertainment alliance manager the earliest date it will be in the UK is towards the end of 2007. However, it could easily be 2008... ...We haven't yet selected a music store provider to build Marketplace in the UK, which means we're way off launch

Bwaahahahaha.

But wait a minute. Isn't teh Zune supposed to work with teh Urge, now they've dumped PFS and WMA-DRM? So they've pissed off the few poor fools who tried to build a WMA based music download site and now they haven't got a replacement can't do it themselves and need to find "partners" to do it for them. Do I detect a bit of channel conflict here?

So then we have the continued lunacy that whoever wants to build a legal music download site needs to build a new one in each market. So this won't just be the UK, but each and every country outside the USA.

iPod Killer. Right.