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Pat Collins today sent me an email talking about an open source Lotus SameTime project called Meanwhile.

The heart of the Meanwhile Project is the Meanwhile library, providing the basic Lotus Sametime session functionality along with the core services; Presence Awareness, Instant Messaging, Multi-user Conferencing, Preferences Storage, Identity Resolution, and File Transfer. This extensible client interface allows additional services to be added to a session at runtime, allowing for simple integration of future service handlers such as the user directory and whiteboard and screen-sharing.

These guys on IRC today were raving about this mp3 tagging program called MusicBrainz. So after hearing all the good things said about this versitle app I decided to give it a try. After you download the free application you’re required to sign up with a simple username/pass and an optional email address that is apparently required if you’re going to make use of the full functionality. In any case, Once you load the app you’ll be fronted with a very simple interface with a few options to either add mp3s or add a folder containing MP3s. I decided to try a test folder containing a variant of 6 mp3s ranging from very popular to extreamly rare. To my surprise it picked up 5 of them, recognizing them as available to tag mp3s. WOW!!! When you double click on the recognized mp3 it will bring up a listing of what it guesses is its origin, be it a compilation or artist CD. You can then confirm that’s where it belongs or if you’re sure that that it doesn’t belong you have the option to submit changes to the main MusicBrainz database; thats where your email address is required.

I strongly suggest anyone with a large digital audio collection that is in dire need of tagging (adding m3u and standard file names) to their collection give this a try.

Download the MusicBrainz Tagger! [Windows]
Download iEatBrainz! More info… [Mac OS X 10.3]

MusicBrainz is a user-maintained community music metadatabase. Music metadata is information such as the ArtistName, the AlbumTitle, and the list of tracks that appear on an album. MusicBrainz collects this information about music and makes it available to the public so that music players can retrieve information about the music that is playing. For instance, most audio CDs do not contain the name of the artist, album, or a listing of the tracks. A music player can use the digital characteristics of an audio CD to look up the correct metadata and show it to the user during playback.

The Supreme Court today has handed movie studios and record labels a sweeping victory against file swapping, ruling that peer-to-peer companies such as Grokster could be held responsible for the copyright piracy on their networks. In a unanimous decision issued Monday, the nine justices said companies that build businesses with the active intent of encouraging copyright infringement should be held liable for their customers’ illegal actions.

Does this mean the end to P2P? I think not… There are plenty of new encrypted and private peer-to-peer file sharing applications spawning monthly. Rodi, an anonymous Torrent application and several other p2p apps will succeed in Grokster’s demise..

What is so funny about this situation is just as the MPAA takes down 1 p2p app, 5 others spawn, some even offshore or opensource, immune to the MPPA and RIAA ridicule.

I feel quite bitter now having just recently booked our hotel room at the MGM Grand.

Microsoft was very very quiet on this one. This will be their second release after purchasing Giant software earlier last year.

Build 613 provides better documentation about unwanted software, fixes bugs that make it difficult to read alert messages and reduces the likelihood that its Winsock LSP removal mechanism will trigger unintended network disruptions.

download it here.

Late into the game, Yahoo just recently opened up their DIY blogging site for everyone to try out. Although still in beta, it’s still pretty stable.. I won’t be switching anytime soon but it’s nice to see a mainstream anchor like Yahoo going that direction.

You can signup here

Friday, at the Gnomedex conference in Seattle, Microsoft announced platform level support for Really Simple Syndication (RSS) in Longhorn. This is suppose to drive many of the new feature-sets available in the upcoming Longhorn flagship OS for Microsoft.. We’ll see.

Longhorn will provide a common RSS feed list across all applications, common RSS data store for applications to access downloaded content, and an RSS platform sync engine. Subscribing to an RSS feed from within Internet Explorer 7.0 will be similar to adding a Web site to “Favorites.” An icon placed in a toolbar will illuminate when feeds have been updated with new content.

The past couple of days I’ve been looking for a decent spell checker for WordPress. Every spell checker I find uses the PHP Pspell() function which requires the Aspell librarys installed on your server… Well, since my hosting provider doesn’t allow compiling I’m unable to install the libs required for this very useful feature.

Does anyone know of a decent spell checker that doesn’t make use of PSpell() ?

David Breyer was asking me the other day about the new Unreal Engine 3. For those who don’t know, Epic Games, developers of the Unreal series, gave a demonstration of their Unreal 3 game engine at the past E3 convention in LA earlier this year. The new updated engine will be used in their new game Unreal 2007 due out probably late 2009….

A guy on IRC had posted some amazing looking screenshots that looked, well.. Unreal! Searching through my history, I managed to find them:

Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2
Screenshot 3
Screenshot 4
Screenshot 5
E3 trailer

Oh, and if you have the skillz, Epic is now hiring.

So I guess the rumors were true. Microsoft is suiting up to begin testing of their new antivirus offering they are now calling “One Care Live“.

OneCare is set to combine the anti-spyware software that Microsoft has already been publicly beta testing along with antivirus and firewall software. Microsoft has not announced pricing for OneCare yet but one can guess it will be subscription based like their competitors and will no doubt come bundled in Longhorn.

Avalanche, Microsoft’s new codename for their Bittorrent like file sharing engine is in the works of being released here shortly. Cloning many of the features that BitTorrent already possesses Microsoft officials are touting in a research paper that both praises and criticizes BitTorrent: “Despite their enormous potential and popularity, existing end-system co-operative schemes such as BitTorrent, may suffer from a number of inefficiencies.” The coding system used by Avalanche, which is based on network coding, is 20 percent more efficient with downloading, according to the research paper… *Cough* BS *Cough*.

Read more about it here