Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Two notable tech birthdays

Creative Commons and G33k D1nner celebrated birthdays, 6th & 3rd, respectively, on 12/16/08. The LA Weekly even came out to cover the festivities.

The Los Angeles G33k D1nners are where folks of the huge, yet still burgeoning LA Tech Community get together to geek out over food, fun & drinks. Very cool event, way cool people.

Creative Commons is a movement that is VERY close to my heart. I mentioned it briefly here a little over a year ago. As I said in that post, Creative Commons is where open source met multimedia & their beautiful love child was CC. Just imagine a world where multimedia content of all types is provided by its authors under varying license types. You can also check out some of their many cool projects. I love CC because it is just one of the many ways that open source is invading the mainstream.

M$ patches IE

Microsoft patched Internet Exploder...err, Explorer today. After the internet was abuzz over ¨forgetting¨ to patch IE in its monthly patch last week, Microsoft had to respond. The issue was two-fold. First, Microsoft wasn´t going to be able to patch again until January. Also, and more importantly, the IE security gaffe was not only HUGE but it affected ALL Windows users since IE is installed automatically when Windows is installed and CANNOT be uninstalled.

There were already tons of reports gushing over the sheer amount of exploits that were already circulating. So yea, they patched it but if you´re browsing this in IE, stop it already! There is not one feature in IE that´s not in Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, etc. Not to mention that most of these browsers not only do it better but are also more secure. Of course, your mileage may vary, especially if you´re using one of those browsers on a Windows machine.

The emergency patch can be found on the Microsoft website. So please go download it even if you´re not using IE as your browser on a Windows box.

ps. I feel very dirty tagging this post w/Microsoft & Security as those are terms that, for as long as I can remember, have been mutually exclusive. You´d figure M$ would spend some of their money on creating solid, secure software but I guess they´re more worried about saving that p.o.s. operating system codenamed Project Mohave...errr, Vista.

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Songbird 1.0 released!

So Songbird finally went 1.0 Gold! Its release today marks a major milestone for this free yet feature-rich, do-it-all media player. As a long-time user and minor contributor, I can honestly say that it is a wonderful product and solution for us music heads. Songbird is an open source media player powered by the Mozilla engine (yes, as in Firefox).

For those of you yet to try out this awesome media player, here are some of the features that I dig:
Browse the web while you play your tunes
Tabbed browsing
Ability to play/download media files from any web page you´re browsing
Last.fm integration so you can rate your own tracks
Shoutcast radio
MashTape integration
Complete customization through add-ons (called ¨feathers¨)
You can check out the full feature set here.

Download it today and feel the power of open source and media at your fingertips. Songbird runs on the big three operating systems: Linux (any distro), Mac and Windows so don´t be alarmed when you visit the download page. It is smart enough to detect your current OS and only provides that option for download.