DeepAurelia

Software of interest

Blender – an open source 3D rendering software.

I decided to switch back to Winamp for a while since I grew tired of Windows Media Player.

I will go through some of the advantages and disadvantages of both Winamp and WMP.

Winamp

Light and fast. Highly customisable and has large skinning community. Ability to assign global hotkeys for volumn control, play/pause/next/previous, and various other functions. Playlist management can get tricky when music library gets large.

Windows Media Player

Resource hungry and slow even on high-end systems. Search feature is surprisingly good. Ability to filter music based on any meta-data (eg. filter music of multiple genres and exclude individual artists in a single query).

Due to many arising problems with Windows Vista, I was forced to re-install Windows XP back onto my laptop. One of the main issues is the Hotkey utility which is not supported on Windows Vista and therefore, it is a hassle not being able to switch video output to my LCD monitor. I have to admit that the good old Windows XP is still a reliable OS.

I managed to legally download and install Windows Vista Business on my Sony VAIO VGN-Y18GP laptop. Despite the fact that my graphics card does not support the Windows Aero experience, it is performing exceptionally well. I’m still getting used to the new interface as a lot of things have changed since XP.

Many people have critised Windows Vista to be highly resource hungry and claim that the operating system requires state-of-the-art systems to run properly. Many of the “eye candy” features in Windows Vista (such as Flip 3D) already exist in other operating systems such as the OSX and Ubuntu (Beryl/Compiz Fusion) and thus, some believe Microsoft tries to copy ideas from other products. BadVista.org is a website worth visiting.

Here is a screenshot of my desktop with Windows Sidebar and a huge Recycle Bin.

I have switched back to Microsoft Office Outlook (2007). I have been trying Thunderbird/Lightning and Evolution Mail for a while but found none of them as effective/good looking as Outlook. I love Outlook because of its import/export feature which never fails. On the other hand, with Thunderbird/Lightning or Evolution Mail, it is a hassle trying to convert a simple calendar with repeating events to a .csv file. Despite the fact that I dislike Microsoft products, I haven’t yet seen any better PIMs.

Software of interest

Songbird is an open source media player.

Software of interest

One of my lecturers introduced to me an open source IDE package called Eclipse. It’s mainly known for its popularity for Java but it is also a multiple IDE with plugin support which you can configure C/C++ and many other programming languages.