Author Archives: Donncha

Incessant Ramblings: jetsam on Windows and Linux media playing.
I don’t like Windows Media Player. On occasion I’ve used it, and it’s big, it’s slow, it’s clunky. I agree that skinning the application serves no purpose. If it’s playing MP3s, it’s more than likely going to be behind some other application anyway so why waste the clock cycles drawing fancy graphics?
A bigger issue is codec installation. Yes, it does download the codecs for common formats from some Microsoft website. Yes, it’s easy. Yes, a new user could an Indeo 5 avi file playing easily.
No, a new user couldn’t get a divx video playing as easily. I’ve tried, God knows I’ve tried! It’s now come to the stage where it’s easier to play movies in Linux than it is in Windows! In Windows XP I’ve never managed to get WMP8 to play Divx files. In Win2K I can view older Divx files, but newer ones fail, and AFAIR the required codecs don’t seem to install for some reason.
My freshly installed Red Hat 8.0 desktop can play all sorts of movies. How did I do it? “apt-get install mplayer” and copy the codecs from their homepage into a directory. It’s not as if mplayer is hard to find or anything, and the download page clearly points out the Win32 codecs available.
These are my experiences using these bits of software, they’re not the experiences of a newbie (who wouldn’t know a tarball from an rpm) but mine, and I’ll bloody well raise my hand and claim my right to be counted as a “computer user” no matter what! *bah*

I won in the Lotto!! woo! Alright, I only won a scratch card, but I won 25 Euro on that. I’m taking my money and running while I’m on a winning streak 🙂

Will Filters Kill Spam? – Nope, but they’ll help a lot. Over the holidays I received over 400 spam emails. I had one false positive, that was from someone using a mail server that had been blacklisted. I had 3 spams in my inbox. That’s not bad. That’s Spam Assassin.
(Thanks Keith, and to set your mind at ease, Spam Assassin handles base64 encoded emails just fine. Catches them just as effectively!)

It’s 2003 in Australia already, only half a day left in Europe. Happy new year!

Dynamically labeling blockquotes with CSS | Holovaty.com – looks really interesting.

Linux Today – Year-End 2002 Digest: Looking Back and Looking Ahead

Back at work.. hope you had a good holiday!

The Matrix Makers – behind the scenes on the set. Can’t wait!