Archive 8/2005

Always wanted to buy somewhere simply because it's exactly as expensive as everywhere else? Wattle Software now offers O'Reilly's "Hibernate: A Developer's Notebook" for 24.95USD... so exactly for the same price as offered by O'Reilly

As you can already see in the title this post will describe how exactly I got Last.fm player installed on my laptop. This is not a generic howto but IMO it should also work on most other Linux systems out there.

Today Last.fm has released a source package of their player so that finally Linux and Mac user can also listen to the radio stations again. The thing has just one problem: It requires Qt4 which is AFAIK not yet bundled with any major distribution so you'll have to compile Qt4 yourself if you want to have this player. Let's see how long it will take me

After checking my feeds today I noticed that the RSS feed of Gregaire has been removed. Then I checked their website just to see, that the project is dead. Currently it seems like they are searching a new maintainer for the GPL'd PHP5 news aggregator with MySQL or SQLite backend.

Seems like the Mozilla Store is open again with some new products and a new business partner. Within a few seconds I found some nice stuff I wanted to order so I went to check the shipping conditions for international orders... Ok, I think I'll wait for the European store to open its doors. More than 50USD for <=5lb shippings? No thanks

Yesterday last.fm was relaunched with a brand new design and many new features like tagging and journaling. They've also changed the way their radio streaming works, they now require your browser to handle the lastfm:// protocol which is quite easy to do in Firefox: Simply add following lines to your prefs.js:

Today I finally got my Ubuntu Hoary CDs Now let's see how long it will take to get at least a few of these to some new (or old) Linux users It took quite some time though and I nearly lost all hope since I ordered them right when Hoary was released. But there is really nothing to complain about considering that this whole service is free

Just in case you haven't noticed it yet: I've yesterday installed the Gravatar plugin available on gravatar.com. If you find any design flaws resulting from this addition or simply want to give some feedback please comment to this post

Thanks to Marcel Adrian I found a new service to try: Blogcounter.de. Here you can register for free to get quite detailed statistics about the visitors of your weblog. All you have to do is enter your (hopefully still available) username and e-mail address to get access to this service. No realname, no address. Actually, it isn't all that new having as far as I can see all known german bloggers listed but it's (as far too often for my taste) new for me

Seems like Sony has now once again opened a lawsuit against LikSang [link] but this time to distributing the japense edition Sony's Playstation Portable to british and other european customers. This announcement becomes even more stupid if you consider Sony's release policy outside of Japan where esp. european customers are the big losers with the PSP being released here this September with nearly one year delay from the japanese release.