This guide came to me via Charles. It is IshKur’s Guide to Electronic Music. You can track the evolution of all types of electronic music from one genre and subgenre to another across the decades including multiple example clips of each.
Its been a while since I posted what I’ve been up to so here is what I have been up to lately… Warning. It is long and rambly.
Get back to work you slackers! From: http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,22862900-5013037,00.html
“Local online shopping site Getprice.com.au said last week that many employees would be spending the start of the week shopping online for gifts during work hours.
The company said this year it expected December 3 and December 10 to provide peak demand for online shopping sites in Australia, as people rushed to do their Christmas shopping.”
I was given a web camera as a Christmas present. Specifically a Logitech QuickCam Communicate STX. To get some use from it I had to install the official MSN Windows Live Messenger which supports video calling. I have never used the official client before. I had only every used Trillian and then Gaim which is now known Pidgin. The first thing I noticed was the advertisements at the bottom of the main window and every chat window. Wow has there always been ads? Why would someone want to use a client containing advertisements? I wonder if they collect what ever personal data you give them and look at your messages to tailor the ads accordingly. If I was running a messaging service thats what I’d do. (Wait… I’m not google… or facebook…)
Now I have to admit the video and/or voice calling within MSN messenger works really well. It just connected. No router, no firewall problems. Video quality was fine as was audio quality. Audio quality was even better just making voice calls. (Is that the client or the bandwidth?) I just cant get over the ads they have in it everywhere. I almost feel like paying for the pro version of Trillian so I can have the web cam features without the advertisements. Trillian being the only other client that supports web cameras via the MSN protocol. Some other open source ones have their own implementations which work if you are both using the same client.
The Pidgin people just need to hurry up and implement support for it as well. I read that they don’t really care for web cameras so its not a priority for them as well as the way they have designed their client makes things more difficult. The messenger library (libpurple) at the core, is designed to have no platform dependent functions (i.e. talking to camera devices) and the front ends that would contain the camera functions are more complicated as the core implementation would be protocol and vendor neutral API.
Not that Pidgin is perfect. (without camera support) – They latest version (2.3.0) fixed spell checking as you type (on windows) so it looks like I can spell again, but broke your local display name. So whoever last logged on, in all chat windows, your name appears as theirs. It also writes the log files with that name as well. Very annoying especially if you are talking to the person that most recently logged on. They have acknowledged it as a defect so hopefully the next version will fix it.
One thing I do have to say is using MSN for a few hours tonight it keeps getting disconnected over and over again. I’m not sure if that is its fault or the earth quake that just happened in the US that cut some fibre lines my ISP uses.