Since I have been able to update my old blog at http://johnbfrommemphis.ellerbestyle.com ,  that’s where I’ll be blogging from now on. So I will not be posting here any longer. All posts can also be found at the new location. So have fun and I do hope that you find something interesting and stimulating and hope to hear from you soon. Thanks!

I finally received my replacement video card for my recently deceased 7950GT .. eVGA sent me an 8800GT! It’s more awesome then I’ve even heard from other people, in short I love this card but here’s what’s going on. Assassin’s Creed is playing in a window on my new 8800GT even though the game itself has no controls for playing in a window or fullscreen and should always run fullscreen. I have no idea how to fix this slight problem so any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

My Dad purchased a copy of Wall-E for my 2 daughters for Christmas. It was the 3 disc edition with digital copy. Only problem is that the leaflet with the code to acquire the digital copy wasn’t included. I’ve always thought that the digital copy feature was instituted in an attempt to stem the tide of movie piracy. Disney, if I’m correct then why is it obviously so unbelievably difficult to include everything your customers need to allow us to take advantage of the digital copy feature? I’m not the only one that has purchased dvd’s thinking I’d be able to just slide a dvd in my dvd-rom drive and get a pristine iTunes compatible copy ready to sync onto an iPod. I can’t

I guess you’re going to eventually go back and treat your own customers as thieves again right? Is digital copy just another trojan horse to “induce” people to commit crimes under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act? Even though it’s illegal under the D.M.C.A to use anything or do anything to break copy protection, it’s also against the law to put a law in place that supercedes laws that have come before it.

So thanks a lot Disney, I think you just lost a customer……… for good. Have a nice day!

I first heard about Songbird via an article at Cnet, oh I’m not sure maybe back during the first part of 2008. I really liked the fact that it’s built on top of Firefox, being the Firefox fan (note that I didn’t say fanboy =))  that I am. You have add-on support and available skins for installation called feathers, they are available directly inside of Songbird via the browser. Yes that’s right, this nice media player has it’s own browser. All you need to do is open the add-ons menu, then click “Get more extensions”. That web page open in it’s own tab from within Songbird, from there it’s just like Firefox, click the big install button, click the install button in the popup dialog and then restart. I really like that kind of simplicity.

Installation is very straightforward and if you can choose from Fairplay playback and WMA DRM playback support among a few others. In my case, once the Fairplay playback support is installed it will try to detect if you have iTunes installed. If you have, it’ll give you the opportunity to import your iTunes library, very nice and simple. You can add tracks to your iTunes library and Songbird can scan for library changes such as track adds or removal and make those changes to your Songbird library. It also has profile support for some multiuser love.  The only drawback to this is that once Apple decides that they need or want to upgrade Fairplay DRM, it will most likely break Fairplay support in Songbird. Also you must have iTunes and Quicktime already installed for it to work properly. I did try having Quicktime 7.5 installed without iTunes, but my tracks from iTunes weren’t playing properly. Once reinstalling iTunes + Quicktime and those files starting playing properly again. Hmm notice how much Songbird looks like iTunes? Actually, the bar at the top containing the playback controls as you see in the picture below is placed at the bottom by default and a setting change moves that to the top as you see here.

All in all I’d have to give Songbird 1.0 a  4 out 5 for it’s extensibility, great audio quality and the large burgeoning commuinity surrounding it.

Copy this into a txt file and rename it with a .bat at the end and you should be good to go.

@echo off

reg delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\VistaSp2 /f > NUL 2>&1
reg delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\VistaSP2 /f > NUL 2>&1

reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\VistaSp2 /v Beta1 /t REG_SZ /d C21A5C64-2530-CC19-042F-9ABDB4ED27F9 /f
IF NOT %errorlevel% == 0 ( goto ERROR)

:SUCCESS
@echo.
echo ================================================== =========
echo Windows Vista SP2 registry key has been set successfully.
echo Please check for updates in Windows Update.
echo ================================================== =========
@echo.
goto END

:ERROR
@echo.
echo ================================================== =========
echo FAILED to set Windows Vista SP2 registry keys.
echo Please run this script by right clicking and selecting
echo “Run as Administrator”.
echo ================================================== =========
@echo.
goto END

:END
pause

UPDATE!! – The Windows Vista SP2 Community Preview Program has been made publically available at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dd262148.aspx

Bit-tech.net recieved word yesterday that the Radeon HD 4830’s have been using approximately 560 stream processors instead of the 640 that the card should be using. Even though these are production samples, when hardware gets to this point, it’s supposed to a sample from production just as the moniker implies. Bit-tech.net heard various stories from AMD, from it being a “known issue” to there being problems with the application calculating the number of stream processors.

AMD finally came out and admitted there was a problem with the production samples after their “no comment” earlier in the week.

Here is their quote ….

“AMD has identified that, in addition to reference samples of the ATI Radeon™ HD 4830 boards sent to media with a pre-production BIOS potentially impacting the card’s performance, a very limited number of ATI Radeon™ HD 4830 boards were released to market with the same pre-production BIOS. This is in no way hardware related, and an updated BIOS fully resolves the performance limitation.

Through consultations with AMD board partners, it has been determined with a high degree of certainty that fewer than 400 ATI Radeon™ HD 4830 boards from one AMD board partner, HIS, have reached the market with the pre-production BIOS incorrectly provided by AMD. As only a small number of HIS-branded ATI Radeon™ HD 4830 cards are impacted, we ask any customers that purchased an HIS-branded ATI Radeon™ HD 4830 to test the board using the GPU-Z utility (available at http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz). If the GPU-Z utility reports fewer than 640 shaders, please visit the HIS website for information on how to update the card BIOS via a downloadable install utility.“

Kudos to AMD for publically recognizing this problem and working to fix it. For people that are complaining and wanting replacement, would you rather fix the problem keeping your new video cards installed, or not be able to use your computer for a period of time while someone else flash upgrades the bios on your video cards for you? I would rather do it myself, fix the problem and keep my video cards and save the money it would take for shipping. In other words, shut your mouth and flash the bios and enjoy your new fully functioning hardware. You’re not making any sense other then you’re making people think that your anger is due to your ignorance on how to take care of this. AMD is offering full instructions for this. You people I’m speaking about at this point, you know who you are. (:

Thank you to Bit-tech.net for posting this artickle at http://is.gd/4VbV

Please watch this. Thanks to George Donnelly for posting this on FriendFeed. This is very frightening. This is further proof that Bush is acting outside the bounds of the U.S Constitution and without any oversight and Congressional consultation. Bush really is unfit for command.

The following was found at http://is.gd/3P4u.

the following was taken from http://archives.starbulletin.com/2008/09/21/news/obits.html

Aug. 29, 2008
Carl Spencer Weisbrod, 69, of Honolulu, a psychologist, hypnotherapist and enterpreneur, died in Honolulu. He was born in Pomona, Calif. He is survived by son Ron Peters, brother Bud and sister Mary Aiana. Private services.

I met him through Talkshoe about 2 years ago or so. I was really surprised that I was one of a few people that he always looked to for tech knowledge. He had a thrist for knowledge that exceeded anyone I had known before. He was young in mind and older in body. He was a good friend and a great man. Myself and friends were wondering where he was and if he was going to be ok. We know now where he is and I’m certain he’ll be ok. I’ll miss you Carl Spencer Weisbrod.

This is part of the newly released Windows Live Wave 3, the Live Writer Beta is supposed to be what’s new from Microsoft in the revised and updated Live suite. This is my first post using this so I’ll go ahead and finish this post and see how it looks after it’s posted.

When I first heard of the Windows Live services, it was about 2 years ago or so with the release of the initial Windows Live Messenger Beta. It was a bit crude but at least it’s been released with some more “spit and polish” this time around.

The new Windows Live Writer Beta has a much improved UI as where it actually looks like you’re posting to your blog directly not logging in and typing up your blog post in a white empty text field.

Using Microsoft Virtual Earth, you can include maps in your blog post, and of course as I’m sure you can tell it works well with wordpress.com hosted blogs so I’m sure it’ll work just fine with self hosted wordpress blogs as well. You also have the ability to add third-party plugins via using the “Add a Plug-in” feature link listed on the right. All you need to do to refresh the list is to restart your browser and Windows Live Writer. Another part of the UI are the Edit, Preview and Source tabs. The Edit tab is where you do the majority of your work. The Preview tab is rather self explanatory, and the Source tab is where you can see the source html of your blog post. Which is kind of handy if you’re using to using something along the lines of Expression Web. That’s all for now give it a try and let me know what you think of the new Windows Live Writer Beta. Here’s a screenshot.

I’ve been venting my frustration through digital art lately, so I give you my latest work.

You can click through to view this picture in it’s full size. This digital artwork is available under CreativeCommons-Attribution-NonCommerical-ShareAlike3.0 license

This is a quote attributed to Samuel Adams…he was far more then just a beer brand/maker.

“If ye love wealth greater than liberty the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace.  We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”

I could not agree with this any more strongly. Thanks goes to @exador23 over at Identi.ca for posting this.

iTunes 8 was released today shortly after the keynote. The mentionables are a new album art grid layout. When you click on an artist with multiple albums listed under one heading, it then goes into a list mode with the album art for each album to the left of their asscioated tracks just like previous versions of iTunes.

What’s the most notable is the Genius bar. Not to be confused with everyone’s favorite bar at the Apple Store, it sends info on your entire library to Applet to mix playlists of tracks that Apple thinks goes well together. While the keynote was ongoing I was hanging out with Bwana McCall @ Bwana.tv and he was concerned about not being able to opt-out at the onset. Well, I’m happy to say that it’s disabled by default and you do have to opt-in. Thank you Apple for not pulling another Chrome on the populace.

The only problem I had was with one particular part of the install.  The installer said it was stopping all applications, then all of a sudden avast! popped up a message in the center of my screen stating that something was trying to stop avast! On-Access Protection. I guess it really was trying to stop all applications lol. It gave me a choice of whether to let it end by clicking yes, or to keep it running by clicking no. I clicked no of course. I’m not entirely sure if this is due to running Vista X64. A XP Pro SP3 x86 virtual machine I run in VMware Workstation did not exhibit this behavior with the same antivirus installed so I’m not sure why this happened in the first place. You mileage may vary.

Windows XP Pro X64 is still not supported while Vista X64 is.  Again why I don’t know. XP X86 and Vista X86 is fully supported as well.

All in all, this upgrade to iTunes is working very nicely and I’m liking the grid view better then cover flow. I don’t care about ram usage, I know I got plenty of ram to start with.

iTunes 8 from Apple is available at the following URL http://www.apple.com/itunes/download Enjoy!

Since the release of Chrome, it has been found that Google’s new browser is sending data on your web habits back to Google regardless of if you actually hit the enter key to go to that website you’ve entered into the address bar/omnibox. It is rather easy to disable but Google themselves didn’t release this information. It took some digging around by some rather top shelf bloggers to find this information. Not to mention, that disabling the “info send” prevents me from using Chrome the way I would otherwise want to.

Google, while I’m not sure if I can trust you with the keeping track of the websites I visit, a lot of other people do and I just hope you don’t “go evil” on us.

The url hashes that help determine illicit from legit websites are not an issue, as I have been using Firefox for a very long time now. I actually find that aspect helpful.

I don’t believe for one moment that keeping ip addresses along with collected data is necessary. You really don’t want the EFF up your craw for too long. You were implicitly trusted for so long. (You have the bulk of my email, what are you doing with all that?)  You have the right to keep track of ip addresses that visit google.com for a google search or two, but I say that you don’t have the right to collect and collate info in your browser of users web traffic that is going elsewhere other then google.com only because we’re using your browser.

I say this is a bad play Google, and while I don’t expect you to change this behavior in Chrome any time soon if ever, I think I’ll just uninstall it and keep it that way

I can’t tell you how long it’s been since I first heard rumors of Google creating their own browser. I honestly thought they wouldn’t do it or couldn’t do it. Well after a few hours of sitting down in front of Google’s new browser Chrome, I really like it. The interface is a real fresh and it’s not a hard thing to reach advanced settings. Google did include Google Gears in Chrome to make any web site a web app accessible from either the Start Menu, Desktop or Quick Launch toolbar. For the hardcore tweaker like myself there isn’t a lot in Chrome to tool around with and change.

I can’t test javascript performance at the time of this writing due to the fact that the home of the Acid3 test, http://acid3.acidtests.org/ is down for the count at the moment of this blog post. I’ll update that later.

All in all, I’d have to call this a really good effort from Google on their new browser and I hope that they keep it up through

Walt Mossberg says that Chrome is worse then IE8, why does he still have a job and why do we still listen to him? Does anyone know? Occasionally, he does get a review right; but in my eyes he gets his reviews way wrong far more often then he gets it right on the dot.

Here’s some info on Chikara…

CHIKARA Wrestle Factory was founded as a wrestling school in Allentown, Pennsylvania by Mike Quackenbush & Reckless Youth. After five months, the school started CHIKARA.

In 2004, Chris Hero became a co-trainer at CHIKARA Wrestle Factory. In 2005, Jorge Rivera joined as the third trainer. In March 2005, the school moved from Allentown to the New Alhambra Arena, in Philadelphia. They then took over the training for Combat Zone Wrestling, leading to the school’s new name of CZW/CHIKARA Wrestle Factory. The schools split in 2007. The training center is once again simply known as CHIKARA Wrestle Factory. In 2007, Claudio Castagnoli took over Chris Hero’s training duties.^[1]

The company’s catalog of events (on both VHS & DVD) are available through Smart Mark Video.^[2]

CHIKARA drew their biggest crowd ever of over 550 at the New Alhambra Arena in Philadelphia to see the finals of the King Of Trios event on March 2, 2008.

CHIKARA also makes Internet Pay-Per-Views by the name of Pod-Per-View. CHIKARA also have a weekly Internet show by the name of Podcast-A-Go-Go which contains CHIKARA matches and interviews.

I’ve been building PC’s starting all the way back to the release of Windows 95. It’s always been a fun hobby for me, albeit expensive. What’s interesting to know is that the amount of performance you get for the dollar you spend on your parts has jumped through the roof exponentially.

For example, the computer I built to run Windows 95 on was a 166Mhz Pentium that cost me 240.00$ and the most recent cpu that I purchased was a Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (Kentsfield, 2.4Ghz) for 219.99$!! This applies to anything else that you would need to build a computer at home.

There are a lot of people that think it’s too difficult, too intimidating. It can be if you let it be so. What I usually tell people is don’t get yourself in a rush., find someone that can help you, take your time and realize that everything fits properly one way, and to read all the manuals that come with your parts. Reread them if you have to.

If this is something you want to do, the bottom line is go for it. It’s been very rewarding for me and if this is something you want to get into, then it’ll be rewarding for you too. Oh one more thing, stick to your budget. I’ve always had a problem doing that. hehe

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=195271

I’m not buying any of this marketing drivel from Sony for a single moment. The PS3 since it’s launch has been the most expensive console of the current generation. What Sony really means is that we’re going to charge a premium because we’re Sony and we can. They’re asking the public to pay for features that aren’t available yet. That’s just absurd. Sure they might be planning a digital tv tuner, oddly named PlayTV, but what they’ll do is charge a premium for the PS3 and then charge a premium for everything else they plan to release for the PS3. It’s what Sony does people and I don’t think they can command it anymore.

Yes, they are releasing regular updates for the PS3 firmware but none of that really matters. We (and by we I mean the public) have John Carmack on record stating that from a programming and development standpoint the XBOX 360 is a better and easier platform to work with.

Sony is trying to get you to believe that the PS3 is it and that there is nothing else out there. Hell the Wii has been outselling both the XBOX 360 and the PS3 is some markets (most notably the U.S) and I’m just not going to drink their kool-aid ; buying their spin.

There was only a single launch title for the PS3 and it was Resistance : Fall of Man. The PS3 has become known as a gaming platform that’s known as being hard to get the most out of. I wonder why is that. Sony has to send out their “PS3 best and brightest” to the game development companies just to get games out the door.

To top all this off, the original PS3 80GB had the Emotion Engine chip from the PS2 on board to allow for backwards compatibility and in later revisions they removed it. Want to know why? They did so to allow them to drop the price because it was getting stomped on by both the XBOX 360 and the Wii. In the end they lost one of the biggest selling points, backwards compatibility. They should’ve just cut the price but that would hurt Sony even more due to the fact that they’re losing hundreds of dollars on each one they sell. They won’t make it up selling games and peripherals when the XBOX 360 and the Wii are both outselling the PS3 anyways.

in closing, why should we be asked to pay for the potential of the PS3, when it’s publically known to be difficult to get the most out of it from a development standpoint. If the titles are lackluster, then who will be buying a PS3?