2006 on John Paulett

Songbird 0.2 (Almost)

Sun, 01 Oct 2006 04:15:45 +0000

There’s a new kid in town, Songbird. Imagine if Firefox mated with iTunes, and somehow the gray and brush metal interfaces formed a midnight black child--that would be Songbird. Songbird is an attempt to use the XUL design framework from Mozilla Firefox to create a user experience similar to Apple's iTunes program. While some have said that Songbird is nothing but a direct rip off of iTunes, Songbird brings new ideas to the media player realm. Like iTunes (and most media players), there is a library with the typical sorting features. However, instead of only providing a single source for new content like iTunes has with iTMS, Songbird uses the whole internet as its "music store." Any site with open media content can be part of Songbirds "music store," as Songbird auto discovers tracks on the site. Songbird uses services from Amazon, Creative Commons, eMusic, and dozens of others. Podcasts and streaming radio are easily accessible sources of content in Songbird. A nice feature is the Wikipedia plugin (make sure to install it during the Songbird installation), which shows the Wikipedia page for the currently playing artist.

Firefox 2.0 beta 2

Wed, 06 Sep 2006 00:24:37 +0000

The new version of Mozilla Firefox is out--grab a beta copy now! There have been doubts if Firefox can keep making inroads against Microsoft's Internet Explorer, given the fact that IE 7 is now out in beta and has many of the features that the internet community has come to expect from a "modern browser" (tabbed browser, feed integration, etc.). However, it appears as if the Mozilla team is going strong with the latest preview of Firefox and will beat Microsoft to the market in the latest round of the browser wars.

Smithsonian Quickly Drops Pluto

Tue, 05 Sep 2006 01:51:03 +0000

The International Astronomical Union has decided that Pluto no longer is considered a planet. This distant body has been reclassified as a "dwarf planet," along with two other bodies, Xena and Ceres. While some may feel cheated, losing one of their beloved planets, the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum was quick to adopt the new standard. Within a week and a half, the museum had begun making changes to the solar system exhibit. The symbol of Pluto, which had been in a list of all the planets, was hidden behind a black plastic square.

Downfall of DRM?

Sun, 03 Sep 2006 00:43:29 +0000

There has been a lot of buzz this week in the anti-DRM (Digital Rights Management) camp. Engadget posted that Microsoft's PlayForSure had been removed by a program called FairUse4WM. While Microsoft almost immediately pushed a patch out that broke version 1.1 of this program, within the week version 1.2 was released, which according to its author should be much harder for Microsoft to break. Meanwhile, in the iTunes arena, a new version of QTFairUse6 has been released which removes the Apple's previously uncrackable DRM, FairPlay for iTunes v6.

New Site, New Host

Fri, 01 Sep 2006 21:19:36 +0000

Welcome to the new jhcore.com. After having hosted the website for the past 3 years on an old computer in my apartment, it was time for a change to a hosted solution, where I wouldn't have to worry about my internal network being compromised. After quite a bit of research, I have settled upon DreamHost--besides multiple glowing reviews, their prices and features are highly competitive.

In addition to switching hosts, I have finally decided to try out several packaged web-software packages. I have thought about switching over to WordPress for about a year and a half now, but I have always enjoyed creating my very own layout and code for my site. But hopefully with WordPress I will be able to focus more upon the content of the site and less with the actual code.