Winamp crashes Gtalk when “Show current music track” is enabled

If you use Gtalk and you have set the status optionĀ  to “Show current music track” and use Winamp 5.xxx you will see that Gtalk has a hard time getting the information from Winamp. In order to solve this you will need to create a blank “winamp.m3u” using any kind of player that understands that format or simply by using Notepad and saving a blank file as “winamp.m3u”.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Streamripper for Winamp on Vista enable & disable annoyance

If you are using the well-known Streamripper with Winamp for ripping your favorite streams on Vista you might experience a problem when disabling Streamripper. I for one, don’t need Streamripper all the time so I disable it and re-enable it only when I go for a “tunes hunt”. The user credentials stuff will give you headaches on Vista (even if you are logged in as Administrator or another user with administrator privileges). Why ? Because when you enable/disable Streamripper plugin or other Winamp plugins they will edit their config files (mostly INI files). Vista won’t let them do that so you disable Streamripper, restart Winamp and Streamripper will pop right up again as nothing happened.

In order to get rid of this issue make sure that when you open Winamp you will open it by right-clicking the shortcut icon and choosing “Run as Administrator”. All problems will go away and your changes will be saved. If you want to run it as Administrator all the time without needing to right click on the icon, then right-click on the shortcut icon once more, choose “Properties” and navigate to the “Compatibility” tab, and on the “Privilege Level” setting check the “Run this program as an Administrator” box.
That’s a pretty easy solution for this annoying problem. Hope that it will server you as it served me. Cheers.

LE: I noticed that if you choose to run Winamp “as an Administrator” then Winamp won’t be able to see the external mounted drives. For example I have mounted my 500GB WD external HDD and when I loaded a playlist that contained tunes located on the external disk Winamp started to skip all my playlist. I noticed that when I want to load a folder into Winamp’s playlist and get to the browse window I can’t see the mounted partition that is viewable from My Computer. The fix was to run Winamp normally, not with administrator privileges which conflicts with the above fix.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Logitech Cordless Desktop Wave Kit + Foobar2000

For those of you who found themselves having problems configuring the media keys for the keyboard, don’t worry. The solution exists and you don’t need to think of changing your favorite player because of this issue. If you own this cool wireless set and you are a fan of Foobar2000 player you will proably want to get those media keys to work. As I don’t have time to write those instructions here, on my blog, I will give you the link to this wonderful, comprehensive post that will guide you through all the process. Here, Luckz posted this cool step-by-step guide. Don’t worry, the post may have been written in 2006 but I successfully used those instructions and got my kit working smoothly with Foobar2000.

Posted in observations | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Sorry for downtime

Eleven days ago the server on which this blog is hosted went down. The server’s OS (RHEL 5) went into kernel panic. Reason is unknown and probably will remain that way unfortunately. For the last eleven days, I spent most of my time recovering what I could from the server. MySQL databases have been fully restored. Domains files, websites, e-mail accounts, pretty much everything we needed from the server was recovered. This has been a long and tiring task for me. It consumed me as a person. I definitely learned some new stuff from this, so I guess it was an educative experience. I want to use this occasion to officially thank the support staff from “The Planet” who has been more than friendly and acted very professional while supporting me through this milestone. Backups are important. VERY IMPORTANT !!! Preferable off-site backups (you might want to check EVault) but local ones (on a separate local disk maybe) will probably do also. Plesk is very powerful and definitely a top-class CP. I enjoy using it every day. I am very grateful that I managed to recover everything. I even made considerable progress on improving stuff that we already had. I am very happy with how things turned out in the end.

Thank you everyone for your support and understanding.

logo_rhelplesk-logoapache-logomysqlphp-logo

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Woork Handbook – a great resource for web designers

Antonio’s Handbook is like a present for all web designers out there.

The Woork Handbook is a free eBook about CSS, HTML, Ajax, web programming, Mootools, Scriptaculous and other topics about web design… directly from Woork!

I strongly suggest you download (it’s free !) his book and have a look. It’s a great piece of reference.

In case you don’t know, Antonio is the writer on Woork; a blog about AJAX, CSS, Mootools, Scriptaculous and many others.

This is my way of saying “Thank you Antonio !”.

Posted in news | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment