…hello MediaMonkey!

At last I’ve found something to take over from ol’ iTunes, which has been noticably feeling the strain since my MP3 library passed the 10,000 tune mark. MediaMonkey seems to load & work quickly, it’s library management is light years ahead of iTunes, and best of all it’s amazingly easy to extend with simple VBScripting.

Expect a few MediaMonkey scripts in the near future, I’m currently working on one that emulates the ‘now playing’ tab of Amarok (which I also love, but it only runs on *nix), and after that I’m gonna try sticking some Flash in there (perhaps for a nice interactive ‘browse by album art’ type view)

yup, a stupid idea, a stupid law, and now some stupid photoshoppery….

Fark.com

Useful article on garbage collection in Flash Player 8. Switching to ‘mark and sweep’ means it’ll run faster.
But it also runs different and there are certain things to bear in mind.

One example: Particle systems. If you have objects representing particles, reuse the objects when they die instead of allocating new ones. Allocating large amounts of objects in a short time can kill the GC since unlike with the referencing counter model object are not freed right away anymore. So when objects die, put them into a recycle container from which you create more particles.

Haven’t done this since I was in junior school, very nice…

Make-a-Flake - A snowflake maker by Lookandfeel new media

Sounds like a ‘men in black’ type rumour, but apparently every printer leaves an almost invisible tracking code that can be used by the government (or more specifically, the American government) to track where and when the item was printed. Is it just me who finds this a touch scary? How many other everyday items are being silently tracked by ‘the government’ for ‘our own protection’? (…and dont get me started on Oyster cards!)

Sleuths Crack Tracking Code Discovered in Color Printers