” Free software to improve your computer life. “
The biggest and meanest (and not completely legal) codec packs of all got an update! It contains new versions of MPC, ffdshow, XviD, DivX, Haali Media Splitter, x264, AC3ACM, FLV splitter and InterVideo DVD decoder. Just install it over your current installation.
>> Download K-Lite Codec Pack update (27/06/2006)
>> K-Lite Codec Pack website
Yes, you’ve read it right. It’s now Adobe Flash Player, since Macromedia was bought by Adobe last year. The Windows and Mac versions of the Flash Player just got a new release.
Flash Player 9 achieves up to 10 times faster performance through ActionScript 3.0 and a new ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM), which features a Just In Time (JIT) compiler that translates ActionScript bytecode to native machine code for maximum execution speed.
>> Download Adobe Flash Player 9.0.16.0 (Windows & Mac)
Once again people going to Rock Werchter by train will have difficulties. The unions are preparing actions during the Werchter weekend, starting on June 29th. Two years ago I think, they did the same: there were no trains for the people wanting to go home after the festival weekend. If the unions want to have support for their cause, they shouldn’t do it this way. The train ticket is included in the price of the Werchter entrance ticket. Now they’re only going to piss of a lot of people.
Nullsoft Winamp is a fast, flexible, high-fidelity media player for Windows. Winamp supports playback of many audio (MP3, OGG, AAC, WAV, MOD, XM, S3M, IT, MIDI, etc) and video types (AVI,ASF,MPEG,NSV), custom appearances called skins (supporting both classic Winamp 1.x/2.x skins and Winamp 3 freeform skins), audio visualization and audio effect plug-ins (including two industry dominating visualization plug-ins), an advanced media library, Internet radio and TV support, CD ripping, and CD burning.
The Full version Plays MP3s, AAC, WMA, and more; Compatible with Winamp 2 Plug-ins; Full Support for Classic and Modern Skins; Plays Videos; has a Powerful Media Library; Browse Internet Radio & TV Stations; Integrated Internet Music Videos & Songs; Bundled Visualizations; and Burn & Rip CDs.
Fixed: [in_midi] crash bug & potential security vulnerability (info)
(Note: bug exists in all Winamp versions from 2.90 to 5.23)
Jakob Nielsen - who has spent years advising companies about their websites - took some time to chat with the Wall Street Journal’s Lee Gomes about RSS, email newsletters, web design and blogs. When asked whether blogs must maintain a ‘conversation’ with readers, Nielsen says, ‘That will work only for the people who are most fanatic, who are engaged so much that they will go and check out these blogs all the time. There are definitely some people who do that — they are a small fraction. A much larger part of the population is not into that so much. The Internet is not that important to them. It’s a support tool for them. Bloggers tend to be all one extreme edge. It’s really dangerous to design for a technical elite. We have to design for a broad majority of users.
Matasano Security is running an excellent interview with Christopher Vaughan, a lead PM on the IE team. Christopher has worked on every release of Internet Explorer since version 2. He discusses IE7, security lessons learned from IE6, the future of .NET managed code in IE, and more.
Opera is “the other good browser”, besides Mozilla Firefox. Free to use, available on almost all platforms. And it has a ton of features:
User Interface
* Available accesskeys are now listed when entering accesskey mode with Shift+Escape.
* “Save as HTML file with images” now uses a folder for external files.
* Cookie site preferences now override globally disabled cookies.
* Bookmarks exported to HTML are now in the Netscape Bookmark File Format, making them compatible with Yahoo bookmarks, Scuttle, MyBookmarks, etc.
* When enabling the status bar, link and form tooltips will not show the URL address anymore, and will display the content of the title attribute without the “Title: ” prefix.
* Several content blocker fixes.
* Some plug-in content will now require you to click before you can interact with it.
* Changing alignment of mail headers no longer causes headers to overlap or disappear.
* Fix for font preferences being ignored when restarting Opera.
* Double-click to select words now doesn’t select punctuation.
* User JavaScript can now be set as a site preference.
* Temporary download directory used for opening files in external applications can now be modified in opera:config.
* Added setting Show New Opera Dialog, to allow version check to be disabled without turning off updating of browser JavaScript site patches.
* Added setting User JavaScript on HTTPS, to allow User JavaScripts to be used on secure pages.Widgets
* window.moveTo and window.resizeTo are now supported, as well as window.close.
* widget.setPreferenceForKey for Widgets now works.
* Fixed unwarranted security violation errors.
* Any [plugin] and [java] tags must now be inside the [content] tag, which itself should be inside the [security] tag.Messaging and newsfeeds
* Several IMAP fixes including improved drag/drop from IMAP trash.
* Opening images in mail by right-clicking the image now works.Display
* Improved handling of percentage heights on tables.
* Stand-alone images are now centered on the page; image.css is read again.
* User set encoding is now window and site specific.
* Baseline for CJK characters is now correct.
* Fixed animation speed of animated GIF images.
* XHTML mobile profile rendering is fixed.
* Fix for missing marker on floated list items.
* Fix for display: block; on button elements.
* background-position can now accept positions larger than 2047px.Script
* Added support for DOM level 2 Style Sheets and associated parts of DOM level 2 CSS.
* Added support for the CONTENTEDITABLE attribute and contentEditable property.
* Several improvements to behavior of designMode.
* Added support for Audio.loop.
* Improved handling of mouse events passing through clipped or overflowed (or otherwise transparent) regions of an element.
* Implemented JavaScript 1.5 const as an alias for var.
* Added support for document.charset and document.characterSet.
* Improved handling of offsetTop, offsetLeft and offsetParent.SVG
* Improved SVG performance for dynamic changes.
* Allowed SVGMatrix to be read/write.
* Added smallcaps support.
* Support panning.
* Fixed handling of gradientTransform attribute when gradientUnits is objectBoundingBox.
* Support keyboard navigation in SVG.Forms
* Several fixes for Web Forms 2.0 stepping.
* Improved display of date inputs.Miscellaneous
* Multiple stability fixes.
Windows-specific changes
* International MSI installer:
o Installer should now pick up the system locale and configure Opera with that locale if the language is supported by Opera.
o Now has 30 languages in one package: The international MSI package contains US English, Japanese, German, Polish, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Latin-American and European Spanish, Canadian and European French, Italian, Norwegian bokmål and nynorsk, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Dutch, Korean, Brazilian and European Portuguese, Russian, Czech, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Turkisk, Punjabi, Croatian, Lithuanian, Frisian, and Georgian.
o Note: Norwegian nynorsk, Punjabi, Canadian French, Frisian, Georgian, and Lithuanian are not supported during installation. On first startup, go to Tools > Preferences > General and use the drop-down to switch to one of these languages.
* Several NTLM fixes.
The Windows Live services are on the rise as it seems. Yesterday I could opt in with my Hotmail account to use the new Windows Live Mail, and today the Windows Live Messenger has been released. Windows Live Messenger is what used to be MSN Messenger. By the way, when I changed from Hotmail to Windows Live Mail, my language preference went from Dutch to Deutsch, giving me all kinds of weird characters on the screen. The weird part was that all words were still in english. But hey, it’s a beta 
And when I changed the language back to english, all was good.
Features:
* PC-to-PC Calling
* Telephone calling, too
* Even better video conversations
* Sharing Folders
* Text message their phones
* Your two-way, super-powered address book
* Windows Live Alerts
* Soon: Talk to your Yahoo! friends, tooChangelog:
* Cheap PC-Phone Calling
* Sharing files with friends through Messenger
* Unified Contacts between Messenger & Hotmail
* Improved voice quality for free PC-PC calls
* Totally updated look at feel
* Way improved connectivity & Performance
* Messenger Duel Phone- works as a regular phone and a PC-PC phone for free calls
>> Download Windows Live Messenger 8.0.0787 final Dutch
>> Download Windows Live Messenger 8.0.0787 final English
Ars Technica is reporting that Microsoft is finally trying to do something about PC driver problems. A new crash-report-driven Driver Quality Rating system will be used in Windows Vista to rate drivers. Drivers that rate poorly in real world use by users will lose their logo certification status, which would be bad news for OEMs and the device manufacturers themselves. Maybe now submitting crash reports will feel more useful? This is long overdue.
The world’s most popular media player just got an update!
* Improved: [gen_jumpex] jump-to-file speed improvements
* Fixed: playlist saving with network share files
* Fixed: Media Library preferences not loading in correct order
* Fixed: main window not hilited when restoring from minimized state in classic skin.
* Fixed: slow loading of playlists with URLs
* Fixed: CD burning using third party input plugins
* Fixed: classic skin winshade playlist time display
* Fixed: [gen_ff] Wasabi XML font-related fixes from Martin Poehlmann
* Fixed: [gen_ff] Map.getHeight() maki script function returning width instead
* Fixed: [gen_ff] winshade global hotkeys broken w/ modern skins
* Fixed: [gen_jumpex] ‘Add to Queue’ issues
* Fixed: [gen_jumpex] NT4 incompatability
* Fixed: [gen_jumpex] misc bug fixes
* Fixed: [gen_ml] icon changes on drag+drop items
* Fixed: [in_mp3] playback of AAC streams
* Fixed: [in_mp4] seek bug when using right arrow key
* Fixed: [in_wm] Playback restarts from beginning when editing tags of a currently playing .wma file
* Fixed: [in_wm] protocol/extension reversed in config > filetype > edit
* Fixed: [in_wm] ‘Audio only’ always checked for ASF/WMV in config
* Fixed: [in_wm] seek bug when using right arrow key
* Fixed: [ml_bookmarks] ‘Edit Bookmarks’ menu item not working when Media Library is hidden
* Fixed: [ml_local] crash while rearranging media library views
* Fixed: [ml_local] crash on close
* Fixed: [ml_local] sort arrow reversed in some columns
* Fixed: [ml_playlists] Import Playlists uses containing dir for title instead of filename
* Fixed: [ml_playlists] No “Recurse” checkbox in Import Playlists From Folder
* Fixed: [ml_playlists] Add Dir adds all filetypes (not just all-supported)
* Fixed: [ml_playlists] rt-click enqueue not working & other issues
* Fixed: [ml_playlists] Not saving playlists in some situations
* Fixed: [ml_playlists] crash when loading badly formed WPL playlists
* Fixed: [ml_playlists] drag&drop into playlist not adding to correct position
* Fixed: [ml_playlists] root playlist screen not updating when adding new playlist
* Fixed: [ml_playlists] reverting changes on send-to: playlist
* Fixed: [ml_wire] some podcasts only display one item
* Fixed: [out_ds] stop with fade (shift+v) issue
* Fixed: [ml_pmp] Syncing duplicates finally fixed (thanks gordol)
* Fixed: [pmp_ipod] Playlist sort now works again
* Fixed: [ml_pmp] Removing items from a playlist not saving issue (thanks Nick)
* Updated: [in_cdda] CDDB 2.0.1.25