Battleangel

Winamp 5 is actually nearing completion. Amazing work considering how slow development has been in the past. The latest RC8 is quite useful and they seem to have ironed out most of the bugs. I’ve had some issues with extremely slow refresh from tray mode and interference from rapid keyboard action and other system processes but most of that seems to be gone with this RC.
Of course the new interface is going to consume a little bit more memory and CPU. Nothing to do about it.
One of the best features of this new incarnation is probably global hotkeys. Wow. I can finally use Ctrl + Shift + Q or whatever to bring up Winamp from the task tray. Just like I’ve become used to with Miranda IM.

I’ve been looking at some new / updated php scripts as well. For instance, Coppermine is now at 1.2 final.

Also, I’ve been looking at a few new DVD / Digital Video scripts like Martijn Best’s Movie Database, VideoDB. There are some amazing scripts out there that I’ve previously overlooked.

Miscellaneous script candidates include ICQ Status (displays ICQ status in plain text), PhpBB XML (latest topics in XML), Amazon XML (turns ISBN to XML information for site inclusion) and CrisoftRicette (archiving of cooking recipes).

In addition, I’m still looking for a good way to output Winamp data to emails and the web. Because of the Miranda WinampNotify plugin I already have that part taken care of. I was thinking of using HTTP POST and AMIP.

There is beta multiplayer demo out for Terminator 3: War of the Machines. Not that it looks that promising but it would be one helluva game if they could just get some things straight. Chances are it will bomb however.

The best BitTorrent client currently, ABC, has been updated to 2.6.1. The only bad news is those hideous icons that the software now uses. Less is more sometimes.

I think I was finally able to beat the 100% iexplore.exe CPU usage thing. I got HijackThis. I had a hunch and deleted the Acrobat BHO (Browser Helper Object). It seems fine now at least. BHOs is probably the first thing to check along with unrecognized HKLMs if Internet Explorer is acting strange. Fingers crossed. UPDATE: I’m taking this back. Just happened again. Dang. First time in 24h.