July 2006 - Posts

SOFTWARE: WinRAR v3.x will be free this Sunday!

The greatest compression app (stable, lightweight and very good compression ratio) available right now - WinRAR from RARLabs - will be giving free licences this Sunday as a token of appreciation for their award...
WinRAR Voted Overall Best Utility for SIAF People's Choice Award
The people have spoken and voted WinRAR as Best Overall Utility. Each year the Shareware Industry Awards Foundation (SIAF) asks computer users from all over to vote for their favorite software.

Thanks for all your support and for voting for WinRAR. It was a great honor for us to receive such an award.

To Say Thanks and to Celebrate: Get the Winner WinRAR 3.51 for FREE on Sunday In order to thank everyone who voted for us and made it possible for us to win this prestigious award, we are offering the WinRAR 3.51 single user license non upgradeable version this Sunday the 30th of July 2006 from 00:00 until 24:00 CET for absolutely FREE. Please click the following link which will become active on Sunday. Fill out the form on that page in order to receive further information via e-mail about how to get your FREE version of WinRAR.
So those of you who still use WinZIP (who?) time to move over to a better compression app... As you may realise I package HotHTML 3 within WinRAR's self-extracting executable (modified to fit our visual requirements), without WinRAR's RAR compression we'd be looking at about a 2-3Mb bigger file. Ofcourse looked at 7-Zip as well earlier on... So be ready to get your free license:-)
posted Saturday, July 29, 2006 11:33 AM by Thushan Fernando with 1 Comments

Simpsons Movie Work In Progress

Some "beta" work in progress shots of the simpsons movie coming OMG OMG OMG july 27th 2007 hosted on YouTube...

Clip 1
Clip 2

Cant hardly wait.... hmmm isnt that a name of a movie? Ahh bugger it! And another clip The Simpranos for the sake of the good times...

posted Thursday, July 27, 2006 2:07 AM by Thushan Fernando with 2 Comments

0Day: Firefox 1.5.0.5 Final Released!

A day before release! Firefox 1.5.0.5...

What's New in Firefox 1.5.0.5

Firefox 1.5.0.5 is a security update that is part of our ongoing program to provide a safe Internet experience for our customers. We recommend that all users upgrade to this latest version.

Release Date: July 27, 2006

Windows | Mac | Linux | Others
posted Wednesday, July 26, 2006 11:20 AM by Thushan Fernando with 1 Comments

HARDWARE: ATI and AMD Merge, its official!

Its official, ATI and AMD have merged. heres a pic from DailyTech's news article about it.


Awwww a happy snappy!

AMD announced the deal is valued around $5.4B USD: $4.2B in cash and 57M shares of AMD common stock will be used to purchase the ATI in a takeover bid. A little more than half of the cash to be used from the transaction will come from a $2.5B USD loan from Morgan Stanley

Very interesting times ahead... especially considering DirectX 10/Vista/+HDCP cards are just over that hill in the distant... and the talk of integrating a GPU and CPU taken from yet another DailyTech article:
Specifically, it appears as though AMD and ATI are planning unified, scalable platforms using a mixture of AMD CPUs, ATI chipsets and ATI GPUs. This sort of multi-GPU, multi-CPU architecture is extremely reminiscent of AMD's Torrenza technology announced this past June, which allows low-latency communications between chipset, CPU and main memory. The premise for Torrenza is to open the channel for embedded chipset development from 3rd party companies. AMD said the technology is an open architecture, allowing what it called "accelerators" to be plugged into the system to perform special duties, similar to the way we have a dedicated GPU for graphics.
Hmmmm interesting...
Furthermore, AMD President Dirk Meyer also confirmed that in addition to multi-processor platforms, that "as we look towards ever finer manufacturing geometries we see opportunity to integrate CPU and GPU onto the same [die]."
*wonders what Intel's got planned*
posted Monday, July 24, 2006 11:45 AM by Thushan Fernando with 1 Comments

HARDWARE: Microsoft's music player, Zune! Its official!

Call it an iPod clone, call it a failure before launch, Microsoft's entry into the mobile music market is here, Zune that is... From first glimpses its far from a failure and may actually pick up:-)



Not much is known about the unit, but according to the DailyTech article and the subsequent Engadget article it will be a wifi-enabled music player...

This release is interesting (forgetting all this iPod clone discussions) as Microsoft are also planning to roll out their own music service, support for XNA toolkits and maybe finally put some truth into the Xbox2Go discussions. Very interesting times:-) As an Xbox 360 owner (but hardly a fulltime user) it'll be interesting to see where and how all these will "integrate" into one big entertainment hub...

I love the fact that the screen is large enough,  iPods & the current Nomad's have the buttons as the center piece, have a small screen with the rest of the real-estate taken up by buttons or nothingness... As a total Creative Nomad nut I might even change...
posted Thursday, July 13, 2006 10:35 AM by Thushan Fernando with 1 Comments

WINDOWS: Shutdown Windows faster with the User Profile Hive Cleanup Service

Microsoft released the User Profile Hive Cleanup Service a few days ago for download (or here for non-validation).

What does this service do?
The User Profile Hive Cleanup service helps to ensure user sessions are completely terminated when a user logs off. System processes and applications occasionally maintain connections to registry keys in the user profile after a user logs off. In those cases the user session is prevented from completely ending. This can result in problems when using Roaming User Profiles in a server environment or when using locked profiles as implemented through the Shared Computer Toolkit for Windows XP.

On Windows 2000 you can benefit from this service if the application event log shows event id 1000 where the message text indicates that the profile is not unloading and that the error is "Access is denied". On Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 either event ids 1517 and 1524 indicate the same profile unload problem.

To accomplish this the service monitors for logged off users that still have registry hives loaded. When that happens the service determines which application have handles opened to the hives and releases them. It logs the application name and what registry keys were left open. After this the system finishes unloading the profile.
Also see Steve Wiseman's post. Without this service running shutdown on my main desktop takes 2-3minutes (lots of stuff!) now it takes barely 10 seconds(~5)...
posted Thursday, July 06, 2006 3:28 PM by Thushan Fernando with 0 Comments Rated Excellent [5 out of 5].