If you have a large collection of MP3s, WMAs and other audio files, you probably have quite a few where the tag information isn’t set up properly. In other words, they don’t come up with the correct track name or artist in your media player.

Editing these tags manually can be a laborious task, but fear not, the contributers at MusicBrainz offer a solution to your problem. As they say themselves:
MusicBrainz is a community music metadatabase that attempts to create a comprehensive music information site. You can use the MusicBrainz data either by browsing this web site, or you can access the data from a client program — for example, a CD player program can use MusicBrainz to identify CDs and provide information about the CD, about the artist or about related information. You can also use the MusicBrainz Tagger to automatically identify and clean up the metadata tags in your digital music collections.

The website has a number of applications that you can download which access the database. The one I found most useful was Picard, which provides an interface to search the…

Windows Genuine Advantage, system currently in place in Windows Vista. There are actually two different scenarios in place, the first is called Reduced Functionality Mode which Vista will start in if the user does not activate the product in time. The second is if a WGA check fails which will make Vista run in Non-Genuine Mode. Both modes impose certain penalties upon the user like logging him off after an hour or disabling features like Aero or Readyboost.

The good news is that both modes described above are gone. Users will not be logged off automatically anymore which is great. Microsoft however decided to change tactics and nag the user to death - eh registration / activation - instead. Users will experience the following if their Vista installation fails the WGA check or if they fail to activate Vista in time.

“A nag screen to activate at logon that cannot be dismissed for 15 seconds.
Every hour the desktop background is switched to black (it can be changed back, but after an hour it’s set to black again).
Activation dialogs and balloon dialogs appear regularly.
Optional Windows Updates aren’t delivered.“

You can also get a list of changes…

South Park meet Star Wars meet Microsoft. Minh over at the Microsoft enthusiast community Channel9 has finally revealed what he has been teasing in the past week or so, an animated movie about Microsoft he’s been working on. It’s all being done in Anime Studio and Windows Movie Maker. Here is the trailer he released today, with the full movie coming soon.

Starring Ray Ozzie as Senator Palpatine, Bill Hill as Qui-Gon Jinn, Steven Sinofsky as Anakin Skywalker, Bill Gates as Obi-Wan Kenobi, Steve Ballmer as Darth Maul, Mini-Microsoft and more.

So I guess this is what happens during a writers’ strike and you leave creative people with the right tools. Love the bit where Steven “Skywalker” Sinofsky’s hands get chopped off. Just kidding. No hard feelings Steven.

On January 24 MVP:Security Jesper Johansson posted a very good blog entry, "Do Vista Users Need Fewer Security Patches Than XP Users?", about Windows XP vs. Windows Vista security. This was in reply to the "One Year Vulnerability Report" by Jeff Jones (who is the Director of Security at Microsoft).

It’s VERY interesting reading  showing how strong Vista is - oh, and Jesper takes that even further comparing IE7 and Firefox patching. Cool stuff.

Enjoy!

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