General

Yahoo Music Engine

Wow… Over 1 million tunes for $60/year. I’d say $5/mo (like the Yahoo ad does) but that would be a lie. If you want to pay by the month it is $6.99. Still a deal. Less than half of what the cost of a similar offering from Rhapsody (Rhapsody to-go is 14.99/mo). Downside is of course they are DRM enabled Windows Media files. You can use them from 3 computers however, and unforunately I don’t have a lack of windoze computers around the house. You are “renting” a music collection and you know what? I’m fine with that. The albums I love I’ll probably still buy. Today I buy quite a few albums that I don’t care for except a song or two. I can buy just those songs on Yahoo for 79 cents now (If I still like them after hearing them 20 times). You can also take the music to a DRM enabled MP3 player.

For $5/mo it is worth it to listen to just about any music you want. The WMA files can be downloaded to your hard drive for offline use but they will expire I guess if you don’t connect or cancel the subscription. The software is pretty buggy. It logs me off periodically and then after I log in it doesn’t let me stream music – restarting the program fixes it. It is very web centric and is pretty slow right now. How would you like to size that application deployment?

Ok, so when can I do this with movie and TV shows Yahoo?

Back online

Finally had a few moments to upgrade WordPress to a version that can
handle bulk spam… So everything is now working again.

Eclipse RCP

The Eclipse IDE has made a big change in the 3.0 release. The framework used for the plug-in model, and the system services have been “unbolted” from the IDE. This new layer is called the Rich Client Platform (RCP). After spending a few days going through the plug-in class material, reading doc, and writing sample code I’ve convinced of one thing – it could be easier. The documentation is lacking. The only online tutorials for RCP are not real useful, but they do show the most complicated Hello World sample I’ve ever seen! That being said, I like it and am starting to use it for the card game platform. Is it better than NetBeans for RC? I don’t know. So far the widget library (SWT) has made me want to use the Swing widget library, which I’ve never liked. Time will tell…