A Modest Construct

Posts tagged `Windows`

¶ μTorrent 1.7

uTorrent

Despite the paranoid delusions of people who think that uTorrent is now a tool of the MPAA, it remains one of the most popular bittorrent clients for Windows (and soon Mac).

v1.7 was just released, boasting some new features and improvements, including a bug which limited downloads on large torrents. A full changelog is here, broken down by build.

Until RC6, the new uTorrent sported a Vista-compatible icon, but which was taken out because people are great big whiners, apparently, and didn’t like the extra 30Kb of extra executable size. Also, apparently, they couldn’t figure out how to make an icon which included versions for all operating systems.

Maybe next time.

Grab the new executable (218K) here. If history is any indication, an installer will be available once the initial rush for updates has died down.

μTorrent 1.7 had a severe bug that caused incorrect data to be reported to trackers. Please upgrade to 1.7.2

§1870 · July 13, 2007 · 3 comments · Tags: bittorrent, p2p, software, Windows

¶ cdrtfe: a powerful cdrtools frontend

Previously, I reviewed InfraRecorder, a relatively young project that seeks to add a bit of spit and polish to the venerable cdrtools command line programs. At the time, noted that while the interface was lovely, there were a few flaws, notably the hassle of add-on mp3 support, the lack of FLAC support, and limited flexibility.

Another frontend, cdrtfe (cdrtools frontend), was a freeware project that fairly recently opened its source, and I’ve been using it ever since. It hasn’t got the best interface in the world, but it’s one of the most powerful little programs I’ve seen in a long time.

Please note that the version of cdrtfe that I use is 1.3pre1 which is not the stable 1.2x series. Any bugs which I describe should not be ascribed to the stable series, but considered bugs in development until proved otherwise.

¶ Software for 8 May

software

Since I’m not writing anything of substance at the current moment, here are some recent software releases to be aware of.

Pidgin (formerly Gaim) finally saw an official 2.0.0 release, with too many features to list.
Paint.NET released its latest incremental change to 3.07, with a few fixes an an enhanced line/curve tool.
Notepad++, a Scintilla-based tabular editor for Windows, released 4.1, updating the scintilla component and quashing some bugs.
Sumatra PDF, a minimal PDF viewer for Windows, released 0.6, now with support for password-protected files (which I didn’t realize it lacked before)
IrfanView, a popular freeware picture viewer for Windows, incremented to 4.00, with various bug fixes, a few new minor features, and better Vista support.

§1846 · May 8, 2007 · 3 comments · Tags: open source, software, Windows

¶ Infra Recorder: the best Windows cdrtools frontend

Infra Recorder

The state of Win32 burning programs

The proprietary choices for optical disc burning on Windows are pretty obvious: at the fore, there’s Roxio’s offering, EZ Media Creator, and Nero’s offering, Nero Burning Rom. Having used Roxio’s v5 program long, long ago with my Hewlett-Packard 4x external CDRW drive, and having used Nero’s Burning Rom during the entirety of its v6 lifecycle (when it was one of the best offerings on the market), I’ve been disappointed to see most of these offerings turn into bloated creatures, invasive and slow.

Perhaps you want built-in picture managers, movie players, reencoders, editors, and every bang and whistle you can think of. If that’s your bag, baby, you’re more than welcome to shell out $80+ for a copy

My time on Linux, however, has engendered me to the rock-solid (if historically murky in license) cdrtools, especially since the wonderful k3b is essentially a cdrtools frontend.

Historically, frontends for Windows have been touch & go. Burnatonce, a freeware closed-source frontend, which two years ago was a great little minimalist project, has stagnated, as the developer has no clear roadmap for development or time to create one.

The functional but less-glamorous cdrtfe is another good solution, although my experiences with it have been limited.

¶ Still think running a Windows server is a good idea?

I’m not sure how I missed this for that last 9 months, but I love it.

The following pictures are diagrams of system calls made to serve a single static HTML page with one image. The one on the left is Apache on Linux; the one on the right is IIS on Windows (I assume Server 2003). Click either for a larger version.

§1710 · February 3, 2007 · 6 comments · Tags: Linux, miscellany, software, technology, Windows