Could someone please enlighten me as to why the hell so many propgrams in Windows choose to put such stupid, useless, idiotic icons in my system tray?! Why?! I have five icons in my tray that I have never used, will never use and don’t want to ever see again.

Why do ATI and the makers of the little pointing stick thing on my laptop feel so self-important that I might want to change my resolution from the system tray or alter my pointing stick sensitivity? Has anyone ever done it? Why do who-ever made the keep-the-system-uptodate software think I’ll ever care to use their icon? And don’t get me started on anti-virus software. Make the icons go away…

So I added a few things to my mp3 program. It’s now got a playlist, where you can see currently queued songs. I’ve also implemented multiple selection in both the folder and playlists so you can choose what to play quicker. Finally, if you try to queue or play a folder, all the files in the folder are queued.

It still crashes a lot, however. See screenshot for current status. If anyones interested in helping code (Mono/C#), maybe we can start up an sf.net project; I might well do that anyway for the CVS facilities. Drop me a line, I can bribe you with Gmail invites =)

I’m writing a program. It’s quite exciting in a way, because it’s a very long time since I coded anything more than a few lines just for the fun of it. I’m coding something that I’ve needed for a while. First I’ll state the problem:

When downloading music files from the net, you are often going to have duplicates and bad files. All the music players I have at the moment do a good job of divorcing the music from the file system; this is a Good Thing when I am listening to music I’ve happily categorised. However, there is the time between downloading a file and importing it into your music library when you are deciding whether the downloaded file is good enough. Here, the connection to the file system is essential: you want to be able to delete bad files and move good files to reasonably named folders within your music library, ready for importing to your favourite music player.

I’ve been doing some optimising of my Gentoo build process. I added a Blueyonder mirror to my list of places to download software from. This is good because I am a Blueyonder customer and so already on their network. I tend to get around 80 kilobytes/second from their mirror, which is about 30k/s faster than before.

I also had a look into my make.conf settings and discovered that I wasn’t turning on any optimisations for the software build, to allow gcc to take advantage of my AthlonXP’s shiny features. A little silly of me, for if you are building all of your software yourself, you should really be trying to optimise the hell out of it, otherwise what’s the point? so “march=athlon-xp -O3 -pipe” it is now. We shall see if that all works fine.

One thing that is overtaking the world recently is a vast quantity of sales in shops. It would almost seem like shops may as well make sale prices permanent, they are so often in the throes of a sale! Coming home on the bus yesterday I saw a sale advertisement in a window so crazy, so completely out there that it’s questionable you’ll believe it’s really in a shop window near my house. Ladies and gentlemen, Carphone Warehouse present to you their: