Wednesdays What’s New: Make Sweet Music With Jaikoz!

by Kevin Blalock, Quality Assurance

In today’s world, everyone has an mp3 collection. I do, and it is pretty ridiculous. I have been storing my music in digital format as long as the technology to do so has been around. Currently, I have close to 250gb of music. Now what is more ridiculous than having that much music? Making sure it has correct metadata. I can’t tell you how many of those are named Track 1.mp3, Track 2.mp3,  and so on.

So, I have been looking for tools that can help clean all that mess up. There are many out there, and like everything else, some better than others. I believe I have found the best all around app out there for cleaning up your music collection. It is called Jaikoz.  It is java based and runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. The full version will run you about $20 but it is WELL worth it! Here is a quick run down on some of the features:

– Works on windows, mac, and linux
– Tagging of mp4, m4a, m4p, mp3, wma, flac, and ogg. (No need for multiple tagging applications to fix all of your music)
– Uses MusicBrainz, an online database of over nine million songs. (using metadata)
– Many also have an Acoustic ID provided by AmpliFIND
– Allows manual editing of metadata
– Fixes artwork
– Can autocorrect your lyrics with Lyrics Fly
– Free upgrades and support so you get all the latest features at no cost

Do you have experience with this program? If so, we’d love to hear what you have to say about it!

Monday Tech Tip: Easy Screenshot Sharing

Many people use screenshots in one way or another. A screenshot is a powerful tool for visual demonstrations and help users tremendously. Today’s tip for quick and easy screenshot sharing, we’d like to introduce you to Gyazo.

Gyazo is a simplistic program that anyone can use. Simply launch the application, drag your mouse to grab the screen and it’s instantly uploaded and the URL is copied to the clipboard.

Launch. Drag. Done.

http://gyazo.com/en

Windows – Everything You Need To Know

We’re all familiar with the BSD (Blue Screen of Death) when it comes to Windows. Perhaps you’ve experienced the ever so popular “missing dll errors”, spyware, or the time consuming defragging.

Some feel that Windows just offers a little too much, leaving your system feeling bloated and sluggish. We all want our computers to run as fast as possible and while there is hardware out there that is available to accomplish this, you won’t get it without a not-so-pretty price tag.

Lifehacker has posted a great article that provides information on how to get the most out of the above mentioned situations, as well as dual booting your computer, automatically backing up your hard drive, making the most out of dual monitors, and much more. You can read more over at the Lifehacker site here: http://lifehacker.com/5118066/everything-you-need-to-know-how-to-do-in-windows

NVIDIA’s CEO Ready for Battle

I have always loved candidness from businesses. I get tired of hearing corporate canned sales pitches or canned responses to the press. When businesses are open, honest, frank, and to the point about their products whether it be good or bad – it’s always a win.

For those of you familiar with NVIDIA’s CEO – Jen-Hsun Huang, you know that he’s a very down to earth man who speaks candidly. During the company’s recent financial analyst meeting, not long into the call Huang began to speak what was on his mind –

“We’re going to open a can of whoop ass,” he told analysts, who quickly broke out into laughter.

Intel and NVIDIA have been playing a game of cloak and dagger with technology press, along with secret slide shows and secret slide show rebuttals. The sole reason for this battle is the integrated graphics market, and some of the claims attached to it. Jen-Hsun Huang doesn’t hide the fact that his company is spending nearly a billion dollars each year ready to take on Intel’s graphics offerings.

Throughout the bulk of the conference call, Huang continued to lament Intel for poor graphics performance. He hints at another Intel slide deck that claims Intel GMA 3100 is Windows Vista Premium compatible — a claim which was debunked by Microsoft employees in a recent lawsuit.

Intel fired back minutes later, sending emails to analysts detailing NVIDIA‘s poor track record when it comes to Vista crashes due to incomplete drivers. Almost on cue, Huang responded once again.

“NVIDIA has to support several new titles every week,” he said, alleging that Intel‘s graphics just have to support the basic office packages. “You already have the right machine to run Excel. You bought it four years ago,” he said.

The statement clearly struck a nerve with Huang, who paused for a second before adding “How much faster can you render the blue screen of death?”

You can read the full article here.

ServerBeach celebrates 10,000 Server Milestone

From left to right – Angela Ramirez – Manager of Client Loyalty, Allison – Customer Service, and Amy – Billing Department.

Employees of the ServerBeach San Antonio division partied it up and got their game on at Dave and Buster’s last Thursday to celebrate the ServerBeach 10,000 server milestone. Ted Smith, Vice President of Operations was able to join in on the fun while visiting San Antonio. We had food, drinks, gaming competition and ServerBeach Trivia. Congrats to Team #4 for winning the gaming competition. Jim Bair, DC Ops Technician and previous customer to ServerBeach, won the ServerBeach Trivia with only missing five answers out of 21. Congrats Jim! Some of the trivia questions related back to the beginning days of ServerBeach, such as:

1. What is the name of the person who founded ServerBeach?
2. What year was ServerBeach founded?
3. What was the name of building where the first ServerBeach datacenter and office were located?
4. What was the name of the first ServerBeach server?

All of the employees sported some cool limited edition 10,000 t-shirts (see pic). The purpose of this event was to recognize a huge accomplishment for ServerBeach and for the PEER 1 company. When PEER 1 acquired ServerBeach 3.5 years ago, SeverBeach had approximately 4,500 servers. We have now more than doubled our server count and tripled in revenue growth. This couldn’t have been done without the hard work from employees all across the PEER 1 organization.

See more pictures

ServerBeach Reaches 10,000 Server Milestone

 

We’ve reached the 10,000 servers mark! This is a big milestone for ServerBeach and we want to thank you for helping us get here! Below is part of the official press release that went out late yesterday:

The company has reached this milestone through its dedication to providing the kind of control and flexibility that customers expect, in order to grow their businesses and web presence.

“We are very proud to reach this landmark with our strong customer loyalty and support,” said Fabio Banducci, president and CEO of PEER 1. “This milestone also reflects the company’s continuous growth in the very competitive self-managed hosting arena. We strongly believe this has been accomplished in part because ServerBeach has maintained its commitment to go above and beyond what other self-managed hosting companies provide, with much needed resources and support that help our customers succeed.”

Unlike competitors, where service often ends once the server is connected, ServerBeach is focused on providing its customers with continued support as their businesses grow. ServerBeach offers 24/7/365 customer service and automation tools that make self-managed hosting as simple as possible.

Automation tools include Rapid Reboot(TM) and Rapid Rescue(TM), which are powerful self-management tools optimized in-house by ServerBeach and available to customers free of charge. Rapid Reboot(TM) enables customers to restart their web servers instantly and on-demand, without having to wait on a technician to reboot them. Rapid Rescue(TM) is one-of-a-kind, allowing customers to rescue their dedicated servers from potentially fatal errors without waiting for assistance from an onsite technician.

Strategically located across the U.S., in California, Texas and Virginia, ServerBeach takes advantage of the high performance, fully redundant PEER 1 network, with 15 state-of-the-art data centers in 12
cities and 20 network points-of-presence across North America and Europe. Customers can expect reliable service, minimal latency, disaster recovery, and geographic diversity.

“I tried and quit several hosting vendors before discovering ServerBeach,” said Mike Mitchell, CIO at Winnovate.com. “I’ve used ServerBeach almost exclusively for over 4 years now and am very happy with their pricing, reliability, and support. Finally, a web hosting company I can count on!”

Microsoft Confirms Windows-Word Attacks

Microsoft Corp. yesterday warned of a critical vulnerability that affects users of Word running on Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003 SP1 — several weeks after one security company first reported an exploit and a day after a second vendor confirmed ongoing attacks. In an advisory posted Friday, Microsoft acknowledged “public reports of very limited, targeted attacks” that exploit a bug in the Microsoft Jet Database Engine, a Windows component that provides data access to applications including Microsoft Access and Visual Basic.

According to Symantec Corp., however, the attacks Microsoft described used malicious Word 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2007 documents, which in turn call up the vulnerable Jet .dll (Dynamic Link Library file).

For further infrormation on this, head on over to ComputerWorld and read the full story. You can find the Microsoft Security Advisory here.

ServerBeach in Austin, Texas at South By Southwest – Come Geek Out With Us

ServerBeach, Blue Flavor, and Raincity Studios are proud to present the 3rd annual South by Northwest (SXNW) Geek Fest Party at the Iron Cactus in downtown Austin, TX. This is one of the hottest events during SXSW. There will be plenty of free drinks and cool people to meet. Over 1,700 people showed up last year with line ups out the door. Come early and meet the Beach crew. We’ll also have a booth at SXSW Interactive and will be giving out plenty of Beach swag.

About Iron Cactus: a Southwestern style grille and Margarita Bar. They pride themselves on presenting authentic Southwestern cuisine, gleaning recipes and ingredients from Southern Mexico to Utah. Plus, Iron Cactus features more than 80 Tequilas and is considered in the top 10 best Tequila bar in the world.

Venue: Iron Cactus, 606 Trinity Street at 6th Ave, Austin, Texas 73301

For more details about this event, including maps, comments, and other attendees, visit the event page by clicking here. We hope to see you there!