If anyone's interested Parallels is apparently giving away version 2.2 of Parallels Workstation (the latest version as far as I can tell) for free!

Go here!

I filled out the form (name, e-mail, company, and phone) and got the following email almost immediately...

Dear [Hirudin],

Thank you for your interest in Parallels Workstation 2.2!

Your permanent activation key is listed below:

PRODUCT : Parallels Workstation 2.2 for Windows & Linux

ACTIVATION KEY : 3[XXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX]

I don't know how long this will be going on, so act soon!

I found out about this on this slickdeals.net thread...

I consider myself a pretty big computer nerd, and I fell for some Phishing recently... I think.

As a dabbler in several web services I had a Blockbuster Online (BBO) account for a while. One way or another I decided it didn't fit my needs so I canceled it and started up with Netflix again. Well low* and behold I get this e-mail that says something along the lines of "Sign back up with Blockbuster Online and we'll send you $25 to your PayPal account!" I'm 90% sure Blockbuster has actually run promotions like this before, so I didn't think much of it. I was on the fence as to whether I wanted to sign up again so I kept the message.

Well, somehow I remembered the expiration date of the promotion. On the last day I decided to give it a shot. I opened up the e-mail and clicked on the link. I've had Thunderbird warn me of "suspicious" web links, but I'm not sure if that feature was implemented in the version I was using. One way or another, no "hey dummy, this isn't the address you think it is" message popped up. I proceeded to enter my username and password (actually KeePass did) and I clicked the "sign me back up" button.

About 3 minutes later I realized that I didn't actually check the link. When I did check it, I noticed it went to some strange URL (I don't remember what it was). I immediately changed my PayPal password (KeePass' password generator is great) and my BBO password. Then I sent a message to BBO inquiring as to whether it was a legitimate promotion or not, to which I received a canned, unhelpful response.

Anyway, sorry to go off topic... I just figured that I'd try to ease the shame of being phished a little. Show your friend all my nerdy posts if you want :) .

Thanks to the non-helpful BBO e-mail response I'm not even sure it wasn't a real promotion. I did some searching and all I could find was a person from around a year earlier with a similar e-mail, that linked to the exact same domain, that was also wondering about the legitimacy of the whole thing. I was using Firefox at the time, I was pretty disappointed the big, red warning didn't pop up alerting me I was about to do something stupid.

*I have a feeling that's not the correct spelling of "low"

There's a few different types of tags that can be in MP3 files. The most common type is "ID3" (and now-a-days ID3v2). Another type is "APE". For some reason APE tags are less supported than ID3, and it would appear that sometimes they actually cause problems.

For instance the music software "J River Media Center" does not currently support APE tags (I think I heard it's coming in version 13), so anything written within an APE tag cannot be read or written using Media Center.

Some programs write the ReplayGain settings into APE tags (why I wonder) I guess others use the standard ID3 tag for ReplayGain (I suspect this is what Media Center uses).

...
You can and should turn that 'feature' off as it uses an non-standard tag (APE) to hold the info
...

-GHammer (April 24, 2008, 06:14 PM)

anyone know what is meant by the bit in bold

-tomos (December 21, 2008, 05:34 AM)

I'm not sure what program GHammer is referring to, but it must place the ReplayGain info into APE tags. Perhaps he's talking about dbPoweramp, which for some reason seems to have started using APE tags in version 13 (while version 12 didn't).

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does that not stop it from completing it's main purpose ?
...

-tomos (December 21, 2008, 05:34 AM)

Yeah, sounds like it to me. I would guess GHammer is suggesting that a different ReplayGain (which is the same as mp3gain I think) implementation is a better way to go. Media Center has an "Analyze Audio" option that will scan your whole collection. You can set it to skip songs that have already been scanned. It also has a very cool option that lets you choose how many processes you want to do at once. So if you have a multi-core CPU you can get your collection scanned much more quickly.