This guy is an idiot. There's too much proof to list any. Just read on. Although, you have to give him credit, he gets paid for being an idiot.

After weeks of begging and pleading from friends, I finally joined MySpace. It was against my will. Anyway, if you feel like adding me, I'm at SixStringed. Mainly I'll be using it for linking to this page, and posting comments on friends' pages, but everything worthwhile will be on this page still, or finally, maybe. Shut up :P

Not really but close. Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has me hooked, it's a wonder two years haven't gone by already. I can write up a huge description of it, but just go visit my Google Pages page instead!! There, you will find nothing related to Oblivion. The end.

Check out this GEM!!! I can't believe out of the 7 billion people out there, I am the first (with $35 and Internet access, and English speaking, and an interest in "movements" and domain name registering) to think of it!

OfTheWorldUnite.org

With a little Sub-domain action, it's a bazillion domain names in one!!

HockeyFans.OfTheWorldUnite.org
RedBeardedPeople.OfTheWorldUnite.org
StupidPeople.OfTheWorldUnite.org
PeopleWhoNeedMoreExamples.OfTheWorldUnite.org

You get the picture. If not, visit that last one, it's for you.

I go to install OpenOffice.org (Commonly just referred to as "OOo"), and the install package for Linux is in RPM format, which is a RedHat invention, basically an installation package (usually you're just compiling source :p). I type in "which rpm" to see if I have rpm to install this thing. It says "No rpm in $path". "F@#%@#$#. I can't install OOo 2.0?!?!"

Ahh, but then I type in "emerge rpm". Gentoo has a software management tool called "Portage", and how you use it is to simply type in "emerge" followed by the software that you want. F@#*^ing A!! It takes a little while, since it checks for the dependencies, downloads all the source code, compiles it, and then cleans it. But, I'm talking 10 minutes ago I started this thing, and it's almost done. There were 2 dependencies to install before RPM. Take that Windows!!

Other times I've needed stuff on other Linux distributions, I'd have to search the web... pfff. That's like 2005 technology.

After 12 minutes, I try again...
which rpm
/usr/bin/rpm

It's miraculous

Wow, on another topic... OOo 2.0 is pretty sweet. I was using 1.1 or something forever. It has definitely improved, interface-wise. And I saved my first "OpenDocument" file!! I just opened my "Attachments" document and saved that as an ".odt", or "OpenDocument Text". Free, awesome stuff kicks ass.

You Passed 8th Grade Science

Congratulations, you got 8/8 correct!

* Pats self on back *

Of course, this comes as no surprise to me. I just saw this thing here and had to see how much I totally ROCK at science. Not joking though, I subscribe to "Scientific American", and I regularly watch The Discovery Channel and the Learning Channel. Another reason for the complete devastation I razed on the 8th grade Science Quiz is that Math and Science were my favorite topics in school. NO WAY am I not ACING 8th grade science.

Oh, and possibly one more reason. My degree is in Science. I am a "scientist"... a "computer scientist", officially.

I never do those things, but I had to do this one... too much dedication to Science to ignore it. Like, if a show is on about Einstein, you bet your ass I'm watching it :)

My site's been on and off very randomly. Today I went to add this awesome, funny, crazy news post, and my site was down, and now I forget what I was gonna say... but, I go to the website of my host, Nexpoint, and go to log an error, and I get this message.

And I'm like "Dang"... I tried to write down what I was going to write about, but all I could muster up was the following



So, as you can see, I'm distracted easily and apparently had nothing funny to add to the internet... nothing worth remembering for 9 minutes, anyway.

I took out the "Book" form for now, otherwise it would be a gigantic cluster@#%@@#, and I limit the file size to 1000 bytes (less than 1KB). Other pictures here and here.

And with that, stringed.org's underlying software is ready for some major overhauls!! There's this whole huge thing I want to do to it yet.

Yes, I installed it (but only at work). Mozilla still wins. (This is based off of the default install).

Best feature of Mozilla, the one that I use every day, is to save a group of tabs opened as a single bookmark, and a single click will open that same group of tabs. IE7 allows you to save a group of tabbed websites, but it saves it to a folder. You can't click the single bookmark and have each site open up in its original tab. I find this extremely useful in opening up all of my email websites in one window. Both Hotmail and Gmail open up with no effort.

Tabs in my copy of Mozilla only show up when there are *other* tabs. If there's no other tabs opened, it looks like a standard browser. IE7 always show tabs, so you lose real estate.

Scrolling. I opened up slashdot with my crappy computer in IE7. It's really choppy! Mozilla works much better with my limited hardware.

IE7s default search is Google, which is fine. But, didn't Microsoft create its own search engine? Are they giving in to the popular search engine with the funny name? It's what the people want.

At the bottom of slashdot, there's a huge black space in IE7. Mozilla's version of slashdot is fine. Wonder what that's about.

I know this is a beta, but it's the latest beta, and will closely resemble the final version. I do notice some cool features, though.

IE7 will scan a page for links to RSS feeds. It has a button that becomes enabled at the top that is a quick way to link to those feeds. It then shows a nifty screen with the latest news from that site, complete with filtering by the rss category, and sortable by date, title and author, along with a search. I'm too impatient to see what it does when one of those sites is updated, so I'll assume, for Microsoft's sake, that something awesome happens. Flashy lights and a marching band, for instance.

That seems pretty much it for the UI experience. Mozilla owns IE7 still. There's no developer tools in IE like there is in Mozilla. DOM inspector, color coded source viewer (it still uses notepad), JavaScript debugger, built in Calendar, etc. Microsoft loves to make developers miserable, despite what they say...

This is only biased because Mozilla rules.

I realized the other day that I am no longer addicted to the internet. It was fun while it lasted, but then you get bored. You see the same stuff everywhere (excluding the personal sites).

It wasn't a very long lasted addiction. During my senior year of high school (1996-1997) was when it started. I would go on our dial-up to Prodigy and go into chat rooms, because that's really all that Prodigy had, as far as I was concerned. I'd chat with people, meet "girls", talk up my mad guitar skillzzz, exchange emails, etc. Then came college.

I wasn't a very education oriented person. I found nothing in high school that interested me (except physics and math of course), so I had average grades (except in physics and math of course). By the end of high school, I was getting good grades because I basically beat the system. I knew how to do the minimal amount of work and still pass with Bs. This didn't necessarily involve studying, neither did it involve cheating... basically, I just paid attention in class and did the homework. Most of the time. See, Bs didn't require full attention and one hundred percent complete assignments. It was fun. So, when I got into college, I had to go to a "summer school" of sorts. You go there for the summer, take 3-4 classes a day, and if you pull a 2.5 average, you're in for the fall. Well, this summer, as you can imagine, was a blast. 2.5 is lower than a B! I was and probably always will be shy. However, I saw a kid there that I knew I could be friends with. One day I saw him on the computer in the computer lab, so I went in and joined him. I noticed he was in a chat room, so I asked him what chat room he was in, and he told me. We hit it off after that, being roomates for two semesters, one of which being "THE semester". Tom and I got our best grades ever during college our first semester together (Spring '98). We had Computer Science I (one) together. I whooped in that class. Put it this way, when the final came around, I was the first to hand it in, 15 minutes after I started, and Tom said it was 20 minutes before anyone else left. I aced it. I ended the semester with a 3.5 average or something. I was taking other courses, like writing and Calculus II. While Calc was extremely interesting, it was a B@#%@!! So, I got out of that year, and into the next semester, "THE semester".

The Fall 1998 semester started off really bad. During the summer I was working for my Dad as the assistant to the computer guy, saving up money to buy a computer. I got it later that summer, and that's when my life ended. Basically. The Fall '98 semester was not my best one. In fact, it was by far the worst. We're not talking "missed a few classes" here. We're talking, from around late September til the end of the semester, I went to a handful of classes. I was nocturnal. During one stretch, I slept 12 hours a day. I was the bomb that semester though, both socially and electronically. Socially, I was friends with everyone on the floor. Our room was the hangout. We'd have people in there at all hours. Our most was 14 people at one time. Electronically, I was the bomb too, as I had downloaded software (I forget what it's called) that allowed you to run a P2P server. I had so many people on that server, downloading files, uploading files, chatting with each other, leaving me messages, etc. All told I left that semester with about $12000 worth of software that was not paid for, and about 1500 mp3s. (I should mention that I no longer found any of that software useful and deleted it all).

This server ended my chance to graduate college ever. Or so I thought.

After that semester, I convinced my parents to let me go back to school. Luckily, they bought it. I went back and graduated with a B+ in my field of study, so it worked out. That semester was also my enlightenment period. I had Computer Science II, and was completely lost. However, towards the end of the semester, just playing around (because I didn't go to classes, but still loved writing programs), I became enlightened to Object Oriented Programming with C++. The s@#%@ just made sense after that.

That was pretty much the strongest point of my internet addiction. After that, it dwindled down to what it is today, where I can't f@#%$#$!$12 stand the internet. I can read the news though, or a handful of personal sites that I visit, or slashdot, but if I find myself just clicking s#@%$ mindlessly, I'll just walk away most of the time. The other times, I'll close my browser and do something else, like program. Or play a game. Or go outside and play with the dog.

That's one addiction that I'm happy to get rid of -- the internet in general. I have to kick this email addiction next. I check 34,859 times a day. Although, I will easily go a few days without it, so it might be a matter of just throwing out my cable modem. Share or link your stories below!

Money is incendiary. That s@$%@# burns right through anything I put it in. Has my whole life. Not like I spend it all, but when I get money, I have to buy SOMETHING. Well, not all the time. Like, now I'm trying to save. Thanks a lot Amazon.com...

I head there today, and there's a "4 for 3" deal, buy 3 books, get one free. Well, if that's just about as ignorable as a punch in the face. I have to buy books now. I need KNOWLEDGE!!! Bad timing on their part. I just placed an order yesterday, but not for books! Sweet! I've always been great at justifying purchases.

But, yesterday I ordered 2 movies and the 2nd season of the X-Files. The first one was outstanding, I recommend it to anyone. Oh, and I ordered a video game (Lumines for PSP). There's nothing like feeding your addictions with a few clicks. Ask the mice who repeatedly press a button that injects them with cocaine. I saw it once on Discovery.

So, today I'll place another order. Good thing I signed up for Amazon Prime all those weeks ago. Now I can get free 2nd day delivery, so it doesn't matter. I can place order after order after order... after order. And they have to ship them for free, since I paid that $79 for the year. They lose out on that one.

I'm getting to a point where I don't have to have a video game within 4 nanoseconds of the exact nanosecond that it is released. So I'll probably order more games online that will be coming out soon. Of course, those game makers should just be selling their games online so I can download them... but, that might take just as long as ordering online and getting free second day shipping.

[Update] Bleh, just found out that no books that I want for knowledge can be classified under any of the following (the only books under their 4 for 3 deal):
* General Fiction
* Mystery
* Romance
* Science Fiction & Fantasy
* Baby Books
* Kids: Ages 4-8
* Kids: Ages 9-12
* Teens

What a bummer. What, "Game Programming" isn't generally accepted as a "Kids: Ages 4-8" book? I guess I should stop trying to teach it to my 6 year old niece :) Although, they should really fall under "mystery", since I'm buying them because I don't have a f#@#@$ing clue about the subject matter... because if I already knew, then I wouldn't be buying it!

I reported a bug to Google the other day regarding Gmail. It was to do with their new "Contact Groups" feature that I have been waiting for since forever. Now that it's there, I was a bit surprised when I couldn't create a new group, considering the normally above par standards that Google upholds. This was a simple bug, but, obviously it shows the extensiveness of Google's testing practices, at least for this feature.

What happened was, I went to create a new group, and it couldn't read the email addresses after I used the neat drop down list that Google has on their pages that suggest what you are trying to type in, and make it easier for you. When you choose an email address that you would like in your group, say "Wootzor von Leetenhaxor", it drops in the name in the format "Wootzor von Leetenhaxor" <wootzor@stringed.org>. Don't ask. However, to easier find the people in my list of contacts, I've stored them as "von Leetenhaxor, Wootzor". (HAHA That name cracks me up, I just thought of it the other day. It's my handle on Slashdot) The problem lies in the way that Gmail expects contacts to be in the list that will be added to the group. When more than one contact is added (hence, a group), it uses commas to separate them. So, I would have commas in my names (yet, inside quotes), and separating contacts. And apparently Google didn't expect this. Which is why I said it leads me to believe that their testing practices are not as extensive as I would have thought. Maybe they just missed this one... hopefully.

Today, I tried to add these contacts again to my "Drinking Buddies" group, and it still failed. To get it to work, I have to delete the names from the "Last, First <email>", or just delete the commas, from each contact in the list before creating the group. I still have commas in the names in my contact list, I just had to actually delete them from the textbox containing the contacts to add to that group. So, if you come across this, just erase the commas from that textbox. It shouldn't be much of a problem, they are fixing it, as they say in this email to me:

Hello,

Thanks for bringing this issue to our attention. We have forwarded the information you provided to the appropriate team for further investigation. We appreciate your patience, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Sincerely,

The Gmail Team

I signed up for Amazon.com Prime yesterday. Should be a money saver, although it hasn't yet paid for itself. However, it definitely will. Free 2 day shipping?!?! I've probably paid an average of like a bazillion dollars a year on shipping from Amazon.com, and this only costs $79 per year. They will surely lose out on this deal. Suckers!

Druel:

Yesterday, I connected to GameSpot to read the review on Fable: The Lost Chapters, after I had beaten it. It connected in no time. Now, I started loading an article on Day of Defeat : Source, and it's taking forever. The thing is, they changed their site last night. It's now a little bit better looking, but it's slow as HELL. I'm looking at a white page and it's been loading for about 3 minutes. When is a software upgrade not worth it? Probably when it takes a lot more time to process and when it takes a lot more time to transmit. They're all about looking good. Who the hell wants to look good when it's compared with loading fast?

Reminds me of a story, a story that was the reason I spent literally 2 years devoted to visiting CNN.com. You remember September 11th. Well, I wanted to browse the web as well as watch TV because I wanted all the information I could get. Well, obviously, about every person with internet in the country was visiting news sites. I visit a few, even like MSN, and all of the pictures are on the site, making the site take forever to download. Even their stupid little background pictures, their logo, everything. This was on every site. Until I got to CNN. They had taken down all of their images, their logo, and everything else, and just had text describing the events. Not too much on one page though, just enough, with links. Everyone always just wants to look pretty, but they don't realize that it's not the same as looking good. What do people want? Not pretty buttons, but information.

[Update] Thankfully, GameSpot's site is much faster now. They must have been having server troubles.

I came across an article in my favorite tech news site, ZDNet, that said Microsoft had predicted 10 years ago that the Internet is the next platform. But, Microsoft still spent bazillions of dollars making Windows XP and the new Windows Vista. Meanwhile, under Microsoft's radar, 2 Stanford students develop something in their dorm room, a search engine, and in 2005, they are big. HUGE. Google. With Google's way of innovation, and their ideas and having the top minds in the field (except they don't have me yet :p ), they are developing a lot of things, and they are not platform specific, but they are for the internet. Gmail, Maps, etc. They have more, and you'll see them by visiting their beta section. So, now Microsoft is feeling the heat. Without having a specific operating system, you can use any of Google's Internet products. Microsoft just wants to take over the world, so they will fight this, and start doing their own, or they just don't want Google to get too big, because then they can go stealing all their smart employees, paying them the big bucks, giving them the Presidential Suites, etc, and using them to develop products specifically targeting Microsoft products, instead of Microsoft doing it to them. The playing field is leveled a bit.

It's an interesting concept, the Internet as a platform. How I picture it, the possibilities are endless. Before I had that vision though, and before I read that article, I had pictured something a little different, something like Google's platform, the latest desktop search. Plug in components into a base platform, and the base provides a lot of the functionality that the components need, providing quicker development. Think of Mac's Widgets. There's a widget container that can provide lots of functionality to the widgets, and then there are widgets that you can plug in. I always imagined something like an application container. I could have small apps that plug in, and you can open any of them from this container. I had thought of this before Mac's widgets, but instead turned towards internet applications. My main reason for this thought process was because of how Java works. I didn't know if you could make a Java program automatically run by double clicking it, you always have to open them with another program. Of course, have everything run under one program. (I later found out about JNLP, Java Network Launch Protocol, which launches 'JAR' files containing a Java program)

Sometimes solutions are so obvious for one problem and they aren't even considered for another problem.

What wasn't obvious to me is that this idea had already been done! In fact, everyone is doing it! When you visit a website, you are typically using an application written for the web. An application. Written for the web. My container application, the platform for running every program I write, is in fact your web browser. This seems like a great platform. Some obvious aspects that you have to watch out for are backing up data, security, limitations of certain web browsers, certain web browsers not following web standards, downtime, scalability, application flow, user experience, and users. Some great benefits to web applications are deploying, updating everyone's version instantaneously, data stored in a central location, and if you secure the server, it's virtually unhackable... if you develop it to be that way. Having a client application obviously has its benefits. You can access local resources (disk drives) and do stuff that you can't do in a web application, like video games and accessing hardware, and stuff that would kill the resources on a web server if too many people did it at once... intense applications. Basically, it depends on the application, whether you should make it a client application or a web application, and whether you can make it a web application.

There aren't too many downsides to writing a web application, but they are pretty big downsides. There is another one. HTTP. HTTP is pretty primordial. HTTP is the protocol in which web servers communicate with the world. It consists of numbered codes and data separated by line breaks. It was developed before XML. However, XML has its obvious downsides. It's heavy, lots of text. Depending on your data, XML can double the size. It's mainly used for text, so you wouldn't normally go storing your images in there. I only bring this up because of client/server applications, or server to server communication, which still falls under client/server. This is why SOAP was invented. SOAP is an XML format that was developed for multiple applications, infinite applications, to send XML data over HTTP. A standardized format is a good start. HTTP can stay as it is, as long as everyone uses SOAP. This was the advent of web services; small applications written to run on the server and communicate with the client. Usually just a function or two. There's a huge history there (search the internet for RPC or "Remote Procedure Call", you'll see what I mean), and the idea was to make a standard way, rather than hundreds of developers fending for themselves, all writing a different way to call functions over the internet.

One of the important downsides I mentioned with writing web applications is user experience. This isn't about making users laugh or showing help or different messages. This is about "perceived speed" of an application. Who wants to watch a progress bar at the bottom of the screen? Or watch as the whole website goes white and takes a few seconds for something to pop up. In client side programming, you typically develop a multithreaded application to improve user experience. Things appear to happen simultaneously. However, these applications run on a web server, and the only protocol for speaking between the web browser and the server is HTTP, which makes requests only at the user's request (hence the name) and provides responses, how in the world do you expect to make an HTML web page seem "multithreaded"?!? AJAX. You may have heard of it. It's "asynchronous" using JavaScript and XML. That's pretty much what the acronym stands for. This way, I can have JavaScript make requests back to the server without the user's interaction, typically on a schedule (every 5 seconds, every minute, etc), and get that ever-so-desired perception of multi-threading in a web application, significantly improving a user's experience.

Google has realized this. Maps and Gmail use AJAX extensively. It is the way of the future, and it is important enough that soon every browser will have it. But this isn't just about writing a web application that appears friendly to the user. It's about writing many applications that are all friendly with each other, and that all appear friendly to the user.

Imagine an internet portal, a website that you go to as the first page you visit on the web. It has everything. News, stocks, your email, messages sent to your IM client that you missed, emails from other accounts you have, voice mails from work and from your cell phone, reminders about events in your calendar, and anything else you can think of. This is Google's vision... probably. Imagine having all this personal data on one website, collected from many different web applications, each using SOAP to communicate with each other, sending XML to the user's browser on each AJAX request, and reading all this personal data on the fly, determining which advertisements to show that user. Advertising is Google's main source of income still, besides selling stock.

"But Google's also buying up loads and loads of dark fiber and buying wireless internet technologies and WAPs" you say... Yes, they have invested in a company that can triangulate exactly where you are when you connect to a wireless network. So you can search for the closest guitar shop to the exact point on which you are standing. This on a portal full of all of that other information I mentioned would just be showing off.

This is where I think Google is heading. As with its search technology, I think the Internet can do better. I must emphasize this. I've mentioned this before, here. I think all of Google's web applications will supply their data this way. I quote myself:

"Imagine, if Google, instead of just reading all of the HTML through a website url, can just ask a website "Yo, what's your deal?!" and the website can respond back "Dude, I am a guitar shop, here are my wares.""

RDF is this for news. Somehow Google is able to extract prices of goods on websites as well, and build a shopping cart around them. But instead of Google just being able to search these results for items you may be looking for, what if there was no website that actually sold this stuff, but Google just read data from a server, through another protocol, and did everything: shopping cart, credit card processing, etc. Google would be the only online shop. Or, what if someone else did this. Like me! No, there's an "end of the world" scenario in there somewhere. No more online shops, just Google, and less jobs, and less money, and more Google. It could be bad, let's hope that they're only doing the portal mentioned above :)