Well lots to talk about…

Wow, where to even start…a lot of interesting stuff has happened since I last wrote. I got another gmail account jpaine …so that was cool.

It turns out the service I posted about a while back, youvegotpost has changed there policy. Instead of offering 1 TB (1,000 GB or 1,000,000 MB)as previously reported, they are in fact offering Unlimited storage and Unlimited attachment size. In their support form one of the technical support people was quoted as saying “you keep using the space and we’ll just keep adding on more hard drives.” so that is pretty cool needless to say. I am pondering if I want to email myself an image of my hard drive for backup purposes…lol.

I have changed my original opinion on Gmail, I, in fact, love it now. It’s so nice to have a clutter-free, relatively spam-free, stable, fast, and Huge (storage-wise) webmail account that is accessible from anywhere. To make this even better I’ve been following the development of this brilliant little application called Pop Goes the Gmail(PGTM)…what it does is setup a pop3/smtp server for you that allows you to check your gmail and send messages over gmail from within your normal email program. Wow, oddly enough, when I went to get the URL for that program I just found out that the creator of that program was offered a job with google, wow…now that is damn cool. Everyone keeps bitching about google not offering pop3 access…well here is my thoughts.

If I had to guess I’d say the likelihood of google offering pop3 access for free is unlikely. They may offer it as a paid service or ad-supported. Think about it…They have ads on the right side of the pane for a reason…to generate money to support gmail, if you are using pop3 you’re never going to see those ads and therefore they aren’t making the same advertising profits. Just my $0.02.

I got apache up and running on my home computer. Mainly just for the sake of playing around, eventually probably to work as a file server with password protection. So as of right now I have a mail server and a webserver running on my home computer with VNC to access it from anywhere, it’s pretty sweet. The address for my other website is jupaine.dyndns.org though there isn’t going to be all that much there unless I get bored.

I had the urge the other day to start learning C#. It looks incredibly promising considering the things that are possible with it. However, it looks very complex and I am not quite sure how much of it I will be able to grasp considering I need to start spending some hardcore time brushing up on my Espanol so I don’t suck at that next semester. Ah well. I made my first program yesterday…that was hot. Granted, all it did was ask you for your name and your age and then when the user clicks the “OK” button it simply outputs “Hello (name), You are (age).” But hey, it’s a start right? Now I just need to sit down and get the whole prompt user for input, store the input in a variable, and then later display the variable after any kind of transformation I want to run of it. Hope that makes sense…it sounds good in my head at least.

Along the same lines as starting to learn C# was the installation of Visual Studio .NET 2003 Beta Whidbey. This is the release that was given to attendees of the PDC (Professional Developers Conference) in um…April I think it was. It was a 2.6GB download, lol…which luckily only took about 2 days of on and off downloading to complete. Then I had to battle with the file structure because every time I tried to un-rar the file it was creating directorys that were too deeply embedded and therefore couldn’t find. For example, the directory structure looks like this: (Crogram FilesVSNETVSNET2003Visual Studio 2003 .NET WhidbeyVS8.0Codename WHidbeyBeta …etc….needless to say the computer got about 24 characters into that whole mess, rouhgly to the “S” in VSNET2003, and then got really confused. After lots of frustration and anger I figured out how to correct this problem, un-rar-ed it, installed it and began my endless journey into the abyss that is C#.

I’m proud to annouce the release of the new website for Century 21 Premier Properties . I advertise this simply because I created the site, not because I think any of you are looking to buy a home in upstate New York. lol. It looks very similar to the Vassar Media Cloisters site huh? Although the only thing that has been copied was the general architecture of the site layout, the rest of the coding and images, etc are entirely original. I was part of the group working of the Media Cloisters site so I did help write sonme of that site’s code so I didn’t feel guilty borrowing some of the idea’s we had worked on all semester long.

That might be it for now…hmm, nope nevermind I remebered two other things.

Windows XP SP2 RC2 was released yesterday afternoon or Monday evening for all of us who um….get things from other places *wink* …Here is a link to the download, Warning: This is a 264MB download. Also be very sure you wish to install this as it is still not a final product. RC2 means that it is out of beta testing but hasn’t gone OEM, aka to the manufacturers for distribution, and therefore it could cause potential problems. you have been warned. SP2 contains a bunch of speed improvements, increase wireless networking features including new wireless networking security features. SP2 will include a built in monitoring system that will prompt the user to install antivirus and firewall software. Also, this monitoring system will automatically update windows with the latest bug fixes if the user opts in to using this feature. Overall, it will make an already pretty stable and relatively secure operating system, XP SP1, and make it even better. Even better, it’s going to be free for download.

Firefox 0.9 was released also on Tuesday morning, again, Monday night for some of us *wink*. This update includes several speed improvements including faster startup times and faster page rendering. Several notorious stability issues have been fixed as well. For a comprehensive list of changes check out the Firefox site here, and go here for the download.  The only thing keeping me from immediately upgrading to this new version is the incompatibility with older extensions and themes. I make constant use of the EditCSS extension and I use pinstripe religiously on every installation of Firefox I have…I can’t imagine upgrading and having neither of these work properly. Supposedly there is a new 0.9 extension that provides 0.9 support for the legacy extensions so maybe this weekend I will have to investigate this. Another new feature includes the new extension manager, hence the older extensions no longer function correction until they are rewritten to take advantage of this, that allows for easy installation, uninstallation, and configuring of extensions.

Well, *gasp* believe it or not, I think that’s it…If I remember anything else I’ll post it. lol.