AlanBarber.Org
Wednesday, March 31, 2004
An early April fools?
News.com is reporting that Google will be offering a new free email service. However, unlike the other big guys, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc that offer limited storage space, Google will give each user 1 gigabyte of space.That's a lot of space folks! Just doing a quick run of the numbers considering the average email size I receive, a gigabyte of storage would let you store something like 100,000 messages. Of course that's messages without attachments. So a more realistic number might be something like 10 to 25,000 messages. Still that's huge!
I know I'll be signing up if just to use it as a great storage space. Any emails I want to save I could just forward them to my account to know they're safe there.
Of course the downfall to the service is the ads that get put into your messages. I know the service is free and you have to pay for it somehow but I just hate having ads slapped in my messages.
It's still early and so we'll have to see what happens. It might be a early April fools but considering the fact that Google has released several new services and just did a major overhaul of their website I wouldn't be surprised by this announcement.
on 03/31/2004 at 10:06 PM
Tuesday, March 30, 2004
Why do I feel like I got screwed?
Ahh shoot! I got sucked into driving to the OCRF Convention this weekend. That's Ohio College Republican Federation for the lay out there. It's the statewide group of all College Republican clubs. They annual get together is this weekend and I'm going.I had planned to drive anyways but I didn't want to have to take people along for the ride. Well other than my girlfriend! Basically, I wanted to put some long miles on my new car since after owning it for two months I've only put around 800 miles from driving short back and forth trips to college classes. This would be the change to give the car a change at a long continuous haul to help finish the break in process.
Honestly, I like driving. Not like speed demon city driving but just your average leisurely sunday drive type. I spent the first three years at a college across the state that was around a three hour drive each way using the turnpike (toll road). I liked driving that. Once you get out of the big cities you could set your cruise control around 65-70 miles per hour and just relax. I found it rather soothing and fun to do. Of course that last year before I transfered, my car died several times and about drove me insane with fear every time I went home. But anyways...
Plus I wanted to have a change to spend some quality time with my sweetie. I just wanted some nice one on one time. You know, give us a change to really talk about things. You know being stuck in a car for several hours with nothing else to do allows for plenty of time to talk about deep and important issues. Since you can't find things to distract you with or feel afraid to speak becuase people around might hear you, you can open up.
Oh well, I'll live. They club is paying me 20 bucks to do it so that's not too bad.
The actual event is not that exciting. There will be a bunch of little sessions, speeches from statewide officials, etc. Saturday night there will be a big black tie event. The main speaker will be Fred Barnes. He's on several shows on Fox News and is the editor of The Weekly Standard.
There will be the usual assortment of parties and everyone will go out to local bars and so on at night. It's just a big weekend to party really. Of course I don't drink so I find it all boring and useless. Well I might have a single beer I'll nurse on all night but that's it. I'm no party animal that's for sure.
The real reason I'm going is to spend time with my girlfriend. With the way our lives are it's just very hard to find any time together to just hang. I could care less about everything that will happen this weekend. I'm looking forward to spending two whole days and night together with my baby.
Monday, March 29, 2004
Interview with Bill Gates
Caught a nice interview with Bill Gates at EWeek after he did one of his famous “Think Weeks”. You might wonder what this “Think Week” is. Simply put, when you’re as rich as bill you can afford to spend a week where you shut out the entire world and read about things that interest you.
Basically, Bill makes a pile of stuff he wants to read to learn about new technologies, ideas, theories, etc. Every once in a while that pile gets really big so he tells everyone to sod off and spends a week playing catch up. Usually afterwards he ends up running around talking with Microsoft staff and tells them what they need to focus on now.
This folks is the secret to Microsoft’s success. The fact that any other man that has all the wealth and success Bill Gates has would retire and goof off for rest of their life, Bill Gates refuses to stop and take life easy. He knows that sitting around for even a moment can give someone the ability to outdo him. He refuses to let that happen and is always trying to understand the latest and greatest new ideas out there.
Every graduate thesis to solve some computer problem some kid crank out at MIT or some other top tier computer school Bill gets a hold of and reads it. He’s a very serious man about always being at the forefront of technology.
I really idolize the guy. He’s been lucky enough to be a part of the beginning of the personal computing revolution. It must be amazing to know you where there with the ability to have a hand in molding the direction in which technology flowed. I’d love for the ability to just spend time and talk with Bill. Have him tell stories of the early days, share his thoughts on where the future of computing will go, to just be given the opportunity to bask in the energy of such an amazing man.
Anyways, on to the actual “Think Week” now. Bill covered plenty of issues.
He spent a lot of time on XML and web services. This is a big, big area right now. I’ve been trying to keep up with some of it just so I’m not out of the loop. There’s a ton of issues with web services right now especially in the creation of standards. Getting everyone to play on the same field is always hard in the beginning. Once a few standards are ironed out web services will grow very much in the future.
He talked shortly about hiring at Microsoft so I found that pretty interesting. He made a very good point about how the enrolment in computer science in the U.S. right at the time when enrolment is up in India and China. This rolls right into the current issues with overseas outsourcing.
Finally, they talked a bit about security and the future products out there. Like the next version of Windows codenamed Longhorn. Which by the way is way off now. Last reports put it no where near release before like 2007 or 2008 I belive.
Anyhoo, it’s a good read so check it out.
Sunday, March 28, 2004
No I'm not a zombie from that new movie!
Man it's been one of those crappy weeks again. Been sick with a nasty head cold since around Monday. Monday and Tuesday, I just had a stuffy nose. By Wednesday/Thursday it was a full bore cold. Friday I probably blew my nose every 10 minutes for most of the day and had a slight fever on top of that. I felt like I'd been hit with a Mack truck. Saturday I started to feel better and by today it's back to feeling like Tuesday. So I'm probably looking at another 2-3 days before I'm back to "normal."Anyways, that's enough playing up for sympathy.
I'm so behind on my todo list it's terrible. Actually, I did get two things off of my "school todo" list. Wednesday, I went to the graduation fair and got my graduation package. It includes the cap/gown/tassel, souvenir tassel, alumni keychain and mug, 20 announcements, and a diploma frame. The total cost was around $140.00. A bit more than I'd like to spend but that's because the frame cost $80.00 alone. It's a huge frame too! They call it the "petite diploma frame" but that thing is a monster. It's probably bigger than most frames you'll see in a lawyer's office.
Other than a quick look at everything to make sure it's ok, I haven't touched any of it. I don't want to jinx myself by being a goofball and trying on the gown or cap until the semester is over and I'm sure I pass all my classes. I know I'm just being paranoid but my luck if I go dancing around with the gown on I'll end up failing one of my classes and not graduate. So just to be safe I've stuffed everything away and won't mess with it until May comes around.
So, I was able to cross off the "buy cap/gown" and "get announcements" from my list.
Because I've felt like trash all week I still haven't gotten around to finishing my father's website yet. It's down to the wire and I only have one thing left to do. I just have to get the newsletter system up and running. Basically, there are two parts that need finishing. The first and easier part is to get the database setup so users can add and remove themselves from the mailing list. The harder part is integrating the admin part so actual newsletters can be sent. With a busy upcoming week I'm not sure I'll get it done again.
This week I have a physics exam Thursday, computer graphics project due the next Thursday, and I'm going away this weekend to the state wide College Republican get-together.
I think I better start working on the computer graphics project right now. If I can kick out the core parts of the project by tonight I can put it on the back burner until next week. Then between studying for the physics exam I can maybe squeeze in a bit of time working on my father's site.
Wednesday, March 24, 2004
Immortalized for the ages.
Hey it's a geek thing ok. Non-geek types might as well leave right now!I run the FreeBSD 4.9 operating system within VMWare on my windows XP system. Basically VMWare is an emulator that lets you run other operating systems inside windows at the same time. It's pretty neat software. Anyways, time drift is a major problem with VMWare so they include tools to synchronize the clocks. Of course manually installing this software is a bit of a pain to do. Luckily, there's a nice guy that maintains a simple installer in the FreeBSD ports system to do it for you. You can find it in /usr/ports/emulators/vmware-guestd4.
Long story short, VMWare released an updated version of their program so I had to update the time tools too. Well when I used the ports system to update the tools I noticed some strange problems. I contacted the creator of the installer to notify him of the problem. I just happen to check to see if the port has been updated today at freshports.org and I found it had. However, a nice little note of my noticing the problem was made as well. Check out the March 20th, 2004 entry.
So now my name has been placed into the footnotes of BSD port history. I know, I know! It's silly but like I said it's a geek thing to be excited by this.
Sunday, March 21, 2004
High School VS. College
1) In high school, you do homework. In college, you study.2) No food is allowed in the hall in high school. In college, food must be provided at an event before students will come.
3) In high school, you wear your backpack on one shoulder; in college, on both.
4) In college, the professors can tell you the answer without looking at the teacher's guide.
5) In college, there are no bells or tardy slips.
6) In high school, you have to live with your parents. In college, you get to live with your friends.
7) In college, you don't have to wait in a certain lunch line to be cool.
8) Only nerds e-mailed in high school. Cool kids hadn't heard of it.
9) In high school, you're told what classes to take. In college, you get to choose; that is, as long as the classes don't conflict and you have the prerequisites and the classes aren't closed and you've paid your tuition.
10) In high school, if you screw up you can usually sweet-talk your way out of it. In college, you're lucky to ever talk with the professor.
11) In high school, fire drills are planned by the administration; in college, by the drunk frat boys on their way home when the bars close.
12) In college, any test consists of a larger percentage of your grade than your high school final exams ever did.
13) In high school, when the teacher said, "Good morning," you mumbled back. In college, when the professor says, "Good morning," you write it down.
14) In high school, freshman guys hit on senior girls. In college, senior guys hit on freshman girls.
15) In college, weekends start on Thursday.
16) In college, it's much more difficult to figure out the course schedule of the man/woman you have a crush on, in order to figure out where he/she will be walking around campus and at what time to find them there.
17) Once you've obtained the information described in #16, it's much more time-consuming to run between classes to that place where you know he/she will be in order to "just happen to bump into him/her."
18) In college, there's no one to tell you not to eat pizza three meals a day.
19) In college, your dad doesn't pay for dates.
20) In high school, it never took 3 or 4 weeks to get money from Mom and Dad.
21) College men are cuter than high school boys.
22) College women are legal.
23) In college, when you miss a class (or two or three), you don't need a note from your parents saying you were skip....uh, sick that day.
24) In high school, you can't go out to lunch because it's not allowed. In college, you can't go out to lunch because you can't afford it.
Monday, March 15, 2004
Next Gen Console Rant and Pimping a Contest
Well I had planned to post a rant about this piece of trash article over at BBC. The article is claiming Sony has won the next generation console wars with their PS3. Sad thing is we're still around 2 years from Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo release their next generation consoles! Proclaiming a winner before anyone has even released any hardware is a moronic joke. In this industry 2 years is enough time for a company to go from being top dog to being in the doghouse. I mean really, while Sony might look like it will be a winner who knows what could happen. Some horrible scandal could surface and everyone would end up hating Sony in 2 years and sales end up tanking on the PS3. I think we need to all just sit back and wait to see where we are at release times.Ok I guess I did get to do a rant on it after all!
Anyhoo, I wanted to give a shout out for a contest some buds are holding. The fine fellows of Snackbar Games are holding a Resident Evil: Outbreak Contest. The winner gets a limited edition Resident Evil: Outbreak survival pack that contains a canteen and mask. I'll admit it is disappointing that you're not even getting a video game or heck even a copy of the Resident Evil movie. Still go check it out and sign up since they could use the traffic!