meebo

lately i'm finding that if i can use firefox to perform the same function as a desktop program i'll go the firefox way. which is to say the ajax way.

i use gmail and yahoomail via their respective  web sites. my real email account is web based.

 now that i have a writely account [and many thanks to the kind soul who invited me] i don't really need a word processor installed. i don't think i would write code in writely, but it will work for all the word processing i do.

i used to use the blogger and msn spaces sites themselve and cut and past from tkblog.

but now i just use qumana and tkblog.

lately i've been reading my newsgroups via newega. not fancy but it works for casual reading/writing. it probably won't replace agent for me.

and after watching ep #56 of  dl.tv i found out about meebo. now i can use firefox and meebo to do any im'ing. i have firefox running all the time anyway.

somebody on the meebo forums said firefox was overrated. i bet all IE users say that before their machine gets owned. snrk.

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maddox

crankygeeks ep #11 was about myspace. everyone there over 15 thought myspace was a fad and not well done at that. the ryder stacy guy (if that's your real name, snrk) like, thought it was like, the coolest, like thing, like for kids, like you know?

i didn't count the number of "likes" he used to express himself, but, like, it was  LOT.

he mentioned about this maddox guy who had more power on the internet then coca-cola. umm............no. if you're under 15 you'll disagree with me. snrk.

i'll admit. some of maddox's  stuff was funny. most of it was contrived. he seems a lot more concerned with pop culture than any adult is, and it looks like he'll eventually degenerate into sarcastic blogs that cut up his hate email.

if maddox ever decides to envision himself as more powerful than coca-cola, he'll add oh, an rss feed. although now that i think about it. 90% of his audience might not know what to do with it.

either way, the vented spleen has 5 years on him for that kind blog (ie. venting your spleen) via the dialup bbs.

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google writely

now that writely has been taken over by google, accounts are as rare as hen's cliches.  as of the timestamp of this blog you can only get an account by invitation. or you could probably buy one on ebay if you need one right now. as before with gmail i didn't know anybody who had a gmail account, and now everybody i know has one. once i'd been given an invite to gmail, i sent out invites as fast as i got them.

i'm thinking that writely hasn't got as much widespread appeal as gmail did. a lot of people will probably get accounts and never use them. anybody wants to invite me i'd be eternally grateful :)

just watched ep #9 of  crankygeeks. at the end they complained about stupid slashdot comments. hopefully they just didn't figure out the moronic level slashdot  commenters can get to.

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software deals

a few years ago i bought vc++ v6.0 professional on sale at a bookstore [of all places]. it was a deal i couldn't pass up, and since then i've used it to compile vim from the tarball. i've written the odd command line program, but never anything gui related with it. i  just don't do c++ programming.

the professional version IS a nice package. it included a number of goodies among them was a vc++ specific version of installshield, which could actually be used for creating installers for any binary. i had that installed along with installshield express but never really used either one with the exception that one release of tkblog used it.

anyway right beside the incredibly cheap vc++ was office 2000 developer tools. and i pretty much forgot i had that...

till sunday night. when i remembered that the office 2000 dev tools have the redistributable access runtime included. that means i could write access 2k applications and my end users didn't have to have be ripped off by microsoft and forced to buy a copy of access.

it also means i could run my book database application even though microsoft won't let me use my legitimate copy of access 2k2.

so i say this to microsoft: FYITN*

*some swear words meaning "screw you in the neck"  [thanks penn & teller :) ]

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shuttle costs

from what i've been reading after googling around the shuttle cost $10 billion to develop/build in the '70's. the cost of a shuttle launch is up to $1.3 billion. the total cost of the program is approaching $150 billion dollars.

and a 5 inch piece of foam weighing less than an ounce can turn the shuttle into a big fireworks display?

what's wrong with that picture?

maybe it's time to get the cost of foam tiles and adhesive up into the billion dollar mark instead of that dollar store stuff they're obviously using now.

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sqlite

sometimes i start the morning with a particular objective in mind, and through frustration or the inability to find the information i need end up where i started.

the last few weeks i've been  using visual studio express c# edition . i know i've complained about .net before, but that was when i was using win2k and very reluctant to screw up an already working os by a failed .net install. of course xp doesn't have this problem as it's already part of the os.

part of the requirement for the vs c# is sql server express edition, and so yesterday morning i had the brilliant idea of  transferring over my access2k2 book database to sql server. the only frontend applications i could find were database managers with the  actual database stuff done through sql statements. i'm reasonably competent with sql but for quick updates that's not efficient.

and sql express is not exactly portable, so i started looking at sqlite which IS portable.it's the backend db that popfile uses so it's robust. same problem: all the applications fell into the category of db managers.

i googled for hours, installing various mssql/sqlite applications i could find, but no luck..

i came to the conclusion that both sql server and sqlite were aimed at programmers and NOT the end user. which is fine in itself, except that no programmers have cranked out any database applications for the end user.

for now i'm still using openoffice's base. it's a little bit of overkill. right now my book database is a flat file that i could easily export to csv and just use a text editor. i have other plans for it, and the db paradigm is the obvious way to go for the information i have.

as per usual when the internet world is lacking the once piece of software i could make use of, i end up writing my own database program...probably based on sqlite or mysql to keep it portable. last time i had to do this, the result was tkblog :)

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