Are you ready for the Grid? Get ready. It’s about to be the next phase of the Internet. The Net is currently comprised of ancient technology. We are using copper wires and archaic telephone hubs to transmit a digital signal. In some cases we rely on single-processor, PC equivalent machines to serve data from one end of the country to the next. There are far too many points of failure. The current infrastructure is bottle-necking. It’s like the 405 on Tuesday morning….a gianormous cluster phuk.

The Grid enables data to travel at the speed of light via fiber optic lines. No “noise” (telephone static) to interfere with the signal. Data will be able to flow without resistance from point to point, without hopping through 100s of nodes. The Internet as you know will be 100s of times faster.

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A few months ago, when I first installed Ubuntu, I heard a rumor that Compiz was going re-merge with Beryl, making the ultimate Window Management System in the world. It finally happened. The website is up, along with a Wiki. It’s so new, you have to install the dependencies and build it from the source code. No distribution packages yet.

In a few weeks this should be in all the repositories. I am downloading all of the dependencies as I type this. I am so phuking excited to see this in action. Oh shit, I just said phuking excited over CompizFusion. I think I need to go smoke crack while watching hard-core midget porn to de-geekify.

Update: I actually just found a distribution page. It was just updated, it’s that new. I swear it wasn’t there when I started this post. Choose your OS and download your distro. I guess there are packages after all.

As the world awaits on this iPhone eve, I feel compelled to at least say something. I have been pretty quiet about this phone. I reluctantly posted something about it when it was first announced. It looks damn cool. It's also damn expensive. So let's take a look at all the things your $500+ (and 2 year contract) doesn't get you.

The iPhone will not have:

• Songs as Ringtones
• Games
• Any flash support
• Instant Messaging
• Picture messages (MMS)
• Video recording
• Voice recognition or voice dialing
• Wireless Bluetooth Stereo Streaming (A2DP)
• 3G (EV-DO/HSDPA)
• GPS
• A real keyboard
• Removable battery
• Expandable Storage
• Direct iTunes Music Store Access (Over Wi-Fi or EDGE)

Not that I really care about having Akon as my ringtone…but you would think the innovator of the digital music player would be able to incorporate customized rings. Right? Doesn't that one just seem…well…dumb? No games, hmm… I guess with the price they feel like they are marketing this at the biz crowd, but still games are fun while waiting for meetings to begin. Cell phone batteries die as often as gold fish, I wonder what Apple plans to do in 6 months when half of these units are "dead?" I won't get started about the lack of GPS, that's just silly and will most likely being integrated in the next version. The one lacking feature that makes this phone a deal-breaker, MMS. The inability to snap a pic and send it to my friends (or enemies) at $500 (for the 5GB) and $100 per month makes me happy I bought my Motorola Ming.

While I was watching the eighth-seeded, Golden State Warriors almost crush the dreams of the 67 win, first place Dallas Mavericks, my friend Kelly pinged me with an IM, "Are you seeing what is going on at Digg?" I tried to pull up the site but it was timing out.

Digg received a cease and desist letter for anything related to the HD DVD Encryption Key 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0. As Digg continued to remove post after post, the posts became nothing but posts containing the key. Users of Digg revolted at Kevin Rose's attempt to silence them. Digg proved that it is now an entity bigger than it's creators. Kevin quickly realized his loyal readers were right. He wasn't about to stop them for saying a number.

Is this really an illegal hexadecimal number?  09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0. It's just a number. So many other things have to happen before this Key can unlock an HD DVD. Isn't it the intent which is illegal? The DVD burner isn't illegal. The blank HD DVDs aren't illegal. In a country that supports the right to bare arms, it is unfathomable to think a number can be considered illegal. I am entitled to protect my home and I am entitled to say any number I can possibly think of. Those are the first and second amendments, right? 

Kevin just posted a blog titled "Digg This: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0." Digg is back online with all the posts of the key. It's nice to know someone is standing up for our rights.  

Amarok is a Music Library Organizer. It uses SQLite, MySQL or PostgreSql to index your entire music library. Amarok blows iTunes away. The interface is light weight and beautiful. The ability to search, sort and create playlists couldn't be any easier. As the player changes songs, a "Web 2.0" banner fades in showing you the name of the track, the artist, the album and the album artwork. It took about 10 minutes to index my entire library of 40GBs.

Amarok currently only runs on Linux. The Amarok Development Team is working with Google in the Summer of Code project to natively port Amarok to OSX and Windows. So hopefully you will be able to use the best music player in the world real soon.

Amarok alone would make me switch to Linux, had I not gone 'buntu already. So make the switch cause Amarok is well worth it.  

The other day I was having a conversation with someone and they said "I believe Excel is possibly the greatest program ever invented." I thought about it and I really couldn't argue it. Are there other great programs? Absolutely! The Turbo Tax website might also take the prize, IMO. These programs take something that is actually very complex and simplify it to drag and drop, point and click. These programs make our life easier.

As I continued to think about other programs that possibly could compete, I realized something else. Qmail is the WORST program ever created. Qmail is an MTA (Mail Transport Agent) written by Daniel J. Bernstein. It was first released on January, 24, 1996. It's final and current release was June, 15, 1998. Daniel stopped working on Qmail 9 years ago. Qmail has a cult following that has attempted to patch the buggy, broken software.

According to Wikipedia, and various other sources, Daniel has offered a $500 "reward" to anyone who is able to prove Qmail is vulnerable. Georgi Guninski published his report in 2005 but Daniel has refused to pay saying these security holes do not meet his standards. Interesting…

Qmail sucks! Any software that hasn't had an official release since 1998 is deprecated. You can only patch for so long. The 3rd party patches will start to conflict and need to be included in the core. Qmail needs to be entirely rewritten. Qmail is based on the world's most popular MTA, Sendmail. Sendmail has many critics. Sendmail has many flaws. No one claims Sendmail is perfect by any means. Sendmail comes with any Linux distro and is easy to stop and start. It's easy to check the mail queue and just as easy to flush it. Sendmail works. The Qmail cult loves to say Qmail is better than Sendmail. That's like saying it's better to drown than be burned alive.

If you are looking for an MTA, chances are you are going to have to pay for it. Writing an Enterprise level MTA takes a lot of time and a lot research. Big companies spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours developing secure, scalable, MTAs, that work. www.zimbra.com happens to be my favorite Enterprise MTA. It has a customizable AJAX interface with all of the functionality of MS Exchange. For $50, a direct-push plugin can be purchased for Blackberry and Windows Mobile compatibility.

Some things are just better when you pay for them. I am currently moving all of my email to Zimbra. But when I need to send some basic form mail, I am using good ol' Sendmail.

service sendmail start

About a year ago, I blogged about installing Ubuntu and not liking it. I was installing it as a Web Server and I found it to be "restrictive" with the root account disabled. At the time I read the misconception that root is "missing" and you have to use sudo for everything. While the misconception is still very prevalent on the Ubuntu forums, I can assure you it's false and you can activate the root account. You can even enable logging in with it from the Gnome login screen. It doesn't matter anyway. After 12 hours I am used to putting sudo in front of any root command.

The coolest thing about it has to be Beryl. If you have a NVidia or ATI graphics card, you can support the super cool 3DDesktop provided by OpenGL . There are many ways to configure OpenGL. I find Compiz to be hella buggy. Beryl is the way to go.

On Sunday, my homie was kind enough to hook me up with a brand new Maxtor 300 GB drive. He wasn't using it and knew that I was about to put it to good use. My Windows XP install was actin a fool. On boot up it was coming up with all 16 bit Subscript error. I haven't seen something like that since the day of Win95. It was time to reformat…and that I did. I was hesitant to use my Windows drive as I was still unsure as to how successful this Ubuntu install would be. Well…there is no reason to put a 40GB drive back in here. I now have 2 300GB Maxtors.

My second drive is a data drive, formated in Windows NTFS. This was one of the first things I worked on after getting the 'buntu up and running. I found a great tutorial on booting up with NTFS mounted drives and allowing users read/write access. With drive mounting, I now have my MP3s. The Add Remove Programs is extremely powerful. While only touched to remove a program in Windows, this GUI Repository Manager has tons of free and powerful applications. The Synaptic Package Manager has everything else you might possibly need. Missing MP3, DVD or the Divx codec? You can search and download it right from this built in tool.

WINE is a Win32 emulator. You don't have to install any Windows files. It works well — once you get the Windows fonts installed. So far I have found a replacement for every program. I guess iTunes will be one I will have to use WINE for. Possibly Photoshop, although I have heard great things in the advancement of GIMP.

Ubuntu + Beryl + NTFS + WINE =

I spent 2 hours today figuring out how to transfer my voicemails (T-Mobile) to my computer. There is the old school FM radio rip method — play the VM on speaker phone while recording it with a mic on the PC. The quality is poor and that is just so 1.0.

So here a breakdown of what I did to get a good quality recording, directly from my voicemail.

1. Download Gizmo Project. It's a free VoIP client for your PC. The setup is fast and easy.

2. Dial your voicmail. It's usually your own telephone number. Wait for the greeting, press * and your password.
3. Hit the record button. 2 wav files will be saved on your desktop. The small file contains data from before the call connects.
4. Download Audacity. This is a great (free) sound editor. Once installed, choose Project > Import Raw Data. Select the big wav file which contains the recorded voicemail.
5. Select the part of the voicemail you want to save and Edit > Trim the selection.
6. File > Export as MP3.

That's it. You now have an MP3 of your voicemail. This is excellent for embarrassing your family and friends by putting them on blast on your blog or MySpace. Enjoy. Have fun!

I needed the first letter of every word in any given string to be capitalized. So I wrote a small little function to parse the string and create an array with all the words. I then loop through the array, break off the first letter, capitalize it and reattach it. We finally join the string with the other words and trim extra space at the end.

This function performs well and gets the job done.

function CapitalizeText($text){
$text = explode(" ", $text);
foreach($text as $t){
$CapText .= strtoupper($t{0}) . substr($t,1) . " ";
}
$CapText = trim($CapText);
return $CapText;
}

I started to think that someone else has to have done this (that never matters to me, I like writing my own stuff) and I searched to see if I was right. It turns out PHP (both 4 and 5) have this…built in.

All you need to type is ucwords($string) and it does the exact same thing as my function. Oh well, it is ALWAYS better to use built in functions. So goodbye, CapatilizeText(). Why didn't you tell me you are "moo like a cows opinion?"

In the era of Web 2.0, can these damn Self-Signed SSL Certificates not display an "error" message? If I am going to login to Plesk, I know I am logging into Plesk. I know that server is using OpenSSL and is encrypting the data transmission with a Self-Signed SSL Cert. I am logging in to manage the server. Why do the browsers insist on telling me something I am well aware of?

SSH alerts me that I am using the default public server key and if I would like to accept it. While I am perfectly aware I will be using the default server key, because I didn't create a private key, the alert is much more of an informational alert than an error message. I couldn't imagine PUTTY reacting to the SSH key the same way IE6 or 7 reacts to Self-Signed SSL. Microsoft treats this as if I just encountered browser intrusion and must take draconian actions to destroy it. I am surprised an alert box doesn't pop up asking me if I want format my hard drive and recreate the partition.

Come on IE, if I am logging into the server, and specifying the SSL port, don't you think a message box notifying me would be more appropriate at this time? I sure think so…don't you?

I have made a decision to sign off from IM during the work day. I may login only if the situation requires I do so(i.e asking someone for programming assistance). I spend too much time on IM. Most of it is work related, but that doesn't mean it isn't distracting. The ping is rarely every regarding the task at hand. It's about a future task, a past one or something totally different. It breaks concentration. That's what email is for. I check it when I am able to read it. I respond when I am able to do so.

I am guilty of being an IM junkie. I know that. I will still login in the evening (work) hours, for now. I may need to go cold turkey. It might be the only way. Great success always follows personal sacrifice. I am willing to give up AIM and MSN. If you really need to talk to me, you know the email address.