I recently heard about a new webmail client from my friend Justin, who’s infatuated with it. RoundCube, a “browser-based multilingual IMAP client with an application-like user interface,” is the latest and greatest webmail client. It’s only in the alpha stage of development, which explains the jagged installation procedures, but that doesn’t mean it can’t kick some major squirrels. RoundCube is much smaller, scalable, and less resource intensive than another competitor, Zimbra, which weighs in at 150 megabytes. The interface is the stunning with lots of AJAX magic as well as user configurable via XHTML and CSS 2 skinning. I love RoundCube so much, I’m declaring it better than Gmail. Yes, you read that correctly. Hopefully by the end of this article you will have a fully functioning RoundCube webmail client on your server.

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My favorite social bookmarking and technology news website, Digg, is about to get a whole lot better. This is because some big names have invested 2.8 million dollars into Digg, which has been rapidly growing since its inception. Investors included the co-founder of eBay and Netscape. I hope this means that they will have the money get more servers as Digg has been fairly slow recently. This is fantastic news. You can read the article here and the Digg for the article here.

Here’s what one of the Digg founders and former TechTV show host, Kevin Rose had to say in regards to questions raised:
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I changed somethings in the header, so if you are seeing two headlines you need to clear your cache so the browser can get the latest CSS file.

I tried to carve my school mascot Buzz, the Yellow Jacket, into a pumpkin I bought today. I’ll let you decide if I was close or not. It was ridiculously hard considering I just had one huge knife. Getting details in there was a pain.

It’s about time Flickr can print photos. This is great news, finally I can do something with some of my better photos. I know lots of people that will take Flickr up on this new feature. Check out the Flickr blog for more info.

Over the last year, we’ve been asked 15,381 times, “How about printing? When are we going to get printing!?” Today we are happy to answer: “Today!” For now it is U.S. only (we know! we’re working hard on rolling it out everywhere!). You can order prints to be delivered by mail, or pick them up at your local Target store for one hour printing, even. In both cases, you get 10 free 4×6″ prints to get started.

I just started using FeedBurner for my RSS feeds, making it easier for me to keep track of everyone. If you are currently subscribing to any of my RSS feeds, please change them to the new URLs.

The Open Office Suite is an open source must have. Download the latest version here.

Ubuntu, a popular distribution of the Linux operating system, has acquired a wildly growing user base and today I have joined them. Described as being Linux for Human Beings, Ubuntu is somewhere in between Mandriva (formerly Mandrake) and Fedora Core in terms of ease of use. It is far from Gentoo (my personal favorite because of the emerge package manager), which should be pleasing to novice users that want a more versatile Linux installation. Ubuntu has recently been awarded Best Distribution.
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I recently remembered that I wasn’t using the internal hard drive in my Mac Mini, rather my external firewire drive… so I’m going to go about installing a distro of Linux called Ubuntu on it. Hopefully it will have native support for most of the hardware in the mini, or I will switch to a version of Fedora Core 4 for PPC that works well on the mini. I’ll try to chronicle the events or show a brief how-to if I can make the time between studying for a Physics test and a Calc3 midterm.

Flock is the latest open source browser, catering especially to bloggers and Web 2.0 savvy users. It is heavily based upon open source code from Mozilla’s Firefox browser and was developed by a group of a 10 guys and a gal in a garage in Palo Alto, California (with lots of contributions from many developers). Flock promises to leave the user with a strong social web browsing experience. With bookmark syncing with del.icio.us, integrated blogging and flickr support, Flock looks like a real treat. But be warned, in this early developer preview there are some nasty bugs and lacking features that should be a must if Flock hopes to lure current Firefox users. Continue Reading »

My pc modding website, TheModWiki.org, has a folding team and we have just ranked among the top 2000 folding teams. This is out of roughly 40,000 teams. It is quite an accomplishment considering we only began folding mid-summer. You can check out the Stanford folding stats here. If you want to learn about folding, check out this thread on TheModWiki.org forums.

Follow TheModWiki.org’s folding team stats here.

For the past three weeks Fox has dumped airings of The O.C. for a football game, a baseball game, and just tonight for no reason, showing back to back episodes of Reunion. This is a horrible way to treat their best show. And it’s not like they vividly advertise when it will be showing next. They just don’t have any commercials for it, when they would usually have many the week of its airing. If I take the time to sort out my schedule to make time for a Fox show, they better damn well show it. Or at least they need to let me know in advance when the next episode will be aired, arghs.

As the title says… go get it.
login:

password:

P.S. I am in the midst of a Flock review but have been swamped with school work. Expect it this weekend.

Update: The Developer Preview is live.

Keep ‘em coming guys! ;-)

My favorite DVD ripping utility, DVD Shrink, recently got shutdown for some legal reasons. A team of developers came up with an open source solution to replace DVD Shrink and called it ShrinkTo5. Their name stems from the fact that a typical DVD (DVD5 not DVD9) holds 4.7GB, roughly 5GB, of data. Most commercial video DVDs nowadays can hold 9.4GB so if you want to backup the DVD with one of your own single-layer 4.7GB DVDs you would have to downsize or shrink the DVD. This is what ShrinkTo5 has set out to do in DVD Shrink’s place.
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Apple released updated PowerBooks, PowerMacs, and a new photo editing program called Aperture.

You can read the article at MacWorld.

First on the list are refreshed PowerBook models. Moody announced two new systems — 15-inch and 17-inch PowerBooks. The 15-inch model now features a screen with 1440 x 900 resolution, the same as the previous generation 17-inch model. The 17-inch model now features a 1680 x 1050 pixel display — the same resolution as Apple’s 20-inch Cinema Display

I’m really pleased Apple updated the PowerBooks, as I will be considering purchashing one in a year or two. However, by then, they may get another update. I was also hoping that since Apple recently released the Mighty Mouse, they might get a hint and include a two button trackpad in the PowerBook/iBook lineup but I guess not.

Fall break is just about over.  I’ll be heading back to Atlanta tomorrow on a noon flight.  Hopefully, my cell phone alarm will be loud enough to wake me up.  As I’m writing this, in my sister’s apartment, I am seeing 52 wireless access points and a whopping 28 that are unsecure.  People need to realize that they need to protect their access points.  I doubt that all of them are aware of the circumstances or are willingly giving away web access.  Anyway, I am not complaining, I am borrowing some right now.  I can’t wait to get back to the dorm and setup Flock on my Mac Mini.  I have been messing around with it on my Windows laptop for the past day but it’s just not the same.  I also need to scrounge up some change and see if I can find a place with the Batman Begins DVD in stock, it comes out that day.

Virginia/D.C./Maryland are amazing.  If California doesn’t work out after college, I would like to live in this area.  However, the car nut in me did not like the fact that radar detectors are not legal in Virginia, and there weren’t too many roads where you could let some throttle out (but the ones where you could looked stunning).  On top of that, there are 3 Apple stores within 30 minutes of each other!  I am used to those one Apple store cities… Houston, Atlanta.

I just received this email after posting something to the Flock Beta2 mailing list. If I get it tonight, you can sure expect a review very soon. :-)

Hi Paul,

After fixing a few of the grosser bugs from the release from Friday, we are just making sure she still flies, and you will likely receive the browser later tonight ;-)

All the best,
Lloyd

I was cleaning out my laptop and getting rid of some junk when I found an old batch file I had written to repair LAN connections. It works great, but only releases/renews the IP. Just save the code below as a .bat file and execute it in Windows whenever your Internet is acting up.

I just found a long awaited Konfabulator widget for Mint. It is slightly different, with rounded corners, and a Mint leaf instead of the logo, but it’s just as great. Enjoy!

Note: Please consider setting up a Tor server to donate bandwidth to the network.

There has recently been a lot of buzz about decentralized trackers for BitTorrent and other tools resulting in anonymous filesharing. My goal for this article is to have your Azureus installation running on the Tor anonymizing overlay network for TCP. I will essentially be translating this article into something that you can follow. This article is part of a series, please check out the first and second articles if you have not done so already. Warning: This one’s a bit more difficult. Continue Reading »

Tomorrow begins a four day fall break for students at Georgia Tech and I’ll be heading off to Washington, D.C. to visit my sister. Of course, I’ll have my laptop but don’t expect too many posts. Hopefully sometime tonight I will be able to post an article I’ve been working on all last night, it will be called “Part 3: Azureus Anonymity.” On a side note, I just saw some INSANE cars! I was filling up my car for the trip to the airport tomorrow and on the way back I spotted a dark silver Lamborghini Murcielago right on PeachTree St., and then a silver BMW M6, which I didn’t even know were out yet, and a black Ferrari 360 Modena that was tailing me for a few miles. I really need to start keeping my digicam in my car. That makes my first Murcielago sighting, first M6 sighting and I’ve lost track of how many 360’s I’ve seen (at least 20). That reminds me, I forgot to mention how I saw a yellow Lotus Elise last weekend on the way to the Atlanta Greek Festival. Well, I’m off to eat, pack, and watch The O.C., cheers.

I’ve been featured on the front of Hack A Day today in their hackaday links. If anyone else is a fan of hackaday it’s definitely worth a visit. I recommend checking it out if you haven’t before… its a top notch site showing a new hack, or mod, every day.

I didn’t post [Paul Stamatiou]’s original setting up Azureus post because I thought it was a little too basic for here; it didn’t even get into port forwarding. His second article is a little more interesting, covering forwarding and a couple plugins.

After arriving back to the room from Physics, I was delighted to discover that Apple released an updated iMac G5 with an integrated iSight as well as a new media-centeresque app called FrontRow, a new video iPod with the 60GB model being 12% thinner than the 4G iPod, and iTunes 6. I just installed iTunes 6 and noticed a new section in the left pane below Podcasts called Videos. The ultimate reason for iTunes 6 was video support. You can now purchased music videos along with tv shows for $1.99 each. However, I’ve found it a little hard to navigate between the music store and the video store; several pages don’t work as well. I also don’t think they are just ready for delivering music videos seeing as how trying to preview any music video results in a gray box, even though I have the latest QuickTime. But I will vouch for iTunes 6 in one thing; the Videos section includes all of the video podcasts I have, making them much easier to browse.

I suggest watching the keynote if you’re interested in that kind of thing or checking out Engadget’s review.

I’ve really come to appreciate the scalability and extreme precision that Mr. Inman’s Mint deals, especially after receiving a major increase in visitors after having several of my articles on Digg. Mint has become a valuable tool for helping me determining the performance of my websites and where I should focus my attention if I see that users like a certain type of content more than others. To show my gratitude to Mint, I will list and rank my favorite Peppers for Mint. Peppers are plugins that dramatically enhance the functionality of Mint. If you recall from a previous Mint post, the Pepper API sold me. It allows anyone to spend some time and make an excellent addition to Mint. Alright, enough babbling, now to some serious business! Continue Reading »

when Plextor decided to make a slot loading 16x DVD+/-RW drive? The only thing that would sweeten the deal would be a SATA version. Up until now the only company that made a decent slot loading drive was Pioneer and last I checked theirs didn’t burn DVDs. By the way, if you’re a bargain hunter or are about to begin building a computer, I highly recommend subscribing to NewEgg’s Daily Deals RSS feed.

Update: They found the bomber… read below. Apparently this morning around 9am, 3 bombs were found in the dumpsters near my old dormitory, Glenn Hall. I heard from a friend that lives in Glenn that a custodian was taking out the trash and picked up a plastic bag, where one of the bombs had been placed and it exploded. After that incident, a whole bunch of Atlanta police and a bomb squad arrived to find if there were anymore bombs. Two more were found in the dumpster, and were taken care of by the bomb squad. My roommate saw from driving by on the campus bus, the Stinger, that many students were evacuated until the situation was handled. Pretty scary stuff I may say, even though the bombs were said to be made from small plastic bottles, nothing too powerful. After hearing about this, I found it was put on the frontpage of Drudge Report with a red link saying “‘Terrorist Act’ on Georgia Tech Campus.”

You can read the article at a local news station’s site.

Update: Continue Reading »

Update: I have written a third article for this series. You can find it here.

After my first Azureus article received lots of popularity, I decided to write a follow up article. Several people have contacted me, expressing their interest in a simple guide they can follow to optimize Azureus further and increase functionality via plugins. Today I will cover changing the incoming TCP listen port, the SafePeer plugin and the RSS Import plugin.

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If you’ve got nothing better to do today, I highly suggest checking out the RedBull AirRace. Basically, it is an aerobatic flying contest over the San Francisco Bay. There are several inflated pylons that the planes must do different maneuvers through, such as flying sideways. I have seen the commercials and it looks great. It will be webcast at 3:45PM EST for those interested.

Everyone knows what aerobatic flying is. Most people have also seen a skiing slalom and are familiar with auto racing. Air Race is, to a certain extent, a combination of these three disciplines.

Firefox Beta 2 was released by Mozilla today. Go get your copy now. Here’s a list of the latest features and bug fixes for this version.

Google has just released an rss reader. It is available at Google.com/reader. I have just started playing around with it and it seems very promising. I love the layout. It allows for you to click on one of your multiple feeds and see the full article from every feed entry in the central part of the page. Like Gmail it seems to be heavily based on newer web technologies such as AJAX, allowing for feeds to be loaded without having to reload the page entirely. Of course, like Gmail you are also able to star your favorite entries. However, right now it is probably being knocked by some impressive traffic so it’s a bit slow.

Earlier this evening an article I had written about configuring the Azureus bittorrent client was posted on the frontpage of LifeHacker.com. A few minutes later I found hits coming in from Digg. Less than 20 minutes later, I was on the frontpage of Digg! This is a huge deal to me because I visit Digg several times a day and to have my article on there is an awesome feeling. Right now I am just sitting back, RedBull in hand, keeping an eye on my Mint stats. At the time of this post I’ve received over 2,500 unique hits within the past 2-3 hours. Compare that to my regular 100-200 unique hits a day. You can check out the Digg page here.

This only adds to my already great day… On the way from Physics to the student center some people from RedBull were handing out free RedBull (my roommate didn’t like it so he gave me his) and then I received my Calculus 3 midterm grade - it was significantly higher than the class average. Later this evening I had gone to Borders to return a web design book that was suckier than I thought and on the ride back I spotted a Maybach!

Update: I have surpassed 12,000 unique hits on that article!

For those of you that haven’t been online in a few months, the buzzworthy Flock browser is coming soon.  While it is going to be a challenger for Mozilla’s Firefox browser, it will attract a different type of crowd.  Flock has been marketed as being keen with the latest web trends such as blogs and online communities, including a dashboard type feature where users can compose blog entries and post blog.  It might even be a competitor to what I believe is the reigning blog managing software, Qumana.  Flock is fairly close to public release since one of the developers released screenshots on his flickr account.  From what I can tell Flock looks stunning and has some massive potential.  The integrated tags feature seems interesting and it appears as though a search field in the upper right of the browser lets you search wordpress blogs… that’s what I’m assuming by the “W” logo next to the search field.  I can’t wait to get my hands on the first public release, especially after seeing Jon Hicks’, creator of the Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird logos, name as one of the contributors.

edit: On second thought, the “W” logo next to the search field is likely for Wikipedia, the amazing collaborative, open source encyclopedia… just as good though!

I have always been faithful to my favorite K2 WordPress theme since alpha, but I have just discovered a very promising new theme. Squible is a budding new WordPress theme that is very heavily based off of K2 (which may be why I like it so much), especially in terms of the same great AJAX live commenting feature. I love how the frontpage is completely different than most WordPress powered blogs. I tried it out for a minute, just to see what it looked like on my blog, however it seems to be lacking Safari support and since Mint tells me 22% of you guys run Safari, I’ll check back when it gets out of alpha.

I recently stumbled upon a great member of the 9rules blog network, ParticleTree. They have a great online publication called TreeHouse, covering all aspects of the web development community and more. The first issue is free, so go download it and maybe you’ll be interested purchasing six months for fifteen bucks. I was compelled to try it out after discovering that the free issue had an interview with Shaun Inman, or Mr. Mint, and Paul Scrivens, the CEO of the 9rules network.
Aesthetically, TreeHouse is stunning. I thorougly enjoyed the pertinent links laden within each article as well as the 5 links after each main section: code, design, and business. There is also a page in each issue laying out the important bits of news in the 9rules community. I’ll leave you with some quotes from the first issue.

Our Mission
To make the web
easier to improve.

Our Mantra
Give them our best and toss in
a little fun while we’re at it.

Today is the day I’ve been waiting for. Last month Georgia Tech students were informed that today we would get email aliases that would forward email to our monotonous, boring email addresses that are in the format of “gta###a@mail.gatech.edu.” For example, given my year of enrollment, my first “a” is a “g”, the number is random, as well as the last letter. It is a horrible way for students to cope with campus email. No one other than yourself is able to remember it and causes widespread confusion when working in groups as people often mistype the addresses. This has happened to me several times, where people will accidentally send me their lab reports instead of their lab group as my number is the same as another students, but with a different letter. I woke up at 8am, which is when the website went live, to snag my alias, not that anybody else has my name.
While I was up, I checked my email and was happy to see that my portrait from IconizeMe.com had arrived. IconizeMe is a great service run by three graphic artists. You send them your picture and 2+ weeks later you receive your digital self in an icon, pdf, jpg and several other formats for whatever use they will serve. You can see mine in the about blurb on the top of the homepage.

My last bit of info regards the lack of air conditioning in my residence hall. For some reason it has been off since 7am and they are try to fix something, egh.

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Update: I’ve written a followup article to answer all the questions I’ve received.

I’ve had a lot of friends want to install Azureus, a fantastic open source bittorrent client, but were unable to get it running properly. To get Azureus running properly and efficiently, a few settings deep within the configuration panel need to be set. I’m writing this article so I can send it to those who need a quick way to install Azureus and getting it running quickly.

First, you need to open up the configuration panel so we can get to tweaking some settings. Continue Reading »

I saw Serenity tonight on its opening night. Serenity is technically the series finale to the epic Firefly series that Fox screwed up a few years ago. Fox aired the episodes out of order and cancelled it early. Anyways, I went to a nice AMC theater, Barrett Commons, a bit out in Kennesaw, GA with a roommate and friend… but the change from the usual Phipps Mall outing was well worth it. Serenity was an amazing movie, I won’t spoil it but there were some plot twists. On the way back we hit up Chili’s for a late night dinner before the half hour drive back. That reminds me, I saw another Bentley GT Coupe the other night.

Up until now, I have been trying to get my other website, TheModWiki, transferred to my shared server account on (mt). It took the longest time to get the MySQL database restored… I got error after error and the tech support didn’t really help. They would reply but their replies didn’t work, which is rather off for (mt)’s stellar support. Anyways, the solution was ticking a certain checkbox in the phpMyAdmin export settings and then restoring via an SSH mysql command. Now my problem is trying to get around the PHP safe mode that (mt) has enabled for safety reasons. MediaWiki software just doesn’t seem to like it.