IMAP is something which I never really knew about, for some reason I just assumed that it was some old technology, and that POP had taken it’s place. Probably due to the fact that Gmail offered POP + SMTP, as did most other email providers that i’ve used in the past.

I never did like using POP to access my email, so for the last year or so i’ve solely been using webmail, as I’d download all my email into some application, it’d take forever, everything would be”unread” and then for some reason or another I had to reinstall the OS, same process again, it was just missing out the synchronization. Then google announce IMAP was being released for gmail. At first I ignored it, since I didn’t really know what it did, but then I read more about it and it seemed perfect, I could use Thunderbird/Outlook for email, and it wouldn’t keep me out of sync with whats read & whats not. So yesterday I setup Outlook 2007 to use it, and it worked. Perfectly. All mail was read, excepty for a couple new ones, I read them and that was updated at gmail. Excellent! My only problem now is that I don’t know how to use outlook, and manage to keep sending messages twice.

It seem’s like they have been getting quite a bit of bad press recently, but I’ve personally never had any problems with them, since signing up in 2004. But I’ve never actually had to ring up their customer support, until today, they have an offer for a free laptop, on a package which is cheaper & just as good as my current one, so I was expecting they would let me simply cancel my account, and sign up again.

But no, that is too simple, I rang up this morning to ask if it would be possible, and was told yes, I would just have to call customer services to get my account cancelled.

So, I rang up customer services, and was told NO, it would take around 40 days for the whole cancellation process to complete. Say goodbye.

Ring up again (get an english bloke, must say he was very helpful). This time it was only going to take 10 days, but I would be without internet for around 7, which i can live with, just. I said fine, and he put me through to the cancellations department, and told, again, that this would take 40 days.

Now, I think I’m quite a patient person, but by now I was getting a tad annoyed, so I just asked for a MAC code to switch providers, this would only take 5 days, so basically if they think you’ll be back, they’ll take all the time in the world, but once you’re going for good they can’t wait to see the back of you. But getting the MAC code wasn’t a simple process, I had a wonderful salesman on the other end of the phone, after a few periods of holding. I already knew what package I wanted, Sky Broadband’s MID, at less than 1/3 of the price, and 20x more bandwidth, a pretty good deal. Of course if you’re a salesman you ignore maths, and offer a package @ £12.99 with the features of my current one, after getting through the the poor guy that I wasn’t interested, he finally offered me unlimited bandwidth, which to be honest isn’t that great, as it will have a stupid FUP, and I could get unlimited for £10 from sky. The I was offered a wonderful livebox, no thanks. Eventually he understands that I ain budging on this, and requests a MAC code for me, which will hopefully be arriving in a few days.

Now, if they didn’t have a customer service department, then their service would be great, but unfortunately they do, so now I’ve got to wait until I can finally get rid of them.

Or, I have a plan, I’m willing to put up with the 2 gig bandwidth, as it hasn’t affected me before. I was told that I couldn’t use a MAC code to switch package because it wouldn’t work, by the same person who wanted me to spend £12.99 rather than £5, so no doubt in a few days i’ll be making an unfortunate trip to PC world to try and get that laptop, and maybe tell them I changed my mind, I’m sure they’d accept a valued customer, like me, back. We’ll soon find out.

*In the cases where I’ve said My account, actually translated it means my dad’s, but he doesn’t know any different.

I’ve just done a (very) rough calculation of how much bandwidth I’ve used in the last 3 days, both up & down it came to 4.38971772 gigabytes exactly. And that’s just in the last 3 days, I have a supposed cap of 2 Gb per month from Orange. Which I don’t really think is fair, my parent’s are paying £18 a month for it, under their old price structure. The speed is a constant 3 Meg (it does actually act that quick aswell). How I’ve never been kicked off before is a wonder, since in the past I’ve downloaded 4 gig+ ISO’s, thats my bandwidth out in one sweep. Maybe orange are just being kind?

I was just looking through some old old old PHP code, I knew I never was the greatest coder, but I was pretty darn bad a couple of years ago.

My idea of security was just a random string of numbers, here’s a sample:


$id=$_GET['id'];
?>
IF ($id == "98493859") {
?>


The page would be displayed after that, nice and secure I see. Oh, and validation was an absolute no-no, I mean no hacker is every going to get into this are they?

Thankfully I’ve improved a bit since then, (I hope anyway).

It’s also weird to see what I’ve learnt recently, I’m still far from being an expert, but I think I know what I know quite well, I was updating a lot of the code on stuffatschool.com recently, the original had been published a few months ago, and to be quite honest, it was a security risk & then some, I’d left it displaying mysql error’s everywhere, not bothered with SQL injection, thankfully nothing every happened, and the new version is (I hope) much more secure. In fact in just the month or so I’d say I’ve made the most progress in terms of the learning curve, I’d say now I am more sensible & secure in what I do.

Anyone else ever done this? Looked back at something to realise how shoddy it was!

Something I’ve just noticed is that when I open FF I automatically open a load of tabs, all seem to be google (scarry):

• Google Mail
• Google Reader
• Google Analytics
• Google Adsense

Is this part of a weird plan from google to take over us all, or is it just me who uses solely google?

It just seems odd how one company can operate many succesful websites, it’s actually quite freaky in fact that i automatically go to google, is this some kind of master plan for google to control us all (or me at least)

Mwuhahahaha

They’re still great, but can be annoying. By the end of the day I always end up with far too many of them open, a minute ago I did have about 20 open in one window, and FF was using 280Mb of ram, it’s worth it, but slows down my PC like mad.

Is there actually a name for having far too many tab’s? I mean, it can’t be good (for you or the computer), half the time I look back at them and wonder where the hell it came from.

Ah well, FF tabs still beat IE tab’s

Even if they are hungrier.

I was watching my computer boot up earlier, and noticed the speed ratings were totally out. It was saying my processor was 2 cores running at 462Mhz, rather than 1.86Ghz each. Now, this seems a bit too much out for a little error. So, the obvious option seemed to be update the BIOS. I went to the Asus website, and had 2 options, create a DOS boot floppy and install from there, or use their software from within windows.

Now, the last time I used their software it froze my pc, and corrupted the BIOS, luckily it just auto-restored it when I rebooted. So I chose the floppy option. What A Mistake.

Firstly, I don’t have a floppy drive in my PC, so, off to the cupboard and under a pill of crap I find one, plug it in, start up, anf the light just won’t go off, and I can’t access it. After a couple of reboots I finally gave up. Back to the cupboard, another floppy, this time it worked. So, hanging out of the side of my computer, stacked upon 100 CD-r’s I was able to format it as a boot disk, then copy over the files.

Nice and simple, or so it sounds. Shutdown, Reboot, but Nooo Won’t load up any of the files. Stubborn thing. By now I’d spent about 1/2 an hour messing around with floppy discs and had had no success. So, I find a live XP CD (Not sure where it came from, it’s just there). So I booted into that, which took bloody ages, formated it, and then copied over the files. Et Voila. Kindof.

Same process again, reboot, open the flashing software, load the bios file, FREEZE. For crying out loud, one simple thing, and a computer cannot handle it. Alls I ask from it is that it boots from a floppy disc, updates the bios, and done, job’s a good ‘un.

By now I was getting rather annoyed, but, was wanting to sort this problem, so refused to give up. I was looking around for other floppy discs and found one in the motherboard box labelled “Asus Updated BIOS”. Thinking it couldn’t get any worse, I gave this a try, finally, the darn thing worked. No, it isn’t the most up to date bios, but it works, and that counts for something.

Anyway, I think this is enough ranting for one night

On a unrelated note though, aren’t computers cheap! I was looking around on ebuyer earlier, just messing, as you do And wondered how much you could get a computer for, the total, justunder £140 (this is with a 250Gb HDD though, so it could be less). No, it isn’t the best spec in the world, but it would make a good file/development server, with ubuntu on it. For anyone interested here are the parts:

• MSI Motherboard
• Intel Celeron D Processor (2.66Ghz)
• 256Mb DDR Ram
• 250 Gb Hard Drive
• DVD Drive
• And finally, something to put it all in (optional of course, you are free to stack everything up in a corner, just don’t let any pets near it )

Now, it is possible to make it cheaper, but be reasonable,have you ever tried to run ubuntu with 128 meg of ram, I have, through MS Virtual PC, trust me, you need lots of patience (and I’m talking about pre-install)

Anyway, I think i’ve written far to much random irrelated stuff for now.

FreeMind

It is an excellent piece of software for brainstorming, previously I tried to use Inspiration, but it’s just soo big and clunky, FreeMind is the total opposite, it’s easy to use, you don’t need top faff around to get everything working nicely, and it does it’s job well. I’d totally reccomend it to anyone who want’s something to organise their ideas/projects, its just, well, great! I can’t believe I haven’t found it before, previously whist searching for Brainstorming software I got huge lists of paid-for stuff. But recently I’ve found a nice little trick, put “open source” before whatever you want, there seems to be a great open source version of everything.

This year I have done 3 (relatively) large PHP projects, in my terms anyway, this has been the first time I have done anything other than a quick email form, and part way through each script I have had one huge problem, what the hell do I do next, due to lack of planning (i.e. pen and paper) I just started going at it, with no idea where I wanted to end. So now, I am writing an arcade script, and for the first time ever, I have planned, admittedly it means less time working, but the hour or so i spent writing things down really helped out, now I know what I have done, what I’ve got to do, etc. etc. Admittedly there is computer software designed to help you plan, such as Inspiration, from RM, which I have used in school, but it is just so slow, you spend half the time thinking why the heck doesn’t this software use shortcuts, and then the other half looking for the button you need. Annoying. So this brings me back to paper, maybe it’s not so outdated to write rather than type afterall, well maybe, just maybe the floppy still has a use also? Who knows what “old technology” could be used for? And now, I think I have started to babble, so I’ll stop.

Lee