Here is a follow up to the post I created about Vincent Ferarri; the guy who tried to cancel his AOL account. Wow. This has hit the big time. Matt Lauer interviewed him about his ordeal with AOL. After watching the video, I think Vincent presented himself very well. It definitely seemed like he felt comfortable talking to Matt Lauer as well as being on camera. I was, as probably many other people were, to learn that it took Vincent 21 minutes to acutally cancel his account. I think that was about 20 minutes too long.

I hope AOL and other large corporations learn from this… you can’t push your customers around. They are your customers. They pay you for a service. And in today’s compu-world, anyone with a connection to the internet can voice their opinion(except people in China — Sorry guys…) and let everyone else in on the dirt.

Now, if we could only get the government to stop spying on us….

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This is some amazing technology. I saw this and I was in awe of what this guy has done. Simply stunning.

Reading the comments on Digg and YouTube, I get a sense that many people think that this is a waste of time. What they don’t know is that this is a step towards the future. Desktop OSs are so lacklustre in performance. I kept thinking to myself while watching, “Now if this was the desktop manager that came with Windows Vista, I would buy it.”

While this may not be true 3D, it’s much farther from the pictures on a wall style desktops we have now. And it is a step in the right direction towards true 3D computing.

This video shows you a new way to display and organize your desktop. It’s 3D, physics-ruled environment looks more like your actual desktop, which may force users to clean and organize it more often.

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So I think I may be in over my head…. Night Light is turning out to be a bigger challenge than I thought it would be. You could definitely say I hit a dead-end. While I do have a functional system, it’s not totally complete. The one major factor is the fact that PHP and MySQL can’t talk to one-another. The php_mysql.so extension is no where to be found in the distribution. And PHP doesn’t seem to want to actually build it either.

Other than that, everything’s not too bad. I got a huge paycheck today, which I’m psyched about depositing tomorrow. Money is my friend.

Since it’s the summer, I have some free time on my hands. With all this free time, I have been hatching a few ideas in this big head of mine. I don’t know where they come from, but I think they could be useful, and I think it might be cool to start development on them.

Online Password Management Software
I got this idea while I was redesigning the security system at my workplace. Seeing as how everyone says you shouldn’t use the same passwords for all your accounts, I found it rather difficult to keep track of all of them.

Well, I did a little research and found a few desktop applications that will securely store passwords and usernames. The one thing I didn’t like about any of them was the fact that, 1. They only worked on one platform. (I found a really nice one for Mac OS X, but not for Windows) or 2. They required you to keep a USB stick with you to store passwords and whatnot when you were away from your personal computer. I used to carry my USB stick with me all the time, but I don’t anymore, so I found this to be kinda a bummer.

I decided that I would try to make a secure online password security system. It would use a MySQL database backed and encrypt the passwords in the database. That way, I could access my passwords from anywhere. Of course, I’ll need to keep the security major tight in order for this to work, but I figured… why not?

P.S. I’m still working on coming up with a better name. Online Password Management System is lame…

NightLight
Ok, so this idea came from the Online Password Management System. I wanted to create the system on my current webhost. I mean, they have PHP and MySQL, why not? Well, I ran into a road block when I found out that they don’t have the mcrypt PHP module. That means no encryption.

Well, being resourceful, I decided to host my own development server. I have an old machine sitting around not doing anything, and I figured I would install Linux on it and do development on that. I did have one little problem… I have run out of decent-sized hard drives. When I say decent-sized, I mean more than 1GB. Right now, I have two small drives of 550MB and 850MB. I would have like to install linux on those, but the distributions I found either were too big to fit, or didn’t have Apache, PHP and MySQL installed by default. i.e. No tiny LAMPs…..

I went searching online for a tiny Linux distro that had a small footprint, but still had Apache, PHP and MySQL. Nothing. Many tiny desktop linux distros, but nothing for a server. How odd…. Oh well. Then I realized, “Why not make my own distro?” I mean, how hard could it be? I’ve been using Linux for about 4 years now. I kinda know what I’m doing…. I found LFS, a tutorial for building a basic Linux OS from nothing. Cool! I can do this. I can create my own distro, running Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL. It’ll be a tiny LAMP. I figured I would call it NightLight considering a night light is like a tiny lamp.

Well, I’m currently attempting to build my first distribution. Wish me luck, and if it works, hopefully I’ll become famous!

Do you have a LiveJournal? You should. Here are some tips on how to make your LiveJournal the best LiveJournal of them all. Because it’s all about speaking in lyric….

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This site allows you to create and test your own regular expressions. Using PHP as its base, the tool is very easy to use and supports both Perl and POSIX expressions. With its simple and easy to use interface, this is a very valuable tool for anyone dealing with regexps; beginners and advanced users alike.

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