It’s not an emote. It’s not a command, it’s nothing other than that other person changing their away message.

Okay first of all, I know I’m a bit of a moron. I’m posting this so that the next person will find it right away. I almost made a complete fool of myself by posting this as a question in Something Awful with the promise of a free account upgrade. Anyways, if you ever see this light gray, text in Google Talk:

It’s the other guy/girl changing their away message.

I don’t generally use IE, but I opened it for some reason, oh to do go to a microsoft site and this is what it looked like after I installed windows, Google Pack, Yahoo Messenger, and Windows Messenger Live:

I had an idea about creating a self-published news social-software site, but looks like someone’s already done it: Newstoday. There is no voting it seems, but it is a nice use of AJAX. One half is ‘public broadcast’ where anyone can submit news, the other half is editor news. It is a very nice looking site, too. There is a tiny annoying and or cute sound that plays when you first load the page, but since it is an AJAX powered site you will only hear it the first time. I don’t know if it is of any real use for news yet, it has a technical/design slant to it.

I’ve been working on a second version of my Color Tool. I want to move it to JavaScript and AJAX, instead of using flash. Here’s what I have so far. Some of the information boxes will overlap on smaller screen resolutions, but those are just there for debugging purposes. Eventually I’d like to display more color variations and add tons of extra features. My time to work on this project is limited though, because of school. I’ve tried to do a good job to comment the code. Also the RGB to HSL and HSL to RGB conversions were done with the help of formulas I found at easyrgb.com. I’m also using the prototype and script.aculo.us libraries for small things here and there. They have some great tools there. Let me know what you think or if you have any comments.

Got images turned off for emails by default to protect yourself from spam? If you’re using webmail, that might not be enough.

I use webmail for email: I’ve been using Yahoo! mail for a long time now, but recently I’ve switched to Gmail. Both of these two email services have a feature that lets you turn images off in email by default. This protects your privacy. If you load an image that came with your email, it lets the spammers know that your email works and they will add you to their list of working emails. If they find your working email address you’ll be spammed massively.

The ‘images off’ feature works most of the time, but recently I’ve noticed that some emails still manage to show images! I’ve seen these types of emails both on Yahoo! Mail and Gmail. How do they circumvent Gmail and Yahoo? Here’s the code that shows the images:

src\u003d\"/mail/?view\u003datt&disp\u003demb&attid\
u003d0.1&th\u003d10a31a3e38ec6da1\"
align\u003d\"baseline\" border\u003d\"0\">

By placing encoded unicode characters, they’ve circumvented Gmail’s ability to recognize what is in the email body. Your browser however will be able to understand the code, show the image, and destroy your privacy. As of this moment, I know of no way to prevent this from happening, other than ‘don’t open emails from people you don’t know.’ I don’t know if email clients like Outlook fail to not show images as well.

EDIT:
Here’s a screenshot -

Here’s the source for the entire body of the email.

More on my adventures on switching to Ubuntu. You can read my first installment if you want some background info. There’s always a lot of discussion about user-friendliness and it means different things to different people. Is Linux user friendly? With a graphical desktop environment like gnome installed you could make the argument that it is. What a Linux distribution isn’t, however, is ‘lazy-friendly.’ I’ve learned that the hard way. Not paying very careful attention to what instructions say or what you’re doing inside of a configuration file could spell instant death for your operating system. I tried to install xgl on Ubuntu, on a version on which it is not really wise to do so. The instructions said this, but I missed it. I lost everything and had to begin from the start.

Linux gives you a lot of power and control, while Windows takes it away from you for your own saftey. Linux treats you like a responsible adult giving you freedom and responsibility and Windows treats you like a child, taking it away and telling you what you can and can’t do (like with DRM for instance).

It’s not about technological know-how. I don’t have a PhD in computer science. I don’t even know a high level programming language, and I’m able to install and configure and run a linux OS. I finally took the plunge and followed it through. There was a lot of work involved but it paid off, and it was entirely free. I look at my Ubuntu OS and I feel a sense of ownership over it, I feel a bit of pride in having been able to get it running, and I’ve even managed to customize it in a way that suits me. I feel as if I control my OS and not the other way around, and I’m sure as I learn more about it, that feeling will only grow.

Linux is a real alternative OS. It’s not the half-assembled car in your garage you tinker with for fun but never intend to drive to work with (if you ever get it running to begin with). Larger corporations like IBM, Sun, and Oracle with multi-billion dollar global assets run Unix and Linux operating systems in production environments. There are distributions that will do everything you can think of for your personal needs. Just two days ago my wife and I worked out our monthly spending for February on OpenOffice calc. It did everything we needed it to, and it’s all free.

What have we been afraid of? Saving money? A little bit of work? It’s time to stop giving money to Microsoft out of fear and start jumping into the free world of software, a world of freedom and responsibility, and reward for diligence and hard work. At least it is time for me.