So let me give you a run down of just what has been going on. My last post (before the iPhone how-to) was February 20th of last year. A lot has happened since then. My absence initially started with a teacher at school drafting me into the Future Business Leaders of America (FBLA). I was to compete in the Networking Concepts category. It was a 100 question multiple choice test on various networking topics. I took 1st place at both regional and state levels, so I qualified for the trip to compete at the FBLA-PBL nationals in Chicago last summer. I went. I had no chance, being more into coding than networking, but I guess I’m not half bad at it. From the people I talked to that competed against me, every single one of them had some form of networking certification.

While I was in Chicago, I snuck off from the group and took a taxi to the Apple store on Michigan Avenue a.k.a. the Magnificent Mile. I got there right as the store opened, so I walked in and bought my iPhone in under 5 minutes. (The big wtf here is that the Cingular store had a line around the block…) Once purchased, I had a 3-4 mile hike back to the hotel. It was pretty fun.

So the rest of my summer break after I got back from Chicago was spent on IRC trying to hack the iPhone. Yep, I knew most of the hackers and even was one of the first to start a serial dock for the thing, I just suck at soldering. I didn’t get to do much before I had to do summer assignments for school. It was fun while it lasted though. I got to meet many cool people, including Captain Crunch.

Now, we’re getting to the exciting stuff. A few weeks after school started I got offered a job at a startup in Silicon Valley doing PHP coding. The startup is called Qubescape. We’ll have a sweet product out shortly, that’s all I’m going to say. It’s been awesome so far. I work with some really good people.

That brings us up to what’s going on currently. Currently, I have very little time thanks to school. AP US History and AP Physics B are keeping me slammed with work. My AP US History teacher has an insane passing record and intends to keep it that way — which I’m cool with because I enjoy the class. On the other hand, my AP Physics teacher just can’t teach. He’s a good guy, he understands it, but he *cannot* explain it; so, I’m left to figuring it out on my own.

Time is going to get even more rare as I am involved in FBLA once again this year. I will be the first from my school to compete in the Internet Application Programming category. It looks incredibly easy. The project requires a website to track class averages and GPA with simple user authentication and a presentation explaining areas of your code the judges are interested in.

Anyone else that read this blog heard of FBLA? It’s nationwide, but many people don’t seem to know about it.

The first thing you need to do for this kickass setup is to make sure you have room on your harddrive. I downloaded the ‘everything’ package which was 1.96gb. (There are alternate packages though, listed below). To get these packages, you’ll need a bittorrent client, which I’m not going to go into how to use, then you’ll need to grab the torrent files. You can choose between the following torrent packages:

• Everything: #1 #2
• Qt: #1 #2
• kdesupport: #1 #2
• kdelibs: #1 #2
• kdepimlibs: #1 #2
• kdebase: #1 #2
• kdeedu: #1 #2
• kdegames: #1 #2
• kdenetwork: #1 #2
• kdepim: #1 #2
• koffice: #1 #2

Note: All links labeled #1 are from the official mirror which is linked to at the bottom of this post. All links labeled #2 are my own personal mirror. Also, these files are only for OSX 10.4

Also, as quoted from the official page:

You must install at least Qt, kdesupport, and kdelibs for any of these packages to work. Also, kdepimlibs and kdebase are recommended since a number of things will want them. (…and it has Konqueror)

Once you have downloaded these packages, installation is a breeze. It’s just like installing any other OSX application. Double click on the dpkg, then click on one of the mpkg files provided inside the Finder window.

From here, just continue installing the files until you have everything you want. They will be stored in /opt/kde4. (It’s a Fink distribution). According to the official snapshot page, you need to launch these applications from a terminal window. Now, I did not need to do this, but I do not doubt the knowledge of the developers. (My shell setup is *way* modified compared to the default OSX release.) So to take care of these few issues, you need to run the following in a terminal window:

export PATH=”/opt/kde4/bin:/opt/kde4-deps/bin:/opt/qt4/bin:$PATH”
eval `dbus-launch –auto-syntax`

As I said, according to the main page for these files, it says to try to launch them from the terminal. If launching them by double click does nothing, here is how you can start them:

/opt/kde4/bin/kwrite.app/Contents/MacOS/kwrite

These directions are based off the official ones which can be found here. I would just like to take this time to thank the KDE developers for what they are doing. They are really taking a stand to improve the desktop interface overall. This project really shows the strength open source can have if harnessed properly.

Note: I’m still a gnome guy.

Here are a few screenshots for you:
Kwrite:

Konqueror:

Last weekend I got phpSysInfo’s Darwin support almost up-to-par with the other OS’s it supports. I still have a few things left, but I’ll be submitting them back as a patch here shortly.

Today, I spent most of the day working on ThreadBound when I should have been starting my huge project for school that is due on Friday. Besides setting up a bug tracker and doing the usual bug fixing, I actually added a completely new feature to ThreadBound — an MVC based REST API system. It’s actually pretty complete and shouldn’t change much from here until the site goes live, since all I do now is create new class files and methods. Right now, it only has clones of Flick’s flickr.test.echo and my own version of flickr.test.null. Of course, all of mine go by threadbound.* instead of flickr.*.

This site may go down for a few hours sometime within the next 3 days. I’m transferring the domain from enom.com to godaddy.com. Hopefully things will be fine when the transfer is done.

I’m off to bed now.

So we’ve all seen the disasters of pages created by millions of teenagers (like myself :/ ), that are impossible to read or even look at without giving yourself a seizure. To top all of that off, they have annoying flash ads that even talk without a mute button. So, today I set out to get rid of them and create my own, special, page.

First off, here is a screenshot for you to drool over:

moo Hosted on Zooomr

So to start, the first thing I did was see if I could escape the tables. Once I did this, I knew I could get rid of the ads and every other piece of junk I could. So in the About Me section, I had the following:

</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</table>

This allowed me to get out of the table-hell layout that is myspace.com, but I had to do one thing to make it not display the rest of the page. I had to reopen the tables. Code is below:

<table>
<tbody>
<tr><td>

Knowing this, I just added the CSS/HTML and images that can be found in the zip below to the About Me section.

Click here to download the zip file.
Click here to see the myspace live.

I hope that helps some of you.

NOTE: This *WILL* violate your agreement to the Myspace.com Terms of Service. Until they allow the iframe, we have no way to show their ads.

I emailed him and offered $50 for the one domain name, which he just renewed and pointed out that he would still be making a profit on it. ($8 * 4 = $32). He then comes back with a personal attack on my “IQ” level. I’ll let the following emails speak for themselves:

To: ravi4321@aol.com
Are you interested in selling this domain name? I know it is going on it’s 4th
year for sale. What are you asking for it?

His reply:

From: ravi4321@aol.com
HI CODY

I BUY AND SELL DOMAINS GLOBALLY…AND I HAVE MORE THAN 9200 DOMAINS..
MOST OF MY DOMAINS ARE ON AUTO RENEW.

I HAVE…THE FOLLOWING DOMAINS..

*THEERECTILEDYSFUNCTION.COM*
*THEED.COM*

I CAN MAKE A SACRIFICE IF THE PRICE IS RIGHT.

I SHALL SETTLE FOR *$900*

THANKS.

RAVI

THE*ED * ALSO CAN BE USED FOR EDUCATION.

My response:

To: ravi4321@aol.com
I really only want theed.com, but I’m not paying $900 for it knowing what you just payed last week for it.
The most I would be willing to pay is $50. Would you be willing to sell it for that? It is still almost $30 profit.

His reply:

From: ravi4321@aol.com
HOW MUCH DID U PAY FOR

CODYMAYS.NET

AND WHAT IS YOUR
ASKING PRICE

RAVI4321@AOL.COM

My response:

To: ravi4321@aol.com
It is not for sale.
Do you or do you not agree to the price I offered in the last email?

His reply:

From: ravi4321@aol.com
WHILE
THEED.COM
IS NOT FOR SALE FOR $50…
WWW.CODYMAYS.COM
IS FOR SALE …

RAVI4321@AOL.COM

My response:

To: ravi4321@aol.com
Sir, I hate to break it to you, but it’s definitely not for sale. There is no way I am paying
$900 for one domain name that was purchased for about $8. Right now, you are the only
one at a loss here. I have nothing to lose, but you do because you have renewed the domain
for four years now.

If you accept the $50 payment for it, you will come out ahead, but if you don’t, you’ll stay in the
hole. No one else, obviously, wants this domain name because this is your 4th year of attempting
to sell it.

His response and the beginning personal attack. Notice the above email has no attack on him.

From: ravi4321@aol.com
HI

I BUY AND SELL DOMAINS GLOBALLY.
I DO NOT WANT TO WASTE MY TIME TRYING
TO GAUGE YOUR “IQ”. I LEAVE IT AT THAT.

RAVI

My final email before this post:

To: ravi4321@aol.com
Okay, you’re going to gauge my IQ as lower than your own because I pointed out basic
business logic to you?

Well if we’re judging IQ here, you better get reading a grammar book, because you are
flunking English 101 right now. You see the key marked Caps Lock? Press it so the light
turns off. That will get you started. Hope you have fun in the coming days.

Now, I become another person to ask the international blogosphere for some help here. I know the blogosphere has been pretty powerful with Comcast and AOL over the past few weeks, so I figured I would try it as a last resort. As of right now, my partners and I are very set on this name and really want the domain. Is there anyway we could still go about getting it? Any help would be appreciated.

Note:
We do not want to harm Mr. Ravi. All email addresses provided here are for reference only. Do not attempt to spam him by email or phone number from a whois lookup of theed.com

XMPP is the really nice XML based protocol that Jabber uses. Not only does it allow secure remote logins, but it can be used from all over the place. To top that off, the actual XMPP or Jabberd doesn’t have to be open to the public pool, how Gtalk was when it first came out.

I REALLY like this protocal and I’m trying to find a nice implementation to play with. If I don’t find one, I will probably strip the JayantHTTPD code base and start reading the RFC for the protocol. Hopefully, I can get a server up and mod it to do authentication from a local database.

Either way, I’ll be playing with it from the web. My new site needs global accounts that can be accessed from around the internet, similar to OpenID. If I can keep this method fast and simple to work with, I’ll be extremely happy.

Oh, and in other news, I have a work-in-progress mockup of the new design for this slum. See it here. Let me know what you think!

Over the next few hours, I will be moving this site to a new server kindly provided my Allan Jude of ThunderIT.com. You should see an insane speed increase and hopefully more traffic. That’s all for now, I’ll update once it’s moved.

The Wildcard IRC Network is now linked up. See www.thewildcard.org for more information.