sociallysour.org

Its time for another computer section rant..

My mom, who is not a very avid computer user. But has one to talk to me online and mabe send a email every month told me that she had to get a new version of something. Seems there was a new version of ICQ and it said she should get it so she did. Great no problems, but because I am me and want to see this before I next goto her place I hop on icq.com and check it out. I look at the nice little flash demo of the new version. Then for fun I check out the requirements for this new version..

1. Pentium II 350 MHz class CPU or faster (Not bad hard to find much that they say needs less now a days. I am sure it still would run fine on less).

2. 50 MB of disk space (this seems a little much for a chat program, but mabe they are thinking about keeping some log files and extra stuff).

3. 128 MB of available RAM (oh dear god! this has to just be what they would like you to have to keep things fast).

4. Internet Explorer 5.0 or above IE 6.0 Recommended (umm.. why should I need a browser for this?).

5. Active Internet Connection (well that was kind of a given I would hope).

6. WIN 98 Second Edition, ME, 2000, XP Supports SP2 (Great still make it for 98 and it tells me it is cool with SP2).

7. Flash 7 Recommended (Why the hell do I need this to chat).

My thoughts before seeing this thing.. Its going to be slow have way to many buttons on it that really wont stand out due to all the flash adds it keeps showing in small inline frames with small windows of IE playing them. The disk usage is going to be mostly anoyning sound effects that no one should be forced to hear for long.

I suggest gaim to anyone who is looking for a nice multiplatform multiprotocal instant messaging client.

Workbitch Running Gnome.

While playing with a symbol bar code scanner on my system it caused a few things to crash, one of these things was Firefox. When I would try and restart firefox it would always come back saying my profile was in use. I have seen this problem before and knew to delete the lock file located in ~/.firefox/profile/lock. (on windows I guess this would be a diff location and called parent.lock?). Anyhow just seemed like something handy firefox users might like to know.

I have been getting a little pissed off with Cold Fusion pages. I dont know if the sites I happen to visit that use Cold Fusion just have a lot more traffic or slower connections, but they seem so much slower and at times just pause on my request and need me to refresh the page to get it. What little I do know about Cold Fusion is that when on a linux box it uses more CPU and Memory than PHP (Atleast the version I tried). Cant say I played with it at all cause it seems like a less public supported version of PHP that costs to much money.

I am still playing a lot of SOCOM still and have progressed nice in the single player missons. I still get my ass kicked online. The online play just moves so much faster than the single player versions and analog sticks just make it hard. In time you get better with them so I will just keep at it and let everyone get stats for killing the n00b. The missions in the single player are layed out nice and I think that I will pick up the 2nd one when I am done this one.

Woke up this morning and decided it was not a good day to have to go into work, and since I was going to be doing stuff that works better if I am in my own setting called in to say I would be home today. Eccentric was nice to point out a news post on slashdot about blackbox.

For anyone that was looking for me on icq, aim, yahoo, msn, or anything else I am known to be on sometimes, I am back online. I dont really like to use it but too many people dont like to use irc.. I have noticed that gaim has a new feature where I can single click on a person in the list and type the message to them with out having a whole chat window come up. Kinda nice if you dont know if the person is around or not. BTW I tend to just leave it saying I am online, so I am not ignoring you if you message me. :)