Unlimited storage for Yahoo Users

31 03 2007

Yahoo announced on March 27th, 2007 that it will offer unlimited storage for its webmail users for free. Yahoo! Mail has been around since 1997, at which time it was called Rocket Mail and had a storage amount of 2MB. I have pictures on my computer larger than Yahoo’s original email quota. ;D

Dave reminisced: “I remember getting in a room to plan our RocketMail launch over a decade ago and worrying that our original plan of a 2MB quota wasn’t enough, and that we needed to be radical and DOUBLE the storage to 4MB per account! It’s ironic that I routinely send and receive individual mail attachments bigger than that now. Our total capacity for mail accounts back then was 200GB for all of our customers. At Yahoo!, we’re now receiving more inbound mail than that every 10 minutes.”

I find that funny. Yahoo used to have 200GB of storage combined for all of its customers, but now they receive more inbound mail than that every 10 minutes. It’s funny to see how the internet has grown, but you have to consider that some of that could be spam too… and spam takes up space and bandwidth. I, myself, am only using 89 MB (3%) of my 2834 MB of storage within Gmail, so I find that sufficent for now. Hopefully in the future Gmail will consider offering unlimited email storage space.


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Update on Apple Problem

31 03 2007

Well, last night I received the empty package from Apple. It contained a box (obviously) which was the one they used to send it to me, a little piece of tape with backing on it to prevent it from losing it’s stickiness, a sticker that I had to put on the parcel with Apple’s address in Markham, Ontario on it along with a little information sheet and a bag for my iPod.

While the instructions were not completely clear, they were good enough. First of all, I had to put my iPod in the little bag. I had some concerns on that whole issue. What if it gets stratches because it’s so delicate and they blame it on me? Possibilities, possibilities. Hopefully nothing like that will happen. After that, I had to remove the sticker with my address in big print and Apple’s address as the return (obviously, since it was sent to me) and ended up kind of ripping the box a bit in the process. Nothing serious. Then I closed the bag with some extra tape, because of my paranoid nature and placed it inside the two pieces of foam that they supplied for protection. I took my little packing sticker and stuck it neatly on the front, pressing it down firmly. I got some wide tape and put several pieces all across the entire box, making it even harder for Apple technicians to get at my iPod, but keeping it safe.

Next up on the instruction sheet was to call UPS. This part gave me some shivers, because I’ve never really dealed with a courier company all that much before; besides a quick call to FedEX for a pickup concern and an address problem through Purolator. After pressing 1 for this and 2 for that, I was transferred to an agent. No hold time, yay! The agent was very polite, and understood me well… at first. I kept repeating my postal code over and over, and she kept thinking I said “I” instead of “A” for one part of it, always telling me that it appeared to be invalid according to the computer. Finally, after many “A for Apple”s, she understood me and we arranged pickup of my iPod. It will be picked up Monday, anywhere between 8am and 8pm apparently; and will be shipped back to Apple for repair.

So far, I think service is good. I placed my request for service on Thursday and receive my box Friday. Hopefully if I send it in Monday, they’ll receive it Tuesday, fix it Tuesday, and I’ll get it back Wednesday. Dream on, Jordan. Dream on! =D


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My new enemy… APPLE.

29 03 2007

Something else to add to this horrible day/week/month. Dealing with the devil. Not 1and1 (though it is also the devil), this time it’s Apple. Yes, good old Apple. The creator of things that never break. Oh, the glorious Mac that never crashes. The glorious iPod that has no problems whatsoever. Heh. I’ve never saw a MP3 player with as many problems as mine.

A friend recently had the same problem and eventually got his iPod Video back in working condition. I’m not the type of person that lets companies push me around, considering that call to Apple Administration when they said my warranty started on September 13th, 2006 when I purchased my iPod on November 20th, 2006. Oh, the irony. I’ve had it since November, and only started using it more frequently in the new year, and it’s dead. Dead like the cute little pig that once was before I ate porkchop for dinner. Not really dead, but frozen. >_>

I’m not a technology idiot, I’ve tried everything. The age-old MENU + SELECT trick that I’ve been forced to do 20 times too many in the past month, restoring through iTunes and Windows, more menu + selecting, random button pressing, thoughts of smashing my iPod into the wall continous times to put an end to it, that kind of thing. Now Apple’s technicians, sorry, I had to put that in italics, get to work on it.

The deadly process started when I was looking for service information on the website. After going through 10,000 support pages that wanted me to try several obvious tricks like “check to see if the battery is charged” before letting me file a request for support. After actually reading a Terms of Service agreement, (just to make sure there were no tricks involved), it finally let me. During the process, Internet Explorer warned me that there were also non-secure items on the page (Microsoft doesn’t like me using iPod instead of Zune), and annoying messages from Apple saying things were invalid. OKAY! OKAY! That was me. I punched in November 20th, 2007 instead of 2006 and it isn’t here yet. >_> Heh. Back away from my stupidity and back to Apple. The never-ending form that notified me of the terrifying fact that they can’t ship to PO, FPO or APO boxes (that surprises me), it was finished. Now I have to get the iPod shipped to a nearby business where a relative works to get it picked up because I might not be home when it arrives at the house, and they wouldn’t know where I am without a number on the house anyway. Yay for FedEX.

I’m not even gonna call Apple tech support. Is there a point? Now I have to wait for an email confirmation from Apple telling me what to do next. I’ll update you guys on this later. I doubt the news will be positive.


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My Tech Forums

28 03 2007

Since we no longer have The Fun Bucket Forums on the site, I will talk about another website that I like. Don’t worry, I’m not getting paid or anything for this. My Tech Forums is a great forum based about technology, and just chatting in general. I am a member there and I advise you to join, too!


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I change my thoughts on Vista.

26 03 2007

Windows Vista is horrible. I know that I said it was good before, but that was before I had it for long. After having it for exactly 6 days now, every day I have ran into problems with it. From nothing whatsoever in my CD library working on it, including my favorite games like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Midtown Madness, nothing worked. Most stuff made it freeze up and I had to take out my laptop’s battery and unplug it to cut off all power sources to get my laptop to restart because Task Manager wouldn’t load, I couldn’t shut it off (the power button on my Toshiba just puts it to sleep).

While Vista looks pretty nice and has some new features that are eye-catching, including a very-much improved search engine, I would probably go back to Windows XP if I had a choice. I guess I have a choice, but I’m not going to bother to reformat or anything, I just got this machine and it came with Vista so I might as well keep it and slowly wait until compatibility, drivers and bugs improve. I heard that Service Pack 1 will released soon, anyway.

Windows Update is improved vastly. Inside of that annoying, cluttered interface that loaded up within Internet Explorer, it loads up almost like anything else in the Control Panel or on the computer; a cleaner way, which downloads stuff equally fast. Took me about 2 minutes to download 24MB on my secondary broadband connection (dialup sucks and I have to use it most of the time).

Vista crashes way too much. My computer won’t boot up about 40-50% of the time, so I have to let it restart and try it over again. It gives fatal errors, runtime errors and every error you’d ever believe of throughout Vista. Internet Explorer 7 is bug heaven. I had it in Windows XP and it wasn’t half as bad as it is in Vista, trust me. 25% of the time, or less actually, it cannot load a webpage so I have to refresh several times (wtf), my friends have this problem too so it’s not my internet connection or even my ISP for that matter. Don’t tell me to get Mozilla Firefox; I’ve had enough of that. Trust me, I’ve been following Firefox since it’s been out; well since the 1.0 series. I’ve had just about every version up to 2.0, and a few after that; but since I got this computer I decided to stick with IE7. Face it, Internet Explorer is faster. At least on dialup. I don’t care what anyone says, I find IE7 can load pages much speedier than Firefox and is compatible with more sites anyway. I’m not worried about security threats. I have antivirus, I watch what sites I visit, I know not to download everything off the spot, I have McAfee SiteAdvisor plugin for IE7, I only visit the same 10-15 sites anyway. =)

My new ratings on Windows Vista: Home Premium:

  • Speed: 3.5/5 - Windows Vista isn’t too bad with speed. It’s pretty good, and I only have 1GB RAM and a 1.6GHz dual core processor, with Aero and all the eye candy enabled.
  • Security: 4/5 - It has better security than XP. While User Account Control (UAC) can be annoying, it does help protect your computer from unauthorized changes; although it has never popped up yet about anything other than stuff I started myself. It pops up on just about anything; from changing network settings to installing programs. Windows Defender is also included and so is Windows Firewall (yipee <_<)
  • Stability: 3/5 - It’s not that stable yet. Kinda stable, but does tend to lock up a good bit when you actually try to use programs. Some programs. Microsoft things are pretty good, with the exception of Internet Explorer 7 which closes about once a day or so. WordPerfect, like it does on every operating system I’ve saw, freezes up a LOT.
  • Value: 3/5 - It’s not worth the money. I got it free as my laptop’s operating system, though. I would of never bought it (Home Premium) with that price out of my own money.
  • Overall: 3.5/5 - It’s an okay operating system, but I regret not sticking with Windows XP, which has better stability, compatibility with things such as games and drivers and all that. My printer and everything work better than they did on XP, though.

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My Thoughts on Vista

22 03 2007

Vista is an excellent operating system in my opinion. There aren’t ten thousand bugs like everyone thinks/says there are. It has a very nice design and functions pretty good. The performance is alright, I don’t see a huge difference. I recommend it.


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The Fun Bucket 2.0

21 03 2007

By now, you probably have thought that I have abandoned this site and left it there to die. Fortunately, this is not the case. I was trying to transfer it from our old server to a new server where we will just have the blog (1and1 to wordpress.com) so the site will be more reliable, probably faster, more options and cheaper. Unfortunately, this means the forum comes to an end. Anyway, this will be another layer of new beginnings for our blog. From now on, I will be making more posts, hopefully, and more interesting ones. I hope you enjoy the new website.

Here’s the story of the transfer. First, I started the transfer to GoDaddy and it was rejected by 1and1 (the devil) because I had it locked. I unlocked it and tried again. Denied by 1and1. Two days later I tried again, and strangely a couple days after that I got an email stating that it has transferred successfully. I logged into my WordPress.com account and went into upgrades, spent $10 to get the domain set up right and soon everything should be working correctly.

Since my last blog post ages ago, I have purchased a Toshiba Satellite A-100 VA3 laptop. It arrived yesterday from The Source By Circuit City and cost me about $1000 after rebates. ($1200 without) It has an Intel Pentium Dual-Core processor running at 1.6GHz, 1 gigabyte of RAM, a 70ish GB hard disk drive, wireless LAN, etc. and is a very very very nice looking laptop. It came with Corel WordPerfect Office X3, which tells me my serial number is invalid (Thanks, Corel), Windows Vista Home Premium preinstalled and a printer that I will never use because the one I have now is better. They are both all-in-one inkjets so its not too bad, maybe I can sell it or something.

Anyway, welcome to what I call The Fun Bucket 2.0!


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Sorry guys + iPods Rock!

3 03 2007

Sorry for that short and pointless post this morning. I was busy doing things to this site. I just finished some work on upgrading my other site that I maintain for my town to WordPress 2.1.2 from 2.0.7 this time and changing around a couple of things. This time I actually have a story that might have somewhat of a meaning.

Tonight’s blog post is all about iPods. I have an iPod and so do most of my friends. I guess it’s just a fad these days, especially in the US and Canada. Apple sells loads of those things. I had an exact number that I got off the Apple website once, but I can’t seem to remember what it was. Looking in the Apple store, the most popular items apparently are Shuffle and Nano. The Shuffle looks nice, but I don’t think I’d be paying that much just for a little 1GB mp3 player without a screen. 1GB would never be enough for me, anyway. I don’t have a whole lot of music, only a little over 1GB but I am constantly expanding, and have another 100-150 songs on my list that I have to buy off iTunes when I get the patience to download them all.

If you’ve been living in a hole for 7 years, you might not know what the iPod is. Well, its the overrated MP3 player by Apple that causes loads of hype. The iPod is nice and all, and definitely my favorite MP3 player of out the many I’ve tried, but I still think it is a little overrated. All of the hype and stuff about it being the best thing ever, yet it doesn’t even have voice recording capabilities or FM radio. I’m not complaining about the FM radio part, but voice recording sure would be nice. Oh well. They are slightly overpriced too in my opinion. I guess it’s not too bad paying $220 or whatever for a 4GB tiny MP3 player, but to me it seems a little much. On the other hand, Apple needs to generate revenue from this too and it does have a lithium ion battery in it. Anyway….

You may of noticed on my old blog a post about the iPod vs. Zune. The Zune looks like a nice media player, but the shape/design doesn’t cut it for me. I love the streamlined and beautiful interface that the iPod has to offer. It is simple to use, most of the time. The click wheel may have it’s glitches at times, but I just love it. All you need to do is press the play button to turn it on, select music, then artists or songs or whatever and use the neat little scroll wheel to select a song. If you didn’t already know that, it’s time to come out of the stone age hole. You know, the same one I’m in since I’m still running on dialup.

There are several different types of iPods too. There’s the 5th generation iPod (Video) that can, well, play videos. It is a larger iPod that comes in 30GB or 80GB and the large-ness just doesn’t really seem right for me. The 30GB model comes in white and the 80GB comes in black. I prefer the 2nd generation iPod Nano, which is very small and is available in 2GB, 4GB and 8GB models. The iPod Nano comes in black, blue, green, pink, red and silver. The red is special edition that when you purchase they donate a portion to AIDS research or something. There’s one more kind too. The 2nd generation iPod shuffle. This one doesn’t have a screen, but is very compact and is good if you want a random song at a random time (weird sentence, sorry). The 1st generation iPod Shuffle that I have tried is great. The USB plugin is built right in for maximum portability and it looks just like a stick of gum. I haven’t tried or even seen the 2nd generation iPod Shuffle in real life yet, though. I know it has a clip on the back… but from looking at articles and pictures I have come to an immediate conclusion that I prefer iPod Shuffle 1st gen over the 2nd gen. One good thing about the 2nd gen shuffle though, is that it comes in several colors like blue, orange, green, pink, silver, etc. while the 1st gen shuffle is only available in white.

There are also the legacy iPods. Everything from 1st to 4th gen iPods, called everything from iPod to iPod Photo to iPod Video, all carrying different enhancements and capabilities. There was one with four little buttons on it, another made before the scroll wheel and one that has a color screen and can view photos (which all of the recent models besides shuffle can currently do). There’s also the iPod Mini, which what many people say the 2nd generation iPodNano represents, and that it was “a step back for Apple”. I disagree with that statement. I prefer the 2nd generation iPod Nano over the 1st. The 1st looked a little different, not too different though, and the 2nd is made of aluminum. I’d still take the first generation iPod Nano before the iPod Video though.

The recent iPod Video is nice, holds enough music for anyone and can play videos, but I would still rather a nano because of its portability. That’s all I have to say for now, talk to you tomorrow everyone.


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Last Night + Inactive

3 03 2007

Haha, it was after 10pm when I posted that urgent attention notice last night and updated all the files in my WordPress installation. I’m glad I got it all finished and the site looks safe now running WordPress 2.1.2.

Sorry for being rather inactive over the past week or so. I’ve been busy with various things so I couldn’t do too much posting or anything. That’s all I have to say right now too. Later.


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Urgent Attention

2 03 2007

Well, the developers of WordPress found an urgent problem. There was a hacker on the site, and he changed the file for WordPress 2.1.1 (what we are running) to a package with cracked files that can allow hackers to execute a security exploit. I am currently urgently checking all the files on the server to ensure that The Fun Bucket is safe. I really want my site to be safe for all our users so if you notice any downtime or anything, its just me reuploading the files on the server. Here is a quote from The WordPress Development Blog.

Long story short: If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately.

Longer explanation: This morning we received a note to our security mailing address about unusual and highly exploitable code in WordPress. The issue was investigated, and it appeared that the 2.1.1 download had been modified from its original code. We took the website down immediately to investigate what happened.

It was determined that a cracker had gained user-level access to one of the servers that powers wordpress.org, and had used that access to modify the download file. We have locked down that server for further forensics, but at this time it appears that the 2.1.1 download was the only thing touched by the attack. They modified two files in WP to include code that would allow for remote PHP execution.

This is the kind of thing you pray never happens, but it did and now we’re dealing with it as best we can. Although not all downloads of 2.1.1 were affected, we’re declaring the entire version dangerous and have released a new version 2.1.2 that includes minor updates and entirely verified files. We are also taking lots of measures to ensure something like this can’t happen again, not the least of which is minutely external verification of the download package so we’ll know immediately if something goes wrong for any reason.

Finally, we reset passwords for a number of users with SVN and other access, so you may need to reset your password on the forums before you can login again.
What You Can Do to Help

If your blog is running 2.1.1, please upgrade immediately and do a full overwrite of your old files, especially those in wp-includes. Check out your friends blogs and if any of them are running 2.1.1 drop them a note and, if you can, pitch in and help them with the upgrade.

If you are a web host or network administrator, block access to “theme.php” and “feed.php”, and any query string with “ix=” or “iz=” in it. If you’re a customer at a web host, you may want to send them a note to let them know about this release and the above information.

Thanks to Ryan, Barry, Donncha, Mark, Michael, and Dougal for working through the night to figure out and address this problem, and thanks to Ivan Fratric for reporting it in the first place.
Questions and Answers

Because of the highly unusual nature of this event and release, we’ve set up an email address 21securityfaq@wordpress.org that you can email questions to, and we’ll be updating this entry with more information throughout the day.

Is version 2.0 affected?

No downloads were altered except 2.1.1, so if you’ve downloaded any version of 2.0 you should be fine.

What if we update from SVN?

Nothing in the Subversion repository was touched, so if you upgrade and maintain your blog via SVN there is no chance you downloaded the corrupted release file.

That’s all the information we have now. All I can tell you is this notice was posted approximately three hours and I am so lucky that I logged into my admin panel and noticed this security exploit or I could be cleaning up a big mess after my site’s been hacked. =( Hackers… they just have no life.

Well, I better get back to letting SmartFTP do its thing. Stay tuned for more information, and welcome to The Fun Bucket running WordPress 2.1.2.

Edit: I have just completed the upgrade to 2.1.2 and now our server has all the latest files.


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