I'm quite a fan of the Series 60 devices. Series 60 is a Symbian platform, and a couple of manufacturers produce phones based on it.
I've had a Nokia 3650 for about a year, and just got myself a Nokia 6600.
They're both pretty stable (occasional need to reboot due to memory leaks, but not too bad), loads of apps available for them (though quality does vary), and easy to write for yourself. Oh, and they're pretty damn good for voice calls too (nice speaker phone mode etc). Cheap too, I got both mine free when signing up for 12 months with my provider (Vodafone).
About the only downside is that input is only via the text pad. That said, you can buy a bluetooth keyboard + bluetooth keyboard software (3rd party) and you're away, so that's always an option
I started with a new firm about 8 months ago. They asked me to sign their standard contract, and I had a read through. Lo, there was such a clause there.
I asked them about it, and explained why I didn't feel happy signing it, and they were suprised that it was even in there in that form! We sat down, worked out a new wording for it (so work done on company time or in direct furtherance of company business is covered, and nothing else), and I signed that. They then made the altered version the new company standard.
So, do talk to your new company about it. Chances are they'll be willing to change it, especially if they're not huge. They may even not realise they've got such a strong clause in there!
I've been tryong to download the album since the article was posted, and I've finally gotten onto the FTP server and pulled a copy down
So, looks like the/. effect has died down enough that you can now grab a copy, yey!
Try getting an internship with the IT team of a bank. Investment or Merchant banks are best, but any will do.
I worked for an investment bank last summer, and had an excellent time. Lots of interesting and challenging computing problems, good pay as an intern, plenty of other stuff going on etc. Lots of my friends from the year below are off to banks this summer.
While there are less interns in banking because of the downturn, there are still a fair number, as banks view them as a 10 week long interview.
I've been using Mojo to post to my LiveJournal from my wap phone for about 6 months. So, when I'm sat at the station and Virgin have canceled my train again, I can log in and rant about it. When I'm bored and waiting for someone, and I've been thinking about something for a bit, I can write about it
I find that the biggest problem to mobile blogging from your phone is the data entry - you think it's hard enough to use the thing to write a 160 character SMS, try using it to write a fully fledged blog entry...
Well, if you actually read
my article properly...... you'd see that Dave Green from NTK had a recorder with him, and the Union video'd the whole debate. No news on when (if ever) either of those will go online though - waiting on Dave seeing if the quality is good enough, and the Union reaching a decision on putting their debates on the net.
OpenSSL has everything you need to run your own CA.
If you need some more docs than those that come with OpenSSL, there are loads out there, including these
written by me.
I run a CA using OpenSSL, and it's great. Does everything I need. All the internal machines trust the CA, and those external people who need to have also set up their browsers to trust it, so all is fine.
When the Barenaked Ladies released their second album, stunt, they had their agents hire a company to log into napster. They put most tracks from their album online, with a twist - every minute it had them come on and talk over it telling you to go out and buy the real album.
This was about 2 years ago, in the middle of the Napster era, and the reports at the time suggested it might've had a positive effect on album sales. Nice to see that the RIAA are so one the ball by doing it two years later.....
The Sydney Morning Herald have just done an article on this. While it doesn't cover much more than the one linked in the article, it has links to some other SMH articles. One Of them is an interview with one of the main scientists behind it, and is quite insightful. The other is a gallery of relevent photos.
Sure, the course is important, but you'll likely find that half the places have virtually identical courses.
So, start asking about related things. Are you going to want some work experience? If so, does the department have industry links, and with who? How about on campus work - do they have openings for students to do some tech support? My college has a couple of
student computer reps, who do some websites, maintain a few machines, help out the paid staff with admining etc. The experience I've got with doing this was looked upon very favourably by the company that are employing me this summer. No matter which area of IT you want to go into, experience is a big help, so does this place help you get it?
Finally, ask about the facilities. How many computer rooms do they have, and what stuff do they have on them? What centralised 'Nix facilities do they offer? Ethernet to you room is very nice, so do they offer that, and if so what restrictions are placed on it (no webservers? low bandwidth limits?). What about their central web hosting, can you do much with that? If not, are there any other boxes you can use for any dynamic content you want to play with?
Oh, and while you're on campus, go look round the other facilities too. Places to hang out are important, as are sports facilities, on campus shops etc. Also, speak to the students as well as the tutors, find out all you can
The Beauty of Credit Cards
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 2
I, and my family, have been through a few cancelations with ISPs of late, with varying sucess.
My uncle got his new computer, and dropped in the "Free AOL Trial" CD. As per usual, it wanted a credit card number before you could use your "free" trial. So, he entered the details of his card that was going to run out soonest, which happened to be in just over a months time. 3 weeks later, he'd decided AOL wasn't for him, and picked a new ISP. After 5 minutes trying to cancel and deciding it was too hard, he did nothing. AOL customer support then spent the next month trying to coerce his new credit card number out of him. Eventually, 2 weeks after the card had expired, they took his hints that he wanted to cancel, and terminated the account
I subscribed to the BT Anytime service over the summer, so I could use the net as much as I do at college without running up huge bills. After checking the minimum sign-up time and cancelation methods well, I signed up with my credit card. Come the end of the summer, I phoned up to cancel. With a copy of the contract in front of me, I asked if they could cancel the account, or if I should send them a letter, and copy it to my credit card company and ask that no more billing went through. Took 3 minutes to cancel the account:)
My dad changed from one local ISP to another to get ADSL. Apart for getting stung a bit for transfering his domain to the new ISP, it was very pleasant
Amazon.com helpfully stuck a customs notice onto the outside of the box. This clearly stated what was inside of the package, and how much I'd payed for it. Thus, UK customs were able to quickly see how much they needed to charge me.
Oh, and it also had printed on the outside my permission for Customs officers to open the package. Thanks guys...
The Post Office charged me an "Import Duty" which covered the VAT of my order + a handling fee. Because Amazon.com aren't VAT registered, I couldn't pay the VAT up front. The result - I needed to pay the VAT (in the form of an import duty) and thus had to trapse across town to the delivery office to pay said import fee.
Were Amazon.com to be UK (or any other EU state) VAT registered, I could've paid the VAT along with my order and just had my CDs arrive. As it was, I had to jump through all sorts of hoops to get my CDs, and pay a handling charge:(
I ordered some CDs from amazon.com a few weeks back. Two days ago I received a notice that I needed to go to my local postal depot to pay a customs charge before I could collect my package
So, I found a map, located the depot, and trapsed over there. I handed over my card, and the guy said "So, you've been buying from Amazon have you? They're cracking down on all internet purchases you know?". I had to pay the VAT (sales tax) on my CDs bought in the states before I could collect them.
Apparently, almost all internet based purchases from major US sites are now already attacting VAT charges in the UK. I know a friend who bought from Think Geek got stung a few weeks before for the VAT on his purchase.
I use the vodafone Wap email system, and it works great. It quite happily checks both POP3 and IMAP servers for mail (though no TLS on the connections yet). You can view your mail (and folders other than your inbox if using an IMAP mail server), send mail, file it etc. Works brilliantly, all it needs is a wap phone. Oh, and if you want, you can use GPRS to access the vodafone wap service, so you wouldn't even need to dialup before sending and receiving.
Since you're probably in America, I'd go look for your local vodafone partner, and see if they offer a similar service. http://www.vodafone.com/ would be the place to start looking.
You said "An email containing a username and password is sent to the registrant a few hours after submission". The combination of these is your problem in my book.
If I have to get sent an email with a download location, it annoys me. I want to download it then and there, not 6 hours later. Also, if I try to download it on a friday, so I can take it home to play with on the weekend, not having the URL appear for a few hours really annoys me.
I'd suggest ditching the emailing of the download url. If you must email something, email the registration key, and do it right away (like Real do for their server evaluations). That way, users can get the file then and there, and have their licence key arrive by email by the time the download has finished.
Oh, and warn them when they're entering their email address that they'll need to get sent a license key via email. It'll reduce the number of times Bill Gates (billg@microsoft.com) downloads your software if people realise they really do need you guys to have their email address, as opposed to just an email address!
My College has a fairly strict set of rules on computer useage too. However, this didn't stop myself and a friend from setting up wireless and letting each other access the college network from through our wireless enabled machines.
How, you might ask. Simple, we're two of the student computing representatives. As such, we get far more leniency from college about our computer useage. We get free internet access, hosting for a few of our machines out of term time, and a big say in what happens wrt student computing.
Admitedly, we do have to go to two student political meetings / week, and help run some of the services. Since we probably would have spent nearly as much time running similar services of our own anyway, the latter isn't a big deal, and makes for great CV entries - it helped me get my summer job:). As for the former, we're always informed on what's happening, get to have a decent say in what happens, and know most people.
So, if you want to do anything even slightly borderline, get involved in student politics first.
This isn't the only project out there which has suddenly found their digital data is no longer readable. It is a growing problem, and the Microsoft file format mentality really isn't going to help in the next 5-10 years.
There are other projects out there that aim to help people work aroud them. One of the bigger being Cedars, which is dedicated to helping people plan for their digital data acquisition, formatting, storage and cataloging.
A bike is really your best bet. Depending on your needs, you could get a racing bike (fast on flat and slight hills), mountain bike (good for steep hills, cutting cross country) or some snazy folding one (good for taking on other modes of transport). As a bonus, you can keep fit at the same time.
I currently use my bike for a half mile commute, but have previously used it for a six mile one. It is all nice a flat, so I've got a racing bike. I normally beat cars on the way in, cycle lanes are great for that:)
I'd say the only things to worry about is somewhere to secure your bike at work (you could probably get some green grant towards installing something if you don't have anywhere) and changing facilities at work (after a 6 mile cycle you'll need to change, and suit + cycle chain is never pretty...)
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I'm quite a fan of the Series 60 devices. Series 60 is a Symbian platform, and a couple of manufacturers produce phones based on it.
I've had a Nokia 3650 for about a year, and just got myself a Nokia 6600.
They're both pretty stable (occasional need to reboot due to memory leaks, but not too bad), loads of apps available for them (though quality does vary), and easy to write for yourself. Oh, and they're pretty damn good for voice calls too (nice speaker phone mode etc). Cheap too, I got both mine free when signing up for 12 months with my provider (Vodafone).
About the only downside is that input is only via the text pad. That said, you can buy a bluetooth keyboard + bluetooth keyboard software (3rd party) and you're away, so that's always an option
Simon Cozens has written one of these. It's called Flox, is written in perl using Apache::MVC (also known as Maypole), and is only 300 lines of code!
I started with a new firm about 8 months ago. They asked me to sign their standard contract, and I had a read through. Lo, there was such a clause there.
I asked them about it, and explained why I didn't feel happy signing it, and they were suprised that it was even in there in that form! We sat down, worked out a new wording for it (so work done on company time or in direct furtherance of company business is covered, and nothing else), and I signed that. They then made the altered version the new company standard.
So, do talk to your new company about it. Chances are they'll be willing to change it, especially if they're not huge. They may even not realise they've got such a strong clause in there!
Details of the campaign against software patents can be found at http://swpat.ffii.org/group/todo/index.en.html
In suprise news today, it seems Peter Jackson himself liked the idea, and will be including Jar-Jar in a special feature on the DVD! Wow!
I've been tryong to download the album since the article was posted, and I've finally gotten onto the FTP server and pulled a copy down /. effect has died down enough that you can now grab a copy, yey!
So, looks like the
Try getting an internship with the IT team of a bank. Investment or Merchant banks are best, but any will do.
I worked for an investment bank last summer, and had an excellent time. Lots of interesting and challenging computing problems, good pay as an intern, plenty of other stuff going on etc. Lots of my friends from the year below are off to banks this summer.
While there are less interns in banking because of the downturn, there are still a fair number, as banks view them as a 10 week long interview.
I've been using Mojo to post to my LiveJournal from my wap phone for about 6 months. So, when I'm sat at the station and Virgin have canceled my train again, I can log in and rant about it. When I'm bored and waiting for someone, and I've been thinking about something for a bit, I can write about it I find that the biggest problem to mobile blogging from your phone is the data entry - you think it's hard enough to use the thing to write a 160 character SMS, try using it to write a fully fledged blog entry...
Well, if you actually read my article properly...... you'd see that Dave Green from NTK had a recorder with him, and the Union video'd the whole debate. No news on when (if ever) either of those will go online though - waiting on Dave seeing if the quality is good enough, and the Union reaching a decision on putting their debates on the net.
OpenSSL has everything you need to run your own CA. If you need some more docs than those that come with OpenSSL, there are loads out there, including these written by me. I run a CA using OpenSSL, and it's great. Does everything I need. All the internal machines trust the CA, and those external people who need to have also set up their browsers to trust it, so all is fine.
This was about 2 years ago, in the middle of the Napster era, and the reports at the time suggested it might've had a positive effect on album sales. Nice to see that the RIAA are so one the ball by doing it two years later.....
(Details here and here among others)
The Sydney Morning Herald have just done an article on this. While it doesn't cover much more than the one linked in the article, it has links to some other SMH articles. One Of them is an interview with one of the main scientists behind it, and is quite insightful. The other is a gallery of relevent photos.
As ever, The Register have a good article on this. Has a bit more detail on how the modularisation will work
bbspot have a very good take on this whole thing - http://www.bbspot.com/News/2002/05/markers.html
So, start asking about related things. Are you going to want some work experience? If so, does the department have industry links, and with who? How about on campus work - do they have openings for students to do some tech support? My college has a couple of student computer reps, who do some websites, maintain a few machines, help out the paid staff with admining etc. The experience I've got with doing this was looked upon very favourably by the company that are employing me this summer. No matter which area of IT you want to go into, experience is a big help, so does this place help you get it?
Finally, ask about the facilities. How many computer rooms do they have, and what stuff do they have on them? What centralised 'Nix facilities do they offer? Ethernet to you room is very nice, so do they offer that, and if so what restrictions are placed on it (no webservers? low bandwidth limits?). What about their central web hosting, can you do much with that? If not, are there any other boxes you can use for any dynamic content you want to play with?
Oh, and while you're on campus, go look round the other facilities too. Places to hang out are important, as are sports facilities, on campus shops etc. Also, speak to the students as well as the tutors, find out all you can
My uncle got his new computer, and dropped in the "Free AOL Trial" CD. As per usual, it wanted a credit card number before you could use your "free" trial. So, he entered the details of his card that was going to run out soonest, which happened to be in just over a months time. 3 weeks later, he'd decided AOL wasn't for him, and picked a new ISP. After 5 minutes trying to cancel and deciding it was too hard, he did nothing. AOL customer support then spent the next month trying to coerce his new credit card number out of him. Eventually, 2 weeks after the card had expired, they took his hints that he wanted to cancel, and terminated the account
I subscribed to the BT Anytime service over the summer, so I could use the net as much as I do at college without running up huge bills. After checking the minimum sign-up time and cancelation methods well, I signed up with my credit card. Come the end of the summer, I phoned up to cancel. With a copy of the contract in front of me, I asked if they could cancel the account, or if I should send them a letter, and copy it to my credit card company and ask that no more billing went through. Took 3 minutes to cancel the account :)
My dad changed from one local ISP to another to get ADSL. Apart for getting stung a bit for transfering his domain to the new ISP, it was very pleasant
Oh, and it also had printed on the outside my permission for Customs officers to open the package. Thanks guys...
Were Amazon.com to be UK (or any other EU state) VAT registered, I could've paid the VAT along with my order and just had my CDs arrive. As it was, I had to jump through all sorts of hoops to get my CDs, and pay a handling charge :(
So, I found a map, located the depot, and trapsed over there. I handed over my card, and the guy said "So, you've been buying from Amazon have you? They're cracking down on all internet purchases you know?". I had to pay the VAT (sales tax) on my CDs bought in the states before I could collect them.
Apparently, almost all internet based purchases from major US sites are now already attacting VAT charges in the UK. I know a friend who bought from Think Geek got stung a few weeks before for the VAT on his purchase.
Since you're probably in America, I'd go look for your local vodafone partner, and see if they offer a similar service. http://www.vodafone.com/ would be the place to start looking.
You said "An email containing a username and password is sent to the registrant a few hours after submission". The combination of these is your problem in my book.
If I have to get sent an email with a download location, it annoys me. I want to download it then and there, not 6 hours later. Also, if I try to download it on a friday, so I can take it home to play with on the weekend, not having the URL appear for a few hours really annoys me.
I'd suggest ditching the emailing of the download url. If you must email something, email the registration key, and do it right away (like Real do for their server evaluations). That way, users can get the file then and there, and have their licence key arrive by email by the time the download has finished.
Oh, and warn them when they're entering their email address that they'll need to get sent a license key via email. It'll reduce the number of times Bill Gates (billg@microsoft.com) downloads your software if people realise they really do need you guys to have their email address, as opposed to just an email address!
My College has a fairly strict set of rules on computer useage too. However, this didn't stop myself and a friend from setting up wireless and letting each other access the college network from through our wireless enabled machines.
How, you might ask. Simple, we're two of the student computing representatives. As such, we get far more leniency from college about our computer useage. We get free internet access, hosting for a few of our machines out of term time, and a big say in what happens wrt student computing.
Admitedly, we do have to go to two student political meetings / week, and help run some of the services. Since we probably would have spent nearly as much time running similar services of our own anyway, the latter isn't a big deal, and makes for great CV entries - it helped me get my summer job :). As for the former, we're always informed on what's happening, get to have a decent say in what happens, and know most people.
So, if you want to do anything even slightly borderline, get involved in student politics first.
This isn't the only project out there which has suddenly found their digital data is no longer readable. It is a growing problem, and the Microsoft file format mentality really isn't going to help in the next 5-10 years.
There are other projects out there that aim to help people work aroud them. One of the bigger being Cedars, which is dedicated to helping people plan for their digital data acquisition, formatting, storage and cataloging.
A bike is really your best bet. Depending on your needs, you could get a racing bike (fast on flat and slight hills), mountain bike (good for steep hills, cutting cross country) or some snazy folding one (good for taking on other modes of transport). As a bonus, you can keep fit at the same time.
I currently use my bike for a half mile commute, but have previously used it for a six mile one. It is all nice a flat, so I've got a racing bike. I normally beat cars on the way in, cycle lanes are great for that :)
I'd say the only things to worry about is somewhere to secure your bike at work (you could probably get some green grant towards installing something if you don't have anywhere) and changing facilities at work (after a 6 mile cycle you'll need to change, and suit + cycle chain is never pretty...)