I stayed at school very late today, just got home. Trying to finish sorting out the stuff I needed to do for FBLA and the all exciting Computer Club. My first action as president of computer club will be to rename it. I'm trying to decide what still, so please post comments here on your ideas. ;)

Anyways, onto my normal rambling.

Today, I must fight against one of those old ancient sayings. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Every time I see that, hear it, and so on I want to SCREAM!!! If it ain't broke and there is still a way to fix it to make it better, then please, FIX IT! I know some people claim IE isn't broken with its lack of support for standards, but FIX IT Microsoft, it would be a good thing to fix what supposedly isn't broken by people who don't understand the internet. (By the way, I guess its time to do my usual plug for Mozilla Firefox. Its easier to use, faster, makes web developer's lives easier, and gives you many more features which you'll love. If you think IE isn't broken, use Mozilla Firefox and your web browser will end up fixed anyways.)

One of the weak points of Gnome (and KDE and every other desktop environment for Linux, and pretty much OS X for that matter, haven't been able to find an easy way to do it well either) is LAN file sharing. Actually, its been easy to get files that are shared and just got even easier with ZeroConfig/DNS Based Service Directory/Rendevous/whatever else its called (I like ZeroConfig the best and think Rendevous is the worst since Rendevous is the name of an implementation, so I'll be using that). The problem is more of sharing files on an OS X or Linux box to other computers. CIFS (formerly SMB) unfortunately has kind of become the de facto standard for doing this. I think its a horrible however as its really not good at advertising the shares on the network. Hopefully a ZeroConfig based one will be able to replace it (maybe NFS can get ZeroConfig support?). In any case, the problem still remains that its hard to share files. In Mac OS X, the easiest way to share files is to "Allow Remote Windows logins". Not only does that really pose a security risk, it also means you share everything a user has access to (unless I'm missing something). Thats a horrible implemenation. The option should rather be "Allow this username & password to be used for file sharing login." (or something like that, I was gonna put CIFS, or SMB, or Windows in that message, but CIFS and SMB are too techincal and Windows is inaccurate, plus it really should be for all methods of file sharing.) Well, finally, gnome seems like its going to add support for ZeroConfig file sharing using WebDAV. I've never used WebDAV before and don't know much about it, so one of these days I'll take a look. Probably in 6 months when the next Gnome release is out supporting these features. Right click, properties, and then in the sharing tab, you'll only have three options, make it very simple: - Do not share this folder. - Read only sharing. - Read and write sharing. Windows isn't exactly hard to setup file sharing either, but it isn't quite as simple as that and the CIFS protocol has a lot of issues with that. I can't wait to have this... finally, file sharing done right.

Next thing I'll discuss is Jabber support. I was losing hope for it growing at all anymore. Nobody really seems to care about it unfortunately. But Apple just announced that its adding support for it in the next version of iChat, so maybe that will give it a nice usage boost. It should at least be in front of Yahoo soon. I don't expect it to overtake AIM or MSN anytime soon, even though its superior, but Microsoft unfortunately has too much control of the market getting its usage for MSN up and AIM was the original successful one at it. They already have the people and its hard to move that many people over when the protocols are not compatible with each other. I'm often asked why Jabber is better, and the reason is because the protocol is opened. This means that any program, such as a website, can use the instant messenging protocol freely to provide you with instant alerts. For example, if Jabber support was integrated into Invision Power Board, I would be able to subscribe to the announcements forum on their corporate forums for example, and set it to notify me via Jabber. Then when a new release is out and they post in that announcements forum, I would instantly be notified of it. Email isn't instant and is often lost. IM is instant and I think at some point will overtake email entirely. Jabber supports offline messages and such so it really can, and I hope it does.

IBM also announced that they were going to open source their speech recoginiton software. It'd be nice to see what is done for that under Linux, as that market has pretty much been empty thus far. Hopefully this means that it will get much better as well, since the entire open source community will get to work on it and think of better ways to recognize voice. Anyways, thats it for today. Remember to post comments (especially about ideas for the name)!