Today I found MySpace's Official Toolbar. And long story short, its cheap, bad, and a reason to stop using MySpace...pretty much. First of all, about time, myspace. Facebook has released an official (and quite good) Facebook Toolbar a while ago, to replace all the ad-infested user made 'unofficial' toolbars. Myspace users have had to rely on unofficial toolbars up until now. Today I noticed that myspace has ads pointing to http://www.myspace.com/toolbar, so I was interested and downloaded it. The first thing about it is that instead of complying to firefox/opensource standards and uploading the toolbar in firefox extension format so it can be installed with one click (as well as uploading it to the firefox extensions directory itself), they have an executable file to install it. Suspicious... I'll have to do an adware/spyware scan later. I proceeded to download and install the toolbar. Then, it installed, I restarted firefox, and I saw the myspace toolbar. First, I can't customize the toolbar by moving around / removing components. I wanted to remove the google search, which is MySpace's first shady move. I am perfectly aware that myspace would not include a google search in their toolbar out of good will. It's using google's adsense (the program they use on the rest of their site as well, for the banner ads). Every time you search through the toolbar, myspace gets money. Obviously I don't like them sneakily using my browser usage to their advantage, so I wanted to remove the google search, but I couldnt because the toolbar was locked down.. Then I noticed that my Facebook toolbar disappeared!! So I look in Tools > Add-Ons, and I see "Not compatible with firefox 3.0.5", while I know that it was working minutes ago. So this is why the myspace toolbar is an exe. It not only installs their locked down adware-infested toolbar, it also edits the facebook toolbar if you have it installed to make it seem as if it's not compatible!!!

Congratulations myspace, you have stooped to a new low. I'm looking forward to the day when I finally decide to stop using your sneaky cash reaping website, and I urge all my readers to do the same.

So I'm done with another major milestone in my programming/webdev 'career'. I've been working on this for the past week and a half or so, and I've released it. I run the class website for McNair Academic class of 2011. The first version of it was just a forum, which died sorta fast, because not many people are familiar with forums at all, and in addition it got overrun by nolifers. So I created a Joomla-based site, modded the living hell out of it, and filled it up with actual class-related content. The site was made official on Tuesday 12/9/2008 at 8:59 PM. That very night, people logged on in dozens, and overloaded my server to the point it started throwing 500 errors (basically that means the server cannot handle the load of that many users). I immediately checked my Google Adsense income, and realized that I can afford to upgrade to Dreamhost VPS. That would mean that now I have as much server power as I need at the moment (and can prevent usage spikes taking my server offline. What this also means is that I need to keep Google Ads income at a max. Whenever you are on mahs11.com, please click an ad or two, it pays for the site. Also if I get more than enough income to cover the site, instead of taking the rest for myself I'll donate it to my class!

tl;dr - If you are in McNair class of 2011, check out mahs11.com, it's been updated and is now officially AWESOME.

Also I'm starting on my new project - total home automation with proximity detection. Basically, I'm gonna have a bluetooth emitter on my keychain, and when I walk into my apartment, my home server will detect my presence and start up my computer, turn on the heater if temperatures are below a set level, contact my iphone to check what's playing at the moment, and play that same song from that same spot through my speakers, and tell my iphone to pause (basically, when I walk in, my iphone music moves onto the server and starts playing through speakers, so I can take my headphones off, all without me doing anything.)

I'll post updates on how that goes as well as info on how you guys can do something similar.

A couple of days ago I read that Microsoft was on the way to rolling out their next OS, Windows 7. Me being me, I jumped on ThePirateBay and downloaded the pre-beta (build 6801). Now that I have it running (only on my laptop for now), I gotta say, I love it! It's basically vista, minus all the crap. UAC has been streamlined, and works fine now. It hasn't given me any random crap that vista usually does, well not in the 12 hours I've been testing it, anyway. It looks a lot smoother, the taskbar is definitely nicer (and way more useful too).

So this isnt exactly anything new, but i felt like posting it because the place i had it at before (my old forums) has been taken down.

So lemme start with pics, I'll go over the specs later.