Another Day, More Exciting Discoveries

So I was in HRBB 220,
Which is the best lab on Texas A&M Campus, and I was informed about a few new resources which are pretty nice. I was planning on just relaxing after my awful Acct 209 test, but the TAGD nerds (who have recently become my friends) were showing off their code and also some awesome websites on the internet.

BugMeNot
Problem:
ok, so this has happened to all of us who use the internet long enough. You're doing a search online for some material, say a demo of the new Serious Sam 2 game, and the website you're about to download from has the requirement that you be a "member" to download.
ARG! What a pain in the butt! First, you have to fill out a long form, with all your personal information, and you think to yourself, "Ha! I'll just leave all the elements blank, except for the email address" and the server comes back with those stupid

*required field ->

>:-\ So you place some bogus field and it comes up with

*not a valid phone number

(ie: 123-456-7890)

ARGGG!!!!
So then you fill in all the stupid required fields with your friend's information, except with the email address because they all send you a stupid confirmation email, so they know for sure where to send the LOADS AND LOADS OF SPAM TO!!!!
Solution:
This nifty and aptly named website, "BugMeNot"
It's a simple idea: Instead of having everyone fill out the forms, have one person fill it out once and share the user account.
This has been happening on a much smaller level before BugMeNot. Think of all the times that you logged into fileplanet or some news broadcast on your buddy's name because it's just faster.
Well, now it's been organized and made very simple. In fact, there's even a firefox extension (put out by roachfiend)

The Firefox extension is Frillin' Awesome!
Just right click in the user field of the website, click "BugMeNot!" and the userfield AND password are auto completed AND the website is entered! THAT'S AWESOME!

If you don't use firefox you can just visit BugMeNot.com, put in the html address that is giving you a problem and it will instantly give you a username and password for that website. If no website is found you can "give back" to the community by filling out the stupid form and submitting the username and password you get.
It's a great idea!

Woot!
Problem:
Yeah, so you know those people that stay up until 3:32:21am to grab that ebay sale? Yup, you know them... they're your mother, your younger brother, or sadly... you.
Solution:
Well, Woot is a website that adds some consistency to your life. Every day at 12:00 exactly a new item is posted for an "unbeatable price!!!" lol.
It's a lot of tech stuff mainly (speakers, projector combos, ect...) trying to appeal to the techno junkies and gadget freaks. The website is layed out in a very "info-mercial" style with a big yellow "I want one!" button. lol, it's a fun idea and there are a bunch of good deals, too (well, one per day).

Eclipse
For every programmer, there is some underground editor that is better than all the rest "Because it just is, ok?!?". lol
For me, when I started programming with java, I was an insane user of "Jedit". Why? Mainly because it had "Jedi" in it, LOL. Also, it had a TON of addons (plugins) that could extend it's functionality and it was very fast for doing simple tasks (the problem with other solutions like JBuilder and JavaBeans.


Well, Eclipse is a Java editor (current version 3.1.1) that has been growing a lot lately. I got it a while back and it was very impressive. It seems that some of my fellow computer science friends have it working with C++ (pdf), perl, python, and more!
It really is a beautiful IDE. It seems that you have to solve some of the linking issues when you start using it for developing C/C++ projects.

I wonder what ever happened to that Java OS that everyone was screaming (video, alternate site)about a while back... I haven't heard anything from sun about it...
My brother got a live CD after attending a conference that ran a JAVA OS. It was slow (which I blamed on Java, and he blamed on it being a live-CD ;-) ) and wasn't nearly as cool as the video I linked, but showed the limitlessness of Java.
I was impressed and wish they would release some more information about it.
Sigh, but such is life.