I stopped in here tonight because I had another couple of emails from MySpace saying that so-and-so had requested to be added to my friends list. As usual, I go to check these alleged people for mutual friends and find that there aren't any.
I don't suppose that anyone behind such obviously spammed requests will read this but just the same, if you hit the friend request and you're not somebody I know or ther aren't people I do know in the 'mutual friends' listing, then that request is going in the bitbucket.
While I'm here, I'm also going to point out that I've just
released a new version of a program I wrote called "
Mixminion Message Sender". It's a GUI that I wrote for
Mixminion because I got tired of typing long, often complicated command lines in a DOS box. MMS does the "grunt work" of creating the messages and passing the needed command lines to Mixminion.
As for exactly what Mixminion is,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixminion is worth taking time to read. Basically Mixminion is an anonymous remailer, a program that allows specially formatted and encypted messages to be sent through a chain of servers, each one removing a layer of encryption and then sending the message, without any headers that identify the source, on to the next hop in the chain.
While writing this I thought of something else that bugs the snot out of me. Video or Music players that autostart. Frankly, I think it's bloody presumptuous of people to decide that I want their idea of music to suddenly start blasting out of my speakers when I load their site. This is especially true when I happen to be listening to MY music. Trust me, My Mozart and Beethoven beats almost any "music" from the last twenty years or more. And if I have my speakers turned off as I frequently do, your autostart is just taking up bandwidth and cpu power to handle something that is NOT going to be heard.
As for the autostart video thing... consider your viewers, think about the fact that you have ZERO idea if they have enough bandwidth to handle your video stream. And then again, maybe they just don't want to watch it.
Solution? Go ahead and embed your video and music players, but make sure that they DO NOT AUTOSTART!. Autostart is rude, obnoxious, and just plain thoughtless.
Got another gripe (full of it I know)... This thing tells me I can't leave the subject line blank. WTF does this think it is? UseNet? Hmpth!