I signed into Yahoo! Mail today and discovered that it now offers 100 MB of space. That’s a pretty good upgrade from the 4 MB it offered up until now. I had to clean out my Inbox every three months or so. If I keep up that pace with, now, 25 times more space … I shouldn’t have to delete a message for the next six years!

It seems obvious that Yahoo! has made this free upgrade to its email service as a preemptive strike against Google’s Gmail, which will offer 1 GB of disk space. For free. Yahoo’s 100 MB isn’t as much, but it does make me think about MP3 players, where you probably don’t really need to carry every song you’ve ever heard.

But this is a big move on Yahoo’s part. I didn’t expect it. When Gmail goes final or into a public beta, I had planned on making it my primary email address for the disk space alone. Now, switching from Yahoo! Mail would mean telling everyone my new address, and that question pops up: Do I really need a gig for my email?

Apparently there is a new variant of the Blaster worm that actually downloads Microsoft’s patch for the Windows vulnerability and then deletes itself when the machine it has infected reboots.

Can you say viral marketing? How about push technology? Anybody remember when the Next Big Thing in the browser wars was “push technology”? Microsoft had channels and Netscape was going to do up Netcaster. Microsoft’s channels sucked, Netscape never released Netcaster, and the whole thing died with a whimper. People already have push technology — it’s called TV. The whole reason we use the Internet is to avoid push technology.

Still, I can’t help but take a long, hard look at an Internet worm that downloads and installs a patch from Microsoft’s web site and then deletes itself on reboot. What if a Microsoft employee wrote this sucker with Bill Gates’ blessing? And even though it might be causing some unwanted Internet traffic, does it cause any damage? Is it providing a service?

And does anybody remember Darwin’s theory? Survival of the fittest. Maybe the best Internet worms will inherit the Earth. That reminds me. I’ve got to go see what Slashdot is saying about this.

What the dilly DAWG?!!!

In the last two days I have downloaded two very small programs which will — and I’m not exaggerating here — totally change my life.

The first I downloaded yesterday. It’s called Pop This!. I read about it at ZDNet’s Anchordesk. When I tried to download it onto my work computer today the site gave an error stating that it had met its bandwidth quota. I assume that a lot of people read about it on Anchordesk, which is surprising, because I didn’t think anybody actually read Anchordesk. I mean, I used to to subscribe to the newsletter, but that was back when I subscribed to newsletters. (Now I just get the one from Sony about PS2.) But you’ve got to get this program. Version 3.0 is about a meg and a half, which seems large for its functionality. If you try to download it from ZDNet or Download.com (which are all part of Cnet), they will tell you that it is on version 1.01 and that it is 155K … I guess there’s been a lack of communication there. And you can’t download it because of the bandwidth issue. I’m tempted to post the sucker right here on my site, but I think even I get a bandwidth quota. Imagine … even with thousands of daily visitors I still don’t hit my limit!

Anyway — so tonight I was emailing myself the installer so I can get it at work tomorrow. I hit the attachment link on Yahoo! Mail and read this line of text next to a little light bulb (for a second I thought it was the Office Assistant): “Want to see a progress bar when you upload your file? Make Yahoo! Mail your default email program.” ZOINKS! Let me tell you — I’ve been waiting for this for a while. I’m pretty sure Hotmail has offered this functionality for years, but Hotmail also offers “two more inches” about 150 times a day. Yahoo’s version is small – I’m talking 35K, tops. In an interesting twist of fate, the installer wouldn’t work because I had Pop This! installed. I guess those windows that pop up that ask you to install components to IE (or install anything – like Gator) fall within the pop-up window category. I thought they were more of an OS thing. Guess not. To fix that problem, I just added yahoo.com to my list of domains permitted to serve pop-ups. That cleared it right up. Of course, if Yahoo! gives me any pop-ups that I don’t like, I’ll take it right back off my permitted list. Simple as that.

Right now I’m waiting for the Pop This! installer to upload to my outgoing email so I can test out a mailto link and record the results here. The anticipation is killing me …

Okay, the little bar at the bottom of my IE window says that it’s done uploading, but the view is not advancing to the “all set” page. WTF? …

It works! Yes! If you don’t have a Yahoo! Mail account yet, this is just one more reason to get one. It’s free, I never get any spam because it gets filtered out in an intelligent way, and your address will be relatively easy to remember.

Other news: There should really be a button on the keyboard for &lta href = “”&gt … Can you appreciate the irony of writing an italic I: &lti&gtI&lt/i&gt …

I’m sorry, but the last post was really weak. I had to write something else to bump it down.

So I clicked the “Dissatisfied with your search results? Help us improve.” link at the bottom of Google recently after it brought up the raised by coyotes page as the top result on a “dan premo” search. I just did the same search again tonight, and now not only is Historical Context the new top result (as it should be), but the top four results are my stuff. Number 2 is the “current” Who Am I?. Number 3 is the final links page from my RIT site. And in a twist that makes it all worthwhile, the rules page of “The List” from back in my Weldon St. days at RIT is the number 4 result. If you click up to the main The List page, you’ll see that “Brian Lewis is back on the list … with zero points. His demise is anxiously awaited.” You can say that again!

If you’re wondering, PIHTK is an acronym for People I Have To Kill. The List had a short but intense period of popularity, and I was concerned about people I didn’t know reading that I had a list of people I wanted to kill. To clarify, it was a joke and I never actually wanted to kill anybody. Except Lewis.

And yes, for fun late at night I type dan premo into Google.

Theme tonight: Mozilla. Next topic if I remember: parallels between the first two Matrix films.

If you don’t know, Mozilla is an open-source browser developed (as far as I know) primarily by Netscape programmers. It’s in version 1.3x now. I ran it under Red Hat Linux and I thought it looked okay, but I didn’t have a lot of fonts within Linux so I never really liked using it. Right now I am interested in Mozilla for two reasons:

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Multiple home pages. I like this for two reasons. The first is: there are three or four sites that I read every time I surf the web. CNN.com. Yahoo! Mail. PvP. I read them every time. Second: a trait I picked up as an adaptation to dial-up is using multiple browser windows – this lets me read one site while the other one or two are loading. This way, I theoretically won’t ever have to wait for pages to download. Theoretically.

I’m sure most of you pull the read-one-browser-while-the-other-loads trick. With multiple home pages, you no longer have to click File | Open two or three times, and you no longer have to hit three or four bookmarks. Yeah, neither requires very much effort, but since you do it thousands of times per year, and since there might be a better way … Plus, Mozilla has tabs, which are an awful lot like the buttons on the Windows 9x+ taskbar. Personally I’m still undecided on whether or not I would like tabs, but I have a feeling that I would use them once given the opportunity. Next …

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Separate mail client and browser. I remember when I downloaded Netscape 6, I was disappointed with the fact that the browser was buggy as hell, but I also thought that the mail client was not as good as its 4.x predecessor. Plus I was losing messages when the browser crashed. The project name for the standalone mail client is Thunderbird and the project name for the next (and standalone) version of the browser is Firebird. The fact that there is actually a team dedicated to the mail client and that they have enough interest in it to release it standalone makes me think that it might turn out okay.

Additionally, Mozilla supports pop-up blocking. Microsoft really has to implement this. This is the single feature that really made me think twice about Mozilla. I know you can download applications from several web sites that will disable pop-up ads. But the code that actually disables that little component of JavaScript must be like two lines long … why can’t Microsoft just throw it into the next point release of Internet Explorer? Or the next Windows Update release? Probably because they don’t want advertisers jumping on their back. And I don’t install the little helper apps because it’s little helper apps like that that install some other POS or generally just gunk things up.

Finally, why am I considering Mozilla? For the answer to that, think back … Think about the first time you used the Internet, the first time you used the World Wide Web … What browser did you use? Netscape 2.0? Netscape 3? From Netscape 2.0 through Netscape 4.7, I loved Netscape. It was the non-Microsoft product that I used. (Insert first girlfriend metaphor here.) When Netscape 6 dropped (and I do mean dropped), I was so pissed. Yeah, Internet Explorer had been gaining market share for years by then, and may even have passed it, but version 6 of Netscape was the white flag. Maybe the developers were feeling pressure from AOL to make a release date? Maybe they set their goals too high because they wanted their product to be the new face of AOL? I don’t know. Netscape 6 sucked. But still. There’s always been that little part of me that liked Netscape.

Mozilla Firebird was originally called Phoenix. Maybe the Netscape tradition will finally rise from the ashes …

Yahoo! is doing up a new search interface to compete with Google. Try typing in “dan premo” and scrolling down to result number 8. I wonder what the Washington College professor of political science would think if he saw this?