There are 1,300,925,111,156,286,160,896 (1 sextillion, 300 quintillion, 925 quadrillion, 111 trillion, 156 billion, 286 million, 160 thousand, 8 hundred and 96) ways to spell Viagra if you were to spam someone. Interesting to note that a picture is no longer worth a thousand words.

I was invited to test out a new Gmail beta account from Google (the ones with the 1 gig storage limit). While I was initially excited about this, my enthusiasm waned quickly as I read that attachment sizes are limited to 10 MB apiece. (Yes, I was toying with the idea of emailing myself 10 messages with a 100 MB attachment just to test it.)

So, I decided to test the 10 MB limit (by creating files of specific sizes). It wouldn't accept a 10 MB attachment (10,240,000 bytes), nor a 10,239,999 byte file, nor even 10,000,000, 9,999,999, or 9,999,000 byte files. So then I thought it might be because of the cluster size storage issue (file size vs. size on disk), and lowered my attachment's file size to 9,998,000 bytes (9,998,336 bytes on an NTFS-formatted disk with a 4 KB cluster size), but that still didn't work. Since I think Gmail is running on some flavor of Linux running either GFE/1.3 or GWS/2.1, I decided to look up the cluster size info for Linux (Ext2) - either 1 KB or 4 KB (varies), but certainly not any bigger than that.

After those and subsequent experiments with even smaller MP3 files failed, I realized that it's not a cluster size issue at all, it's attachment encoding overhead. There are several ways to encode attachments for transmittal, e.g. Base64, UUEncode, MIME, yEnc, etc. All of these add overhead to the transmission "size" of the attachment - some a *lot* (MIME, Base64), and others not as much (yEnc). Thus, your 10 MB attachment actually looks more like 14 MB to the server when it's being transported. What it all boils down to is that Gmail really will only accept 6.95 MB attachments (depending on encoding method), nothing larger. Lame. (Yes, I'm going to suggest to them that they update their documentation to reflect this fact. As it stands, their wording is deceiving.) And another thing - why does SBC also not allow you to send attachments over 6.95 MB either? Double lame.

The 3-eyed, 2-mouthed mutant calf is pretty cool. Netsky.Z came out yesterday - FINALLY. The next one in line should actually be interesting (simply because of it's name, whatever that turns out to be). Also out yesterday: MyDoom.J, Blaster.T, and MiMail.V.

New Internet 2 speed record set yesterday: 6.25 Gbps. The real story behind today's amorous rhino incident is that this guy was taking photos in the first place. After all, everyone knows that rhino have terrible eyesight. Forget the rhino, what was the *guy* thinking? Here's an interesting article debunking the myth of the '5-second rule'.