onOkay--remember The Grand Upgrade back in January? When I was updating all of those outdated pieces of software on my server? Well, I did forget to mention one fairly obvious outdated piece of software that is used perhaps more often that any of the others listed. Well, maybe I didn't forget to mention per se seeing as I didn't update it that day. Well, yesterday I finally did.
If you haven't figured it out yet, I'm talking about The Fourm. Yes, The Fourm is a freakishly old piece of software, as it used to run on an original copy of phpBB 3.0. That's nearly three years old. whistles Yes, I know, it's commonly believed that The Fourm ran on phpBB 3.0.2, but I vaguely remember, two years ago, trying to upgrade The Fourm to 3.0.2 and encountering some difficulty that required me to revert the changes (even though The Fourm still ended up saying 3.0.2), which is probably the reason that I have been too afraid to upgrade The Fourm since as it left me the impression that I had hacked The Fourm too badly to upgrade it. That, and the fact that 3.0.1 and 3.0.2 were released after the launch of The Fourm, is what leads me to believe that our friend The Fourm was actually previously running on an original copy of phpBB 3.0.
Anyway, yesterday, I set myself up at my computer and worked at upgrading The Fourm to the newest version available. I ran it through once on the testing copy on my laptop, learned from my mistakes and wrote down a checklist and eventually did the real thing. And good golly gosh, it worked. The Fourm is sparkly clean and brand new. :D 355 bugs fixed, 54 new features, 88 general changes made and 4 security holes patched. Once again, whistles
One of the things that I am especially excited about for The Fourm is the new ability to use reCAPTCHAs on registration forms rather than the home-brand one included with phpBB. I have had a real problem with spam registrations in the past on The Fourm and it has led me to disable user registration several times. I last opened it up again some time in late July and by the time that I upgraded phpBB yesterday, I had to delete 375 freaking spam registrations. Whut. I know.
Anyway, while the spam registrations weren't too much of a problem since most of them couldn't be activated due to The Hotmail Bug, which has spread to a lot of other email providers, it's a good thing I've plugged that hole with a reCAPTCHA because I have finally fixed The Hotmail Bug! Incidentally, I suggested the solution that I used nearly two years ago and I once again ignored myself. :P Yes, I know I claimed to have fixed it, but I really don't know why I would have said that because when I looked at my server yesterday, the fix was clearly not there. Perhaps The Grand Upgrade, which happened a day after that post was posted, messed with it somehow. I dunno. :P Anyway, it's great that Four Island can now actually email people and though this opens the spam activation problem up, that problem is neatly solved with phpBB3's new reCAPTCHA module. :)
The third awesome thing which ties into the first: my server has been broken out of it's jail! I mentioned the restrictions placed on my server before and never really explained what they were, but it's not necessary anymore because they're gone! And you know what that means: reCAPTCHAs (AND PINGBACKS :D) actually work now! I had previously removed reCAPTCHAs from Four Island anonymous commenting due to the fact that they never worked and prevented people from commenting, but I have now added them back! Also, if my server hadn't been freed, reCAPTCHAs wouldn't have worked on The Fourm either, so I'm glad that this had happened just in time. :P
Anyway, so The Fourm now has no spam registrations, Four Island has less spam and I can finally receive email notifications from The Fourm again. Hoo-ray. However, there's one last thing I want to mention: WE NEED TO REVIVE THE FOURM!
Click the link. Read. Learn. Act. Because I've typed too much in this post already and it's nearly half past 11. Goodnight. :P
onYay! Quite a few people said that they would quit Facebook (though I must admit--I voted twice :P). I would be interested to know, though: for those who said they don't use Facebook, what alternatives do you use? :P
Do you think you will ever quit Facebook? YES! some other words - 5 vote(s)! No, Imma miss all me bffls and chinese fud! - 2 vote(s)! Lol, I don't use Facebook. LAUGHS HYSTERICALLY - 4 vote(s)! Indifferent - 1 vote(s)!
Okay, so this weekend, I'm away. AWAY. And I spent most of yesterday writing a fairly long post, which I may post tomorrow three hour distraction okay, so, um, let's just skip to caption'd! :P
Snowball Fight
I See You!
I'm actually rather proud of myself--I posted quite a few times this week! Anyway, I've really got to work on those music reviews--especially as I'm buying a new CD this Friday! :P Hopefully this week's as good as last week! :P
onOh my god, I have to share this.
This is a tangential story, but not one with a particularly happy ending.
Yesterday, while I was bored, I spent a whole bunch of time reading quotes from the XKCD Quotes Database. I came across a quote that linked to TV Tropes. I was doomed before the page even finished loading.
For those who don't know, TV Tropes is like Wikipedia multiplied by a hundred million. It's about devices and conventions that authors can and will use in their works, many of which have become clichΓ©d and a list of them and the works themselves. This site is infamous for it's ability to keep you trapped within it's walls all day. I went from LaserGuidedAmnesia to FairlyOddParents to LotusEaterMachine, sidetracked temporarily to 1408 (scared myself a bit reading about that), back to Oubliette, to HighOctaneNightmareFuel, to NightmareFuel and finally to FridgeHorror. While I opened many tabs off of FridgeHorror, I never got to read them. Sitting inconspicuously in the middle of the page was the link that brought would inevitably be my downfall. As TV Tropes would call SchmuckBait:
"Animal Crossing is made of this trope. If you don't know what I'm talking about, see here, but don't expect to sleep at all for a few days. No, really."
I DIDN'T LISTEN.
The link led to a story called "The Terrible Secret Of Animal Crossing". And let me tell you, it is quite scary. The fridge horror can be quite amusing the first few times (I love how Tom Nook says "Everyone who works here wears a uniform!" AND THERE ARE NO OTHER WORKERS :P). Don't get me wrong, it's unbelievably awesome story, but it's most likely the same awesome as The Ring or The Number 23. It's like creepypasta with Animal Crossing. I don't know what creepypasta is, but I wanted to say it because it sounded funny. Now excuse me while I get my DS and empty my inventory of gyroids. has a heart attack when she inadvertently digs up a gyroid GET IT OFF OF ME- shot
It was a bit exciting, too, as my favorite Animal Crossing character Tangy appeared in the story a few times. She appears in my (not as insane, but still pretty weird) Animal Crossing story "Obsession" and is the first character I ever met in my copy of the game. We quickly became best friends :P. Also, our birthdays are on the same day, WHICH IS AWESOME. :P
Anyway, I invite you to read it. The Terrible Secret Of Animal Crossing. Read it. I can't say that it's more insane than House Of Leaves (which I also love!), but seriously, be smart and read it during the day. I didn't. And look what's happened to me? :P
Finally, if there's one thing that I've taken away from this experience (and you'll understand when you read the story):
I am *NEVER** going to summer camp again.*
onSometime last year, after MSN became uncool and before I realized there was such a thing as Google Talk, Skype became the primary method of communication in my circle of friends. I have to say I regret this decision SO much, and it's due to one single fact: I am insane. Lol, no, but the problem is, as I've mentioned before, I have to have a log of every conversation I've had with my friends and while Skype will log your conversations for you, it makes it very difficult for you to interact with them. You have to actually use the Skype client to read your chatlogs--they aren't stored in text files and you can't just go find the files and read them. Also, Skype displays all of your conversations with a contact at the same time and you have to wait while Skype loads them all. Clearly, for an insane person like me, this isn't acceptable.
Since then, I have mainly switched to Google Talk and so have a few of my friends. Some of them still use Skype, however, and so I am forced to use the skype4pidgin Pidgin plugin to communicate with them. Sure, it requires that Skype is kept open, but it doesn't matter to me because Pidgin logs our conversations and that's all I really care about.
However, there is still one problem: all my logs from before the switch are still trapped inside of Skype. How do I get them out? I've searched around on Google quite a bit and finally found a solution: Skype has a feature in it called the Public API. With a bit of coding skill, you could use that to get information out of Skype. Perhaps even, chatlogs? :P
Anyway, the only bindings for the Skype API I could find were in Python (Skype4Py), so I quickly learned the basics of Python and set myself to work. And soon enough, I had a little script that could export all of your Skype chatlogs into HTML files, similar to how Pidgin stores your logs. I was really quite excited about this and decided that I wanted to share it as it was probably a common goal of many people.
Here it is, my little script that could: Download skypelogs2text.py.
Here's how to run this script. First off, make sure that Skype is running and that you are logged in. Next, if you run Linux:
sudo apt-get install wget python python-skype mkdir skypelogs2text cd skypelogs2text wget http://other.fourisland.com/skypelogs2text.py chmod +x skypelogs2text.py ./skypelogs2text.pySkype will ask you if you want to allow the script access to the Public API and you should let it. :P Anyway, if you have Windows, since you are probably less familiar with the terminal interface, let's run through this graphically:
- Download Python from its website and install it.
- Download Skype4Py from Sourceforge and install it.
- Download my script into an empty folder.
- Double click on my script.
- Skype will ask you if you want to allow the script access to the Public API. Click "Allow".
Either way, you will then have to wait. Depending on how many conversations you have stored in Skype, this may take quite a while. I had 371 on Linux and it took eight minutes and six seconds. Regardless, when you are done, you should have a folder called "logs" that contains a folder called "skype" that contains a folder with the same name as your Skype handle that contains all your logs. Isn't that great? The logs folder can be integrated with your normal Pidgin logs folder and then you will be able to read your logs from the Pidgin log viewer. :D
So, now that I've accomplished this, what's next on my checklist? Get my friends to stop using Skype! (And Facebook Chat, for that matter, but that's going to be taken care of :P) I would like it if more people switched Google Talk (my favorite feature of theirs is that all conversations are logged on the server so even if you cannot log from your client, they will log for you :P), but it's lack of accessible video-chat may be stopping that from happening. However, you just wait: when FourChat comes out, there will be no stopping me! laughs evilly :P
onWhile I love my newly jailbroken iPod, I really do have to say that I think the word "jailbreak" was a poor choice for the process of opening up your iPod. To some people, the subword "jail" means that the process is illegal and bad things could possibly happen. This couldn't be farther from the truth. Jailbreaking is the name of a perfectly legal method of opening up your iPod so that you can run homebrew apps on it. I jailbroke my Wii last year and no one batted an eyelash, though I admittedly didn't call it "jailbreaking" at the time.
Basically, in this post, I want to run though exactly what jailbreaking is, what it isn't and why it might possibly have a bad reputation. This was sparked by the fact that a few days ago, when I told someone I knew that I jailbroke my iPod, he was astonished that I would do that. I asked him why and he said "Well, that means you get all the apps on the App Store for free!"
....
"Whut?" I spluttered. "That's not true."
"No, it is!" he yelled, "Jailbreaking is illegal!"
It turns out that his poor source of information was a friend of his that I wouldn't normally consider to be the most intelligent person ever. He apparently learned somewhere of a hack allowing you to pirate apps that utilized a jailbroken iPod and automatically assumed that that was what jailbreaking was. He also decided that jailbreaking was dangerous and could destroy your iPod after he, note, went into Settings and deleted all of his content. Manually. By himself. And he blamed it on the jailbreak.
....whut.
Sure, I won't deny it, you could theoretically use a jailbroken iPod to pirate apps, but that's not what jailbreaking is for. To quote Wikipedia:
Some jailbreakers also attempt to pirate paid App Store applications. This focus has caused some strife within the jailbreaking community, as it was not the original focus of jailbreaking and is illegal.
Jailbreaking is not the act of pirating apps, it is the act of using a bug in Apple's software to install a third-party app. It's for those people who want to write iPhone apps but don't want to have to pay Apple $99 a year or those who want to write apps that do stuff outside of the official API (like the awesome Scrobbl (live scrobbling) or Backgrounder (true multitasking)).
Also, jailbreaking started out with a completely different use. Not many people know this, but when the iPhone first came out, there was no App Store. There was literally no way to get apps onto your iPod... other than jailbreaking it. And that's what jailbreaking is really for: getting apps onto your iPod. The only reason piracy got dragged into this is because jailbroken iPods allow for the installation of apps that haven't been approved by Apple, and could therefore do bad things. As stated earlier, piracy is not the intent of most jailbreakers and my brother's claim that "If you say 'jailbreak' to any American, they will think you are pirating apps" is a complete falsity. And not a true one, either. :P
The other reason that jailbreaking has a bad name is because there is one other illegal thing you can do with it: SIM unlocking, which is the act of allowing the iPhone to use another network besides AT&T. In America, AT&T has a monopoly on iPhones (which is technically the reason the iPhone was created--as a secret deal between Apple and AT&T) and using a network other than AT&T with your iPhone is not allowed. However, this is basically the extent of bad things you could do with a jailbroken iPod; Apple has even said that they will not attempt to break jailbroken apps other than ones that perform SIM unlocking. So you don't have to worry about anything; unless you are actually trying to do something illegal, your jailbroken iPod is protected.
Last thing: the claim that jailbreaking your iPod is dangerous is also untrue. I've had my jailbroken iPod for a week now and it's not a brick yet (though SpringBoard did crash once, but that was easily fixable by uninstalling an offending app). The claims that you can destroy your iPod while jailbreaking it are too unrealistic as most jailbreaking methods require you to install a new firmware on your iPod and iTunes will automatically make a backup of your device when you do that, so that you can restore to a working firmware if anything goes wrong. Also, with the new jailbreak that I pointed out last time (which is awesomely codenamed Star :P), the entire jailbreak is done on your iPod and has a very small chance of failure (though it is suggested that you backup your iPod with iTunes before jailbreaking anyway).
So there it is, folks. Jailbreaking is awesome and there is nothing wrong with it unless you are trying to make there be something wrong with it. I want to write Maze Of Life for the iPhone; is that wrong? No! Not at all. :) Incidentally, the original reason that I preferred a BlackBerry over an iPhone is the fact that you can easily write programs for the BlackBerry, but now with jailbreaking, you can do that for the iPhone too! Yay!
Also, I just wanted to point out that I am awesome and a trend-setter as after I jailbroke my iPod on Monday, TimTam followed suit. Drifty has jailbroken her iPod, as well as a few others', apparently. :P Jailbreaking for the win!
onInteresting, The Option Of Complete And Utter Indifference tied with the positive option. You people really do think you're so funny. Well, actually, so do I, seeing as I made the option. Anyway, shame on whoever voted negative and yay Starfall!
Are you excited about the fact that omg Starfall might ACTUALLY be finished soon? YES! nags Starla - 5 vote(s)! Lol, no it's not. :P - 2 vote(s)! I really couldn't care less. - 0 vote(s)! I care less than Option 3. I can't even be bothered to pick whichever option suits me the best, I just want to vote and get out of here. So there. - 5 vote(s)!
Actually, Starfall is sort of progressing. I posted my chapter synopsis last week, woo-hoo! I won't give you the link because I don't want to ruin the story for those who aren't involved with the process already. :P
Anyway, I can't be bothered to rant about how much I hate writing poll posts this week, so I'm just going to skip right to Caption'd:
Passionate About Doughnuts
Gleefully Held Hostage
So, things are happening! I worked on Four Island a bit this week, wrote a couple of posts, stabbed some people, it's all good. In fact, since I am pretty much free all month, you can expect more posts from me because I'm in that kind of mood. :P Anyway: I HATE POLL POSTS! :P
onAs most of you may know, I am filled with a contempt for Facebook that is a lot of contempt. Why yes. Dot dot dot. Anyway, though I have not yet posted my reasons for quitting Facebook on Four Island, I will make sure that I do so before I completely quit. Yes, I'm only going to gradually phase out of Facebook because a lot of people still use Facebook for a ton of various things and while it's going to be difficult convincing my friends to use these alternatives that exist, it will hopefully be possible.
You may notice that this post says "Phase 2". That is because I have already been doing Phase 1 for quite a while: stop logging into Facebook. I haven't logged into the Facebook Website (though I still log into Facebook Chat via Pidgin) for quite some time now; the only exceptions being when people specifically tell me to go look at something. So I think Phase 1 has been a success.
Phase 2 starts today. As of August 6th 2010, I have disabled email notifications on Facebook messages. That means that if you send me a Facebook message (instead of doing the proper thing and just emailing me), I will not know about it, I will not read it and I will certainly not respond to it. Sorry if this sounds a bit mean, but I am very tired of receiving emails from Facebook notifying me of messages that I have to go back to Facebook to reply to and not being able to have my entire email archive IN my email account and having the nice pretty email threads that GMail does.
I will probably not implement Phase 3 for a month or so, just so people can get used to Phase 2. While Phase 2 isn't really too difficult to do as most people have normal email accounts (in fact, you need to have one to get a Facebook account), Phase 3 is a bit more dangerous because it assesses the laziness of my friends. YOU CAN DO IT, FRIENDS! BE STRONG! :P
So, remember, the next time you want to send me an asynchronous long message, what do you do? Email it to me. Because if you Facebook Message it to me, it would be equivalent to writing a letter and then burning it. Because I may never, in fact, see it.
EDIT: Oh yeah, you may have noticed: I changed the font on Four Island for Layout 7. It's a webfont called Delicious (with a fallback of Verdana) that I think looks quite beautiful and just the right size. This is a pleasant change from Lucida Grande (with a fallback of Arial) which, though I LOVE Lucida Grande in the desktop environment, I think made Four Island rather ugly and difficult to read. Hopefully this works well! :D
onYes, I am going to yell at Apple in this post. But, first of all, let me make something clear: while I have been largely negative toward Apple in the past (and I still am apathetic towards the Mac, which was my original target), I love my iPod touch. I don't know how I lived without it. I mean, as I type this, I am on vacation, at a hotel, swinging on a swing while listening to music. I know, right? :P (Though I really do want an iPhone; I mean, seriously, Internet everywhere? Awesome!)
But right now, I'm fairly annoyed at them. On July 31st, I got two iTunes giftcards and used $5.99 off one of them to purchase an upgrade to Palringo Premium (a version of Palringo, an awesome instant messaging app for iPhones, that has features that I need like Message Logging :P). My account was debited, but I never received the upgrade. Shock. And horror, I guess. I tried to report this to Apple, but when I went to iTunes to do so, the link simply sent me to Apple's support site. What? Something was definitely wrong, because if I tried to report a problem with any other purchase, it would let me. This made me very angry. I sent an email to Palringo's support team and have not yet received a response. A response better come or else.... I'LL START SINGING KATE NASH SONGS! :P
Anyway, on a lighter note, I did something yesterday that made me love my iPod even more. That's right, I jailbroke it. :P I had been trying to find a way to jailbreak my iPod, but newer iDevices (iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPod touch 2 MC model and iPod touch 3) with iOS 4 had no available jailbreaks and I was sad. However, when I was searching around again yesterday, I found something amazing. A brand new (it literally came out like yesterday or the night before) userland jailbreak for nearly every iDevice, compatible with iOS 4.
I think, at that point, I started jumping around and spitting out my cream soda, which was a bit of a shame because you can't get cream soda anywhere and I do love it. The best part of this jailbreak, though? IT'S SO EASY. You literally just have to open a page in Safari, slide a bar to the right to activate the jailbreak and wait a few minutes. You will likely have to retry quite a few times because the jailbreak is brand new and the servers are clogged (rebooting helps too), but it's soooooo worth it. Here, read this tutorial.
Anyway, now I have something that makes me happy. And what's that? LIVE SCROBBLING ON MY IPOD OH YEAH FIRE MUFFINS. Seriously, I told you before, I'm insane. And the iPod scrobbler that I used to have to use on my computer would either scrobble each song far too many times or take a very long time doing the right job. And either way would result in completely falsified timestamps because the iPod could only track the last listen of a song. Now, with the Scrobbl app, songs are scrobbled AS I LISTEN TO THEM and if I don't have WiFi at the moment, it'll queue the songs for scrobbling for the next time I am connected. THIS.... THIS IS JUST AWESOME. GIVE ME A HUG, SCROBBL. GIVE ME A HUG.
Anyway, I am very excited about that and doing more jailbroken-y things on my iPod. What's that? I could do what? I COULD MAKE APPS FOR MY IPOD NOW?!?!? Yes, that would be AWESOME: I could make apps for my iPod now that it's jailbroken! I could totally write Maze Of Life or something, create my own Cydia repository and put it up! IT WOULD BE GREAT-TASTIC! Of course, I'd have to learn Objective-C and all of Apple's garbage APIs, but wouldn't it be fun to develop apps for the iPod? Yes, WOULDN'T IT?!?!?!?
Oh, by the way, that reminds me: I've had a new version of Maze Of Life that I've been meaning to release for quite a while. I should do that soon. :P
onLol, the poll has finished! Sorry to those not in the know (basically everyone), but this poll is the result of a combination of two inside jokes that you would probably be better off not knowing. Anyway, here are the results!
What's your favorite shirt from Gap Senile? "Help, I'm Lost" - 0 vote(s)! "Excuse Me, I Need Some Ice Cream. Here's My Wallet; Can You Help?" - 2 vote(s)! "Do You Know What My Name Is? Please?" - 3 vote(s)! "I Gotta BM" - 1 vote(s)!
This week's poll is a bit silly too, but it's actually a bit relevant as well! Did you hear? Starfall, the story that Drifty, TimTam and I have been collaboratively writing for THE PAST TWO YEARS (TOTALLY NOT MY FAULT THIS TIME :P) is finally up to the final chapter! And who has the ominous Chapter 10 been assigned to? Oh god, it's me. :P NAG ME, NAG ME, NAG ME IN THE COMMENTS! :P
Another note: I HAVE BEEN VERY LAZY RECENTLY. And by recently, I MEAN ABOUT A YEAR. I haven't done any real, solid programming since InstaDisc fell through (apart from some short-lived attempts at creating The TGS Website). WHY IS THAT? Something needs to be done here, but mailing me flaming crates of C4 is really messy, so we're going to have to find a different way. Yeah. fizzles out
Anyway, CAPTION'D TIME! :D
Prozac
Phone Service
On a random final note: I changed my fourm avatar to Kate Nash (WHO IS AWESOME)! That, plus Twitter, says that there's going to be another music review soon! Actually, there will be two because I have recently acquired two CDs (and possibly a third in a few hours :P). Anyway, runs away
onHello, it's me again! Before you scream and run away to the funny farm where life is beautiful all the time, and I'll be happy to see those nice young men in their clean white coats and they're coming to take me away ha ha, they're coming to take me away, LISTEN. Yes, I'm ranting about something in uppercase letters that doesn't pertain to the English language. Shock and horror.
Anyway, this rant is mainly about my "No WWW" policy and EDUCATING the CHILDREN with THE TRUTH. THAT'S RIGHT LITTLE JOHNNY, THAT WASN'T SANTA CLAUS UNDER THE MISTLETOE! IT WAS YOUR REAL FATHER! Um, anyway, I felt the need to do this because first of all, I run Four Island at a Class B no-www compliance level and I've never actually talked about it and because last week, after explaining a bit about how the World Wide Web was not the same thing as the Internet to my cousin, she rebounded with this: "So, does that mean that Four Island isn't part of the World Wide Web because it doesn't have a www?"
No, Keke Palmer, it doesn't. (Lol, seriously, no offense, I like ranting! PLEASE DUN KILL ME- static) Let's begin with what a URL actually needs to be part of the World Wide Web. No, it's not the "www.", it's the "http://" that most people have only seen in their community college's Computing 101 course where they get to learn how to increase the font size in Microsoft Internet Explorer 2.03. The World Wide Web (which was invented by Tim Burners Lee, who is awesome) actually goes by another, less common to non-techy people, name: The Hypertext Transfer Protocol. I'm not really going to go into it much because I'm afraid my popcorn will get cold but basically, the Internet is full of many, many different ways to transfer information and the way you use the Internet to see webpages is HTTP. That's what that "http://" in front of URLs means; that it's going to let you see a webpage or a picture or a sound file. Or a picture of a sound file... or something like that. The reason that it's necessary is because, as I said earlier, there are many different ways of transferring information on the Internet and you have to tell your computer which one you want. However, many people don't know this because most web browsers created after 1650 automatically add the "http://" if you "forget" (read: don't realize the existence or necessity of) it.
On the other hand, there's "www." I have witnessed some horrible things with "www."s such as someone reciting a link to someone at a computer and the person at a computer MANUALLY ADDS IN a www. even if the other person didn't say to add one. I see people go "Hey, let's Google that" (which, by the way, you shouldn't say because it's trademark infringement (yes, I went the Googleplex last week and it was awesome (YOU GET FREE CANDY AND SODA! SO WORKING THERE! :P))) and go to their computer and type in "WWW.GOOGLE.COM". Yes, in all caps, but that's not the point; the point is that they added four completely unnecessary characters to what they had to type WHICH MADE THEM MORE SUSCEPTIBLE TO CARPEL TUNNEL! SEE, FOLKS? USING WWW. IN FRONT OF EVERY URL CAN KILL YOU! DON'T DO IT!
The use of "www." in front of URLs most likely came from the old standard of putting your servers at subdomains corresponding to their function, such as "www" for web servers, "mail" or "smtp" for email servers and "ftp" for FTP servers. However, THIS ISN'T NECESSARY! IT'S JUST A STANDARD! In fact, as some of you may know, if you leave out the www. in a URL.... IT WILL STILL WORK! OH MY GOD! HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE?!?!?! It's possible due to a magical thing call DNS and the kindness of your local detergent salesperson.
The reason why I don't like "www."s is because it makes me angry when I see people think that it's necessary and that the Internet is the same thing as the World Wide Web and was invented by some guy named Bob. I'm sure some guy named Bob has set up an intranet in his local laundromat that wants to go "TOTALLY DOT COM", but he didn't invent The Internet. Also, I think domains look prettier without the "www." in front. www.fourisland.com. fourisland.com. Yeah, someone's winning Hottest Domain Of The Year.
Also, while, I'm at it, no, Obama does not have a button that can turn off the Internet. There is no conspiracy or CIA cover-up because IT'S PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE WITHOUT BLOWING UP PLANET EARTH. (However, you could theoretically disable the Internet for people who aren't insane and memorize IP addresses by blowing up the 13 root nameservers of the Internet, but they're heavily protected (seriously, people have tried to attack them. Twice). Wow, that would be an AWESOME movie: "NO! WE HAVE TO SAVE THE INTERNET!!!! NAMESERVER G IS GOING DOWN! HAND ME THAT ETHERNET CABLE! WHY ISN'T DMAP INSTALLED ON THIS COMPUTER?!?!?")
I'm sorry, I'm off to file copyright papers. That idea is just too awesome to let go.