Off the Top: Internet Entries
Showing posts: 106-120 of 138 total posts
An entertaining overview of VoIP or voice over Internet protocols for those unfamiliar with this acronym. I am a little more impressed with the quality of the limited Internet on my mobile phone than I am with VoIP at the moment. This is saying a lot, given the current state of mobile Internet in the U.S. VoIP works fairly well over large bandwidth that has solid quality of service agreements (QoS) with the providers. Internally on a large organization's wide area network (WAN) the quality is not to bad either, but this is not the everyday person either that has this capability.
Beeb also offers an insight into the Rocket Network, which is a collaboration tool that unites musicians virtually. The network lets artist collaborate anywhere in the world, but that is the same story for anything that touches the Internet.
Of conference interest for Web and mobile types: 9th International World Wide Web Conference in Amsterdam, NL; Thunder Lizard's Web Design World 2002. These look to be interesting, particularly the International WWW Conference, which offers the mobile perspective.
Web robots
Want to explore Web robots? The Database of Web Robots is a great starting place. This is also a good place to find information about those robots you find in your access logs. [hat tip Cam]Ooh, cookie paranoia strikes the CIA. The U.S. Congress blundered its understanding of cookies and has proven itself inept on understanding technology. The U.S. in trying to combat cross-site cookies, as in Double Click, ended up giving cookies themselves a bad name. Cookies running on one site and not sharing information with another site are innocuous and actually are what keep sites running properly. Cookies ease personalization and enable bringing desired information to the user easily. I know you understand this, you are using the Web and you are intelligent as you come to a site that is overly verbose.
I am sitting in the Austin Airport using an 802.11b wireless connection to collect and read e-mail and to post here. The world of wireless connectivity has been kick ass this trip. The SXSWi guerilla wireless efforts by Cory (boingboing) Doctorow were greatly appreciated and widely used and many of us would offer our first child or at least a beer for his fine efforts.
Another observation of this trip is the insanely wide use of Apple laptops. They were everywhere at the conference, it was almost as if they were in the conference bag of goodies. Those of us on Mac had little problem grabbing wireless connections and were showing our pictures to others we had taken. By the end of the conference many of the Windows folks were cursing their non-compliant and non-easy to adopt laptops. Not only were the graphic folks using Apple, but the tech geeks were too (this is where I fit in, believe me). Even Doc Searls was Mac'n around. In the land of Dell, Apple proved to be king.
I am somewhat saddend to be heading home and leaving old and many new friends behind. SXSW is a place were passion for the Internet rules and sharing our passion, knowledge, and experience is what it is all about. Hair color, age, gender, skin color, or location is not important as the passion binds us together. We are all out to make the Web and Internet a better place to be. To a person we all have become much better people because of the free sharing and passion. Jack Vallenti and his trying to label us terrorists is not only poor sighted but a fat lie. We share to grow and learn. Jack only want to play his Anderson card and shred our reality. (There will be more later to clarify and to help you understand what I mean by these comments.) Liars and fear mongers are trying to steal the truth, but Austin let truth ring out. You bet your sweet bippy, I'll be back.
I love all those I met and whose paths I crossed and wish all safe journies home. Keep the passion alive.
Yesterday was all about getting the synapses to fire in the right order at SXSWi. I was running on sever sleep deprivation from phones and alarm clocks ringing when I had not finished my needed sleep cycle. None-the-less I had a great time. I greatly enjoyed Steve Champeon's peer panel on Non-Traditional Web Design, as it focussed on the fine art of tagging content, understanding the uses of information, and the true separation of content, presentation, and application controlling the information. The Web Demo panel I was on seemed to go rather well as there were a broad spectrum of sites reviewed and the information from the panel to the developers was of great use (I hope) as I think we all learned something.
The evening provided good entertainment, a wonderful gattering at the EFF party. Once again many folks adjourned to the Omni Hotel lobby for the after-hours social gathering. I spent much of the time just listening to conversation and occasionally partaking. Of intrigue was Rusty of Kuro5hin and Adam of Brian of Slashdot discussion development of site tools that will help a dynamic site fly, keep in mind all these tools are in Perl.
PHP has a security hole that warrants a patch/upgrade ASAP. Hopefully you are running PHP on server with a recent version of Apache so that it is built in using Apache's dynamic modules. This will make the upgrade a breeze. Fortunately my Web host had upgraded this server to PHP 4.1.2 prior to the news coming out. My host? PHP Web Hosting.
The U.S. Government relaunched their central information sourcse today. First Gov is a much better resource this go around. The site is very quick and serves information based on queries very quickly. Now I really want to know more about how it was put together. The site seems to quickly and easily get the user to information. Parsing through the amount of information that is available on government sites is a daunting task. Now if am very curious.
InfoWorld has an interview with the executive director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Dan Reed discussing the computing grid. This is somewhat like having an electric grid but the commodity is data. The grid's biggest hurdle is interacting with differing data types for essentially similar data. This he explains is bridged using metadata. The metadata needs are enormous. Understanding the information and data is paramount to the task and getting the system right.
In following the ArsDigita closure, I have found many linking to a diary of a start-up, or how ArsDigita began. The goals and inspiration for the company are a place that many would want to work. Remembering back there seemed to me many places that had high-minded goals, but lost sight when money came in. Philip Greenspun also offers his take, which includes a great insight...
Spending time in the aviation world has given rise to some thoughts about why there are so few plane crashes and so many business failures. The FAA establishes strict guidelines on what training and experience is required before someone can be pilot-in-command in various situations (daytime, nighttime, instrument conditions, single engine, multiengine, turbine, all alone, one passenger, lots of passengers, etc.). The president of United Airlines can't hire his old college buddy and put him behind the yoke of a 747 because he has a good gut feeling that Biff can handle the job. Very seldom is a pilot legally able to get into a situation that is beyond his or her capabilities, training, and experience (JFK, Jr., for example, was flying in instrument meteorological conditions with only a visual flight rules rating; he was legally required to make an immediate U-turn and fly back into the clear). But in the business world the Peter Principle rules: people are promoted until they reach a job at their level of incompetence. Because there are no standards, it really isn't possible to say whether a person is unfit for a business job until and unless you give him or her the job. Afterwards it is tough to admit that you made a mistake and demote or fire the incompetent-at-that-level person.This is very much a meritocracy mindset, which a lot of us that are in techinical fields hold to be true.