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Why I Love The Internet

May 10, 2012 in Google by Ezra S F |

Everything is out there. From the most profound to the most mundane, whatever I need to know when I need to know it.

Last week I set my DVR to record a series. I knew it was in re-runs and British. The DVR sucks in the sense it gives an original air date but not an episode number. The first episode I got was not called “Pilot”. At this point I had no idea whether I have the first, the sixth, or the eleventh.

So I toss the show title with episode list into a Google search. It pulls up several sites with episode titles and their dates. I could have just gone to imdb.com. Turns out I had the third. (Plus there are places offering to let me watch the series online.)

Probably I search too much instead of going to specific sites I know first.

There is something rewarding between hitting the button and seeing results. It feels so good.

How much does the Internet weigh?

November 11, 2011 in Internet, Movies / Films / TV by Ezra S F |

An interesting attempt to calculate the weight of the Internet. Not the machines or fiber. But the amount of data and weight of electrons used.

Smaller Java Cache

September 16, 2011 in Blackboard Vista, Browsers by Ezra S F |

One of our campus Blackboard Learning System Vista Enterprise administrators reported to have reduced the number of Java cache related issues (failed sessions) by changing the Disk Space Allotment from the 1,000 MB default down to 100 MB. This is found in the Java Control Panel > General tab > Temporary Internet Files: Settings. I am curious if anyone else has found this to be the case?

The purpose of web browsers having a cache was to speed up use of a web site by not having to download content again. RAM is faster than disk is faster than Internet. (This especially was true in the mid 1990s.) Take a look at this web site. There is the image at the top plus various CSS, and JS files. It looks like there are a good 224 KB in CSS, JS, and their supporting images. Rather than download significant amount of content again, with the appropriate settings a browser will check whether the size changed (assume no changes) or it expired (really that it is stale). If neither are true, then it uses what it already has. This will make my web site load faster for the user. So caching is a very good thing.

Java Plug-in, the client downloading and rendering applets in a web browser, works similarly. It can keep a copy of the applet in a cache. Starting with Java 1.3 there are even parameters placed in the HTML for applet caching. It looks to me like the HTML Creator, really edit-on(R) Pro by RealObjects, JavaScript for instantiating the applet has settings which enable Java to keep it in its cache.

The default cache size of 1,000 MB sounded excessive at first. Do people really reach the point where the whole cached is used? Looking at mine, I have 4 items in Applications from running them on my desktop plus around 2,200 items in Resources. All this takes up only 155 MB. Most of them are tiny files. The largest ones in Resources are from the various Vista  clusters I administrate. Therefore setting this to 100 MB as recommended probably means these getting downloaded more often and waiting on 1MB+ files to download. Glad we have a fast Internet connection at work. Sucks to be the students on DSL who follow this advice and use lots of Java-based applets.

If the Java Plug-in cache was buggy, then I could foresee problems with display of applets. It should download the applet but does not, it should not download the applet but does, the wrong applet is used, a corrupted applet is used. Instead, this seems to be claiming to solve an issue were the web browser lost the session cookie. It seems very unlikely to me that a Java Plug-in could cause a web browser to lose a session cookie much less changing the cache size fix it.

Pneumatic tubes

August 3, 2011 in History by Ezra S F |

According to Dan Pink, John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. predicted several things:

Among his calls: Americans will be taller. (True) There will be no C, X, or Q in the alphabet. (False) Photographs will be telegraphed from large distances. (True) Rats and mice will be gone. (False). Pneumatic tubes, instead of store wagons, will deliver packages and bundles. (False, but Amazon is working on it.)

The pneumatic tube one was interesting. Packages and bundles would have included memos, correspondence, and perhaps even books or games. The Internet was so “eloquently” described by Senator Ted Stevens, “The Internet is not something you just dump something on. It is not a truck. It is a series of tubes.” Most memos, and correspondence these days is carried over the Internet. Books are getting there. So maybe this should be a partial?

Am I too generous?

TED Talk: The Filter Bubble

May 6, 2011 in Facebook, Google by Ezra S F |

Companies are personalizing web sites for us. Facebook only shows us things like what we have before clicked. Google gives us search results tailored either to our user id or a number of factors.

Basically, our perspective of what is on the Internet could be highly flawed due to actions we had no idea was judging us. So usually clicking on Democratic news items filters out the Conservative perspective which helps us be more balanced in our thinking.

TED Talk: How Kids Teach Themselves

March 24, 2011 in Socio / Anthro / Archae by Ezra S F |

Find it amazing children who have never been exposed English can learn it from a kiosk with just 1980-90s computer games made available to them. That the kids worked in groups appears to enhance the effect was also pretty interesting. One child would operate with 3 advising and all 4 would test the same, so they learn as much by watching as doing.

Speaking at LIFT 2007, Sugata Mitra talks about his Hole in the Wall project. Young kids in this project figured out how to use a PC on their own — and then taught other kids. He asks, what else can children teach themselves?

In 1999, Sugata Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other.

In the following years they replicated the experiment in other parts of India, urban and rural, with similar results, challenging some of the key assumptions of formal education. The “Hole in the Wall” project demonstrates that, even in the absence of any direct input from a teacher, an environment that stimulates curiosity can cause learning through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge. Mitra, who’s now a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University (UK), calls it “minimally invasive education.”

    “Education-as-usual assumes that kids are empty vessels who need to be sat down in a room and filled with curricular content. Dr. Mitra’s experiments prove that wrong.”
    Linux Journal

Please Don’t Write Off the LMS Just Yet

October 26, 2010 in Learning Management Sys, University by Ezra S F |

Found the Educational Technology Trends 2010 quite interesting. Especially the part which predicts yet again (still?) the death of the LMS.

Both learning and learning content are moving away from traditional centripetal models, in which everything happens at set locations and is controlled at the institutional/publisher level (top-down), and moving toward centrifugal models that are learner-focused (bottom-up) and in which learning happens wherever a student happens to be. This means new platform models for learning (post-LMS), greater mobile access, more flexible e-commerce models, and a renewed explosion in generic online learning.

I suspect the relationship between the LMS and what is next is more like  LMS : post-LMS/PLE/DIY U :: book : Internet. The Internet has not as of yet killed off the book. We still have plenty of books available. Even books are shifting towards digital. The Internet just moved into greater prominence and changed how we think. Similarly, new platforms may result in something which we will think of as how students learn in higher education, but the LMS will still be around for a very long while. (Which is good because it means I still have a job for a while.)

Linux Adventure Part 2

December 2, 2009 in Hardware, Unix / Comp Languages by Ezra S F |

Linux Adventure Part 1 | Linux Adventure Part 3 [SOLVED]

So far into the story, I tried repairing Windows Vista which failed to actually give me a working entry into the operating system. The Linux Live CDs were non-committed forays into Knoppix, CentOS, and Ubuntu. All failed to turn on the wireless. An ethernet cord would have gotten me online.

So I was stuck with pretty much a brick.

My next step was to venture out to the store and buy a hard drive. The Ubuntu CD included an installer, so I used it to install a local copy. Continued research revealed my problem probably was the fact my computer came with a Broadcom 4312 card. (My brother said my problem was trying use wireless with Linux.)

Without an ethernet connection, I ended up installing Linux STA drivers from source by downloading them and transferring them by FTP.  No good. Multiple times. I never got it to recognize them. Other options called for installing a firmware update on the wireless card. The idea of a firmware update to the wireless card making me stuck on Linux worries me.

Thankfully I got home to where I have ethernet cords. By this point, I had so completely hosed things, so I reinstalled Ubuntu to start over fresh. Now seeing the Internet through the LAN, Ubuntu offered me “restricted” hardware drivers. The b43 set didn’t do anything. The STA set did enable the Wireless option. Even dhclient referenced eth2! However, the wifi status light doesn’t turn on when I enable wireless. Ugh. So the drivers work better but not enough to get it working.

Also, (based on the time stamp of the file I was able to find in a backup of the problem laptop) I haven’t connected a computer to my home network since February, so I didn’t remember what was the password for the network. Finding which computer or external drive contained the information took a few hours. Yay for backups.

Linux Adventure Part 1 | Linux Adventure Part 3 [SOLVED]

Useful User Agents

October 21, 2009 in Blackboard Vista by Ezra S F |

Rather than depend on end users to accurately report the browser used, I look for the user-agent in the web server logs. (Yes, I know it can be spoofed. Power users would be trying different things to resolve their own issues not coming to us.)

Followers of this blog may recall I changed the Weblogic config.xml to record user agents to the webserver.log.

One trick I use is the double quotes in awk to identify just the user agent. This information is then sorting by name to count (uniq -c) how many of each is present. Finally, I sort again by number with the largest at the top to see which are the most common.

grep <term> webserver.log | awk -F\” ‘{print $2}’ | sort | uniq -c | sort -n -r

This is what I will use looking for a specific user. If I am looking at a wider range, such as the user age for hits on a page, then I probably will use the head command to look at the top 20.

A “feature” of this is getting the build (Firefox 3.011) rather than just the version (Firefox 3). For getting the version, I tend to use something more like this to count the found version out of the log.

grep <term> webserver.log | awk -F\” ‘{print $2}’ | grep -c ‘<version>’

I have yet to see many CE/Vista URIs with the names of web browsers. So these are the most common versions one would likely find (what to grep – name – notes):

  1. MSIE # – Microsoft Internet Explorer – I’ve seen 5 through 8 in the last few months.
  2. Firefox # – Mozilla Firefox – I’ve seen 2 through 3.5. There is enough difference between 3 and 3.5 (also 2 and 2.5) I would count them separately.
  3. Safari – Apple/WebKit – In searching for this one, I would add to the search a ‘grep -v Chrome’ or to eliminate Google Chrome user agents.
  4. Chrome # – Google Chrome – Only versions 1 and 2.

Naturally there many, many others. It surprised me to see iPhone and Android on the list.

Why Read Books?

October 19, 2009 in Books / Novels / Writing, Internet by Ezra S F |

That I read books probably lowers my highly coveted geek cred. Instead, e-books read on the computer screen, phone screen, or e-book reader should have long ago replaced reading on dead wood. Unfortunately, I am intentionally avoiding reading books much on computers, phone, or readers.

  1. Why I need a purseNo purse to carry more stuff. I have big fingers, so I need stuff with big buttons. Things like iPhones are maddening to use because I cannot seem to hit the buttons correctly. Things with lots of big buttons tend to be big which makes them a pain to carry.

  2. Never underestimate my ability to break toys. Only the most resilient of electronic toys survive me. It isn’t uncommon for my laptops, phones, or cameras to experience 5 foot falls. Everything I carry with me ends up with marks from the abuse even books. Paper can take the abuse. I have no faith e-book readers could maintain their screens from being around me.
  3. Computers tend to tempt me to fail at multi-tasking. When I shut down my computer to go home, I typically have at the minimum a dozen windows. (Even the client I use to connect to my servers usually can fill that dozen.) Reading on a computer rarely will result in more than a page of reading every 10 minutes. Because blog posts are usually pretty short, distractions have less chance to interfere with reading them.
  4. Books are common enough people accept them as normal. Cool toys attract attention. I’d expect an expensive phone or e-reader or laptop to attract the kind of attention which results in theft. Books are cheap few would care to go to the effort.
  5. Phone are becoming more like computers. What I don’t want is a phone (or another device) which I treat like my computer, aka failing at multi-tasking. Just today I squared 1024 on paper instead of using the calculator on my phone. Having access to the Internet through my phone could be bad for keeping me on task.
  6. Why faux paper when you could use paper? The e-book readers market how much their technology looks like paper. Paper looks, feels, smells, and tastes like paper.
    :)
  7. Spending money on a device to get to read seems counter-intuitive. The devices should be subsidized by the content. But that would mean Amazon $10 books would cost more like $20.

Typically I don’t change until I have a problem with what I am using. Books don’t cause me problems. So I am happy to continue to read books for the foreseeable future.

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