Category: Internet matters

Posts about the internet

A supercomputer on every desk

One product of globalization and technological advance is the amplification of the ‘pygmy and giant’ phenomenon. On measures like wealth or fame, the world is probably more unequal than ever before. There are faces that would probably be recognized by a significant majority of those alive on Earth – probably a situation that has only existed for a few decades at most.

At the same time, technology is sometimes a great equalizer. For instance, the world wide web lets virtually anyone with literacy and moderate wealth speak to a worldwide audience. The range of capabilities is also narrowing in other areas. For example, Wal-Mart supposedly has about 583 terabytes of sales and inventory data stored at its headquarters. That sounds impressive until I remember the 1 terabyte drive sitting on my desk. It cost about three days worth of after-tax pay and serves the major purpose of protecting my data from the failure of the disk in my main computer. At a moderate personal expense, I have 0.17% of Wal-Mart’s storage capacity.

The amount of computing power you can get per dollar (or per watt of electricity), continues to increase dramatically. For the price of a sports car, you can build yourself a supercomputer. It is interesting to speculate upon what the democratization of computing power will lead to. Will it just mean increasingly realistic games and ever-more-bloated word processors, or will some genuinely game-changing applications emerge? The fact that someone can host a webpage like this for under $40 a year suggests the potential importance of this confluence in technology, economics, and innovation.

Link rot

Anyone who has been running a website for a few years (and paying attention) will be familiar with the reality of link rot. Sites get redesigned or removed from the web and, in so doing, links you have made to them in the past cease to be functional or lead to the right content.

Unfortunately, there isn’t a huge amount that can be done about this. For the people doing the linking, there is only so much effort that can be devoted to making sure old links are still current. It is feasible for a few critical links (blogroll items, links in key posts), but not in the case of hundreds or even thousands of old entries. If the content had been moved, there is at least the theoretical possibility of combatting link rot through updating. If the content is simply gone, there is really very little that can be done.

Those being linked can probably do the most in response. When they move from one type of site organization (or one site location) to another, they can provide tools to help those brought in through old links. The gold standard is to automatically redirect people to the correct pages in new locations. At the very least, sites should provide a mechanism for lost visitors to search for the content they wanted.

Track stolen laptops with Adeona

Those enthusiastically toting their MacBooks, MacBook Pros, and MacBook Airs to coffee shops and university libraries should take note of Adeona: a free program that helps recover laptops in the event of loss or theft.

Installation is very simple: download a file, double click an installer, and choose a password. Once the program is running, it can be forgotten entirely unless needed. It won’t give you the name and phone number of the disreputable person who made off with your lovely portable Mac, but it will give you information about any network the computer has been connected to. If your computer has a built-in camera, it can also be used to snap a picture of the perpetrator. That function probably also justifies putting it on any desktop PCs with an integral camera, such as the 20″ and 24″ iMacs.

The software isn’t exclusively for Apple products (though those who shell out the cash for Steve Jobs’ toys might need it most). Versions are also available for Linux, Windows XP, and Vista.

Enforcing open source licenses

An American court has ruled in favour of Robert Jacobsen – a man who wrote software for model trains and released it under an open source license. Ignoring the requirement in the license that derivative work credit the original and provide the original code, a commercial company made a product using the code. Under this court decision, the violation of the open source license means that the company’s behaviour consitutes copyright infringement.

I personally see a lot of value to the ‘some rights reserved’ approach of Creative Commons and others. By not requiring payment for non-commercial usage, such licenses can avoid blocking the experimentation of hobbyists. By reserving rights over later commercial usage, they prevent the abuse of materials created for general public usage. Such licenses provide the flexibility to share, along with the assurance that others will share in return.

Seeing the legal integrity of such contracts upheld is thus especially gratifying. For information on the Creative Commons license applied to my blog posts and photographs, see this page.

Editing video using still photos

Recently, there was controversy about a doctored photograph showing four Iranian missiles launching, whereas the original apparently showed three and one on the ground. Errol Morris discussed the images on the website of the New York Times.

Photo and video editing are nothing new, but some new software seeks to make the former much easier. It combines video data with that from still photographs in order to accomplish many possible aims. For instance, it could be used to improve the resolution of a whole scene or elements within it. It could also correct for over- and under-exposed regions. Of course, it could also facilitate video manipulation. The skills and software required to edit still images are increasingly available. Combine that with this software and you could empower a slew of new video fraudsters.

It will be interesting to see what kind of countermeasures emerge from organizations concerned about data integrity. One route is forensic – identifying markers of manipulation and tools for uncovering them. Another relies on requiring technologies and techniques for those capturing and submitting video. That could involve the expectation of multiple independent photos and videos produced from different angles using different equipment, or perhaps the widespread deployment of timestamps and cryptographic hashing to strengthen data integrity.

Online climate calculators

Here are two neat online climate-related calculation systems:

The first is provided by the American Environmental Protection Agency and allows for various kinds of conversions. You can work out what a volume of one greenhouse gas would be equivalent to in another gas; you can also look at a set quantity of carbon dioxide emissions as being equivalent to certain number of barrels of oil, homes heated for a year, etc.

The second site – RoofRay – lets you draw solar panels on top of buildings using the satellite photos in Google Maps. It then tells you how much it would cost to cover that area with panels, how much energy it would produce, and how long the system would take to pay off its own costs.

Backing up GMail

A recent Slashdot post raised a good question: Google Has All My Data – How Do I Back It Up?

I am a pretty determined Google user myself. While I have abandoned Blogger for WordPress and never much liked Picasa, I do have a pretty packed Google Account: Alerts, Analytics, Book Search, Calendar, Custom Search, Docs, GMail, Groups, iGoogle, Talk, Web History, and Webmaster Tools are all used to differing degrees. The bolded items, I would definitely mourn if lost.

Backing up most data fed to Google is probably best done by retaining the copy you had before you uploaded one to their system. That works well enough in the case of photos and MS Office documents. It doesn’t work with emails, however. This is annoying, because they are probably the most important and irreplaceable thing most people have entrusted to Google.

Thankfully, backing up your GMail is a relatively simple process. Start on a computer that (a) you already have a regime for backing up itself and which (b) has adequate hard drive space to store all your Google Mail. Then, follow these steps:

  1. Log into GMail
  2. Click ‘Settings’
  3. Click ‘Forwarding and POP/IMAP’
  4. Click the button beside ‘Enable POP for all mail’
  5. Configure a mail application like Outlook or Thunderbird to access the POP version of your GMail account.
  6. Watch all your messages move from Google’s ‘cloud’ to your hard drive

My GMail archive is an extremely valuable collection of data, greatly improved by the ability to search through it with ease. That functionality doesn’t carry over to the backup, but I do feel more at ease knowing that in the event of one of their data centres burning down (with no working backup tapes to recover from), I won’t have lost the messages forever.

Human Health in a Changing Climate

Health Canada has followed up the climate change impact assessment carried out by Natural Resources Canada with a report of their own: Human Health in a Changing Climate: A Canadian Assessment of Vulnerabilities and Adaptive Capacity. For some bizarre reason, they have decided not to post it on their website. Rather, it is available through email upon request. To simplify matters, here it is:

When I have the chance, I will merge them all into one file and post it.

[Update: 19 August 2008] Here is the whole thing as one 9 megabyte PDF: Human Health in a Changing Climate: A Canadian Assessment of Vulnerabilities and Adaptive Capacity.

[Update: 1 January 2012] Here is just the overview page as an image file.