Category: Internet matters

Posts about the internet

Seeking new Oxford bloggers

Oxford is positively laden with newly arriving students. At least some of them must be bloggers. If you are among them, please let a comment with a link back to your site (if you want it added to my listing of Oxford blogs). Likewise, if anyone has found such a fresher blog, please leave a comment that links back to it.

I will not link blogs immediately. Rather, I will wait to see that they:

  1. have at least some real content
  2. have been around for at least a few weeks

Otherwise, maintaining the list would take far too long, and too many items in it would be without much value.

All Oxford bloggers should remember that the fourth OxBloggers gathering is happening on Wednesday of 4th week, November 1st.

PS. Making a link in a blog comment is easy. Just use the following format, replacing the square brackets with pointy ones (the ones that look like this shape ^ turned on either side):

[a href=”http://www.thesiteyouarelinking.com”]the text you want for the link[/a]

That will make a string of blue text that says: “the text you want for the link.” When clicked, it will take the browser to www.thesiteyouarelinking.com. Every bit of the formatting is important, including the quotation marks, so be careful.

On being an inept and reluctant webmaster

A website I am managing (not this one) is proving exceptionally frustrating. When I disabled the ‘what you see is what you get’ (WYSIWYG) editor in WordPress, I did so because its name was a filthy lie. In truth, what you code, and check, and then check again in every other browser you care to support is what you get. Well, the content management system (CMS) for the other site it like the the WYSIWYG editor writ large: nothing you do actually shows on the site in the way it showed in the editor. Like with the WordPress editor, hundreds of useless tags get added in opening and closing pairs. What’ s more, the CMS has added many layers of complexity to what it, in essence, a very simple site. The only way I have been able to edit tables in one part of the site has been the grab the HTML, edit it using jEdit, then paste it back into the site. This is clearly not the kind of thing you should have to do when you are running an elaborate CMS.

The simplicity of the content, versus the complexity of the management, is tempting me to copy the whole site over to a new CMS that is more comprehensible. Right now, we are using a system called Mambo. In many ways, it is a lot like WordPress. It uses an SQL database to store content, then displays it on dynamically generated pages. I am pretty sure WordPress could actually handle everything this website does, though having it look like a blog would not be acceptable.

Does anybody know of a free CMS that can be hosted using Apache and MySQL that might be easier to work with than Mambo?

Fourth Oxford bloggers’ gathering proposed

Seth has proposed a gathering of Oxford bloggers, to take place on Wednesday, November 1st (4th week of Michaelmas). 8:00pm has been our normal starting time. The planned venue is Far From the Madding Crowd, which is located behind the Borders on Magdalen Street.

Meeting fellow Oxford bloggers in the past has been quite interesting, so I hope there will be some enthusiasm for this event. Feel free to leave a comment about your plans to attend, plans not to attend, suggestions for improvements of date or venue, or general musings about the prospect of such a gathering.

[Update: 12:15am] Seth has a post about this online as well.

First impressions of Tiger

Installation, performance, and headline features

Installing Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) was a breeze – certainly the only time I have been surprised by the ease of installing a major OS upgrade on top of an existing installation. Because of the simultaneity of my RAM upgrade and the installation of Tiger, I can’t discuss the performance effect of the new OS. In aggregate, the iBook runs like a whole new machine. While it used to creak and complain when running just Fetch and iPhoto, it now runs Firefox, iTunes, iPhoto, Photoshop, TextEdit, and Fetch without any trouble. Indeed, 321 megs of RAM are still inactive with that collection, as a Dashboard widget informs me (along with weather forecasts for Oxford, and the all-important Canada-England exchange rate).

Another widget (pearLyrics, suggested by Jessica) is adding lyrics to my iTunes tracks as they are played, though it is oddly myopic when it comes to absurdly popular songs not released in the last ten years (most songs by Pink Floyd and The Beatles seem to stump it). This is a particularly useful function for me, as I am prone to either ignore lyrics entirely, focusing on the tone of a song, or spectacularly misinterpret them. I will leave the specific examples to my friends, for use in mocking me at parties.

Spotlight hasn’t proved terribly useful to me yet, mostly because I already have all my information sorted for easy location. That is not too unusual, however. All advanced search tools – from Google to Oxford’s OLIS – take time to become familiar enough to be really beneficial. Next time I am digging around for a particular file not viewed in months, it may prove its worth.

I have not used Automator yet, but I eventually want to create a workflow that takes an image file from iPhoto, opens it in Photoshop, resizes it to either 1024 pixels across for horizontal shots or 768 from top to bottom for vertical ones, lets me adjust the levels, lets me apply an unsharp mask, then creates a 320 pixel across the long axis thumbnail version, and uploads both versions to my server using Fetch. Ideally, it would then create an appropriate block of code to paste into WordPress, but this is all a project for a less hectic time.

Newly usable software

One of the reasons I decided to upgrade to Tiger was the desire to use the free application WriteRoom. The essence of simplicity, it is just a black screen onto which you type. Unlike almost all Mac applications, it can be made to take up the whole screen. There is no formatting – though there is optional spell-checking – and the simplicity seems to contribute to my ability to concentrate on the topic at hand. At a stroke, it becomes more like writing a letter than writing an email, which is clearly a valuable transition in a world where enough attention is rarely paid to written expression.

As soon as I can get my Airport card to work in passive mode with packet injection capabilities, the new version of KisMAC seems likely to be quite useful. It is already rather better than the standard Mac OS WiFi interface, in terms of detecting networks and revealing their characteristics.

Less obvious improvements

Another unexpectedly good feature of Mac OS 10.4 is the Grapher utility, which does both two and three dimensional graphing in a useful and attractive way. I may not have enormously much cause to use a graphing calculator these days, but it can be good to play around in an attempt to remember some fraction of what once I knew about trigonometric functions and calculus.

A few welcome improvements have also been made to Safari, though I have yet to open iCal (I use Google Calendar, though iCal would be grabbing the data from there and copying it to my iPod, if my iPod wasn’t broken again), Mail (I use Entourage and GMail), or Address Book (same). The improved PDF functions built into every Print dialog definitely look useful for anyone who does any sort of document publishing or collaboration.

PS. Unrelated to Tiger, but Apple-related: If you call Apple about your broken iPod using a scratchy enough Skype connection, they will call you back at their expense. Since spending time on hold at 30p a minute cell phone fees is among the most tooth-grinding of human experiences, this is good to know.

Radio communication

I have long found it surprising, and a bit unsettling, to think how many different overlapping radio signals there are surrounding and traversing us at all times. There are all the AM and FM radio stations, cell phones on different frequencies, communications from satellites, broadcast television, military and police radio frequencies, and miscellanous other signals such as aircraft transponders.

Most of that bandwidth is very inefficiently allocated, as with analog phones. Because frequencies have dedicated purposes that are not always being employed, there is a lot of bandwidth that is allocated but unused at any one time. The clever thing about more advanced systems like Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) cellular phones is that they can use dynamically allocated frequency, and thus scale bandwidth according to need.

If we could do the same with some the the excellent bandwidth given over to television or military purposes, large scale wireless internet could come about rather more quickly and easily. Wireless internet, such as it exists now (the 802.1x standards) are located in a really undesirable part of the radio spectrum – hence problems with range and interference. As in so many other cases, the stumbling block is more regulatory than technological.

On digitized books

For years, Project Gutenberg and related endeavours have been seeking to produce digital copies of books that are no longer under copyright. The Gutenberg people have already digitized 17,000. Purposes for doing so include making machine-readable copies available for those with disabilities, allowing for their use with e-book readers, and even in more creative applications – like printing books onto scarves, so that you can read them on flights from the UK to the United States.

In the grand tradition of huge companies incorporating the results of smaller enterprises, many (if not all) of the Gutenberg books are now available through Google Book Search. Figuring out which Jane Austen book a particular passage stuck in your memory is from has thus become a far simpler task. For years, I have been using The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, provided by MIT, to search through plays.

Admittedly, not many people want to sit in front of a monitor to read an entire book. With the development of electronic paper that has high resolution, high contrast, and no requirement for power consumption while displaying static information, perhaps this will all become a whole lot more useful.

Preferences, re: ponderings

The sky over Woodstock

A comment was posted earlier that has a certain resonance. While there is no greater online sin than blogging about blogging, I will trespass for a moment – always with the aim of pleasing you better, dear spectators. The comment:

You know, if you took the amount of time you spend on a week’s worth of these mediocre mumblings and used it to write one thing, it might be good?

This is a possibility I have wondered about myself. I feel a constant urge to write, but it may be better directed in a less haphazard direction. At the same time, about 100 people a day read the blog; I am willing to bet that is more people than will read my thesis, in total, between now and the end of humanity.

The issue, then, is not the medium, but the message. What would it be more socially useful to write? Before seeing that comment, I was going to write tonight’s post about metallurgy and the possibility that we are living in a ‘composite age.’ Hardly my area of expertise, and hardly an area of interest of most people who I know to be reading the blog.

The format of this blog is intentionally somewhat experimental, as well as somewhat scatterbrained. All told, I am skeptical about whether I can impose a pattern upon something as ephemeral as daily posts, but constructive criticism and suggestions about profitable directions to take would be most appreciated.

PS. We had our 30,000th visit today.

Creepy stuff

Who runs http://www.vroomfondel.co.uk? Also, why do they keep scanning through my blog? They do so through this page and seem particularly interested in anything involving NatWest: the bank where I foolishly opened an international student account.

Is anyone else getting several hits a day from these people? I don’t know who they are, but their URL is registered at the following address:

c/o Net Rank
Suite 1c, Western Way,
Exeter,
Devon
EX1 2DE
GB

Suffice it to say, I do not appreciate their attentions, at least so long as I don’t know who they are or what they are doing. If you run your own server, it is easy enough to ban people referred directly from their strange login site. Just add this to your .htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} vroomfondel\.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule .* – [F]

Depending how automated the system is, that might foil it. If it is run by a group of people working through that portal, they will be able to find another way to access your site, regardless of the above addition to your .htaccess file.