Great Walls of Fire

I was up late last night turning my home computer into a media server so that I could stream my music from anywhere (in theory) with an internet connection. After realizing how little I know and struggling to comprehend the first step of various Unix and php kernels, I finally tracked down a helpful explanation of what the hell to do. Thanks Hadley Stern!

Anyway one of the steps of the procedure involved opening up one of the "ports" on my computer as well as on my router. I understand what firewalls do in concept, but I had never had any reason to know their actual function until last night.

Firewalls were first put up in 1988 when the "Morris Worm" caused one of the first major internet security breaches in history. Firewalls are simply a means of restricting access to parts of a computer on a network. There a varying levels of trust such as the internet (no trust) versus an area or local network (high trust).

Firewalls have evolved over the years and have many different functions. Packet filters compare packets of information coming across a network and discard packets that do not comply with firewall settings. There are stateful filter which can analyze packets based on the type of connection they are connected with. A third type of firewall is an application layer or a proxy. These types of firewall can "understand" certain types of application (ftp, DNS, browsing) and determine if they are using non-standard ports. A port is a transfer protocol between computers. That is what I had to enable to open up my computer and turn it into a music server. And it works great, well kind of. All the music is there, and the concept is awesome, but the connection is a bit slow to handle the streaming (buffers more than it plays). But hey, at least I learned something.

via Wikipedia

Saturday Morning Commercials

I just put down an article on the soon to be unsheathed Transformers movie. An interesting fact that came up, of which I was previously unaware, was that the reason we had shows like Transformers, He-Man, Lone Star, Silverhawks, and their like is that in 1981 Ronald Regan eliminated many of the restrictions on children's programming that had been in place since the late 60's. The restrictions were put into play by the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) and NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) and included limitations such as a shortened allotment for commercials in children's programming (nine and a half minutes versus sixteen) as well as regulating the content of shows to ensure they were not simply the half hour long commercials as my generation would come to know and love. They went so far as to cancel the show Hot Wheels under that same provision. They even considered banning the advertising of that blight of the nation sugar.


However, at the beginning of the Regan era, all of those regulations went out the window. The doors were opened to the market and the Children's Television Act (which would have reinstated many of these limitations) was vetoed. Companies were given unrestricted access to young minds. We, of course, all know the result. Our whole generation grew up worshiping and collecting (or forcing our parents to buy) every single object with a price tag these poorly animated talking advertisements touched. Because of television deregulation in the early 80's valuable space in my brain is occupied by every name of every character from Thundercats and He-Man. At least Regan lost his mind too.

Via Everything 2

Auto Alchemy

Though the press was all over it last month, I just heard today about Purdue University Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Jerry Woodall's discovery that adding an aluminum + gallium solution to water yields hydrogen atoms. The is of particular interest for application to hydrogen fuel cells, and even more specifically to clean internal combustion engines. Previously no solid solution had been found for generating transporting and storing the hydrogen fuel. Woodall's process is safe, clean, and very efficient (two atoms of aluminum yield three atoms of hydrogen). It can be done on site with virtually any quality of aluminum and water (including salt water) and on the spot so hydrogen needn't be stored or transported.

The process is a simple chemical reaction. When water comes into contact with the aluminum pellets in the liquid gallium the hydrogen atoms separate and can be easily collected. Of course the implications are grand. It's clean, easy, safe, efficient, and the ingredients are plentiful. Keep you eyes open for developments.

A bit on the elements while I'm learning stuff. Gallium (Ga) is periodic element 31. It is a metal that melts just above room temperature, and will actually melt in your hands. In the form of gallium nitride and gallium arsenide, it is used as a semi conductor in LED's. It is not naturally occurring, but it easily derived from smelting.

Aluminum (Al 13) is a ductile member of the poor metals family of periodic elements. It is very lightweight and notable for it's ability to resist corrosion. Aluminum is nontoxic, nonmagnetic, and nonsparking.

Hydrogen (H 1) Hydrogen is the lightest and most abundant element making up roughly 75% of the universes' elemental mass. It is odorless, tasteless, nontoxic, and highly flammable. It will also someday hopefully power our lawnmowers and transportation.

Meeting with Problems

I was sitting in on a meeting at work this morning, and the boss was speaking with an SEO specialist about the big redesign of our website which we will soon undertake. Anyway, SEO was all they ever said, but they said it a lot. I nodded my head enough to seem like I knew what they were talking about, and I kept up with the rest of the discussion, but that acronym remained elusive until now:

from Wikipedia

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it "ranks," the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As a marketing strategy for increasing a site's relevancy, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. SEO efforts may involve a site's coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more noticeable efforts may include adding unique content to a site, and making sure that the content is easily indexed by search engines and also appeals to human visitors.

The acronym "SEO" can also refer to "search engine optimizers," a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term "search engine friendly" may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.

Additionally, I also found out about so called White Hat and Black Hat SEO, which means what you would assume. White hat is the good guys; playing by the rules and designing content for users and not resorting to deceptive tactics to improve their spot on the search engines. Black Hat is appropriately dark and deceptive, often using hidden text, and repeated word to lock in results and generate hits. Invent anything and people will exploit it. Trust me on this one.

And that's it. I'm going to be taking some training in it in the weeks to come, so I'll get more than my fair share of knowledge about it. But at least now I'll know what they're talking about. Just making sure your site is optimized as much as possible for web searching and trawling.

LOLcats

Now, I wouldn't consider myself a n00b by any stretch of the imagination. I have an avatar in Second Lie, although I forgot my password about a year ago and have yet to correct the matter. I'm on Flickr, Mog, Last FM, Skype, Veoh, Digg, Odeo, De.li.cious, all that newfangled web hipster 2.0 hoo-haa. But one avenue (well many, but this one for now) of the internet that I remain completely dumbfounded by is the explosion of LOLcats. I could try and put the craze into my own words, but I think I'd better let the experts speak on this one:


From Wikipedia

Lolcats, a compound of lol and cat,[1][2] are photos of cats with humorous captions. They are a type of image macro, and are thus also referred to as cat macros. Lolcats are created for the purpose of sharing them with others on imageboards and other internet forums, especially on Saturdays ("Caturdays").[3]

Lolcat images usually consist of a photo of a cat with a caption characteristically formatted in a sans serif font such as Impact or Arial Black.[4] The image is, on occasion, photoshopped for effect. The caption generally acts as a speech balloon encompassing a comment from the cat, or is a simple description of the depicted scene. The caption is intentionally written with deviations from standard English spelling and syntax[4] featuring "strangely-conjugated verbs, but [a tendency] to converge to a new set of rules in spelling and grammar."[5] These altered rules of English have been referred to as a type of pidgin[4] or baby talk.[6] The text is frequently in the form of a snowclone parodying the grammar-poor patois stereotypically attributed to internet slang.

Lolcats are similar to other animal-based image macros, such as the O RLY? owl and captioned pictures of walruses (lolruses [7]), elephant seals, dogs, hamsters, birds, and rabbits.[8] The format is popular enough to have spread to subjects as diverse as United States Presidents and tapirs.

So it turns out that I fully understood the concept all along, I just never fucking got it. I still don't think it's funny. But that certainly cleared up a lot. Thanks Internet, I'm glad we had this talk. Now I feel comfortable making a submission of my own to the fog of LOLcat hysteria:



Meez so smartz now!

Gone to Croatoan

One of my favorite of history's mysteries because it is so vague and ominous. The vanished colonists of the Roanoke Colony on Roanoke Island in present day North Carolina. Sir Walter Raleigh attempted to establish a permanent colony there between 1585 and 1587 but after three years of being cut off from supplies from England, the settlers vanished, and Roanoke went down in history as "the Lost Colony."

It is still uncertain what happened to the original colonists. There was no trace left of them except for the words "Croatoan" scratched into the bark of one tree near camp, and "Kro" on another. They had been instructed to carve a maltese cross into a tree as a sign of forced relocation, but no such indication was ever found.

It is theorized they they were absorbed into the surrounding Native tribes, but the assimilation theory has never been confirmed nor denied. To this day they remain the Lost Colony.