Internet Tag Archive
We all hate spammers. There is truly nothing good that you can say about them. They allegedly constitute a form of human life, but if this is true then it is only on the sub species level.
Most people, no matter how evil, have some form of conscience underneath it all. At the very least when they do something wrong they feel guilty about it. Not so spammers. They are shameless. Give them an inch and they don’t just take a mile. They take a light year. They are human cockroaches. They will do anything and everything they can think of to connect you with unwanted advertising. There is no tactic off limit. In fact they have no limits whatsoever. The end justifies the means.
Fortunately my ISP now provides a server based spam filter. It seems to work reasonably well and captures perhaps 95% of the spam. But even so there is a lot of spam that still manages to get through. Since I use ChoiceMail any unsolicited email that gets through the server spam filter gets an automatic challenge email from ChoiceMail. It requires that the emailer to go to their website and fill out a special form for me to receive their email. New emailers have to enter a number or phrase embedded into a graphic on the web site, and provide a written justification on why I should read their unsolicited content. Those who don’t respond end up on my blacklist. Even if they respond I still have the option to reject them manually.
I find it educational to go through my spam occasionally and see what new tactics spammers are using. Lately I’ve been getting emails with excerpts from famous novels. Of course there is at least one embedded linked image that will take me to their site. I guess this is one way to get me to read Stephen King. The hope is that the content will seem legitimate and thus pass through most spam filters. But this is yet one more example, if it were needed, that spammers are soulless scum. Of course they have no qualms about using copyrighted works of others simply to send spam.
As email program spam filters get better with strategies like Bayesian algorithms of course spammers will keep trying cleverer solutions to let the spam through. No doubt you’ve seen some of these. One tactic: create an authentic looking, almost snooty looking email address. In my spam box is an email purportedly from AtlantaBallet.com. For some reason the Atlanta Ballet wants to sell me Bextra. Umm, no, I don’t think so. Spammers may be ingenious at getting the spam through, but they must have oatmeal for brains in the common sense department. If I were in the market for Bextra I certainly wouldn’t buy it from some shady dealer pretending to be the Atlanta Ballet.
Words are also getting subtly mistyped to pass through spam filters. Viagra becomes V1agra. Copy becomes C0py. Affordable becomes Aff0rdable. Do they really think I am going to buy anything from someone who cannot even spell? I don’t think so! And what’s with these ridiculous email addresses? Do they really think I will open up emails from gjfmdillwmywmkj@aol.com and Rxelx@manonthemoon.com?
And can someone please terminate these ridiculous Nigerian email scams? Goodness, they were old ten years ago! Every conceivable variation has been tried. There is no one left in the world with an email account that has not received a hundred copies of these. Maybe they snared some naïve people during the first six months, but today even imbeciles know to trash this stuff. And yet it keeps coming and coming.
What really incenses me though are those spammers who use my good name and email address to pass off their spam. Of course my friends are likely to assume the email is from me because it has my name and email address on it. So it sails right through their spam filter because I am in their address book. But now my friends have to treat my email address with suspicion. Perhaps they get 100 emails a day from me that are spam. Perhaps out of frustration they have added me to their blacklist.
If spam were limited just to email then perhaps it would be endurable. But email is yesterday’s spam frontier. Spammers’ tactics are getting increasingly ruthless and non-discriminating. For example, in this blog I routinely average 1-5 fake “comments” a day. Needless to say like all spam this spam is programmed. A computer has sniffed my site, determined that I have a Movable Type weblog, found the CGI program that processes comments (even though I renamed it) and sends a canned HTTP request masquerading as legitimate comments. Fortunately I review all comments before they are published, but I still need to remove them manually. And that means to some extent I still must read them.
But now even blog comment spam is insufficient. The latest twist is to create bogus blog trackback entries. Movable Type is not yet programmed hold trackbacks in a queue for approval. So anyone who looks at a trackback entry before I have a chance to remove it is directed to a spammer’s website.
(Yes, I know about Movable Type plug-ins like MT-Blacklist. It’s of some help, but no silver bullet.)
The response from our legislatures has been anemic. The Can-Spam Act has done nothing of the sort. The government gives lip service to tracking down and prosecuting spammers. In reality there is not much they can do. Spammers can and do move so quickly that law enforcement cannot keep up with them.
I cannot see any short-term solution to this problem. Signing all email with digital certificates could potentially help solve the problem. However a valid digital certificate is easy to acquire. With the right software you can create your own. And just because the email is legitimate doesn’t necessarily mean it is something I want to read. Eventually we will need some newer approach that does away with the drawbacks inherent in our twenty year old SMTP email protocol. Blogs have been suggested as one way to circumvent the problem. Instead of sending email people could leave public or private comments on your blog. But as I have discovered that is a simple magnet for spam too.
Sadly I see no solution on the horizon other than a brand new SMTP-less email architecture. Otherwise it may be that the convenience of email will no longer be worth its hassle. Using snail mail may be time consuming and costly but at least advertisers have to pay for the privilege of putting their fliers in my mailbox. Perhaps some sort of new system where those who send you unsolicited email must pay a fee when you read the email it is the way it will eventually have to be.
One thing is for sure: if the exponential growth of spam on the internet keeps increasing at its current rate eventually there will be no bandwidth left for more prosaic usages like surfing the web. Our whole Internet-based infrastructure could be rendered obsolete by soulless spammers. The good news is that spam would die. The bad news is that electronic commerce as we know it would be gone. So let’s hope a new email system that fixes these defects is embraced before it is too late.
(I’m betting this entry will get its share of comment spam.)
April 11th, 2005 at 11:02pm
Posted by
Mark |
Technology |
no comments
I hate passwords. And yet my electronic life is full of them. I don’t understand why in 2005 I still have to use such an annoying means as passwords to authenticate myself. You would think that there would be a better authentication solution like digital certificates that industry would universally embrace. But that would require, like, work, coordination and money! So for now and likely for the indefinite future systems designers will continue to play in the safety of their own sandboxes and throw yet more passwords and password management schemes at us. Someone hand me some aspirin!
So we are stuck with those damned and annoying passwords. Every year I have more passwords to maintain. Each site seems to have varying policies on if or how often I must change my password, and how complex my password must be. I had to change my Lotus Notes Internet Password today. I have been avoiding it for weeks because it is such a hassle. My agency requires a password of at least eight characters, one of which must be a special character such as the # sign and one of which must be a number. But the first character must not be an alphabetical character. It made my head hurt just trying to think up a password I’d remember with these bizarre rules.
Pretty much every day I struggle to recall my passwords. And of course I am constantly forced to change them. When I change them many systems won’t let me reuse old passwords, or use any variant of a password that looks like another password I used. Some won’t allow me to use any word that is in the dictionary. All this complexity means that many of us just write the darn things on pieces of paper, which defeats the purpose of creating complex passwords in the first place. The reality is that password schemes are so complicated these days that we can’t put them all into our memory.
Browsers are much better at remembering passwords. This does help but opens up another vulnerability: anyone who can sit down at your computer can potentially get into systems accessed over the Internet. Internet Explorer encrypts passwords. The browser I use, Mozilla Firefox, does not encrypt passwords by default. Over time though our numerous Internet passwords become important. I really need to carry them around with me but they are tied to my machine. Neither browser is smart enough yet to read passwords by default from portable devices like Flash drives. Clever people can move passwords managed by browsers from machine to machine but it is not intuitive and it’s a hassle. So mostly we don’t do it.
But today I tried out a free solution that, while not perfect, is a step in the right direction. It’s probably too much of a hassle to use if most of the systems you access are over the Internet. But if you are like me and you have to authenticate yourself to your computer, the network, the email system, the payroll system, the training system, the travel system and any other number of systems scattered here and there then Keepass may be a solution to check out.
First of all it’s free. I always prefer free if I have the option. Second, it’s open source so it is not proprietary. Third, it keeps a doubly encrypted password database. Using highly secure encryption algorithms it is unlikely anyone but the NSA would be able to decrypt it. And fourth, it’s reasonably portable. I created a password database on my Flash drive. I can also put the Keepass application on my Flash drive. It doesn’t need to be installed! And I can use it on any Windows computer from Windows 95 to Windows XP. Perhaps some day they will have versions that work on a Mac or on a Linux desktop. But right now it only does Windows.
You can authenticate yourself to Keepass with a master password or pass phrase of your choosing. Once activated you can use it to get to any of your passwords. You select the password you want from your Keepass database and press a button that places it in the Windows clipboard. Then you just paste it (quickly) where you need it. Although the password lives in the clipboard, it doesn’t stay there for long. (The default is ten seconds.) Minimize Keepass and it requires that you reenter the master password or pass phrase if you need to use it again.
It would be better if it filled in the password for you automatically. But it does have a nice feature for Internet passwords where you can put the URL into the database. Click on it and it takes you to the password page for that system. That saves some time.
There are additional security features you can enable if you want. In addition to a master password or pass phrase you can create a key disk, which is a file that will open the database. With this option you have to point it to the file containing the key disk. Since the computer’s hard disk typically has hundreds of thousands of files on it, it is pretty unlikely that someone will accidentally choose the right file. Used with a master password or pass phrase and you have two forms of authentication, which is doubly secure.
There are some downsides. If you lose the master password you are generally stuck. There is no password recovery method. But most of us can remember the one master password or pass phrase. So it’s usually not a problem. You will probably want to back up your password databases periodically to other media like a Flash drive to protect yourself from catastrophic password failure.
For now Keepass works for me. It’s easier than thinking and a heck of a lot less aggravating!
March 21st, 2005 at 09:14pm
Posted by
Mark |
Technology |
one comment
Oh dear, I hope I’m not turning into a Republican.
Yesterday I made my first dollar off the internet. Perhaps I should wait for the check to arrive and the money to actually make it into my bank account before I spend the money. And it’s not a whole lot of money: $60. Still, if I get it then it will be tangible evidence that there is money to be made off the internet by ordinary Joes like me. I won’t quit my day job but for the first time in years I am motivated to feel a bit entrepreneurial.
In 2001 I purchased my first domain, oakhillva.com. I bought it because I live in a place called Oak Hill. Of course it’s not incorporated. It’s the name on the post office in my zip code: 20171. Many of us who live in Oak Hill don’t even know we live here. We say “We live near Herndon” or “We live near Chantilly” or “You know Franklin Farm? I live near there.” Basically it’s a bedroom community with a couple shopping centers.
Anyhow in 2001 a new post office opened with our name on it which made it sort of official. So I went shopping for related domain names. I figured maybe there was some money in having a community web site. I had planned to learn this internet stuff anyhow and this seemed the way to go. But I was so naïve back then. I bought the domain off of Yahoo Domains for an inflated price. I shopped for a web host online and picked a place called Javapie.com that was dirt cheap but was actually a reseller for successfulhosting.com.
And that was about all I did with the domain. I guess I was hoping someone with more time and energy than me would offer me some big bucks for the domain name. It never happened. Instead I used the domain to practice. Since I had started teaching web page design and I wanted my students to have an experience similar to real electronic commerce. So I created a few server side scripts on the site. Students submitted a web form to an address on the oakhillva.com web site and they got back a response. Pretty simple stuff.
After a year or so I decided to get fancier. I erased the FrontPage version of the site and put up portal software, phpNuke. This too was a learning experience. The real learning experience came when some hacker broke into the site and defaced my main pages. It became such a hassle trying to fix it that I just erased the whole thing. I then tried PostNuke but it didn’t have the interactive features I wanted. Eventually though I decided to stick with a product I knew: phpBB, open source bulletin board software used everywhere. I had plenty of experience customizing that with my other domain, potomactavern.org. So I put up some forums, dressed up some content, placed ads around it and went back to my slumbers. About once a year, usually when I was off between Christmas and the New Year I would go to the site and tweak it a bit. I added a neat interactive business directory and local link directory. But mostly I ignored it.
Over the years I moved the site around. Now it is hosted by Site5.com and DiscountDomainRegistry.com generally manages my domain names. Over the last couple months I have started to get inquiries about the site. One guy had a number of similar domains and was investigating potential partnership. That didn’t seem to go anywhere. I also got a couple requests about advertising on the site. Only one went anywhere. It culminated yesterday when I got my first paid for advertisement on the site.
My hope is to bind the citizens of Oak Hill together on the web. Basically we are a bunch of subdivisions and if we have any allegiance at all it is too our subdivision, not to Oak Hill. We are also very well moneyed. Our average income is more than $100,000 per household. But marketing the site seemed daunting. I’m just not a salesman. I tried that in my days working for Montgomery Ward and flunked spectacularly. I can’t imagine going door to door to do marketing. I’m too much of an introvert.
With my wife unemployed she has been picking up a few wetbacks fixing and building computers for friends and through referrals. It hardly pays our grocery bill but it keeps her from hanging out in pool halls. So I slapped an ad for her nascent business on the site. I’m not aware of any referrals she got directly from the site. Nonetheless for a site with no marketing oakhillva.com gets a fair number of hits. It comes up #1 on a Google Search for “Oak Hill Virginia”. In February there were nearly 28,000 hits and close to 700 visits.
With someone willing to give me $60 for six months of advertising on the site though I am thinking that I need to think larger. It’s time perhaps to risk a little working capital. My wife needs more customers. And my site could use more traffic. So we’re looking into doing some advertising ourselves in more traditional mediums. The hard part is reaching every home in the area. We are looking at bulk advertisers like Money Mailer and ValPak. We are also considering a couple ads in the local newspapers.
Selling one advertisement for $60 basically pays my hosting costs. Oakhillva.com is just one domain parked in my potomactavern.org domain, and at Site5.com I was able to buy quality shared hosting for less than $100 a year. Add the modest cost of maintaining the domain name (about $15 a year) and it only takes a few paying customers to make a profit over my operating costs. Of course my time is worth a lot of money and right now my day jobs pay the bills. But there is the potential that with some marketing and focus I could make some small amount of money on the side from this venture. Just a couple hundred bucks a year would demonstrate the potential of internet commerce on a personal level.
Of course if the site caught on that would bring other issues. Hackers would find it more inviting. Since I have forum software I’d have to watch and worry about content posted there. So small steps. I am still skeptical that after all these years there is any money to be made in a small community web site, but perhaps I will prove myself wrong.
March 8th, 2005 at 07:08am
Posted by
Mark |
Technology |
one comment
Like many of us in the information technology field, my career has been about creating and maintaining information systems. The techniques and technologies used have varied. Until now the process has stayed essentially the same thing. The process is something like this. Get people to put data into a computer. Store it somewhere. Apply business rules to it by writing a lot of customized code. Then spit it out in the forms wanted by various data consumers.
Really, that’s it. It’s doing with a computer what people used to do in their brains. Computers just have the ability to do these things much more quickly and reliably. But of course you have to tell computers precisely what to do and the order in which it must be done. This logic is what we call code or software. While it has not made me rich it has kept me gainfully employed and enjoying a comfortable lifestyle.
There were classically a couple ways to get information into a system. The most often used method at the start of my career in the early 80s was to stick someone in front of a terminal and have them enter data into forms on a screen. They then pressed a key and off the data went, through the ether and into a database somewhere. But there are other ways to bring data into a system. In the old data processing days one popular way was to load big reels of tapes from somewhere else and read them into mainframe computers. Since then we found more efficient ways of recording some information in a computer. Bar code scanning is probably the best-known way.
Once the information is in the system it is scrubbed, processed, compared with other information and placed somewhere else. In other words, it is sort of assembled. An information system is a lot like a factory. Raw material (data) is dumped in at one end. Out the other end comes data on steroids: information. You know much more about something from the output of the system than you know from the relative garbage of facts that fed it. And this information is typically used to add value, such as to gain a strategic or competitive advantage.
That stuff in the middle between keyboard and printer was a lot of usually hand crafted code. At the dawn of my career it was often written in Fortran or COBOL. During the mid to late 1980s it was more likely to be in languages like C, Pascal or PL/I. During the 1990s object oriented programming languages gained ascendance. Instead of C, it was C++. Businesses that ground out client/server object oriented applications used development environments like Delphi or PowerBuilder. Data and the software used to manage these data began to merge into something called objects. Logically the stuff was still stored separately. But conceptually an object let us programmers get our brains around larger and larger programming problems. As a result we learned the value of abstraction. Our programming languages became more ethereal. It became a rare programmer who could actually write a binary sort routine. Instead we call APIs or invoked methods on software objects to do these things.
Toward the late 90s critical mass developed around the idea that data should be easy to move around. Businesses needed simpler ways to transmit data with other businesses. This was one of those “no duh” ideas that someone should have successfully ran with twenty years earlier. Okay, there were ideas like EDI, but they were expensive to implement. Instead with the Internet finally ubiquitous enough to use as a common data transmission medium, a data standard for the web emerged: Extensible Markup Language, or XML. In the process data became liberated. Whether a field started in column 8 no longer mattered. Tags describing the data were wrapped around each element of data. An externally referenced XML Schema acted as a reference to tell you whether the data were valid or not. Instead of writing yet another unique application to process the data, a generic SAX or DOM parser could easily slice and dice its way through the XML data. Using objects and modules built into the programming language of your choice it became fairly simple to parse and process XML data. As a result there was at least a bit less coding needed to put the system together than in the past.
The newest wave in data processing is called web services. Just as XML became a generic way to carry data with its meaning over the Internet, web services provides protocols for automated discovery, transmission and retrieval of XML formatted data. Figuring out the best way to do this is still being hammered out. Protocols like SOAP are losing favor for simpler URL based methods like XML-RPC and REST. We’ll figure out what works best in time. But equally as interesting as these web services technologies are the XML transformation engines now widely available. The XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language) specification, for example, allows XML data going or coming into a system to be transformed in an infinite variety of different ways. It can be something simple like converting XML data into a web page with the XML data embedded inside it. Or XML can be rendered into something more complex, like a PDF file or a MS Word Document.
But what does all this mean? The light bulb finally went off yesterday. I was explaining to a colleague at work why I wanted a system I managed to have web services. My team understood the value. Data and presentation could be wholly separated. With data in XML it could fairly easily be transformed with the XSLT engine of our choice into the format that we chose. The effect of this is to markedly diminish the actual logic needed to set up and maintain an information system. The big payoff? In theory, fewer programmers are needed and it should be faster and easier to manage information. But in addition the system should behave more reliably, since less code is needed to run the system.
For example the system I manage is what we in the computer business call tightly coupled. It works great. But it’s just a pain to maintain. The data of course is stored in a classical relational database. To get it out and present it to the user we have to turn it into HTML. Right now we do this with a lot of code written in Perl. Naturally we get lots of requests to add this and delete that and show data rendered like this. And so once again, as programmers have done for a generation, we perform major surgery on our code and go through extensive testing until we get the results requested. But since we are a government system in a non-sexy agency we are grossly under funded. So most of these requests go into a programming queue. Many of these great ideas will be abandoned due to our tightly coupled system and our limited resources.
So what’s really interesting to me about these XML technologies is that we should be able to put together systems much quicker once we have the architecture in place. In addition we should be able to make changes to our systems much quicker too. We could end up with systems that in the classical sense require little programming. This example on the W3Schools site shows how incredibly simple it can be to take data from an XML data store and render it as HTML. Once the XML schema is defined and the template is written in XSLT then rendering it can be accomplished in just a few lines of code. Of course this is a very simple example. But when I think about what sort of effort and time would have been required to render this same result in those pre XML and web services days I am a little awe struck. The productivity potential is sky high.
So I’m starting to wonder: do XML technologies mean that information systems will no longer require any crafting by programmers at all, but will instead be easily assembled? If so this is revolutionary. But the pieces seem to be there. On the output side of the system XSLT and an XML database work fine together at spitting out information in a useful format. There is little or no coding needed here to make that happen. But what about the input side? There is revolutionary news here too. Initiatives like the W3C XForms project are finding standards based ways to gather form data intelligently. We programmers should not have to struggle too much longer with HTML forms, embedded with Javascript client logic and server based scripting logic. XForms will handle the job in an XML way that will minimize coding and markedly reduce maintenance costs.
And so there you have it: all the components needed to construct basic information systems in a generic fashion are nearly in place. Simple data collection and retrieval systems — what I have been doing my whole career — could potentially be done using open standards and without writing a line of code. With an XForms editor we will draw our forms and push it out to browsers and other web-aware device. Input interface: done. Web services can be utilized for the automated data interchanges needed between businesses. To realize this vision may require putting a SOA (service oriented architecture) in place first. A good application server will be able to get the data and persistently store it without much coding. And an XML aware transformation engine embedded in or talking to the application server will take our template of choice and render it in the format and media wanted.
Will programmers no longer be needed to construct information systems? Not quite, at least not quite yet. Few applications are as simple as the one I suggested. And there are hosts of other variables to be thought through, including quality of service requirements that often require programmers. But I suspect that over time we will see that information systems will require fewer programmers. Instead the emphasis will move toward those on the system administration side. Database administrators will still capture and manage data, but they will also tune the database for rendering content in XML. Business rules will move more into the database or into rules engines attached to the application server. The result should be fewer programmers steeped in the mechanics of languages like Perl. Instead we can expect more time spent tuning databases and maintaining business rules. Form data will be designed in an XForms editors. We will use similar tools to render output using XSLT.
Time will determine whether I am seeing the future clearly. But clearly I am not alone since this is the whole larger point of XML technology. Companies like Microsoft have created packages like BizTalk just for this purpose. (Their Visio product is used to diagram the business rules.) It should get easier and become less costly to create and maintain information systems. And over time we can expect that systems will be able to exchange and process data with each other much more simply.
March 4th, 2005 at 08:54pm
Posted by
Mark |
Technology |
no comments
It’s a rare day when I praise Microsoft. I do so today for a technology they’ve had around for many years but I haven’t really gotten around to trying until recently. And that is its NetMeeting software.
Using NetMeeting I can have a meeting over the Internet in real time. (I hesitate to call them virtual meetings because they are real meetings, just not one done in person.) Such meetings are I suspect greatly facilitated by also having a separate voice conferencing system. We have one of those where I work. Since the teams I am on are geographically disbursed almost all our meetings are done over the voice conferencing system. Hitherto our notion of a “virtual” meeting was having someone take notes and post them to the web periodically. We’d refresh the page periodically to see if we agreed with what was said.
I don’t know why we’ve avoided virtual meeting software. But we’re not alone. Even Microsoft seems to downplay its own NetMeeting software. On Windows XP it’s no longer even a program you can select off the Start button. It’s still there but you have to hunt for it. Look for a program called conf.exe under your Program Files folder in a subfolder called NetMeeting.
The software is fairly easy to use but not foolproof. Even an experienced computer type like myself was a bit puzzled at first. It offers a wizard that lets you identify yourself and asks you what kind of equipment you have. It wants to attach you to a directory server so others can find you. And there’s the rub. The default Microsoft directory server doesn’t really want you so you’ll probably get a timeout after 30 seconds or so. You could find another directory server and put your contact information there, but most people have no idea what a directory server is in the first place or how to hook up to it. Using a directory server is too complicated for most people to learn or even bother with.
But here’s the thing: you don’t need a stinking directory server. What you do need to know to host a meeting is your Internet protocol (IP) address. Microsoft does not make this easy to find. There are a couple ways to do it but the easiest thing (since many of us hide behind routers) is simply to go to a web site that will tell you what your IP is. I use whatismyip.com. Assuming that your IP is static (and even from home as long as you have a cable modem or DSL your IP is probably static for at least a couple days) just send an email to the participants with the IP and the time of the meeting. Make sure you include your time zone– this is the Internet after all. If they are neophytes also provide some basic instructions on how to find and invoke NetMeeting. The first time through expect 15 minutes or so of futzing using a separate voice system before everyone understands the basics.
I suspect the reason NetMeeting is not used more is that most people don’t have microphones connected to their computer. NetMeeting comes with a shared chat window participants can use but using it is not nearly as productive as using voice. The good news: microphones for PCs are cheap. The bad news: if your participants are not particularly technology savvy it will probably take a lot of nagging to get them to buy a microphone. But while they are at the computer store they should think about buying a web cam too. Why? Because you can also show yourself to other meeting participants this way.
To start the meeting someone has to host it, so they simply select the Host Meeting option from the Call menu. Give the meeting a name and a password (which participants will need to know about before the meeting). Participants have to initiate a New Call and will likely type in the IP that you provided. The host will hear a ringing sound and will be asked if they want to accept their call. When you do they join the meeting. A chat window and whiteboard will come up by default sometime after your first participant joins the meeting. You can also do file transfers and share out programs with the software.
For four afternoons and four hours a day this week my geographically disbursed team did our planning for next year with NetMeeting. Before we would have flown across country to meet. A meeting like this could well have cost the government $10,000. With money tight my boss asked us to try to do it electronically. I had tried NetMeeting before with a coworker or two. But would it scale to a larger meeting?
And the answer was yes it did. We did not have web cams available. And as I said we had a separate voice conferencing system in place that we used. And we all had broadband connections. Participants included four of us at our desks in Reston, and men in Anchorage, Helena and Portland, Oregon. Others joined in the meeting on invitation to discuss particular topics from other points across the United States. My man in Anchorage works from home and just installed a DSL line. I was worried whether it would be fast enough. It wasn’t a problem.
For most of the meeting I shared out a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and we used that to keep our complex notes organized. I typed what I was hearing into my laptop computer. I wondered how long it would take for screens to refresh across the country. I was dancing all over the keyboard and dragging and dropping things right and left. Participants reported almost zero latency. Somehow all those pixels kept redrawing flawlessly and in real time to multiple machines across the country. Now that is amazing and why I thought this software is truly cool.
Occasionally I let someone else operate my shared application. That’s when it got weird because others seemed to be taking over my computer. When done they could transfer control back to me. I didn’t think we’d use the chat window but I was wrong. Participants quickly started posting relevant notes and URLs in the chat window on the topic of the moment. Even the whiteboard was used, but mostly as a place for people to doodle when their attention lagged.
There are other solutions out there that are fancier than NetMeeting. The obvious one is WebEx, which is really a hosted solution and a pretty expensive one. It’s a better choice for many Internet meetings because it is not wrapped around Windows. It also allows you to reserve ports and send out invitations. NetMeeting however is free, providing you have Windows installed. But even NetMeeting supports some other operating systems. For example, there is a NetMeeting client for Linux.
NetMeeting needs an easier and less geeky way for people to find each other. Its way better than mere chat and it really allows you to get real work done efficiently. It was not quite as efficient as if we had all been in person. But we didn’t have to travel thousands of miles to see each other either.
I don’t know how well it would have worked without our voice conferencing system. Doing everything in chat mode would probably be very inefficient. Using the Internet to carry voices would probably give reduced and choppy sound quality. But with Windows having won the desktop war it’s nice to know a powerful tool like this is nearly universally available. It’s a shame we don’t use tools like this more often.
January 14th, 2005 at 10:07pm
Posted by
Mark |
Technology |
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This blog is one of a number of web sites that I manage. Except for the one I actually get paid to manage (and it’s my staff that does the real work) the rest are for my amusement only. The other two sites that I manage are the Oak Hill Virginia Online site and The Potomac Tavern. In addition my brother’s domain 50,000 Cronkites is parked in my web space. I have a few inactive blogs attached to The Potomac Tavern domain that I also maintain.
And all was well until the Christmas Eve surprise. For three days my Potomac Tavern domain got zonked. Bandwidth was running about one gigabyte a day. On a typical day this domain might transfer and receive 100 megabytes of bandwidth. This would not normally be a problem except that the contract I have with my web host gives me four gigabytes of bandwidth a month. It wasn’t long before I was getting quota alarms all over the place. I was spending my Christmas vacation monitoring bandwidth, fine tuning .htaccess files and restricting forum permissions to members only in order to bring it down.
And I did bring it down. My web host graciously gave me another gigabyte of bandwidth, but others hitting my domain quickly consumed it too. I’m not sure exactly what caused the problem. I don’t think I was under a denial of service attack but I noticed that the MSN search engine alone consumed over 500 megabytes of my bandwidth in one day! Thanks a lot Bill Gates! With all those billions you would think you could at least ask me if it is okay to suck 500mb of my web content, or perhaps pay me for the privilege. MSN must have done it multiple times because I only had 110mb of content on my web site.
But MSN was not alone, just the most egregious offender. I do know this had the potential to bring to a grinding halt communications in The Potomac Tavern unless I coughed up some hefty fees to my web host, successfulhosting.com, for more bandwidth.
I was planning to rehost in June anyhow when the contract was up. But Successfulhosting.com is still living in the dark ages and charging what now seems to be a premium price for web hosting. Oh, what is web hosting? A web host is basically a computer facility with big fat pipes to the internet. You rent space on their machines because it’s always cheaper to do that then buy your own servers, stick them in your basement and install your own fat pipe to the internet. My domains, like most small domains are virtually hosted. This means I share a machine in a server room with other users who I don’t even know. It’s a cheap solution, but it can also mean that I am competing for CPU time. Sometimes access gets a bit slow.
And that’s been an increasing problem with my domains on successfulhosting.com of late. I don’t know if there are too many competing domains on my server, the constant database queries were bogging down or what. It certainly was not because I had pornography on the site. But this bandwidth attack made me realize one thing: I needed a bigger and fatter web host with more disk space and a lot more bandwidth.
So I went hunting for a new web host. I had known that competition had been bringing down prices, but I was not aware of just how much cheaper things had gotten. I looked at three web hosts seriously. I first started at Canaca.com, located in Canada. Their Silver Plan looked like a really good deal: 20 gigabytes of storage space and 400 gigabytes of bandwidth for $7.95 a month (if you pay for 2 years in advance). That would sure take care of the bandwidth thieves. But I didn’t know anyone who had used it personally. I also looked at Jumpline.com, on the recommendation of a Tavern patron. Jumpline offers a cool technology called Virtual Dedicated Servers. Basically this means that you are still sharing a server with others but you are guaranteed your share of the CPU and bandwidth. So if someone else is sucking down the bandwidth and CPU on your machine your stuff will still get out. Jumpline had the best prices on VDS technology that I could find. But to seriously address potential bandwidth problems in the future I wanted at least 20 gigabytes per month, and that was $21.95 a month. On the advice of my friend Dawn Gibson (who ran the very successful Back of the North Wind BBS in the 1980s and 1990s) I eventually selected Site5.com. Their Horsepower Plan was a very good deal indeed: $6.95 a month for 1.5 gigabytes of server space and 50 gigabytes of bandwidth. It was so good that Dawn, who already had them as a web host, was a bit upset she couldn’t get the same deal.
I’m still virtually hosted with Site5, but it has some nice features that only fellow geeks would appreciate. For example, I can park two domains for free inside the same web space. This means I can pay just once for the web space and effectively place 3 domains in there, all for $6.95 a month (for a one year contract paid in advance). Also, it was running much more current versions of software that I cared about. In particular they were running MySQL 4.0. MySQL is a relational database used extensively for web sites. The 4.0 version has important features I’ve wanted for years. It seems successfulhosting.com can’t be bothered to upgrade its MySQL servers.
Unfortunately it’s not always simple to move domains from one host to another. If your web site is nothing but simple static HTML pages it’s no big deal: FTP the files down to your PC, then FTP them up to the new host, and tell your registrar the names of the new name servers.
It’s a lot more complicated when you have large interactive web sites. I have two domains running phpBB forum software, which means I have to install this software on the new host. But of course I don’t use it out of the box. I have made special tweaks all over the place. I’ve installed phpBB modifications and added some unique features I personally wrote in PHP. So I have to get them working again in the new environment. It’s sort of like installing Microsoft XP and then having to apply numerous service packs and patches. It gets old rather quick.
Aside from the web pages and the software moving the database itself is a separate task. It meant getting secure shell access on the new host, running the mysqldump command and FTPing the database as one file to the new servers, the reloading the database with the standard mysql command. Since I had new database names I had to use on the new host I had to edit configuration files to get things to behave the same way again. Naturally since my users don’t want much inconvenience I had to logically turn off the forums, capture a snapshot of the database, then move it.
First mission is accomplished: the Potomac Tavern domain is now moved over to Site5.com. With the additional space and bandwidth I’ve installed a phpBB modification that will let users attach files to their postings or private messages. Thanks to extensive pretesting it went off apparently without a hitch and with minimal downtime. The only variable I couldn’t control was how long it would take the new domain name server information to propagate out to my users.
Now I can be a bit more leisurely. I want to consolidate all my domains in the same web space. Next one up is the oakhillva.com site. This is largely done but I accidentally removed some files, so recreating them is somewhat tedious. Last up will be this blog, and I may just leave it here at successfulhosting.com until my contract expires. After all I’m paying for the space and bandwidth.
I still don’t know why the bandwidth problem blossomed so quickly. I don’t think my domains are suddenly that interesting. I suspect there were a lot of nefarious probes looking for vulnerabilities on my site and that was part of the problem. But hopefully I don’t have to worry about either server space or bandwidth for quite a long time. So far things look good on Site5.com. Pages come back so much more quickly than they did on the successfulhosting.com servers. I hope it stays that way.
In a future entry perhaps I will talk more about web hosting and how this service is rapidly evolving. Agile hosts like Site5.com seem to be able to keep up with the technology and find more efficient ways of doing things. I think a number of web hosts are charging way too much. Customers are beginning to discover there are better deals elsewhere. But given the hassle moving from one machine to another I can see why many will choose to stay where they are and pay inflated prices.
January 8th, 2005 at 02:43pm
Posted by
Mark |
Technology |
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Oh the mundanity of it. It’s time for my annual vacation at home: that indulgent time off that starts a couple days before Christmas and ends after the New Year. During this time I am not just off, but I am off. I spend my days doing nothing much and reveling in it. Altogether it is ten days of staying up late, sleeping in late (which for me might be 8 AM) and doing not much. My brain is in a different time and space. I enjoy all the comforts of home because, well, I am home.
And my wife and daughter are on vacation too. My wife happens to be unemployed so in a sense her vacation is about two months old now. This annual recess from real life is a perfect way to end a year that was full of work, school, extracurricular activities, doctors’ appointments, family crises and numerous other things, most of them necessary but no fun. So now it’s that time of year to turn off the dutiful part of my brain and recklessly, deliberately and insistently slack off.
I thought perhaps of starting a project to keep me busy, but that thought was quickly dismissed. There are some doors that need to come out and be replaced by drywall. We need to purchase and install a new microwave over the stove. But I can’t seem to summon the energy to start. I’d rather be lethargic. There was no hurry to do these things six months ago so there is no reason to do them now either. Even trying to sum up the energy to go see a movie is proving difficult. My wife is deeply into watching two seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD that she got from me as a Christmas present. She doesn’t want to be disturbed by reality. My daughter is doing something similar. When she isn’t online (usually IMing her friend Laura) she is watching an Invader Zim DVD. When I can use the DVD player, which is not often, I am watching the appendices in the Extended Edition of Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. Mainly I exercise, eat a bit too much Christmas food, and surf the Net. It’s good to be a vegetable as long as the money keeps coming in.
Not that I’ve been permitted to totally zone out. There was the usual Christmas activities and obligations to attend to. The Christmas Eve dinner with the parents and my sister at our house went well. They arrived late and took off early, which was fine because we saw them all again on Christmas morning at my parent’s apartment. But by 3 p.m. my crew was anxious to rush home to do nothing in particular. There was too much socializing going on for their tastes. Time to go back to Gumby mode.
Once a year I use this time to go to areas of the World Wide Web I normally don’t bother with. I read obscure Usenet news groups. Foreign newspapers. Kos diaries that aren’t even recommended. Polyamory newsgroups. I watch online short movies at sites like Atomfilms.com. I even peruse the casual encounters section at Craigslist. (I have to wonder about some like this lady.)
I’ve decided though that with the remainder of the week I will reconnect with friends if I can. Since I’ve changed jobs I’ve lost regular contact with friends mostly made through work. It’s time to make a physical presence again instead of trading emails. My dance card is filling up. Tuesday I’ll lunch with my friend Sokhama in Silver Spring. But I will also show my friend Frank the virtues of my new Honda Civic Hybrid. And, as long as I’m near my parent’s apartment I’ll bring my wife’s laptop with me and do some modem diagnostics for my father. Wednesday I hope to see my friend Courtney for lunch, who also lives and works in Silver Spring. And Friday it’s Angela’s turn to endure me for lunch; we’ll meet at Union Station. And somewhere in there I hope to see Lisa and her husband Bill to fix a computer problem they’re having. But I’m hoping Lisa and I can abscond to a Starbucks for some long neglected chitchat.
Somewhere in all this time maybe I’ll see another movie. We’ll take down the Christmas tree and the outdoor lights. I’ll pay some bills. But mostly I hope to keep doing a whole lot of nothing. The most ambitious I’ve gotten so far on Day 4 was to work on the web site for the next class I will teach in January. Since it’s basically the same as the one it didn’t take too much time.
My wife and daughter are big into emulating vegetables. I have to admit there is something to be said for it. What’s the point of working hard for a living if there is not the reward of being able to recklessly slack off? I need to do more slacking. I need to chill. Instead more often than not (and mostly out of habit) I am running from one activity to the next. But for now I live in the moment and enjoy each day in its splendid mundanity while it lasts.
December 26th, 2004 at 08:23pm
Posted by
Mark |
Life 2004 |
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When you live in cyberspace can you find real community? Does having with a network of friends online amount to the same thing as a network of friends in real life?
For the last few years I have been puzzling over these thoughts. I have been wondering if my family’s social life has become too virtual. I was arguably the first. Back in the mid 1980s my Commodore 64 was hardly warm before I had purchased a 300-baud modem and was discovering electronic bulletin board systems (BBSes). It quickly became my favorite hobby. At first I was online to download software. But gradually I found discussion boards. I found connecting with people online fascinating. Suddenly my community expanded beyond family, established friends and immediate neighbors into a much larger and diverse set of people, many of whom seemed far more interesting than the people I bumped into in real life.
Back then the Internet was virtually unknown and certainly not available to the average person. Its closest equivalent in the mid 1980s was an online service called Compuserve. Unable to afford a service I found instead lists of local electronic BBSes put together by a man named Mike Focke and started dialing. When I got an IBM compatible computer I graduated to the much larger world of IBM compatible BBSes. While chatting on line with other people from the Washington area I started to care about silly things like whether PCBoard software was better than Wildcat software. One nice thing about BBSes though was they were local. Most of us were too cheap to pay long distance charges to chat electronically with people. So after some initial shyness I got a chance to actually meet some of the people I met online. To this day I maintain a core set of friends from those days including Frank Pierce, Angela Smith and Jim Goldbloom.
But those BBS days are gone for good. The Internet arrived in the home. The location of people on the other end of a conversation became irrelevant. This was both good and bad. I missed those BBS get togethers we had every 3 to 6 months, usually with the online gang from The Back of the North Wind BBS. I still hung out online but it wasn’t quite the thrill it had been. The BBS world slowly died out and in 1999 even the venerable The Back of the North Wind BBS shut down after 12 years of nearly continual service.
For my wife the Internet was a way to connect with people of a very narrow interest that she would never have met otherwise. Around 1999 she jumped into the homoerotic fan fiction (Slash) universe big time. She has been happy in that community ever since. She considers her online friends just her friends. While a handful live locally most are distant. And yet we have met many of them. On our recent trip to Canada we visited one of her friends in every city we visited. She’s very tight with her online friends and her world is certainly richer as a result. And while she has shared intimacies with people who in some cases live as far away as Australia we don’t know most of our neighbors. We know some of them because our daughter went to school with their children. We know our next-door neighbor but not the one on the other side. Those neighbors I haven’t met might as well be on the other side of the world. They don’t seem interested in me and I haven’t sought them out either. We are unlikely to interact at anything more than a superficial level.
My daughter’s friends are mostly people she knows from school or through Girl Scouts. They meet in person from time to time but spend much more time interacting in cyberspace. In that sense she is a wholly modern ordinary teenager. Instant messaging is her primary means of communicating with friends. When she gets phone calls it is often from a friend explaining why they can’t get online. And yet even she has her virtual friends out there who will likely always remain anonymous.
I sometimes feel hypocritical and tempted to declare that this sort of online life is unnatural and wrong. Yet it is not without its allures and benefits. For me in the 1980s and 1990s it was a godsend. It gave me a sort of a social life without leaving home. We had something of a social life in those days but it involved around our daughter and her friends. Through her friends we met her friends’ parents and sometimes we found things in common. But they were rarely meaningful relationships. The reality of those times was that they were packed with parenting chores. The computer offered brief escapes into a world populated with adults. There I could talk about things I cared about like politics at my convenience. No one wanted me to read the The Very Hungry Caterpillar at all! And I could do all this without leaving home. It felt good. I felt optimized.
This new way of making and meeting friends and lovers may be the way it will be from now on. Yet something in me still yearns for the traditional sense of community that I have largely spurned. So this year when my local Unitarian Church once again made the appeal for people to join covenant groups I decided it was finally time to try it.
A covenant group is a group of people who agree to meet regularly to talk. I asked our minister to assign me to a random group. I was hoping I might get into a group with people around my own age. But it seems in our church that covenant groups are largely full of people age fifty plus. Perhaps most people my age are too busy with the childrearing chores to attend covenant group meetings.
Yesterday I attended my first meeting. I actually know most of the people in my covenant group. I know them in the sense that I recognize their faces from services. Some of them I know by name because I have talked to them a few times. But I have largely not really talked to any of them. A covenant group provided a structured way for me to get to know them as people.
This particular group has been around for a year or so, but there were a few vacancies. I and another lady filled the vacancies. We met in a room in the basement of the church for about an hour and a half. We introduced ourselves. Since I was new I gave them a short biography, both professional and personal. And I unloaded on my problems of the moment: my ailing mother and my wife’s imminent job loss. And I learned about some of their issues and struggles.
Every meeting has a discussion topic chosen by the group. Yesterday’s topic was how we got to where we are with our religious convictions. Being Unitarian Universalists a lot of us didn’t have religious convictions. I heard more than a couple in my group confess to being spiritually vacant and left-brain dominant. There were more than a few ex-Catholics like me in our circle too. I confessed that while I spent much of my adulthood as an agnostic it didn’t quite fit anymore. In that sense I felt more spiritual than many of the rest of them.
Despite being the youngest in my group it was still an enjoyable experience. We may all be white middle class people but we are a fairly eclectic and interesting bunch. Our group includes a physician, a man working for the State Department, the manager of a childcare center and a number of retired people.
So although I have a busy life I have covenanted to spend one night a month for a year with these people. I am there to get to know them at something beyond a surface level. In the process hopefully they will get to know more than a little something about me. I have heard of covenant groups that blossom into tightly knit friendship circles. Only time will tell if that will happen with our group. But everyone in my group seemed to be nice, decent yet complex people struggling through their lives and their issues. Perhaps in some small way we will find an old fashioned sense of community. Perhaps in time I will grow to find more of my friends in my community and fewer online.
October 12th, 2004 at 09:22pm
Posted by
Mark |
Life 2004 |
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Windows guru Brian Livingston’s latest newsletter on the sorry state of PC security in the Internet age is a wakeup call. The vast majority us connected to the Internet at home may think we have safeguarded our PCs. But while we may have the front door of our computer locked it is likely our back door is still open. In addition ghouls and other ghastly things are trying to come through the windows. And when we do open the door it is likely that thieves are slipping right past us unseen.
Here’s what we are doing at our house. First we have a cable modem that is always on. All the PCs in the house have the free version of ZoneAlarm installed. It traps (we believe) unauthorized incoming and outgoing Internet traffic embedded in TCP/IP packets. We have a laptop with a wireless card in it connected to our wireless router. All wireless conversation is encrypted and traffic is limited to a few IP addresses. All PCs are running McAfee AntiVirus, which is configured to check daily for updated virus patterns. My wife is smart enough to also know about spy-ware, so she regularly checks our PCs with the free version of Ad-Aware. All of us except my daughter avoid Internet Explorer, preferring Mozilla Firefox for our web browsing. My wife, who works on a help desk, regularly installs the latest patches to our operating systems and key programs. In addition my wife and I have enabled the spam filter on the Cox mail server. But because it is not perfect I also run ChoiceMail whitelist software to further reduce spam. My antivirus program does an automatic weekly virus check of all the files on my hard disk. By most measures we are on the cutting edge of home PC security.
But we are not doing enough. Brian Livingston says we need a hardware firewall in addition to software firewalls on all our PCs. And we need to buy antispam software that we don’t have. Meanwhile we continue to let my daughter violate security rules because, well, we must be spineless morons for parents. You see she must use Internet Explorer because all her friends are using MSN Messenger and it is tied intricately to IE. My wife doesn’t have the heart to take away her administrator privileges so she keeps downloading crap over and over again although we keep telling her not to. A frequently find on her machine is that obnoxious spyware Gator, among others.
All this security is a hassle for us. Yet I doubt most other families are doing half what we are doing. My father, for example, is running Windows Me over a dialup connection to MSN. His antivirus software expired and he couldn’t figure out how to renew it. When my wife ran Ad-Aware on his PC she found it was clogged with crap he never knew he had. We still can’t say if he is virus free because we are having a problem getting McAfee to work on Windows Me.
Enough. It’s time industry came up with a solution. We need a home Internet security appliance, perhaps integrated into our cable and DSL modem. This should be a smart machine that will take care of a whole family’s security needs. To get rid of spam it should have Brightmail antispam server software embedded in the appliance. Brightmail is the only solution out there that really works as a blacklist. With Brightmail integration it should catch virtually all the spam. But this appliance should also catch viruses, Trojan horses, mallware, prevent phishing attacks and kill all ad-ware automatically and transparently.
But it should do more than that. It should constantly keep our PCs tuned with the latest well tested software patches. It’s clear that Microsoft cannot be trusted, so appliance vendors will have to act as a testing clearinghouse for us. This appliance should talk with software installed on our machines to take care of the numerous chores we now have to do manually. For example it could keep us updated on the latest versions of our installed software, optimizing our hard disks and let us know if components appear to be failing. Ideally these appliances would be certified by an impartial government agency, or meet the current FIPS standards.
I hope there are companies working on such appliances. All the antivirus vendors should be doing this as a survival strategy. It would be an easy sell and it would be easy revenue stream for them by marketing a yearly subscription service. I know I would be in the market for such a unit. Why have a PC attached to the Internet if it becomes more hassle than fun?
September 27th, 2004 at 09:27pm
Posted by
Mark |
Technology |
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It’s amazing how fast the marketplace can react to change. During our eight-day vacation in Canada we stayed at five different hotels. Every single one of them offered high-speed Internet service. We were connected to the Internet with a fat pipe everywhere we went!
This wasn’t true a few months ago. In a June trip to Raleigh I had to hunt for a hotel that offered high-speed Internet access in the hotel room. I found a few web sites such as this one that helped me find these hotels. As a result the Courtyard North Raleigh got my business. But there was no such access in my room at the four-star Peabody Hotel in Orlando in April, although a cool high-speed wireless service was available in the conference rooms. And the only way I got to the Internet in my hotel room in Denver in March was through a traditional dial up line.
Our electronic life is now too integrated to be away from the Internet for very long. So my wife’s laptop came with us on the trip. A month or so earlier she had installed a wireless network interface card (NIC) in it so she could read her email anywhere in the house. (Curiously she uses it most in the bathroom.) I didn’t think we would have any use for her wireless card on the road. But I was wrong.
A portrait of Internet access at our five hotels:
I booked our room at the Quality Inn in Schenectady specifically because they offered high-speed Internet access. Unfortunately although we brought along the laptop we forgot both an Ethernet cable and phone line cord for the laptop’s modem. But it was no problem: the front desk provided us with a loaner Ethernet cable. Finding the port in our room was the big problem. We eventually discovered it behind one of the beds. Then we had to dig into the Windows 2000 Control Panel and change a few settings. It took about fifteen minutes to work through the logistics.
The Sandman Hotel in Montreal also offered high-speed Internet, but it was pricey: $14.95 a day in Canadian money and the service always started at 3 p.m. We couldn’t resist and they too were glad to loan us a loaner cable. The billing was all handled through the browser. When we opened our browser and tried to reach any page we were first presented with a payment screen. We selected our payment method and were off.
By the time we arrived at the Radisson East in Toronto I figured the gig was up. There were no such ports in our room. However my wife noticed an electronic billboard coming in that proudly announced high-speed wireless Internet service in the conference rooms. Could we pick it up in our room? For the first time in my life I was glad to have a room on the second floor. Her NIC picked up a nice strong signal. Perhaps ethically we shouldn’t have used this connection since we weren’t there on business. To make it work with our wireless card we had to make a couple small changes to our computer again. This time we had to disable a wireless encryption feature. Once done we were off and surfing.
The Quality Inn in Woodstock, Ontario though seemed an unlikely place to find high-speed Internet. It was a couple blocks from a highway and we could see cornfields out of the window. But this was a new hotel and yes they too offered high speed wireless Internet … for $10 CDN a day. We had to call the front desk to get an access code. Again we entered it into the browser’s web page and we were off and surfing.
At the Holiday Inn in Batavia, New York high-speed wireless service was made available to all guests for free. Unfortunately our access was fairly poor. Maybe it was because we were on the fourth floor. The NIC continually sent us messages telling us our connection speed was “low” or “very low”. Every once in a while the signal would drop off altogether. Part of the problem was that the NIC picked up two wireless signals. I don’t know where the other signal came from (another nearby hotel?) But when we told the NIC to ignore the other signal service became more reliable. But the speed always seemed slow and didn’t seem much better than dialup.
In the car my daughter Rosie often was writing with the laptop computer. (We had an adapter for it so it could run off the electrical feed from our cigarette lighter.) What we didn’t expect is how often it would pick up wireless signals when we passed through small towns and cities. Often this connection would last fifteen seconds or less since the range is very limited and we were moving at a brisk clip. But it was encouraging nonetheless. And sometimes we picked up signals in unexpected places, like in front of dirty old garages along distressed looking highways.
So we were very pleased. Here are a few pointers for fellow high-speed travelers. First, make sure your laptop is configured with a wireless NIC and that you know how to modify the NIC’s interface; it can be something of a black art. Certainly bring an Ethernet cable with you too but increasingly you won’t need it or may be able to borrow one at the hotel. Hotels seem to going wireless instead of wired. For a couple years it would be a good idea to have a directory of local phone numbers to access your ISP. But it is clear the days of dialup Internet access are nearly over. Hooray for that. While I suspect you are less likely to find high-speed Internet at Motel 6’s or Days Inn, you can never tell. Increasingly it is becoming pervasive. If you depend on Internet access on the road you may be in for a happy surprise the next time you travel.
August 30th, 2004 at 08:31pm
Posted by
Mark |
Technology |
one comment
