Want to make it easy to monitor the quality of an internet connection? Convert test packet travel times into a scale of musical notes and play that sound in the background.
The time a pulse took to make the round trip depended on the state of the network. Say a pulse arrived at one end every 10 milliseconds. When fed into a loudspeaker and if the connection was good, this would emit a synthesised note of about 100 hertz - around an octave-and-a-half below middle C. The longer the transmission time, the lower the pitch of the note produced.
This gives a qualitative way of monitoring an internet connection. Sudden loss of sound can reveal a break in the network connection or missing packets of data. "It's like having your CD player hiccup, or an MP3 player that stalls," says Chafe. Most important, the sound accurately reveals the jitter. If the latency varies over time, so does the pitch. "Musically speaking that would be like pitch bends, or vibrato," he says.
Go here to get the Mozilla 1.2 release.
Also, Phoenix 0.5 is going to be released using Moz 1.2 source code and will be out next week. The name is being changed to some other name for legal reasons. New name has not yet been announced.
Update: You might want to wait a day and get the Mozilla 1.2.1 rev that fixes a few last minute regression problems. Though I'm using 1.2 without any problems myself.
UPDATE: Mozilla 1.2.1 is now released. Get 1.2.1 rather than 1.2.
If you want to get out close to the cutting edge in Mozilla browsing the run-up to the v1.2 release means that daily builds are being done on a branch that is very stable. Try out a build from here.
If you have ever wanted to put a different skin or appearance on a browser you might want to try the theme that I've just installed on the latest Mozilla nightly build: Orbit 3+1 1.2.0.0.6.5-dev. You can find it here. I used the second choice that is compatible with Mozilla v1.2 and v1.3 and also with Phoenix 0.3/0.4.
You can find more themes on Mozdev and on Deskmod.
Update: If you want the icons to be really small and to make as much room as possible for the viewed page then try the Little Phoenix theme. I have it installed right now on the Phoenix v0.4 and while the text on the menu bar and pop-down lists is small its readable. The Wood theme also makes the browser's menu bar text and tab text smaller. I think its grainy word background makes the text a bit harder to read though.
I like the way the MozDev site organizes themes. If you want to see all the themes that are compatible with a particular browser then note the little set of icons right above the Themes text in the right hand column. You can click to see only themes that are compatible with your particular Mozilla family browser. For instance, click here for the Phoenix browser themes.
Smaller cities which are dependent on nearby larger cities for their internet connectivity would be hardest hit:
The biggest impact would be felt in the small and medium-size cities whose only or main connections to the Internet come through the major hub cities. Larger cities often have multiple connections to the Internet in and out of the city and would be harder to completely disconnect from the Internet.
The actual impact of a network disruption would depend on a variety of factors, such as the cities affected by the disruption. Grubesic said the most severe impacts would occur if telecommunications equipment were destroyed in the six largest Internet hubs: Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago, and Washington, DC.
For example, Los Angeles is a major hub location connecting other large cities in the South and West. If Los Angeles were eliminated as a node on the Internet, many other cities in California may not have Internet access. But it would also hurt Internet accessibility in Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, Denver, Dallas and Houston, the study suggests.
A relevant glimpse of what could happen with the loss of a major Internet hub occurred with the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attack in New York City, Grubesic said. One major telecommunication hub was located at Ground Zero, and the loss of that hub disconnected three New York counties from the state of New York's computer system. In addition, several major Internet services and e-business providers were left without service for nearly two days.
Grubesic noted that there are more than 40 network provider companies that make up the backbone of the Internet. Many of these companies have agreements to help distribute each other's Internet traffic, which would help if one company's equipment was destroyed in a disaster. Still, most of the companies have hubs in the same cities and a major disaster could destroy the infrastructure of multiple networks.
For that reason, Grubesic said networks should not be concentrated too much in major cities.
Peter Biddle, Paul England, Marcus Peinado and Bryan Willman of Microsoft have written a paper arguing that the file swappers who swap music, movies, and other digitally encoded entertainment can not be stopped. Well, since they are from Microsoft perhaps now people will recognize the obvious. But why is this even a debate? As storage capacity continues to rise and as bandwidth becomes cheaper swapping will become easier and the amount exchanged in each swap will rise.
The truth of this matter can be arrived at with use of pretty simple intuition. Imagine you can hold in your hand a device that can story thousands of movies and tens of thousands of musical albums. Imagine that two such devices can be set next to each other and that they can quickly swap their full contents to each other. Even without the internet people could use such devices to gradually swap just about every movie and album ever made. Such devices will eventually exist. Storage device densities will increase by orders of magnitude. This will so increase the ease having and swapping large quantities of entertainment content that swapping will become unstoppable.
In the future entertainers will still be able to make money off of live performances. Also, any entertainment content that embeds advertisements into it will be able to make some advertisement revenue in exchange for embedding the content. My guess is that both of these sources of revenue will not be enough to replace what is lost through copying.
One way that the movie industry will be able to continue to make revenue from new movies might be to use heavy encryption on content sent to theaters. The theaters could have projectors that have the decryption built right into them. The movie studios could own and even have staff that controls the projectors. The weak link in such a system would be the single movie company employee who gets access to the unencrypted content and then pirates a copy and distributes it. Even if this scheme can be made to work the movie companies are still going to lose revenue from later single copy sales of movies. because of illegal copying.
Those of us who are not at all inclined to do illegal copying will pay a price for the illegal copying done by others because there will be less revenue to fund the generation of new content and hence less new content will be generated.
Update: The Register has a good article on this story including a link to the original paper.
StrategyPage.com has an interesting article on Romanian web hackers:
With only .3 percent of the world's population, a quarter of the attacks on Honeynet sites in the first six months of this year came from Romania.
The Honeynet they refer to is Honeynet.org.
Its a shame the Romanians don't have anything more constructive to do with their time.
Within a year or two more than half of all email will be spam junk mail. What do to about it? One approach is to use whitelists to exclude all email from people you do not know:
But the filters are running out of gas. The spammers keep multiplying, and they keep finding clever ways to fool the systems designed to stop them. Promising newcomers such as CloudMark, which taps the collective power of e-mail recipients to identify spam, may improve things for a while. But there will always be a trade-off between catching all the spam and ensuring that every piece of legitimate e-mail gets through.
So, sophisticated Internet users are turning to a new approach. Instead of trying to block spam while allowing everything else, these users employ software that blocks everything except messages from already known, accepted senders. These systems, called "whitelists," change e-mail from an open system to a closed one.
There are practical problems with whitemail lists. Among the reasons why legitimate email could be filtered out:
The basic problem is that there are a variety of legitimate reasons for why email gets sent from addresses which wouldn't already be in the receiver's address book. Another problem is that junk mail senders can fake the originating email address. So junk mail that pretends to be from an address on a whitelist could get thru.
There are a few methods proposed for dealing with this problem of legitimate email that isn't already on a whitelist. One could put it in a folder that the user would occasionally glance thru to look for what might be legitimate email. Many of us do that with existing email that our filters route to junk mail folders. Another option would be to have automated software that would respond to the suspect mail asking that the originator read some GIF to identify a keywork embedded in a thatched pattern. Then the user would either go to a web page that the response mail would provide a link to or would respond with an email that contained the keyword. Basically, the idea is to ensure that a human cares enough about getting the email thru to look at a response to it and do something to get one registered as a real human sender of individual email messages.
The sharing of whitelists has been proposed. That way, for instance, everyone in a company that deals with some other set of companies could use the whitelists for those other companies. One problem with these shared whitelists would become valuable for junk mailers to acquire. After all, the bulk of their entries would tend to be real used email addresses that could be added to lists of email addresses to email to. Plus, by analysing whitelists the junk mailers can choose originating addresses to fake. It is easy for spammers to put a fake value in the From address field. This would up the odds that a junk mail message will get thru.
One response to the problem of spammers using whitelists as part of their toolbox would be to encrypt the email addresses in the whitelists. Dan Brickley has proposed using an RDF format file to allow sharing of whitelists. He calls this approach FOAF for Friend Of A Friend. He proposes the use of encryption to hide the addresses:
This is an experiment based on the idea of sharing lists of garbled email addresses, ie instead of sharing 'mailto:danbri@w3.org' we might share '357fdd378d61684762ed88277192cfdf001189af', which is what we get when we feed that address to the sha1 algorithm. Consumers of this data can do the same thing with addresses from incoming mail, and then check to see if the resulting value is on the (garbled) whitelist.
One problem with encrypted shared whitelists is that if someone was to give you one you'd have no way of knowing who you are opening yourself up to receiving email from. Another problem with it is that a junk emailer who has a huge database of email addresses could get a copy of a whitelist and then run all of their email addresses thru the encrypting algorithm and compare the output to the entries in the whitelist. The irony here is that the junk emailers, because they have such large numbers of email addresses in their databases, are in a better position to figure out what the encrypted values are in the whitelists.
It might be possible to prevent spammers from faking at least some From addresses by creating a group of trusted POP servers that know about what From domains each POP server is allowed to originate email with those domains in the From field. The sending POP servers would have to enforce on senders that they can only send email with the specific From addresses that have been assigned to them. The receiving POP servers would have to know what domains each sending POP server can legally use to send to them and if an email gets sent by an untrusted POP server and that email contains a domain in the From field that is a domain that is "owned" by a trusted POP server then the receiving POP server would know to reject the email.
I found this interesting URL http://labs.google.com/cgi-bin/keys?q=101+mozilla&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&start=0&sa=N&fromkey=1 in my TechiePundit referral logs. Note the labs.google.com. Okay, so what is it? It appears to be a site where Google lets people try out new Google features. One thing they are trying out is support for Google results pages browser keyboard shortcuts. So if you bring up that URL above you can hit N to go to the next page of results and then hit P to go back to the previous page. If you hit the '?' key it will pop down a list of all the keyboard shortcut keys. This works for me with Mozilla 1.2b. I see in the keyboard shortcuts discussion group (see below) that someone has found it works on Opera 7 beta as well. I like the way one can hit keys 1 thru 9 to choose any one of the first 9 results to go to.
Also, the Google folks have discussion groups (am I like the only one who doesn't know this? - yeah I know about their Usenet groups support) where users discuss their experiences trying out new Google features. For instance, there is a discussion group for Google keyboard shortcuts.
I visit a lot of other blogs and sometimes get annoyed by problems with their readability and general useability. With that in mind, and with the hope that the publishers of the reviewed blogs will change their layouts in response to my review, I present some views about good blog layout followed by comments about several blogs.
Here are some of my personal preferences on blog layout:
With this in mind here's a review of some blog sites that I frequent (or in some cases might frequent if they weren't so hard to read):
PejmanPundit's yellow text on dark grey background is hard to read. Am I the only one who has that reaction?
Also, I do not like the blackspace on either side. The browser window's own borders provide plenty of delimiting signal to my eye. Generally speaking, I find I do not like lots of white space or black space filler on sites. I do not want a browser window to be any wider than necessary. I may have other windows open on the desktop that I want visible at the same time. I don't want to waste space.
Also, for links on the right the light blue text on a gray-green background doesn't provide sufficient contrast. Make the blue darker and the background lighter. Or do the opposite. Just up the contrast.
Update: A friend who looks at this site using IE 6.0 sees the text as white, not yellow. But using IE 5.5 and Mozilla 1.2b I see yellow and the style sheet confirms that its not white since the post text color is specified as FFFFCC.
Samizdata.net is easier to read than PejmanPundit. This is partly due to the white text on a blue background. But the font looks better as well. Samizdata also wastes less in margin space. One can narrow the browser window to get rid of most vertical unused blank space that is outside the blog column. I'd still like to see them cut back on the margins on the left and right of each post inside the blog column.
The top and bottom margins between posts are excessive. There is the blue box with yellow outline as a boundary. So why use so much empty space as well? On this site one rarely can see more than one whole post at a time even when the posts are short.
The link list over on the left side is light blue text on a darker blue with a small font. They need to either increase the contrast or increase the font size.
This site demonstrates a problem I see on a number of sites: The Date is displayed on the most recent post of all the posts for that day. Well, its hard to spot that date. It doesn't get its own boundary shape. The boundary box between posts is quite large. There ought to be smaller boundary between posts (since they are already easy to distinguish for other visual reasons) and the box should just be put out before each date.
Also, this site does not show a Date/Time stamp on each post. I understand that the posters are spread out across many time zones. But it helps if one is coming back to the site to be able to guess where one left off if there is a time on the posts. Maybe GMT would be an acceptable time to use.
He is really Steve Bail but named his blog after the RAF captain which Peter Sellers played in Dr. Strangelove. You will recall that is the fellow stuck on the base with the USAF general who goes mad and rants about flouride and pure bodily fluids.
Well, a few complaints about Steve's site:
I hope Steve is right that his chosen background color is soothing wild belligerent humans the world over. If World Peace suddenly inexplicably breaks out I know who I'm going to credit.
The guy who runs this blog is known as Lynxx Pherrett. Since Lynxx Pherrett is a catchier name than Assume The Position I think he ought to have named his blog after his pseudonym instead.
Okay, one big complaint about this blog: He italicises all excerpts he makes from articles that he quotes from. That makes these excerpts (which run for paragraphs) harder to read. Plus, any pre-existing use of italics in the quoted text gets lost. The indenting from the BLOCKQUOTE tag is already sufficient to allow one to identify text excerpts. The use of italics for this purpose is a bad idea.
Glenn Reynolds has of course become larger than life, InstaMan, Blog Father, Uber Pundit. How dare I question any blog site decision he has made in the face of his overwhelming blog dominance?
Well, first of all, as Glenn surely knows, no one dominates blog world. Secondly, I'm really hoping he'll fix a couple of things that obviously ought to be fixed.
First of all, his pop-up dialog boxes are not resizable. Why? Probably because that is the default for MovableType and he never changed it. When a comment list is long it really helps to be able to make it bigger to see more at once. That way it isn't as necessary to scrolls as often and messages that are in response to other messages can be compared to the other messages.
Second complaint: His permalink icon. I know what it is. But do all users? It also is sufficiently small that its harder to get the mouse over it than it is to get the mouse over, say, the text "Permalink".
She has no permalinks dammit!
Also, I think her main text column should be wider. Most people will come to the page with their web browser open wide enough to allow wider lines and hence fewer lines per post and hence more posts visible at once.
This is a stylish site. If Charles Johnson wants to say "Who are you to criticise my site. Just look at your site in comparison" I'd have to say he's right. Still, since the right to be a hypocrite needs to be exercised constantly in order to help defend it I feel compelled to review Little Green Footballs.
Okay, first of all, he uses a lot more vertical space per post than is necessary. The date/time, comments, permalink are spread out over 3 lines. Also, since all 3 of his columns are fixed width one can't widen the page as a way of getting the middle post column wider.
Charles claims his site is validated for HTML 4.0 Transitional. He says:
This page contains validated HTML 4.01 Transitional code, with a validated stylesheet. (Or at least it used to; but allowing visitors to comment makes validation impossible.)
But the W3.org validator finds problems in places that are not in user comments. So I would be curious to know what validator Charles uses and how recently he's done his validation.
Try this link to see HTML 4.01 validation on Little Green Footballs.
Still, this is a beautiful site and is functionally rich. He has made available some of his scripts he's written for managing his site. See the "Scripts" category in the left hand column.
Over in his left hand column "A few of my favorite things" the links are in orange against a green-gray background. Add in the font choice to make it even slightly worse and the contrast between the colors makes it harder to read the links than it should be. Charles, you are a biological scientist at Harvard with no doubt a very well developed observational abilities. Surely you have noticed your color contrast choice is far from ideal.
For perfectly understandable reasons lots people want to make their sites look unique. The temptation is to use color combinations that look attractive and that are used by few other sites. Well, the reason so many color combinations are rarely used and a fairly small number of color combinations are widely used is that most color combinations do not provide the good contrast that makes text easy to read.
Okay, back to Charles' blog: in the post body section he has light yellow-green text on a darker green background. The contrast is better than what he has in his links column. But it still could be improved upon. I would also suggest a change in font as well. Verdana,Arial is what Glenn Reynolds uses and I've patterned my own sites after the wise choice of the Blog Father (though I'm still using a less readable font in my links column).
I like the picture of the Gorilla (orangutan?) mother on the left cradling the baby. Very cool. Nice touch.
The pairs of double colons on the date posted/links line and at the top make for a mildy stylish touch. I don't understand why he provides his contact info on each post. If it was a shared blog maybe that would make sense (even then not absolutely necessary though).
Charles has a Stats icon at the bottom of his page. But you can't click on it to see his traffic levels since it asks for a password. For all other sites with similar icons that Ive tried to click thru on the result is immediate display of tables and charts of traffic history.
Another small complaint about stats icons: A lot of bloggers put them at the very bottom of their pages. I think it would be more sensible to put them at the bottom of one of their links columns.
His site is too wide and