Monthly Archive for February, 2006

If It Weren’t For Google…

Published
by
Chris Meller
on February 15, 2006
in Commentary, Daily Grind and Random
. 0 Comments

… I wouldn’t have known that the Olympics were even going on.

How the Internet Works - A little Doom and Gloom never hurt Ratings!

Published
by
Chris Meller
on February 14, 2006
in Commentary, School and Techno-Babble
. 3 Comments

Alright, I’m working on an essay for my English course. Even though English was always my best course in school (well, the writing part, not the reading classic literature in Old English), sometimes (as you’ve probably noticed), I have a tendency to ramble and get sidetracked. It’s also tough, given the subject matter I’ve chosen, to know where to draw the line when explaining something.

So I’ll put it to you guys, my readers. I need your opinions thus far on what I’ve written. It’s an explanitory essay, basically explaining how something works or how a process is accomplished (much like a National Geographic essay about how a nuclear bomb is developed - outlining the basic concepts involved). For my topic, I chose “How the Internet Works”, since it was the only thing I could come up with that I would be remotely interested in (and hey, being interested in a subject can’t hurt my grade).

What started off as describing the nature of the Internet as a physical medium has actually turned into describing what dangers the issue of de-peering can cause to the internet population. Like I said when I posted it to our class bulletin board, “nothing spells ratings like predictions of doom and gloom”.

Keeping in mind that I’m talking to an audience of non-technical people, please let me know what you think of the start for my essay here. The minimum length is only 400 words, which I’ve probably already come pretty close to hitting, so also take into account that I’m going to have to get on with things and wrap it up fairly quickly.

Today the Internet as we know it is a continuously growing and highly redundant entity that stretches around the globe. Billions of people every day connect to this global computer network to do everything from swapping the latest jokes via email to swapping the hottest stocks via eTrade. It has been designed from the ground up to be one of the most redundant and reliable networks ever conceived, and yet it has one fatal weakness that could mean the end of its glorious reign. What is it that could bring one of the most heavily relied upon mediums of conversation to a halt in minutes?

The Internet is a vast global computer network comprised of millions of individual computers. From individual personal desktops, laptops, and even media centers to servers, data centers, and the Department of Defense, all these computers have one thing in common: their network.

At its most basic level, the Internet is nothing more than an average computer network, much like that providing connectivity to your desktop at work or your lab computer at Tech. A single wire runs from your machine to a switch - a single box bringing many smaller connections into a single point, much as a highway interchange brings many smaller access roads and streets into a single larger freeway.

From there, out through your company data center or the ______ Information Services building on the Barton campus, and on to your Internet Service Provider, your ISP. As your data enters their building, again a single small wire among hundreds, it flows into another similar switch, just as state highways flow gracefully into even larger systems of interstate highways.

That ____ will be replaced by the name of the building as soon as I see it tomorrow morning on my way to class, and I plan to slip in some statistics (like the number of hosts on the Internet, assuming I can find some reliable source for those).

Please, I welcome your comments. Was my highways analogy too much?

Free Nights Rule

Published
by
Chris Meller
on February 9, 2006
in Commentary, Follow Up, Incoherent Code and Techno-Babble
. 0 Comments

After wrapping up my last Task for my server migration yesterday, I was left with my first actual totally free night in more weeks than I can count. Honestly, when did my life get this busy? I sure don’t remember stepping through that door.

One unfortunate side effect of the server migration was the breaking of my custom-written IRC bot. I don’t have a fracking clue what the problem is. It’s just like connecting to any other public IRC server in existence, and yet the bot fails to identify with NickServ and join its default channels.

Since debugging errors in that horrible mass of code that has slowly evolved into a tangled web of insanity over the course of 3 years is nearly impossible (think about 3,000 lines of code, all of which was written in about 10% stints seperated by 3 to 6 month breaks), I decided it was time to bite the bullet and set aside some time to do a major overhaul of the bot’s code.

Several of my goals for this rewrite include:

  • Cleaner, more function-centric code.
  • More modular and re-usable code.
  • Adapting Wordpress’ magnificent options, actions and filters system of plugin APIs to make it easier to add and remove additional functionality.
  • Centralizing administration - admin users, settings for connection, channels to join, etc. They should all be in the database, not just half of them.
  • Add user registration to increase security for some of the user-based features, instead of assuming a user is who their nick says they are (ie: NickServ’d). Relies on above point.

So there it is. I actually wrote the base system (socket connection, database handle and socket looping) tonight, so at this point the bot will connect to the network and promptly get axed by the server when it fails to respond to the first ping request. Or at least it would if I had the back-end functions ready to pull the IRC connection settings from the database. Oh well, we’ll just assume it works…

Next up on my list is to map-out the structure of this code, splitting functions into appropriately named categories (ie: files) and deciding the best way to handle initial connections and their associated required responses versus later data that’s received and the possibility that we’ll act on it. Thus far, it’s looking easiest if I were simply to hand off everything to a do_action() statement that would, essentially, plugin-ize (is that a word?) the entire process.

If I work under that assumption, I should be able to start planning out my steps in different Tasks tomorrow morning before things get rev’d up at work and set myself up for about 3 good nights worth of work before I get to my real goal. Now, where do I find those 3 nights…?

Comment Aggregation with coComment

Published
by
Chris Meller
on February 9, 2006
in Beta Testing, Commentary, Links, Reviews and Techno-Babble
. 2 Comments

After the pretty interesting exploration of Comment Aggregation with Mr. Morris, I found it interesting when I saw coComment on Scoble’s blog (and later MyComments in another post).

Since everything’s released as a private beta these days (damn you Google!), I wasn’t expecting much when I dumped my email address into the coComment invitation form. After all, I’m not exactly the kind of person whose email address you’d jump at when you saw it in a list (like Scoble or Dave Winer). Happily, I was wrong. Less than 15 minutes later, I had an invitation code in my inbox (although I didn’t notice it until 45 minutes later).

So I’m signed up, playing around, I’ll let everyone know how it goes. Of course, Geof got my first comment.

One funny thing was the recent blogs “cloud”:

coComment - Scobled

Think he carries some weight?

Getting on the Web 2.0 Map!

Published
by
Chris Meller
on February 3, 2006
in Commentary, Daily Grind, Links and Techno-Babble
. 0 Comments

I generally ignore stuff like this Web 2.0 Innovation Map because it’s usually totally useless, but after about a dozen different blogs I regularly read (and respect) linked to it, I figured it was worth my time to load it up and see what all the fuss was about.

Honestly, it was pretty interesting. I didn’t realize there were so many things created in North Carolina, particularly in Montreat, which just had to have been a student (who else lives there?).

Even more interesting was the fact that there was no one on the map for South Carolina. Sooo… Any bright ideas on Web 2.0-ish services I could design and launch in the next few months to become the first? :)