Archive for the 'Internet' Category

How Technology Brings Us Together to Change the World

Published on July 31, 2009 in Internet, Technology and Web 2.0. 2 Comments

This post is in response to a post written by Erin Scott, aka The SMiChick. Her post, titled “What would you do if…” explains her views on how technology has forever changed, oftentimes for the worst, interpersonal relationships. It also goes into our dependence on technology. While I agree with quite a bit of what she has to say, I disagree with some of the basic premises she puts forth.

Erin starts off by saying we are dependent on technology. That we have lost touch with the each other and with the world. Part of that dependence, however, is necessity. Technologies that Erin doesn’t mention (automobiles, trains, and planes) have moved us around. She mentions a simpler time when people basically lived off the land. What she fails to mention is that in those times people did not travel. People stayed as close to a home base as possible. Sure, they wandered off in search of supplies, but only as far as their feet or horse could carry them. Would I like to see more people paying more attention to their local environment rather than worrying about what’s going on in the rest of the world or venturing off to far away cities to have fun? Of course I would. In fact, I think everyone should be doing that. However, technologies have allowed us to travel and travel we did. People never lived an hour drive away from work. They didn’t live a 2 hour train ride from their office. Instead, they lived within walking distance of the trolley or bus or even their place of employment. They lived within the same city, sometimes in a streetcar suburb just outside the city. But with the travel came a need for more technology to keep in touch with family and friends that were far away.

Do you see payphones anymore? I don’t even know where I could find one now. I used to always know where there was a payphone when I was out and about by myself. Now, they’re hard to find. That explains the dependency on cell phones and why parents get them for their kids (I’m still of the opinion that I will never pay for a cell phone for my kid, if he wants one, he can pay for it himself). My car broke down back in 1999 on my way to RI to pick up my brother for Thanksgiving break. I had no cell phone. I walked down to the commuter lot at the end of the exit ramp and used the pay phone to call my parents. It didn’t work. I took a ride with a random dude to a gas station even further away and found one that worked. I stayed there until my father was able to pick me up. Having a cell phone in that situation would have been helpful. I may have been crazy for taking the ride, but he looked like a nice enough guy (actually, he looked like a Phishhead).

I have heard people say that we have become out of touch with the world and each other because of technology. I disagree with that. I have a few personal anecdotes to explain my reasoning. I have met lots of people on the internet. When I first moved to RI, I didn’t know anyone. I went on a few dates through Craigslist and ultimately met my wife through that site. I made some friends through online postings. I met people in Providence through local forums. Since joining Twitter, I have met a bunch of people interested in Phish. We met up at shows in June. In fact, I am going on a trip to California to see Festival 8, a 3 day Phish festival around Halloween. I’m flying to Las Vegas, meeting 6 other people from Twitter, and we’re all renting an RV together and driving the 4 hours to the festival together. The Internet has brought us together. Finally, one of my closest friends was met online. I have never met her, but we met about 12 years ago in a chat room on AOL. I know it sounds super sketchy, but we have stayed in touch ever since. We have gone through ups and downs in our lives together. We have helped each other through rough times. It’s a relationship like no other, but it would not exist if it weren’t for the Internet.

People have come together to become more in touch with the world because of technology. Look at the phenomenon of flash mobs. Look at all the people who joined together to support the problems with the Iranian election or those who came together for the people of Darfur. Sure, most of that was meaningless gestures, like changing your Twitter avatar green. But there are many people who have actually made a difference because of it. Look at what social media did in our own elections. Barack Obama would not have won such a decisive victory if it weren’t for his creative use of social media.

Technology has changed the world. Sure, some of that change is not good. It has caused people to become more isolated. However, I think that it has brought more people together. It has led to meaningless gestures to show support for some issue, but it has also brought “doers” together to actually make change. It has helped people (to be super cliché) to be the change they want to see in the world.

Do I think we should all join the Peace Corps or AmeriCorps and travel the world to help others? Not at all. In fact, I believe we should start right at home with our own communities. I believe that change must start locally. I believe in the “think globally, act locally” sentiment. If everyone did just that, the change we should see in the world would happen. In fact, one of the things I use the Internet for is local issues. Technology has helped this movement.

Perhaps I’ve missed the point of Erin’s post, but it said 2 things to me. The first is that we have become too dependent on information technology (I disagree with the spirit of that statement, but not with the statement itself) and the second is that we need to step away from these technologies to experience real life, to learn to be happy without them, to really have a personal relationship (again, I disagree for the reasons listed above). As for that first part, look at dependency on older forms of information technology (they were technological for their time) – newspaper, radio, television. The computer allows us to experience other things that we wouldn’t normally experience in our lives. Not everyone is given the chance to visit other countries and see other cultures. Heck, many of us can’t even visit other parts of our own country. The computer and Internet allows us to travel without leaving our home. I have never been one to believe that to be cultured, you have to travel. I believe there is plenty to discover in your own backyard. You just have to seek it out, and technology can help you find it.

A Few Months with FiOS

Published on June 9, 2009 in Internet and Technology. Closed

As I posted a while back, I ended up switching from Cox High Speed Internet to Verizon FiOS. There were many reason for that switch, but here’s my thoughts on FiOS so far.

First, I’ll start with my bandwidth. I have more bandwidth available to me than I would have with Cox. It’s a tough judgement here because it’s noticeably faster, but part of that is because it should be. I have 20 mbps downstream and 5 mbps upstream. It’s quite convenient, but difficult to compare to my Cox connection because it wasn’t supposed to be as fast. However, I will say that my connection has been more reliable with FiOS than it ever was with Cox. With Cox, I had been through 3 cable modems (granted I’ve only had FiOS for a few months now) and always had a problem with dropped connections. I suppose it could’ve been my router (which I plan on trying to use with FiOS as I’ve heard there’s a way). Now their router, while it works well and does what I need to (and even seems to give off a stronger wireless signal than my Linksys that had 2 antennae) has a really crappy interface (warnings everytime you go into an “advanced” setting, even after you’ve confirmed a change in an advanced setting). The advanced settings shouldn’t be called advanced. People should be able to set their wireless encryption to WPA or WPA2 without having to go into an advanced area (that scares them away). I can’t change the DNS server (I used OpenDNS on my old router) and if you mistype an address, you go to Verizon’s error page/search engine (a little shady if you ask me, I’d rather get a “page cannot be displayed” message). However, I need to use their router because it grabs the on demand and guide for the set top box.

The TV service is also good. I like having HD service, though I’ve noticed that I can only get 1080i (my TV does 1080p). I don’t know if I have something configured wrong, if I have a crappy HDMI cable (came from Verizon and Gizmodo says it doesn’t matter), or if HD cable service only goes as high as 1080i. It really shouldn’t matter because based on the size of my TV and the distance it is from where we sit, I shouldn’t be able to tell the difference between 1080p and 720p. However, I can’t really compare it to my Cox service as I didn’t have HD with them. From time to time, I do notice some digital pixelation, but that can happen with any digital cable service.

The DVR, however, sucks ass. It had to be said. There are 2 reasons I’m using their DVR. The first is because I can’t afford a Tivo HD. The second is because even if I could afford a Tivo HD, I wouldn’t have the Verizon guide and I wouldn’t be able to use any of the on demand features (I may even lose out on the music channels, but I’m not sure on that). That being said, Tivo’s interface blows away the Verizon DVR. I’d also get a whole lot more storage from a Tivo and better multimedia capabilities without having to pay an extra fee (as with what I’d have to do do get those from my Verizon DVR).

So it’s not all roses over here in FiOS land, but it’s better than my experience with Cox. Cox’s support system was a whole lot better. They have phone numbers listed for easy access on their webpage. They had realistic hours (Verizon stops answering their phone at 6 pm). But the extra bandwidth and reliable service make FiOS better for me.

Update: Apparently, after doing a little research, the set top box is only capable of 1080i.

Thoughts on Chrome

Published on September 6, 2008 in Google, Internet, Software and Technology. Closed

I’ve been using Google Chrome as my main web browser on my home computer, which runs Windows XP.  While I will say that I really like it, there are some features I miss from Firefox.  I miss my extensions and plugins.  That’s the one nice thing about an established browser, even if I do have to add on to it.  I have that option.  Specifically, I miss the Gmail notifier.  I suppose I could just download the one from Google to run in Windows, even when the browser isn’t open, but that’s one more thing running and I like to keep as little running as possible.  I also miss Twitterfox, my Twitter client, though I have downloaded Twhirl, which seem to work pretty well, though I find it to be a bit more than I need.  I like the simplicity of Twitterfox.  Other than that, I don’t really regularly use the other extensions I have installed (web development stuff, FireFTP, etc).

I love the homepage feature of Chrome, showing the most frequently visited pages.  I also like the speed.  It seems very streamlined and small.  I like the multi-threading with a new instance for each tab.  That makes buggy sites easy to kill without killing the whole browser.  It’s a promising browser. That being said, it can be a little buggy and sluggish at times.  For the most part, it’s quick.  I like that it uses Webkit, because Gecko just isn’t as standards compliant as I’d like it to be (for instance, my blog looks noticeably better with a Webkit browser than a Gecko browser).

I hope Google keeps up development on Chrome and that it becomes more mainstream with support for extensions or plugins.  I wish there was an option to open or save certain files (Quicken files for example want to be downloaded and not opened directly).  I like how it uses Windows Media Player as a plugin right inside the browser.  It could be a real contender and it’s kind of fun to have browser wars starting up again.  Now if only they’d release a Mac version (as I type this in Firefox on my MacBook Pro).

What is it with music sites and RSS?

Published on July 27, 2008 in Internet, Music and Technology. Closed

The title should be “What is up with music sites and lack of RSS?”  I’m in the process of extending my regular web reading material outside the beer/Providence world and since I do have a thing for music, I was hoping to add some feeds to Google Reader.  I started with phish.com and clicked the RSS link they have on their news page.  It brings up a blank page.  I wrote to the webmaster to have it fixed because I want to be kept updated on any new developments in the Phish reunion thing.  I then went to Jambands.com as there are a couple columns there that I enjoy reading.  No sign of RSS at all.  To continue down the Phish reunion thing, I checked the Phantasy Tour Phish page for the news and rumors links and again, no sign of RSS.  Finally, I went to Relix (knowing they do have feeds) and subscribed to their daily news and rumors feeds (the others just point to articles that are actually in the magazine, which I get at home).

Why is it, in this day and age of information flying at people, that some websites, posting constant updates, don’t have (working) RSS feeds?  Can someone answer this for me?

Are there any music feeds that I should start reading?  Things I enjoy… Phish, new bands, Providence/RI area bands, or just about anything (see my music links on my Links page for a good idea of the type of music I like).

ResNet 2008: Final Days

Published on June 26, 2008 in Beer, Food, Internet, Technology, Travel and Web 2.0. Closed

I last left off with resting from my seven mile walk around Fredericton.  Following that, we headed back downtown for dinner because we were on our own that night.  Sean and I met up with Dustin from Stanford who said he was meeting a bunch of people at Brewbakers.  Since we hadn’t eaten there yet and since the bill would be expensed, we joined them.  I ordered a wonderful Maple Curry Chicken Penne dish that was very flavorful, yet not too filling.  It was a little on the pricey side, but the quality was worth it.  I tried Picaroons Irish Red there.  It was the best Irish Red Ale I’ve had.  Following that, we ended up at the Rogue again (which will end up being a theme for the conference).  While there, I tried St. Ambroise Oatmeal Stout, Gritstone Ale, and more of the Picaroons Best Bitter.  I also decided to try Poutine.  It was different.  I wasn’t all that into the soggy gravy fries, but the cheese curds were good.

The next day I skipped the first session to try to catch up on sleep.  The late nights coupled with a bed that made prison cots look enticing were getting to me.  The thing about New Brunswick is that it’s in the Atlantic timezone, which is an hour later than Eastern Time, but Fredericton is north of the Eastern timezone.  This made for long days (sunrise around 5:30 and sunset around 10), which also aided in the sleep deprivation (the curtains in the room were not very helpful).  The good news about skipping was that I didn’t miss anything I was interested in (which was decided before I decided to sleep in) and I got to sleep an extra hour.  The last session I attended was about Facebook.  I was going to go to another session on hiring/training/managing students, but I figured I’ve gone to enough of those.  So I tried something different.  It was worth it.  I learned a bit about what students think of Facebook versus “real world” communication (it seems that real world communication is still more important).

Following the session, there was a Program Committee BoF, which I attended and volunteered to help out next year.  I like where ResNet is going and want to do whatever I can to help it continue and sustain itself.  Following that I had lunch and an Information Resources Committee meeting, during which we discussed where things are going with the ResNet websites and communication tools.  Following that, I went to the vendor fair, got some information and picked up some documentation from the doc fair.  After that was a break and then the closing reception and raffles and then we headed downtown for our lobster dinner and kitchen party, which was followed by more time at the Rogue (I tried Picaroons Dooryard Ale and Pump House Fire Chief Red Ale, which was good, though I thought it tasted more like a Brown Ale, and Innis and Gunn, an oak aged English Pale Ale) and a long walk up the hill to pack, sleep, and head home the next day.

The trip home was smooth (had a Creemore Springs Premium Lager in Toronto), except that my checked suitcase was left in Canada because the plane was too heavy.  Next time I fly to Canada, it will be out of Boston because I don’t want to deal with the crappity 18 seat plane and the possibility of my bag not coming with me.  I just got word that my bag has arrived in RI and should be delivered to me sometime after 2:00.

I have pictures of it on my gallery or at Flickr.

ResNet 2008: Last 2-3 Days

Published on June 23, 2008 in Beer, Internet, Music, Open Source, Software, Technology and Travel. Closed

I’m not good with titles, but that really sums up what this is about.  I wrote about Friday already, now here’s Saturday through today (at least so far).

Saturday was the PDS sessions.  I learned about my DISC profile, which was a very worthwhile session.  It actually gave me some insight into what kind of person I am and what kind of manager I am.  It should help me quite a bit at work, once I go through and read the information more closely of course.  The second session wasn’t quite what I thought it would be and I wish I had signed up for the session on dealing with difficult people (since my job is 90% dealing with difficult people).  It was about balancing your life, which is something I think I do pretty well already.  While I might check my work email quite a bit at home when I’m not on vacation, it never gets in the way of enjoying my time away from the office.  So that session wasn’t really worth my time.  I was thinking it was more about balancing everything at work, which is something I could use some help with.  Maybe next year they’ll have something like that (I should suggest it).

Saturday night began the conference.  There was an opening reception with a lot of appetizers that were all really good.  There were some desserts and some really good juices, a lemonade made with some kind of mint and an iced tea with something in it that I just couldn’t figure out.  There was also a large spider, which I can’t include a pic of because I used my phone to take it and I can’t send picture messages from it up here.  During the reception, they had arranged for an Irish dance school to give us a little show.  The kids were young, but they could dance.  It was like a little Michael Flatley dancing with his people.  It was fun, but I forgot my camera and my phone camera just couldn’t cut it.

Following the reception, I went downtown with a bunch of people to a bar called Dolan’s Pub.  They had a live band called Barnacle and some pretty good local beer from Pump House in Moncton, NB.  The band played all covers, but it was a great mix of everything, including Rolling Stones, Tom Petty, Great Big Sea (a Canadian band from Newfoundland), Sublime, Steve Miller, and a bunch of American 80′s music.  People were dancing.  Now there was a bachelorette party there and they wanted the bachelorette to do some crazy things.  I won’t go into details, but let’s just say there was some undergarment removal and a table dance involved… at our table.  I didn’t get back until 1:30 or so.

The next day was the keynote.  Stephen Downes gave the speech.  It was a great speech.  The guy looks just like David Crosby crossed with Arlo Guthrie.  He was a riot… at least for the first half.  He had this neat comment system on his website that he showed us.  It would display comments for 10 seconds and then move to the next one.  We had some fun with it, but some people were a little mean.  The best comment was “Did you play in a band with Stephen Stills and Graham Nash?”  The second portion of his speech was about Web 2.0.  I have already been to 2 or 3 sessions on that alone and this just wasn’t necessary for a bunch of people who are likely intimately familiar with it.  The first portion was about new ways of using the web and what young people expect of the web and internet services nowadays.

There were also 2 presentation sessions.  I attended one which was ultimately about a re-org of the department, but really hit on some good points on how to make the department great, including losing the various groups within a department and getting it to work more as a single entity than as a bunch of smaller groups.  The second one I attended was about making the Helpdesk better, but again was more about a Helpdesk re-org than what I thought it would entail, as the description mentioned a discussion of hiring and training and those were only minor points.

That was followed by the Geek Olympics.  I ended up on a team again this year and our team won (I did it last year and we came in second by just a hair)!  We had people from Stony Brook University on Long Island, Cal State in Chico, and NC State on our team.

This morning was the presentation I was working on with Sean Ward of Bowling Green State University in Ohio.  It was called “The Pros and Cons of Computer Requirements (or lack thereof)”.  It started out as a panel of 4 and ended up just being the 2 of us.  We went through our presentation in about half an hour or so, but there was a lot of discussion, which we hoped would happen.  It ended up being a pretty good presentation if you ask me.  I then went to a presentation about ConPortal, an open source web-based scheduling and time clock system originally created at Pomona College, but added to by Bucknell University.  It’s something I hope to implement, perhaps this year, though maybe next after I start requiring training (unless I require training towards the end of Winter Break).

The rest of today was left to do whatever.  I went for a walk with Sean and other guy from BGSU downtown, over a cool foot bridge that goes over the St. John river (it used to be a railroad bridge), and to a liquor store to buy some beer.  I didn’t find Péché Mortel as I had hoped, but they did have the whole Picaroons lineup.  I bought a bottle of each of the six beers they had from Picaroons and will be taking them back home with me.  The walk totaled about 7 miles, including 1.6 miles carrying the beer (I’m not going to try to put that in kilometers, even though that’s the official measurement here in Canada).

Now is time for rest and relaxation.  As we’re on our own for dinner, I’ll be headed back downtown, but my feet hurt and I need a break.

Twittering

Published on June 3, 2008 in Fun Stuff and Internet. Closed

So I decided to jump on the Twitter bandwagon. I’m RunawayJimPVD (because RunawayJim was already taken).

Wikis, Blogs, and Forums Oh My!

Published on June 2, 2008 in Internet, Open Source, Software and Technology. 3 Comments

We’ve been working on a new project at work to bring more engagement from our users.  To do this, we’re jumping on the buzzword bandwagon and incorporating some Web 2.0 technologies into our department’s web presence.  Being one of the youngest and least resistant to change, I’ve been taking the lead on this.  I figured I’d post some of my experiences with some of the various tools I’ve been using.  Everything is still a work in progress, but once it’s complete, I’ll post some final thoughts.

The biggest part of the new stuff is the wiki.  If you don’t know what a wiki is, it’s basically a dynamic website editable by anyone (who has an account).  We’re using this to write up all sorts of documentation and make it easy for others to post documentation that they have.  We’re looking to build a huge knowledgebase of all the information people from various departments have.  We’re not currently limiting it to IT-related stuff because people have other questions (and we get calls about pretty much anything from the people on campus).   I started playing with MediaWiki, probably the most popular wiki software available, used by Wikipedia.  It was easy to install and get started, but configuring user accounts and doing any maintenance and configuration required playing around with MySQL commands rather than incorporating it all into a nice web-based GUI.  I gave up on that and tried TWiki.  This just didn’t work well at all and I was never able to get it up and running.  So I gave up and looked into PHPWiki.  This was just ugly and not robust enough for my needs.  I finally decided to give a tool suggested to me by the Frymaster, Deki Wiki from MindTouch.  This was a very user-friendly, easy to configure and maintain wiki.  It’s all PHP/MySQL based, and open source.  It looks nice, it doesn’t use some crazy wiki markup like MediaWiki (imagine that, actual HTML to write for the web), and we have people using it already.  If you’re just setting up a wiki and don’t know what to use, give DekiWiki a try.

The blogging software was a no-brainer.  I’m using WordPress here and it’s so simple, I just set it up for work.  I’m using the latest version with the latest version of K2 (though I edited the CSS to give it the look I want, along with a very awesome header/title image).  Not much else to report about that because I didn’t even have to think.  I’m probably going to turn this into the front page for our department site.  We’ll have news about new technology on campus, new services, security/virus alerts, and weekly random tech tips based on the calls we get.

Finally, the forum… I first played around with PunBB and while it’s nice, there’s not as much along the lines of support for it on the web and it doesn’t do everything I wanted it to (like integrate with Active Directory/LDAP) without add-ons (I like extensible software for my own purposes, but for something like this, native ability trumps extensions and plug-ins).  So I setup PhpBB3.  I found a nice theme (I can’t recall what I’m using) and played with the title and colors and it looks great.  I haven’t played with the AD integration, but it has that ability.  It has a lot more options, such as polling and better user controls.  It’s a bit big and intimidating at first, but once you get used to where everything is, it’s easy.  PunBB had a simpler administrative control panel, but you couldn’t do as much.  We’ll likely use this as a tech support forum where people ask questions and others can help answer or we can or we can point them in the right direction.  And it’ll all be archived for others to search.

So that’s about it for now.  This should all come together towards the end of the summer.  I’m hoping I get to completely replace our current website with the new stuff I’m playing with.  The fun part will be migrating stuff from my test environment to the production server.

MPAA Forced to Comply with GPL

Published on December 4, 2007 in Internet, Linux, Open Source, Software and Technology. Closed

In an awesome bit of irony, the MPAA was forced to comply with the GPL.  The MPAA had created a toolkit for universities to use to spy on their students.  Basically, it was a piece of spyware that the universities could install on their network.  The software allowed them to check to see if the students were illegally sharing or downloading movies.  The toolkit was based off Xubuntu, a port of Ubuntu, a distribution of Linux a free and open source operating system released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).  The GPL requires that any changes made to the source code of GPL’d software be made available along with the compiled software.  The MPAA, obviously not wanting some nosy student to figure out how their toolkit works, decided not to make the source available.

Not being happy with this, Ubuntu developer Matthew Garrett decided to contact the MPAA and ask them to remove the link to the toolkit or make the source code available to be in compliance with the GPL.  After several attempts to contact the MPAA without response, he contacted their ISP, explained the issue, and had the link removed.  The University Toolkit site now no longer displays a link for the toolkit.  Only the links for the usage guides remain.

Discussion at Boing Boing, Slashdot, and Gizmodo

First 100 Dot Coms

Published on December 3, 2007 in Fun Stuff, Internet and Technology. Closed

While browsing Slashdot this morning, I found a post about the first 100 .com domains ever registered (the site is actually on the longest domain ever registered).  The first .com was symbolics.com and apparently still exists.  Actually, a bunch of them are still in existence today… ibm.com, hp.com, apple.com, att.com (and many others).  Check out the list.  It’s pretty good history of the big companies of the mid-80′s.