Archive for the ‘Ramblings’ Category

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YouTube: A Procrastinator’s Haven

Monday, October 27th, 2008

Even though my audience consists of approximately 3 regular readers plus the people who searched for the Red-footed tortoise of South Africa, AKA Jabuti – I feel like I’m letting those 3.5 readers down by my recent lack of content. 

My excuse is the Higher School Certificate, the exams which mark the end of high school. I’m currently in the middle of these minor annoyances, which after I get the results back will confirm just how difficult my professional life is going to be. It’s all on a scale from 50-100, basically ranking how intelligent (ability to rote learn lots of pointless crap) you are. 

So, tomorrow – well, later today – I shall be sitting my 3 hour Mathematics exam. It is now nearly 3am and I have to congratulate my brain’s extraordinary ability to avoid work that needs to be done. 

In the 8.5 hours since 6pm when I resigned myself to begin my epic cram session, I have accomplished the following:

  • Memorisation of most critical formulae needed for tomorrow’s test ( I don’t need to actually practice)
  • Learnt to play the verse riff from Muse’s Bside, ‘The Groove’, which has been repeating an endless loop in my skull for days
  • Read the summary of all characters with special abilities from the TV Show Heroes
  • Watched about 150 videos from YouTube
Here’s some of the highlights of my viewing adventures:
Under the humour category, from the amazing Frezned, it is “Discernment”

For your fix of music – From the very talented Alyssa Hart, “Crazy – Gnarls Barkely Cover”

And for a mix of both categories, “Electric Stimulus To Face” from Daito Manabe

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The Success of Cuil – Or Lack Thereof

Monday, October 6th, 2008

I would hazard a guess as to some of the reasons Cuil has not taken off in the competitive search business:

  1. Wow, a huge index list? That’s nothing unless you can display results in an accurate and relevant list. Google has had 8 or so years to develop technologies like Page Rank, and it is innovations like this that place Google at the top of the pack when it comes to search.
  2. Search is a critical technology which is required to use the Web. It demands efficiency, clarity. It is not a function which can be sold to people through a pretty Web 2.0 interface.
  3. There are so many other superb Google web products (maps, image search, gmail etc) that all their popularity and success is boosted by each other. People are more likely to put all their eggs in one basket, especially when that basket is such a free, functional one. Additionally, people trust Google and it has a brand image in a very positive light.
  4. Google’s search functionality and feature list – features of advanced search, like searching for specific file types, and from certain domains are excellent. These features are also available with commands like ‘filetype:xls’. You can type something like “time in california” or similar, when you can’t be bothered doing a time zone conversion, and Google will just tell you the answer! It’s the same with calculations. Along with suberb image search, scholar search and others, Google’s search feature set is not even worth comparing with Cuil’s.

When you put these and other factors together, it comes down to one simple thing; For users to switch to a c ompeting product, there has to be significant benefit to using the competing one. Google has so much going for them right now, that this would seem impossible for a new company to accomplish. Cuil had a slim chance with it’s huge index size, but this was obviously not enough.

Yet, Cuil is founded by former Google employees, so I wouldn’t lose complete hope that they might come out with something not only interesting, but successful some time in the future.

It was not very hard to resist the temptation of adding yet another Cuil/Cool pun headline to the internet.

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Keyboard Launching + XP vs. Vista

Monday, September 29th, 2008

My computer has been crashing in games lately, and I narrowed the problem down to the video card or software.

So, before burning completely through my pocket buying a new video card, I decided to try and go back to XP to fix the problem.

Unfortunately, once back to Windows XP my gaming stability did not change one bit. However, it made me think, what really are compelling reasons to upgrade to Vista?

Security Features such as DEP and ASLR would be more relevant if most developers coded with them in mind. Vista is certainly more pretty, with its glassy, see-through features. Also, there is the fact that all the security patches and upgrades you would have to download and apply after installing XP SP2 are already included or not needed in Vista

But after using XP again for a few weeks, the only thing I missed from Vista was the start menu and its bottom search bar. This may be something for the more keyboard oriented users out there. But I’m guessing most geeks can type quickly and are very at home at the keyboard. I prefer the ease and efficiency of pressing the start button on the keyboard, typing ‘word’ and pressing enter, to using the mouse to navigate the start menu.

XP does not have this excellent feature, but luckily there are several programs you can turn to, if you have not yet “upgraded” to Vista.

Launchy is a free, open source solution which I found on this Lifehacker article, Best 5 Application Launchers. It runs on Windows and Linux (KDE, Gnome)!

All you do is pick a keyboard combination to bring up Launchy. I chose Ctrl + Space. Then you begin typing the name of the program you wish to launch, and the results come up (which are indexed based on your start menu contents and desktop) in a Firefox like magic box, then you press enter.

The time I have saved by launching my applications via the keyboard is probably equal to the time it’s taken me to write this article, so just be grateful I’ve let you know about this excellent program.

Let me know if there are any features of Vista that would stop you from going back to XP, or simple productivity savers like this that you “just couldn’t live without”.

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Isn’t Wireless Great?

Saturday, August 2nd, 2008

I was stupid and didn’t keep track of my downloads this month, resulting in a ’shaped’ (slowed to 64kbps) internet connection. It would have been easier to keep my sanity if there wasn’t a certain someone in my household constantly using the voice chat feature of Live Messenger. That voice chat seems to take all the crippled bandwidth for itself and doesn’t let anyone basically do anything on the internet. Unless you count 5 minutes to load CNET News ‘using the internet’.

So, I went in search of alternative internet connections, in the form of wifi access points. It was the last day before the end of the month (when my download limit resets), so I wasn’t going to bother cracking someone’s wireless encryption. But luckily I found a new unencrypted wifi access point with my laptop. The only place I could get a connection was near the front window of the house, with the laptop raised above my head.

So I shut down my spare computer which was running linux hosting all this web goodness, put an XP hard drive and wifi pci card in it, put it on top of a chest of drawers in that room and connected it to the wired network.

I wish I had taken a photo of this; it looked ridiculous. The computer at the window with no screen, and a huge stack of books on top of it with an antenna sitting at the top.

I used VNC to remotely configure the XP machine and set up a proxy server on it so I could use my neighbour’s wireless from my computer out the back. Unfortuneately, after all this effort it turned out that my neighbour appeared to have gone over his/her download limit also and their internet was no faster than mine.

I could have taken the time sans internet to catch up on some HSC study, but I instead elected to do something I hadn’t done in a few months and watch commercial TV for more than 10 minutes.

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Thank you, Soul

Monday, June 16th, 2008

My Internet Service Provider, Soul Communications has actually lifted the block on various inbount customer ports.

I’ve been with them for months, and I have no idea when this changed. I was unable to receive incoming connections on ports 80, 443, 25 and a few others. But now they appear to work.

Previously, I had a complicated system going which allowed people visiting the site to type in a url without specifying port 500.

The proxy at school allows traffic to be tunneled through it, but only through port 443 so I can now take advantage of that, which is excellent. In all the schools in the state of New South Wales, every computer connects to the internet through a proxy which now implements a whitelist blocking service – meaning that unless a Department of Education and Training official has entered an approved website into the list, it will be blocked from every school computer in NSW. This is where my website comes in.

I host a cgi script which is a web proxy from my home internet connection. It is password protected, and hidden from view. Any DET official visiting my site will see an informative website about an educational topic. But for students in my year, they simply log into the hidden area with a password that changes every couple of weeks and suddenly they are allowed access to myspace, hotmail etc which are normally denied them while at school : D

Though now, I can host a SSH connection on port 443 and access this through the school’s proxy, and then tunnel proxy traffic over this connection and access blocked websites this way, which works much better and faster than the CGI script.

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