Archive for the 'Computers' Category

Internet names for Asia launched

Published by lamar on 20071009 in Computers and Technology. 0 Comments

The .asia regional internet domain has officially opened for business. This should be interesting.. Especially intriguing and massively significant (and curiously mentioned only as a minor side-note in the article) is the separate initiative being tested by ICANN to allow for domain names in non-latin scripts/character sets, ie, domain names written directly in Arabic, Chinese, Thai, Khmer, etc. script rather than some phonetically romanized version of those. This change will make the internet infinitely more accessible to the masses who don’t speak/read/write English.

It will be very interesting to see what effects this addition of native language support, once complete, will have on the following and other areas:

  • IT and networking infrastructure — For example, the practical problem of an American or German network administrator troubleshooting a connectivity or DNS problem to a Taiwanese website with a URL like http://愉快的馬農場.中華民國 or a Korean website with a URL like http://행복한 말 농장.한국).
  • Business — This will potentially & likely lead to massive internet connectivity adoption rates among previously unreached people groups — lower-class and/or less educated people who only know a local language, but already have the connectivity infrastructure available to them. This could well turn out to be the shot-in-the-arm that the IT and Networking industries have been needing to help them revive from the slowing economy and the dot-com bust, which, although a relatively long time ago, left the industries badly shaken.
  • Politics — Control of the internet in many ways is currently still effectively in the hands of the US government, as it is after all basically a US DoD (DARPA; at the time known as ARPA) invention; the ARPANET was the direct predecessor to the internet. This change will vastly complicate that level of control.

Blogger Play

Published by lamar on 20070929 in Computers and Technology. 0 Comments

This is fascinating. I ran across this on blogger.com (run by Google). Their story behind it is interesting enough that I’ll just re-post their entire write-up..

Blogger Play: Watch the blogs go by
Today we’re pleased to launch Blogger Play, a neat little toy we’ve cooked up to show you photos and blog posts as you’ve never seen them before.

Shortly after Blogger launched photo uploading two years ago, one of our engineers whipped up a web page that would show us the pictures that were being uploaded in real time. The result was fun, often beautiful, but above all, compelling. We couldn’t stop watching.

Over the years we’ve kept this photo scroller as part of the Blogger offices, on a monitor or projector, as an interesting (distracting?) slideshow, and a reminder of the diversity and vivaciousness of Blogger blogs. The fame of the scroller spread within Google, until one day we were asked, “so, when are you launching this?”

“Um…,” we replied. But we knew a good idea when we heard one. We got our UI people to come up with buttons and fadey effects and we got our engineers to make the whole thing fast and robust. A bit of work later, and now we can share it with all of you:

http://play.blogger.com/

Blogger Play will show you a never-ending stream of images that were just uploaded to public Blogger blogs. You can click the image to be taken directly to the blog post it was uploaded to, or click “show info” to see an overlay with the post title, a snippet of the body, and some profile information about the blogger who uploaded it. We also wrote a Blogger Play FAQ with more information.

A caveat: we use many techniques, including Google’s SafeSearch technology, to keep the images clean. Nevertheless, on rare occasions an image that you may find vulgar or obscene will slip through our algorithmic filters. Google does not pre-screen the images that appear in Blogger Play, nor is it responsible for their content. To report a terms of service violation, you may fill out this contact form.

YouTube - Fingerprint Biometric Disaster

Published by lamar on 20070928 in Computers and Technology. 0 Comments

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E20lHqbWqN4&NR=1

Looks like they have a few kinks to work out before this technology is truly mature. Nonetheless, it’s fascinating, and well, a bit scary, from a Biblical standpoint.

Hell, mathematically speaking

Published by lamar on 20070927 in Computers and Humor. 1 Comment

I found a bunch of zip disks (yeah really, what are those??) shortly before I moved to Taiwan, over two years ago now.. Luckily, I still had access to a zip drive at the time and was able to get all the data off. A few days ago I finally looked through this data more thoroughly and rediscovered several rather funny items I had felt were worth holding on to - here’s one of them. Enjoy!

The following is an actual question given on a University of Washington chemistry mid‑term:

“Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)? Support your answer with a proof.”

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle’s Law (gas cools off when it expands and heats up when it is compressed) or some variant. One student, however, wrote the following:

“First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So, we need to know the rate that souls are moving into Hell and the rate they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.

As for how many souls are entering Hell, let’s look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Some of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there are more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all people and all souls go to Hell.

With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle’s Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities. 1) If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose. 2) Of course, if Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it? If we accept the postulate given to me by Ms. Therese Banyan during my Freshman year “That it will be a cold night in Hell before I sleep with you,” and take into account the fact that I still have not succeeded in having sexual relations with her, then (2) cannot be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic.”

The student got the only A.

Gallery is set up

Published by lamar on 20061215 in Computers and Technology. 0 Comments

Yay!! I’ve been productive today. I got WordPress installed (WordPress is the blogging software), and I’ve now also installed Gallery2 and just finished uploading the first batch of pictures!! I’m really excited because I have so many pictures and so much to tell about what I’ve done in the last year and 4 months, and these two things will allow me to share everything very conveniently. Link for the pictures is on the right beneath the “peugh.org” heading — “Picture Gallery”. I haven’t finished laying things out or figuring out all the options for WordPress or Gallery, so there’ll probably be lots of changes in the next few days. More to come soon!