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Webitz - Checking out the Web from an amateur's point of view
Now here’s a weird thing. Last night I was trying to upload a post using Mozilla Firefox as the browser. Normally I have no problems with this browser, and, now that I’ve got used to it, prefer it to IE7.
The post contained a link to a site where the last two parts of the URL had two tildes in it. However, every time I clicked on publish the tildes would turn into the following: “%E7”, which is apparently the code for a tilde. That should have been fine, except that by the time the post was published the link was no longer persona grata and would lead to an error message.
I tried all manner of things: swapping the tildes for a slash (it got me to the site, but not to the exact page); copying the URL differently; putting the URL in directly instead of via the publish section’s own link system. Nothing worked, and even my geek of a son couldn’t come up with anything, though he tried.
I was lying in bed dozing quite a bit later on, not thinking about the post and link at all, when suddenly it occurred to me that maybe Mozilla had something to do with the problem. It was too late to get up and try it then, but tonight after work, I loaded up IE7 instead of Mozilla, and, voila! the post is in, and the link works. Now, ain’t that strange?
But problems apart, in the course of trying to find out something about the tilde problem I discovered that if you put a tilde in front of a Google search word, it will also bring up synonyms of that word. Thus, search for movie with a tilde in front (and no space between) and you’ll also get results for film. Search for home and you’ll also get house. Search for run and you’ll also get marathon.
At first sight it seems to be a way of getting too many results, but in cases where things aren’t so easy to define it can be very useful.
Lately a number of people have declared ‘email bankruptcy’, by which they mean either one of two things: they will no longer correspond with anyone by email, or they have wiped all emails from their inbox, and are starting afresh with whatever arrives from then on.
The people who have been giving up on email include college professors, analysts, senior executives. Some say they were so overloaded with emails they could no longer do their work; others just got so far behind there was no way they could catch up.
But these people aren’t opting out of communication, just emails. They’re prepared to take phone calls, and written messages.
This rather seems to defeat the purpose, as an email can be answered when you wish, whereas a phone call must either be answered when the phone rings, or else you have to catch up with the person later – if you can.
Moreover, it may be just a matter of prioritising their time. I remember reading about both C S Lewis and William Barclay – prodigious writers, both. And both spent a good deal of time answering letters – by hand, in the days when typewriters were available, but weren’t always used by the writers themselves.
It seems to me that if men of this calibre could give part of their day to replying graciously to all comers, then other professors (both Lewis and Barclay worked in Universities) should have the ability to do the same. After all, emails don’t require you to address an envelope, lick a stamp, walk down to the post box or even use a letter opener. I write more ‘letters’ now, by email, than I ever wrote by snail mail – and I was pretty good at writing letters.
On the Internet things can take off at the drop of a hat – if they capture people’s imagination.
If you’ve used the Internet recently you’ll have come across a ‘captcha’. It’s that box that has distorted text in it that humans can read, but other computers can’t – at least not at the moment. Usually you find them on sites where they won’t let you in unless you tell the system what the word is. I find some of them so distorted that I can’t read them anyway, but that’s neither here nor there. Maybe my computer and I have more in common than we thought.
Now there’s 'recaptcha.’ This goes a step further – a considerable step further. In recaptcha there are two words. You are asked to type both of them in. But this isn’t to make it more difficult for you: it’s to add to an ongoing project that began about a week ago and is already booming.
It’s thought that around 60 million captchas are solved by people around the world each day. That’s a lot of effort going into just letting people into sites. The recaptcha takes that effort and puts it to good use.
The Internet Archive is digitizing a number of books that are out of print or old or archival or whatever. But this is a slow process because in the method used – Optical Character Recognition – the computers struggle to identify a number of words. (Sibelius, the music program, uses a similar method to turn scanned music into ‘real’ music – it has similar problems.) What recaptcha does is offer a known word to the person wanting access. They type in the answer. The second word is one that’s not been readable by the OCR. The human does the solving. How simple and effective!
The word that’s unknown to the computer is offered to a several humans. If the answer is consistent over a number of offers, then the computer can be sure it’s got it right. Voila! Humans beating the computer at its own game.
The idea is right, but have they really got it working properly yet? A cow apparently produces enough methane to fire up a home furnace for 24 hours. Getting the cow to the kitchen is the issue. So about two dozen researchers at Purdue University have turned the idea into a useful reality. Except that so far it’s cost them some $850,000 – US dollars, that is.
Their ‘cow’, or bio-refinery as they rather more scientifically call it, is a machine that chews up waste and scraps and turns them into fuel to generate electricity. The US Army wanted something that would prevent them throwing out tons of waste each year – supposedly each soldier produces 4lbs of waste a day (!) – and it also had to be fuel-economic.
So, they researchers-cum-inventors came up with a machine that chews up the trash, and then produces enzymes to ‘digest it’ and turn it into simple sugars. These are turned into ethanol by the addition of yeast. Leftover waste – paper cups, plastic forks and so on – are squashed into pellets, and burned to produce a gas that's blended with the ethanol, and used to run a modified diesel engine
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I came across the site, World Without Oil, today. The site is compiled by a number of people who all have concerns about how we will cope when the oil runs dry. According to the backgrounder, they were a group who met at the Denver airport when it was closed, and began a discussion about the whole issue of what will happen this year, when oil is already becoming harder to get. They decided t
got there – such is the nature of the Net) because over the last few months I’ve written a few stories related to this. You can find one of them on Quazen.
To find out more about how the WWO site began, click on the ‘Mystified, Start Here’ link in the upper right corner. There’s also a blog which comes across as a bit random at first. Perhaps it’s because the whole thing has already been going long enough to have accumulated a good deal of information and experience, and it takes some catching up. And the site itself has links to dozens of other blogs. Enough reading here for a month of (oil-less) Sundays.
One of the things I don’t enjoy about my present job is that I sit nearly all day. Previously I was up and down and doing things, as well as sitting, and it gave my body variety. But sitting all day not only affects my posture, but also makes my bum sore. I’ve just seen on the Net an interesting idea which would help this. Although it was produced primarily to help obese office workers, it would be of just as much use to someone like me who’d like to stand more often and sit less. (Charles Dickens, as he got older, wrote
more and more standing up at a desk. Partly this with was to help his back, which became very sore when he sat and wrote for long stretches of time.)
The idea I’m talking about is a vertical workstation. It’s basically a desk fitted over a treadmill, to put it simply. The treadmill strolls along at one mile per hour (it was made in the US, of course), and the office worker can still concentrate, at that pace, on his or her computer duties. I rather fancy this idea. With a laptop it wouldn’t be that hard to fix it to the top of our treadmill at home, and get strolling. Certainly it would be more comfortable, once you got used to typing while ‘moving,’ than sitting for hours on end. Added to this, of course, is the added value of possibly losing weight. I don’t think this has been thoroughly tested yet, but anything that keeps you moving can only be good for you.
We could take the idea further, and produce a way of carrying a laptop at a reasonable height, slung from shoulder straps perhaps, while you actually outside walking, on real ground. It might look a bit strange, and at first it would a bit akin to a woman carrying a baby in pregnancy. But if they can manage, why can’t we
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Those who know the Google Earth program and all its additional features may (or may not) be interested to know that a company called Wild Sanctuary, based in California, is talking with Google over the possibility of adding relevant sounds to the vast range of pictures available on the program.
Wild Sanctuary has more than 3,500 hours of sounds from all over the world, and the idea is to layer these sounds over Google’s images to give the viewer an idea of what it sounds like to be in the area. Dr Bernie Krause has spent the last 40 years collecting sounds not just from the wild, but from
cities as well. His collection is claimed to be the largest sound library in existence.
I understand what Dr Krause means when he is quoted as saying, ‘A picture tells a thousand words, but a sound tells a thousand pictures,’ but I’m not sure that the latter part of his quote makes a lot of sense
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Every time I turn around there’s another site on the Web offering bloggers the chance to do paid posts for them. The latest one to arrive (as far as I know) is Bloggerwave, a site one of my fellow bloggers alerted me to the other day.
Its site looks good but isn’t (for me) the easiest to find your way around in – as yet. No doubt like some of the other paid post sites, it will improve with time – and with more advertisers. (These are also a bit thin on the ground so far, but that’s never stopped Bloggers like me getting up and running in the past! I’m certainly not the first to get going on Bloggerwave)
On my other blog I enjoy the challenge of writing a post that has to include a specific link. Sometimes it isn’t easy to weave the advertising into your own normal writing style, and the effect is a bit clunky. But in general when faced with the fact of ‘having’ to write something about a particular topic, even something I’m not au fait with, I get on with it, maybe do a bit of research (which can be interesting in itself) and the result is usually pretty reasonable. It’s surprising what things out of your own past suddenly come to mind when you’re writing to order. It used to be the same when I wrote a weekly column for a local newspaper. Deadlines have a marvellous habit of forcing your imagination to work harder
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Mikko Hypponen has proposed a solution to the problem of fraudsters phishing bank accounts. He suggests banks have exclusive use of a new
top-level domain called ‘bank’. He recommends that registering new domains under one of these top-level domains could be restricted to genuine banks or other financial groups. To keep these domains out of the hands of fraudsters, the price for acquiring one of these domains would be top dollar. This ought to make it far too expensive – and not worthwhile – for fraudsters, who tend to pay as little as $5 to buy a domain to do their dirty work on.
At present most banks use the common domain extensions of their country, from .com and co.nz to uk or jp. And it’s relatively easy to make a mock-up version of a bank’s home page, which will fool anyone who’s not being careful. Why don’t banks, who aim to be secure in all sorts of other ways online, think of taking up this possibility
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69 ways to boost your web exposure fast? I came across this useful, valuable, hilarious list today after my eye caught this title: Make Money Online with a 13-year old. Now who wouldn’t want to follow that up? What 13-year old knows anything about making money? Nah, not worth checking out…well, maybe….I’ll go and have a look!
Carolcab.com is where the 13-year old is supposed to reside, though it’s hard to tell whether his typos and lack of grammar are actually because he’s a 13-year old or whether he’s pretending to be - or whether he's Asian. Either way, he has a link to his post on 69 ways, and that’s worth checking out.
The list includes such lines as
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Increasingly, people are finding ways to link back and forth across the vast blog network. The aim, in part, is to boost Google rankings, but it’s more than that. It diminishes the sense of isolation that many bloggers experience, and builds up social groups within the blog world. Okay, you will only make small inroads into the blogosphere, because it’s so enormous, rather like being one asteroid in the Universe that happens to smash into another asteroid – or planet. Maybe that’s not such a good analogy, given the damage inflicted on said asteroid or planet in the process, but hopefully you get what I mean.
Another blogger talks about making comments on other people’s blogs, something I mentioned several posts back. But he adds three other intriguing ways that are new to me: shout outs, speed linking and blogtipping.
Wikipedia defines a shout-out (note the hyphen) as ‘a greeting or acknowledgement of a person, group, or organization of significance. It is often done as a sign of respect, synonymous with "giving props".’ (‘Giving props’ appears to be a rap term that says I’m giving you respect.
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Sick of figuring out which charger belongs to what electronic device? Do you have a tangle of wires and plugs sitting in a heap for your cellphone – and your wife’s – the laptop, and all the other things that require regular charge-ups?
I won’t say, wait no longer. In fact, you may have to wait a while yet, but there is a device now invented which will mean you can throw away all those annoying chargers (or put them in a museum for out-of-date technology).
There are already silicon-based power pads on the market, but they’re expensive and relatively specialised. However, a group of seven Japanese researchers have built a plastic sheet that can power all the devices I’ve mentioned above, and more, without the need for wires or plugs. You could power up your computer by putting the sheet on the desk the computer sits on, or by putting it on the wall for a flat-screen television
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