Category Archives: Geek Stuff

Geek Stuff

Frustration

Here I am trying to use my HTML tags to make a nicely formatted article and my browser won’t display them. In the previous article I set up the individual ideas as lists. They should be indented, with bullets. Do they show up that way? No. Look at the source code, doesn’t it show the < UL > tags and < LI > tags?

Silly browsers.

Geek Stuff, General

Column from PC Magazine: Pathetic European Attack on Google and the Net

Column from PC Magazine: Pathetic European Attack on Google and the Net

In a headline-grabbing comment last week, Pinto Balsemão, head of the European Publishers Council, said that the Internet cannot continue to be free, as it has been for the last decade. He wasn’t suggesting that publishers make all their sites pay-per-view, but that search engines could not and should not be able to search for content freely.

There is some concern that Google, and other search engines, can run rampant through a publishers library and start providing copyrighted works to the public, for free or a fee.

If this is a real concern, I can think of several ways to stop this.

  • Get off the internet.
  • Block the bots. I know what bots are visiting my web pages. I could set filters to stop them from accessing pages. Then they wouldn’t be collected, stored, mined, and indexed on the main site.
  • Get W3C to add a tag that tells bots that this page should not be indexed. Maybe even set the tag to allow some bots and forbid others, so internal search engines can provide a catalog for the Intranet. (Note: Intranet vs. internet)
  • Whitelist allowed users. Only allow valid, authorized IP adresses to access the web sites. In a closed community, this is a lot more manageable than a site that wants to be available to anyone, anywhere, anytime.

There are so many controls that a user can provide to limit access to files and pages on the internet. Folks seem to have forgotten them, or never understood how the system worked; just following the lead of what was done before, by a bunch of hackers who didn’t really want to restrict access to information, copyrighted or not.

Of course, it will require a lot more work to manage everything. An expenditure of time, money, and effort to limit access to a system that is a free-for-all in its natural state. But, it can be done.

Can I patent these ideas?

Geek Stuff

An Important Equation

Elevation = sin-1(sin(lat)*sin(dec)+cos(lat)*cos(dec)*cos(15*hour))

where:
lat = latitude on earth
dec = declination of sun
hour = delta hour from noon (i.e. noon =0)

What’s that spell?

Elevation of the sun above the horizon!!!

So at 10 AM on June 21st at my house, the sun would be:
sin-1(sin(39)*sin(23.5)+cos(39)*cos(23.5)*cos(15*2))
= sin-1(.629*.399+.777*.917*.866) = sin-1(.868) = 60.2 degrees above the horizon
Wow!

Geek Stuff

Column from PC Magazine: Whitacre: Threat or Menace? You Tell Me

Column from PC Magazine: Whitacre: Threat or Menace? You Tell Me

The Triple Play option I have heard about in the Telecom world refers to Voice, Video and Data, not Voice, internet, and mobile referred to in the original article.

Cable companies are trying to add Voice and Data to their existing video cable systems. Telcos are trying to add Data and Video to their existing wirelines. All to get into the customers home.

Some arguments can be made that Mobile phone systems may carry all three to wireless terminations, but we will need to see how well that will work given the general bandwidth restrictions on cell systems.

The SBC CEO is saying that SBC owns the telco pipes that carry all this information and that they can tariff the content providers so they can get a cut of the pie. This can be in reference to Voice bypass service providers such as Vonage or Skype or Video providers such as whoever is streaming video over the internet. Both of these potential competitors are using the internet to provide their services to the end customer, who is requesting these services. And there is the rub.
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