Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

This is perhaps the greatest piece of media you will ever find on the internet.

You must download it now.

It’s like 6.5 MB, so you modem users are hating it.

Today I actually waited outside in a line to buy tickets to a concert.

Yes, I got lucky and had the bracelet that put me third in line to get tickets. Yes, Michele and I will be seeing the following bands: Deftones, Incubus, Moby, No Doubt, Papa Roach, Weezer, Disturbed, Linkin Park, Green Day, and Everclear.

Everclear is Michele’s favorite band, and Green day is mine. Good karma I guess.

Calm down. I’m not that insane. I was asked to get a PSX2 for the office. The only reasonable way to buy one is to get it off an auction. Furthermore, I needed to find an seller that accepts the corporate American Express card. Therefore, the high cost.

I will have to test out this system. Oh yes, test it I will. :)Where’s my copy of Kessen?

Netscape 4.7x is sucking so bad,I’m trying Internet Explorer. It’s OK, except on HUGE flaw. In Netscape, I can right click on an image and one option is “Copy Image Location”. I use this all the time.

The problem is that IE doesn’t have this right click option. The closest I can do is to right clcik on the image, choose properties, and then copy the URl from the properties gump. That is WAY too much work.

Someone wake up Steve Ballmer and make him fix this.

Yah, yah, I know about Netscape 6, but I’ll rant about that later.

RP on the ‘hard shard’?

When Siege Perilous was started, many players stayed away. “It will all be PKs” is what people said. The shard began and yes, the PKs showed up in full force. Anti-PK teams were formed to combat them. Eventually the line between anti and PK became blurred as former PKs joined the anti cause to fight blue members of PK guilds. All the while, RP flourished with guilds of orcs, dwarves, undead of several sorts, assorted empires, various religious orders, noble houses, and assassin guilds. All of these guilds participated in the fighting. Alliances not based on anti or PK were formed.

As time passed, the Renaissance changes occurred on the regular shards and the Felucca facets seemed rather empty as PKs were confined and safety was guaranteed in Trammel. On Siege, alliances rose and fell, guilds disappeared, red or blue color no longer determined what kind of person a character was. Large scale guild battles slowed in favor or more tactical ambushes and fast attacks. The town of Safe Haven, founded in the shard’s earliest days, be came a hot point of battle and conflict.

The town of Safe Haven was formed as a neutral ground for all players to meet and buy good from a variety of vendors. The rule was no fighting in SH, everyone is welcome. This broke down as determined grief players forced the formation of Safe Haven defenses. Fighting occurs nightly between attackers and defenders.

Outside of Safe Haven, limited Faction fighting raged and guild wars continue unabated. Numerous events occur from battles to control the Shadowclan’s Keep to helping lost people with purple names find mysterious objects.

Currently, an election is taking place in Safe Haven for Mayor. The topic of mayor is at the top of the discussion on the shard’s “war” messageboards at battlevortex.com. Take a look at the candidates. BTW, the current mayor is Vaniir, a former PK and member of GC, now leader Temple of the Ronin.

Debain Zataurous – former PK, advocates a strong defense with no mercy for SH enemies

Kelly Kindred – advocate of relaxing the laws and for having tolerance on how people play the game.

Gorg’da’guud – a partially deaf Shadowclan orc, advocates razing most Safe Haven buildings and putting and end to the human’s practice of eating their children.

Ammar of NAO – member of an outlaw hillbilly guild that advocates reducing the fighting and encouraging the vendors.

Glendor – leader of a anti-grief player guild, advocates the reduction of fighting and the increase of shard wide events.

Of these candidates, most of them are red. All of them engage in roleplay and are backed by groups in the various PvP alliances on the shard.

I submit to you that Siege Perilous, “the hard shard”, it actually the last bastion of real roleplay in Ultima Online. Without the artificial restrictions of Trammel and stat loss, the importance of guilds, alliances, and fights, takes on importance to players in the game. Where else can groups claim and defend territory? Where else are the top PvP guilds also strict roleplay guilds? Where else are players judged by their actions and not their hue? Where else do the large guilds fund a guild run specifically for the benefit of new players and PKs avoid attacking these new players?

On Siege Perilous you find the player justice and real diplomacy that has been lost in most online games. For the shard that was viewed as “PK heaven”, it has become anything but.

I have been asked by people for a holiday wish list. As a confirmed procrastinator, I have put it off until today. Yesterday, I was threatened with coal in a stocking. As a result, I wrote up a list.

I assumed you voyeurs, greedy for any bit of new data will want to see it too.

I present to you, my holiday wish list.

Here is a well reasoned arguement as to why the www. is necessary. Of course he’s wrong, but it’s a good try.

I post it as he sent it. Too bad America’s college students can’t spell.

RE: December 1st posting at https://www.pusateri.org/cruft/index.shtml

Ohhh, youve touched on a topic that I have strong opinions about so I have to rant. I know that you know most of the following information, in fact I know you know ALL of the presented information but it’s nessacary for me to fully demonstrate my point so bear with me. 🙂

The www. in web addresses is NOT redundant. To demonstrate this let’s disect a Universal Resource Locator (URL) shall we?

Take for example the following url:
https://www.pusateri.org/cruft/index.shtml

https://
This part of the URL tells whatever client you are using what protocol to use. In this case the client is told to use http (hyper text transfer protocol). This is important because the client or in this case web browser knows what language to speak to the remote computer with.

www.pusateri.org
This is the address of the remote machine you are trying to reach stored in little-endian order. Since it is little-endian it would make sense to investigate this piece of the URL from right to left.

.org
The .org reffers to the top level domain (TLD) this is used for a clasification defining what type of orginization this “domain” belongs to.
In this case it is a non profit orginization.

.pusateri
The .pusateri defines the domain. This is the name of your realm, kinda liek an office building or neighborhood. It defines a cluster of machines that are all associated with the same orginization.

www
FINALLY the www part defines which machine within that “neighborhood” or “domain” the client should contatct about this particular request. It’s like the number on your house or the last for digits of your phone number. It is the last step in narrowing the search down to one particular computer. In this case it stands for World Wide Web, usually signaling that that computer is indeed a web server.

/cruft/index.shtml
This part tells the client what file to ask for once it has contacted the appropriate computer. In this case it is “index.shtml” in the directory named “cruft”.

As you can see demonstrated here the URL was desigined with flexability and scalability in mind. Each componet in the URL playing a important and key role. The www signifier is key in finding which computer is the one reciving the request. This identifier, also know as a hostname is a inergral part of the Doman Name Service (DNS) system which allows us to eaisly find computers on the network. Far easier than rembering numbers such as 208.54.123.222. If it were not for hostnames we would have to rember shuch numbers.

Although the world wide web has come to represent much of the internet in recent years it is important to remember that the web is NOT the internet. It is only part of the bigger picture that is the internet as a whole. The
URL was desigined as a way to easily locate any resource anywhere on the internet and each part of it was carefully thought out and 100% nesscarray to finding the location of that resource. It’s not just for web addresses, in fact it is worng to assume that the web is the only use for a URL. Let’s not strip it of it’s robustness just because people are too lazy to type 4 extra charters.

Just try finding the office of joe blow in one million square feet of cubicles without numbers or orginized designation of some sort. Getting rid of the www is the meta equivilent of having only one cube on every floor of that building. It would a waste of resources and throwing out the window the robustness and forethought that the fathers of DNS and the URL so thoughtfully built in for us to use. Let’s not take that for granted.

That’s my take on why it is fundumentaly wrong to take the www out of web address urls. The more standards compliant we can keep the web the better off we are. We have enough problems with web browsers con conforming to W3C HTML standards as it is. In fact Opera is best browser we’ve got as far as being standards compliant and roughly 1/3 of the websites out there are complealy unseable in Opera.

Standards compliancy is a real problem on the web, let’s not encourge this kind of irresponsible behavior.

I hope I have swayed your opinion somewhat on this issue or at least presented a logical and resonable counter argument to your opinion. Feel free to post this message on cruft if you so desire.

-James

One of the web sites I read is Geeknews as in geeknews.com. I was at a computer and wanted to check the news, so instead of clicking a link, I typed in geeknews, then I pondered, was geeknews a .net or a .com? I guess for geeknews.net and got a different site. At first I though they had changed designed or something. They both have Geekcam and slashdot style news on nerdly topics. For grins, I typed in geeknews.org and viola, another geeknews site. Heaven help us when ICANN allows even more TLDs, I don’t know how many geeknews sites I can follow.

One more point. Get rid of the stupid www. in web address, it is so redundant, it pains me.

I went to the movies last night. It was the first time in a long time that I bought a single ticket. Normally I am buying for a group and the cost of tickets is blurred under the pile of $20 bills you hand over.

I was completely shocked at the price of an adult ticket. $8.50. Last I seem to remember the actually price of a ticket it was $7. Am I really getting to be an old man and getting shocked at the price of things? Heaven help me, I’m becoming my grandfather.

The movie is saw was Unbreakable. I love all Bruce Willis movies, including Hudson Hawk (yes, I have the DVD). The movie was good. Not great, just good. The writer/director is the same guy that wrote the Sixth Sense. He had a lot to live up to and I doubt any movie could have compared favorably as a sophomore film. If this was his first film, I think people would have liked it more. The people I went with, Mike, D.J., Joe, & Craig, all agreed that we spent much of the movie waiting for the ‘big secret’. Sixth sense worked well because you didn’t know there was a big secret.

I think upon viewing another time, I will see more in the movie since I won’t be waiting so much.

Overall, the movie tries to say that people cannot be truely happy unless they are doing what they are meant to do in life. Kind of goes hand in hand with his ideas in the Sixth Sense that to move on in life and death, you much have closure and accept the reality of things.

I’ll be buying the DVD, but I won’t see it again in the theater.

I went to Comdex this year and wandered about for a couple days.  Boy, there is a TON of stuff at Comdex.  I thought I’d write up a list of the things I saw on my trip.  I’m not the head of an IS group, so I didn’t have a  big agenda of must see items.  Here is a list of the things I found interesting.  The list is in no particular order

FICA Aqua web pad – A nice little net connected web pad.  If you have an application where you need to walk around while connected to the web, this would do it.

QBeo image processing software – The Photogenetics software does an ‘instant fix’  on digital photos.  No more need to futz around with Photoshop filters and effects to make the pictures look good.

EUPA
computers & cases – EUPA had a wide assortment of interesting cases in the various shapes.  They also make the U-Stylish,
a compact computer that combines the LCD screen into the CPU case in an upright position. 

Hauppauge
WinTV PVR – This card turns your computer into a Tivo.  Not only does it let you record TV programs, it allows you to burn them as VCDs with your CDR. VCDs can be viewed on almost any DVD player.  If only my Tivo could do this…   Hauppauge also makes a HDTV reciever for your computer.  With the WinTV D, you can watch HDTV for under $300.

PocketPC – I had heard the hype on Microsoft’s PocketPC before I went to Comdex.  The hype was right.  This PDA blows the doors off a Palm.  It has built-in Outlook, Word, and Excel.  You can basically take your desktop
with you in a PDA.  With full Outlook compatibility you can see the same basic info as you see in your office. You can read attachments and edit documents if you really need to.  If you are in the market for a PDA, you need to check out this thing.

Synctalk – Synctalk is an app that runs on your PDA to convert data into XML.  You can then IR beam the XML data to another PDA of a different type, where Synctalk converts the XML into that PDA’s native format.  Simply put, you can beam
your business card from a Palm to PocketPC or a Psion.

Raritan KVM
switches – They make keyboard, video, mouse switches that let you control many computers from one set of monitor/mouse/keyboard.  They make everything from a box that controls 4 PCs to a system that let’s you control
2048 PC’s from 8 different keyboard/video/mice.   Solves a lot of problems for us operations people.

Linksys –
These people seem to make everything you need to get your home or small office up and running smoothly in a data sense.  They have wireless LAN stuff, DSL routers, hubs and every other type of network hardware you might need.

EDP – They make various types of rackmount equipment consoles.  They have some interesting fan units and reconfigurable desks.

PoinTech –
The PoinTech system is a combination of a wipeboard and a
projector.  What ever you right on the wipeboard is reflected on the computer feeding the projector.  Conversely, the projector allows you to display any computer image on the wipeboard.  The coolest thing is that you can bring up an internet browser, and by touching the wipeboard, you can link to other pages simply buy touching the link as it’s displayed.

Qbe Tablet Computer – These people make an actual tablet computer.  With a PCMCIA wireless LAN card, you are ready to walk around the facility.  I’ll probably be picking up one of these for testing.  Seems like they would do will in areas with little available desk space.

Biometric Authentication – When I saw the first fingerprint scanning keyboard, I was blown away. 
Imagine no more passowords.  Just put your dumb on the glowing red spot and you are logged in.  After about the fifth booth of biometric tools, I realized that biometrics was big this year.  I really can’t think of a downside.  A few of the booths with fingerprint scanners were identix,
SecuGen, and ethentica. 
I think we’ll be seeing these in short order.

Cypherus – These people deal in file encryption technology.  These days, it’s not the actual laptop that’s important, it’s the documents and email that are stored on it.  The Cypherus software provides a simple way for documents to be encrypted on a laptop computer.  If the computer is stolen, the thief cannot access the files since they are
encrypted at 4096 bits.  

Comdex was chock full of stuff, but those are the items I felt important enough to drop a brochure into my bag.  I was in quite a daze this year.  Perhaps next year I can write a more cohesive report.

–Michael