Navigating the Sticky Strands of the Web

Map 

Image by pjf@cpan via Flickr

The Internet can feel like an unending series of pages; it’s easy to forget that it’s actually a bustling city with a basic infrastructure. Each web page has its own address, which is the only way to find that particular page. Most people think of a web page’s address in terms of the word or phrase that identifies a website, usually the name of the site and preferably something easy to remember. For example, you might think of shopping website Amazon.

 

However, that is not actually the page’s address. Instead, it is shorthand for the page’s true location, known as the “IP” address. This series of numbers and dots, e.g. 193.28.574.92, is how the computer identifies the page’s location. It’s easy to see why people would prefer to use another system – it would be very challenging to try to remember such a series of numbers for even one page, let alone many. Think then of the addresses people use, such as Amazon.com, as a universal code, which the Internet decodes in order to find the page.

 

Humorously enough, even the word-based shorthand of most web page address can become too cumbersome, which is why sites such as TinyURL are so popular. The site takes a bulky address and converts it into a much shorter version, prefaced by “tinyURL.” When people enter that more succinct address into their web browser, the TinyURL website converts the short version into the longer version…and then the browser converts the longer version into the IP address. Shorthand for the shorthand, a code for the code, as it were. Navigation is complicated.

Filed Under: Internet, Search Engine Tagged With: , ,

The Beauty of GoogleDocs



Google has outdone itself with this addition to gmail. Not only is it a favorite with editors and collaborators, but many companies have made it a staple to their system as well. Here are several reasons why Google Docs is an incredible feature.

You can read any Word file. If you have not upgraded to the newest version of Microsoft Office Word and are experiencing difficulty viewing files sent from others, Google Docs allows you to view these files.

You can download the file. Not only can you view newer files, but you can download them to your computer in a format that is compatible with your computer. That means that you can take a file from a newer version of Microsoft Office Word, and download it as either a pdf, keeping any formatting the same, or you can download it as a Microsoft Office file that you can edit.

You can print without changing your format. By clicking “print,” the file is automatically put into a pdf, you do not have to worry about changing margins or tabs when you are transferring the file for printing. The document will print the same as it was when it was emailed.

You can edit online with similar features of Microsoft Office Word. While you can view and print online, you can also convert files for editing. This means you can receive a file and not bother downloading and saving it to your computer to make changes. Any changes you make will be saved as you go.

You can save files online. There is no longer a need to have a My Documents folder on your computer full of files. You can keep your files online. The files are easy to organize as well, with the ability to organize by folders, as well as to share files with other gmail users for concurrent editing.

Filed Under: Internet, Search Engine Tagged With: , , ,

Has Technology Improved Instant Replay in Sports?

Professional and collegiate sports have woven technology into their respective games to help decide the outcome of controversial calls with the use of instant replay.
If this technology is so wonderful, how come professional baseball, soccer and basketball haven’t followed suit?
In the most recent World Cup in South Africa, several crucial calls were missed effecting outcomes of games on the world’s biggest stage. Although the technology was there, the International Soccer Federation chooses not to use instant replay.
With technology in sports replays improving dramatically in recent years it makes you wonder how the officials still get it wrong sometimes. While we at home see the replay in 10 seconds and have a good idea what the outcome will be, the official takes over five minutes and still comes back with decisions that leave fans incensed and home viewers shaking their heads.
While technology has dramatically improved the officiating in college and professional sports, it still has room for improvement. One thing this technology has done is create more grey area between fans and officials as seldom talked about rules come into play that fans and home viewers don’t understand.
Professional baseball and basketball have missed some crucial calls in recent years that have cost team’s playoff berths or advancement in playoff length.
Several years ago, Phoenix Suns point guard Steve Nash was brutally assaulted on the side-line and no foul was called. While Nash bled like a stuck pig, not playing, the San Antonio Spurs rolled past the Suns and into the NBA finals.
Three years ago, San Diego Padres involved in a non-call at home plate that cost them a spot in the playoffs.
While some fans find the technology too slow, it is likely to improve in years to come. It is also likely that Olympic sports and those sports like baseball and basketball will one day have instant replay.

Filed Under: Internet, Search Engine, Technology Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Black Hat SEO

A typical search engine results page
Image via Wikipedia

Socially and professionally unacceptable ways of getting Search Engine Optimization (SEO) rankings is called black hat SEO. Websites sometimes resort to black hat SEO techniques to push their web ranking higher. Higher web rankings mean greater probability of visitors to the site.

Black hat SEO techniques do not follow any guidelines of ethical SEO standards. Users are subject to poor content delivery as a result of black hat SEO. Websites that use this SEO technique leave a bad taste in the users mouth, and might prevent the user from accessing any site in that category.

Black hat SEO presents information in a distorted and manipulative manner to search engine spider programs. It is done to confuse the spider programs, so that they are forced to index the site contents. Looked down by the SEO community, this malicious technique was once upon a time legitimate. Used primarily for temporary benefits, rewards are short lived. Once the search engines find out, then the website gets punitive action. Search engines might shut out the website from any SEO activity. Black hat SEO is sometimes called spamdexing. Although they are nearly the same, spamdexing is more a subset of black hat SEO.

Browsers are gearing up to kill the black hat SEO menace. Black hat SEO is done mostly by evil websites that want to steal your information. By injecting malware into your system, these predators sit silently and record all your activity. After getting your information, they just transfer the information through the network to the crime hub. You might be dumbfounded to see your bank account broken into and your money siphoned off.

Antivirus software companies are getting into something called cloud services. Cloud services are apps that inspect the malware before taking an informed action. Downloads will become more and more circumspect, with the antivirus gaining more intelligence to hole out the evil man behind the angelic veil. Conventional ways of checking were to inspect the downloaded copy. But now, the cloud services application will actually get to know from where the download is from, and take its decision from there.

Enhanced by Zemanta
Filed Under: Search Engine, Technology, Web Tagged With: , , ,

Internet Voice-mail

Voicemail
Image via Wikipedia

Internet telephony has given a great service called the voicemail service. Voicemail is nothing but leaving a message for a person, if that person is not available to pick your internet call. Just like you have voicemail services over telephone networks, the same has come into the IP telephony space. Unlike wired or wireless network voicemails, internet telephony voicemails can be delivered right into your inbox. Fantastic feature this, considering that some people might prefer an alert in the email rather than opening up a voicemail box.

You can set internet voicemail services according to your preferences. Cutting down on the annoyance factor, this kind of voicemail is like your silent servant. You won’t get beeps or incessant alerts. All you need to do is some configuration to route your voicemails to your Smartphone or personal computer.

Voicemail service providers let you have a lot of features for a low monthly charge. You can configure an auto responder to attend your calls in your absence, and parrot your lines. If you want your voicemails in your email inbox, you can set that as well. Internet voicemail can also be converted into text for reading it rather than listening to it. Voicemail alerts can be configured to fly in to your mobile phone message inbox. So there’s a lot of things that internet voicemail gives you.

Some well known internet voicemail service providers are Google, Skype, and laser voicemail. Google voicemail services have a feature that converts your voicemail audio into text. Although Skype is a free internet telephony service provider program, the internet voicemail isn’t. You got to subscribe for it. The rates are not alarmingly high, but manageable.

One interesting voicemail technology described above, the one that converts voicemail audio into text, is called visual voicemail. Visual voice mail works on the Internet Message Access Protocol. Voice recognition software from the vendor servers’ transcribe audio messages and convert them into text. Internet voicemail service providers will provide a visual interface, from which these text messages can be viewed. The user interface can be used to manage visual voicemail messages.

Enhanced by Zemanta
Filed Under: Computers, Internet, IP Address Database, Search Engine, Technology Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Keeping away from social network muggers

Semiotics of Social Networking
Image via Wikipedia

Social networking is a new age phenomenon. It has opened the doors to people from different cultures, and backgrounds to network positively. In an open social networking space, it is imperative that restrictions are cut-down to add more value to the social networking technology experience. You have so many groups, common interest forums and what not in social networking sites. You can create your own common interest group as well. Thanks to the internet, all these things are possible.

Examples of social networks on the Internet are MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn, Facebook, Spoke, Ryze and so on. One may also use social networking technology to share multimedia content on YouTube, or add contents on Wikipedia pages, after a registration process.

When sites use self-publishing mechanisms, and also have a high-interactivity index courtesy the technology, it also opens up loopholes for hackers to get in. Given the enormous amount of content being circulated into personal mailboxes, it seems to be getting easier. RSS feeds, podcasts, are some of the ways that hackers can use to breach security.
When more online participation is invoked, more content needs to be circulated. Spyware is targeted to operate in these situations. There could be spyware that you could accidentally download from the Internet. Some spyware have technology to log your keystrokes; which means your passwords are out in the open.

There some good habits to follow when on social networks. Prevention is better than cure. Don’t just use discussion forums to type-in your personal information. Don’t give out banking info, passwords, and personal details and so on. Plenty of touts are present on the internet, flaying genuine addresses and a certain degree of credibility.
Spammers are now able to get through to inboxes. Spam filters are not able to control the spam mails, because it is recommended by your social networking site. Spam mails will have links that register your IP details, when you click on them. After accessing your IP location, all that the hackers need to do is some digging to get through to your bank accounts and other digital lockers.

Enhanced by Zemanta
Filed Under: Computers, Internet, IP Address Database, Search Engine, Technology Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Formatting a Hard Drive for Windows XP

Formatting your computer hard drive is like cleaning a slate, and readying it to be written-on again. A hard drive is comprised of partitions like the D partition, the C partition etc. Formatting checks all these partitions, and gets them uninfected.

Even when computers are incessantly crashing, it creates a hard drive formatting situation. Clearing your hard drive is easy. Most computer operating systems come with their own set of hard drive formatting tools.

A hard disk drive with the platters and motor ...
Image via Wikipedia

For Windows XP users, Right-click on My Computer icon on your desktop, and select Manage option. In the ensuing window, click Disc Management. You will now see the contents of the Disk Management window. Before you start off the cleaning process, you got to delete the logical drive first. Logical drive is the partition of your computer hard drive. To do that, right click on the required partition, and select Delete Logical Drive. The required partition might be in any of the Disks that you see in the Computer Management window. It’s the way your hard drive is setup. Remember you ought to backup all data before doing this. That’s because once you have deleted it, the data’s gone!

If you want to format lots of partitions at one time, make sure you backup data from these partitions, and do the Delete Logical Drive action. Once deleted, the box will be empty, and will have a prompt at the top telling you that it is free-spaced and waiting to be formatted. Right click on this ppromt and select New Partition option. In the ensuing wizard click Next button. On the next screen, select Primary Partition followed by clicking Next button again. After this, select the drive that you want this partition to get into from a drop-down menu. Following which, you will get a dialog box. In the dialog box, you can set the volume of this partition in Volume Label field. Always choose File System as NTFS, and set the Allocation Unit Size field as default. Since the drive is new, select Perform a quick format, and click Next. Click Finish in the last screen.

Enhanced by Zemanta
Filed Under: Computers, Internet, IP Address Database, Search Engine, Technology Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Shared Web Hosting

Multiple racks of servers, and how a data cent...
Image via Wikipedia

When many web sites are housed on an internet server, then this is called a shared web hosting service. A server that hosts this allocates partitions to each website. By doing this, websites are in their own zones on the server. Looking at this, we understand that shared web hosting sounds inexpensive, than using a standalone web hosting service provider who is only hosting your website. From a maintenance standpoint, all the websites sitting on the servers pay the maintenance charges to the web host.

Small business, personal websites, can make use of the shared web hosting model. But if there are a lot of internet visitors to the website then it is better to go for an internet web host like a dedicated web host. Dedicated web hosts are servers that are leased for only one client. Another dedicated web hosting model is by using virtual private server (VPS) internet web hosting service. A point to be noted is that there are also free internet web hosts.

Shared hosting will work if a new website is launched and is primarily on a litmus-test mode. Or in other words just wants to gauge the response to it. Shared web hosts can install software that tracks the number of internet visitors to the website. Shared web hosting might not provide the best bandwidth or storage that you might expect. Also, web usage metrics are not great sometimes, because, the rates are low, and web hosts might need to contend with doing more with less. Support for database is also limited. Unlike paid webhosting that supports MySQL, shared web hosting might not provide it.

Shared webhosting works for first-timers. With minimal technical know-how one can get the website up and running. Although support is not there for the database, the server administration is generally good. Low downtimes, and low network non-connectivity frequencies. Due to the presence of other websites, shared web hosts are always on their toes. Although security levels are quite low, and software usage is limited to what the web host provides, it is definitely worth a take for small-time websites.

Enhanced by Zemanta
Filed Under: Computers, Internet, IP Address Database, Search Engine, Technology Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

High Speed Rail Technology in China

A meglev train is coming out of the Pudong Int...
Image via Wikipedia

Commercial trains with speeds of over 200 kilometers per hour (KMPH) come under the high speed rail category in China. China has the largest high speed network in the world, by the number of kilometers of high-speed rail tracks it has. It should also be noted that China is the only country that has universalized high-speed rail technology as part of public transport system.

China has put in a lot of money into this high-speed rail network technology. It all started off in China with the commissioning of the world’s fastest high-speed rail route. Wuhan and Guangzhou were linked by a nine hundred-plus kilometer high speed-rail line. Speeds of more than three hundred KMPH were recorded. While the average speed was still a little over three hundred KMPH, it was a great milestone achieved in traditional Chinese public transport technology.
Based on Japan’s Shinkansen high-speed railway network technology and Germany’s InterCity Express (ICE), China’s high speed railway network was still nothing new. However, instead of doing away with traditional railway lines, and implementing high-speed railway lines, China entirely built fresh high-speed railway tracks.

Taking into consideration China’s vastness, the high-speed rail technology also took into account terrain conditions. Safety precautions have been taken into account; all aspects like terrain solidity have been tested before high-speed rail lines were laid. Given the success of high-speed rail technology in China, more such railways lines are coming across the length and breadth of the country.

All these efforts by the Chinese government will only add to the efficiency of the Chinese transport system. High-speed rails save time and money. Chinese economy will only benefit from high-speed railway network technology.
A high-speed railway line is based on the Maglev technology. Maglev is short for magnetic levitation. Trains using this technology are suspended by a magnetic push that is railway-track generated. The suspension is minimal and not visible to the human eye. By creating a magnetically-induced levitation, the trains move faster. Considering there is absolutely no friction between the base of the train, and the railway line, the train transmission speed is very fast.

Enhanced by Zemanta
Filed Under: Computers, Internet, IP Address Database, Search Engine, Technology Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

How Google Map Maker App Helped Capture the Haiti Devastation Pictures

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA - JANUARY 5: A screen shot ...
Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Google worked with satellite imaging organization GeoEye to take pictures of the devastation that happened recently in Haiti. After this feat by Google Earth, it seems that the world has woken up to this kind of technology. Satellite imagery has always seen with circumspection. More to do with the lack of know-how on how this technology works, than the receptiveness to it, satellite imaging has now become a strong tool that governments can use to aid their military.

Emergency situations create havoc. Helicopters and paramilitary aid don’t reach the place on time. For example, in a scenario where an oil tanker has burst, the whole area will be consumed in flames. It is difficult for helicopters and aerial reconnaissance aircraft to completely image the destruction that has happened. This is where satellite imagery comes into the picture. Governments realize that it is time that they empower this technology. Although, companies like Google have strong technology with them for this, security concerns have always taken predominance.

Software giants like Microsoft, and other IT companies expressed their solidarity by donating money and offering technical support to help, and assist in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake. Google used its Map Maker app to get a precise picture of the earthquake scene. Map Maker is a web service. It was started by Google in 2008. Given the difficulty associated with getting information on locations and addresses in some countries, Google opened up the service for open collaboration. Just like what Wikipedia is for online knowledge-content; Google Map Maker is for online map-content.

When users sign up as collaborators, they can get to describe maps. For example, if a user is on a site that displays a hilly region, and the user identifies it as a particular hill, then this region can be labeled by the user. Contributors can also add more maps, and more details. Now the question arises, as to how to ascertain the veracity of the labels. Along with normal users, map-experts are also on the job. All map-markings and labels are signed off by them.

Enhanced by Zemanta
Filed Under: Computers, Internet, IP Address Database, Search Engine, Technology Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
« Older Posts