Category: Technology

Google is establishing another server farm

April 26th, 2007 · · Mount Vernon, Technology No comments - Tags: , , ,

Google is going to have some major incentives thrown at it from Iowa. Why can we not get one of these in Illinois? Specifically, down here in the “poor” area of southern Illinois?

The requirements for a site would seem to be land and electricity. We have LOTS of land, and I have yet to find somewhere (recently) that doesn’t have electricity or pretty close access.

This is a great opportunity to bring major construction dollars and continuing employment of a white-collar industry to our area. Our government should be chomping at the bit to get an industry like this to move into our area, but I haven’t heard anything yet…

TalkDigger and the Semantic Web

April 26th, 2007 · · Technology No comments - Tags: ,

First, what is the “semantic web“? For my purposes here I will describe it as “humanizing” the web. It stands to relate information on the internet in such a way as related articles/music/video or anything else can be found easily. It will also aggregate in a way that will make it easier to ask a question of a search engine in plain English and get a proper response.

As searches go now, one primarily gets vague results based on words in an article or description. The semantic web seeks to simplify searches and bring them together more cohesively. Here is a good description pulled from Wikipedia:

Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out tasks such as finding the Finnish word for “car”, to reserve a library book, or to search for the cheapest DVD and buy it. However, a computer cannot accomplish the same tasks without human direction because web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedium involved in finding, sharing and combining information on the web.

In short, the semantic web is mostly a vision (that is being evolved) to allow computers to search information more accurately and without as much or any evaluation by humans. It is a web for computers.

Recently, I came across a site, TalkDigger, while doing a vanity search on Google. I was concerned that the posts from my blog were being reproduced without permission or attribution, so I emailed the creator/owner, Frederick Giasson.

After emailing Mr. Giasson and chatting via email, he helped me understand how TalkDigger works and I figured out that I was an idiot like the congressman that said the internet is a “series of tubes”. Thankfully, Fred was very nice and helped educate me about his projects and their uses.

In case you are wondering, TalkDigger is a “semantic search engine” for the web. It is still in the early stages of its life, but looks very promising and useful.

THANK YOU, Fred, for educating me and turning me on to the semantic web!

How about some VoIP paranoia?

April 25th, 2007 · · Technology No comments - Tags: ,

I know, I’m crazy for valuing security and privacy, but it IS my blog. So nyah.

I happened across a nice article at www.voipnow.org. They touch on how VoIP is transmitted across the internet with no security at all, just like email. Anyone who wants to be just a little sneaky or put in the smallest amount of work can intercept and listen in on your calls.

I am not sure, but I believe this includes your cable companies’ offering of “phone service”. Assuming I’m correct, all of the people using Charter for “phone service” here locally are just putting their calls out there across unknown channels for anyone.

The article provides several ideas for encrypting your calls, but I would recommend Skype as their best suggestion. It is already encrypted and very cheap. Plus, you don’t have to pay Charter to use it.

Encryption – think about it.

The blog, she lives! (Google’s page rank is funny)

April 17th, 2007 · · Technology One comment

Well, I’m still amazed at how many unique hits I’m getting on here. We’re up to 735+ unique visitors this month, and it is barely half over. Over 700 stayed longer than a minute (the others were probably spam-bots or got here by accident).

Unfortunately, not too many people are using the RSS feeds to subscribe. Just so you know, I would really appreciate it if you did. I count those as real readers since I can be sure that they are reading at least a little.

Something I do find really cool is that over 45% of the people who visit my site are using Firefox, and about 20% are using Internet Explorer. I guess a lot of you are more “tech-savvy” and go out and get your own browser. Maybe the others like the changes in IE7, who knows. Not too many Opera users ~7%.

The main reason I wanted to make this post is that Google has me as the top 2 results when searching for “mvths on the move” at the time I write this article. Go to Google and check, I’ll wait. See? It is odd that they don’t have the site with the same name made by the committee as the first result. At least to me it seems odd. Now, go do a search for “dan voyles”. I come up third. I don’t get how that happens, but it does.

Guess search engines aren’t the best answer to finding information. However, the top five results will usually get you close to what you need.

I’m going to sit here and chuckle about this for a few more minutes.

UPDATE: I am actually off the front page now in results for “mvths on the move”. Guess I was just there when it mattered – before the vote.

UPDATE 2: I’m now the top result again, and I’m still the third result for my own name.

Don’t forget, I’m paranoid for believing in security

April 10th, 2007 · · Technology One comment - Tags: ,

Apparently an agency working for the State of Georgia has lost about 2.9 million people’s information. The information includes at least the people’s names and social security numbers. That is more than enough information to get any decent identity-theft (impersonator) scam going. How much of your information is floating around at your insurance companies’ office? Nervous yet?

Unfortunately, this puts a lot of people at risk for no reason. Simply encrypting this data would have greatly reduced the ability of anyone who found it to make use of the information. They would have to recognize where the information came from, what it was, and then figure out how to decrypt it.

Fortunately, a lot of the people on Medicaid probably don’t have that great of credit to destroy. So that makes it a little easier on my mind.