Bloglet Update - No.2

I apologize for having to apologize yet again to my bloglet subscribers! There has been a lapse in the email reminders that go out when I write a new story. A couple of weeks ago I changed my hosting provider (more on that in a subsequent story). I did not realize that this change would impact things at bloglet.com which is the service I use to notify my subscribers of new stories. Thanks to a number of you for telling me you had not received any updates for awhile and wondering if I had stopped writing. I don't see that day coming anytime soon! I really enjoy writing and I have a long queue of things that I want to write about. Most of my stories fall into one of sixteen categories.  (read more)

Blogging August 31, 2003 09:11 PM

End Of Summer: Cache Found

Geocaching is definitely habit forming. The first hike to find the Tobyhanna Lake Trail Cache ended in failure as previously described. It would have been easier to just forget about it, but that was not to be. Knowing that others had found the cache made me feel I should be able to find it too. It took a second hike but we found it today.  (read more)

Hiking August 31, 2003 07:19 PM

Cache Not Found

This sounds like a Windows error (of which there are plenty) but in actuality it is the outcome of my second geocaching expedition. Conditions were nearly perfect -- blue sky, slight breeze, 75 degrees, DEET (N,N-diethyl-m toluamide) sprayed on skin, water bottles full, and latitude/longitude from geocaching.com loaded into Garmin GPS receiver. The Tobyhanna Lake Trail Cache is somewhere along the Tobyhanna Lake Trail near the enormous Tobyhanna Army Depot. The first few miles of the hike were great -- a nice level trail and no bugs. The excitement built as the GPS receiver said the cache was just 180 feet away. Long story short -- it was nowhere that I could find. I know I was close but in spite of a lot of searching in the woods in a radius around the coordinates, I was unable to find the cache. In spite of the frustration of not getting to the goal line, the three hour hike was very enjoyable. It also got me thinking about the broader aspects of geocaching.  (read more)

Hiking August 29, 2003 08:15 PM

Photo Gallery Update

Internet Technology August 27, 2003 01:46 PM

Photo Gallery

I offer my apology for the photo gallery problems on my website over the past week. I am in the process of changing my hosting partner and the transition has been a bit more difficult than I expected. In retrospect I should have done more planning and testing. I am getting things under control now. There are still a few loose ends, but most things are now working. I really appreciate the feedback from people, such as Chuch Brownstein at CNRI and Jean-Yves Stervinou, Consultant en Nouvelles Technologies Web, who have pointed out specific broken links or errors. Over the years I have been very fortunate to get this kind of input to keep me on my toes!  Building and managing a website is a continuous learning experience. (read more)

Internet Technology August 26, 2003 11:17 AM

Spam Update

There has been a lot in the press over the last few days about spam so I wanted to reiterate and summarize my view on the subject. I continue to believe that the only way to beat the spam problem is through the use of technology, as I have written before. I see no possibility of spam legislation working. The legislation is well intentioned, spam is truly a huge problem, but it just won't work. Included is the recent proposal for a "Do Not Spam" registry. There is little possibility of it working, partly because of the complexity of the management and security issues that would have to be addressed and partly because of the "exceptions" that would get baked into the legislation. Case in point -- take a look at the new National Do Not Call Registry that was launched by the U.S. government recently. The site says that "Most telemarketers cannot call your telephone number if it is in the Do Not Call Registry". When you click on "most telemarketers" you quickly see the problem -- exceptions. I'll conclude the "why it won't work" part of my story and then offer suggestions for what should be done.  (read more)

Public Policy August 22, 2003 01:19 PM

Riding In The Rain

Riding motorcycles is a constant education -- in addition to being a lot of fun. There have been two prior stories here in the weblog about this: Motorcycling In The Winter and Wind Chill. The latest lesson was about riding in the rain. Lots of rain. Everybody that does much bike riding has probably experienced some rain at least once. Sometimes you see bikes and riders waiting under the overpass along interstate highways. More than a year ago I wrote a story called "Do We Need the Interstate Highway System in America?". As of yesterday I now know the answer -- if it is raining really hard we definitely need them! After a thunderstorm had passed, I checked the forecast for the entire route from Pennsylvania to Connecticut. It called for scattered thunderstorms with a 40% chance of rain. Seeded like a reasonable risk. The first 35 miles of the ride was sunny with a blue sky.(more)

Motorcycles August 18, 2003 07:00 PM

Convergence

Convergence as a technology concept has been around for decades. Many have predicted the convergence of electronics and entertainment, of PC's and TV's, and more recently of WiFi and cellular. All of these areas are in fact undergoing various degrees of convergence but there is another area that many are not as familiar with. It is called ENUM. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) issued a "request for comment" on ENUM (RFC 2916) in September 2000. Basically, ENUM is a protocol that will make it possible to converge the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and the Internet. In other words, a telephone number can get you to a Web service -- telephone number in, URL out. The idea can be extremely useful when you consider that most telephones are limited to twelve keys on a keypad. Ever try to enter your alphanumeric login ID and password to a web site on a cell phone or Personal Digital Assistant? It is next to impossible! The biggest impact of ENUM will probably be for Voice Over IP (VoIP). In fact, it could be the tipping point. ENUM is a really big deal.  (read more)

Internet Technology August 16, 2003 02:59 PM

Marvel Of The Vatican

The Vatican Library is home for many of the world's rarest books and documents.The library has more than 150,000 manuscripts, including the four oldest surviving manuscripts of the Roman poet Virgil dating from the fourth and fifth century AD; and the oldest known manuscript of the Bible, written in 350 AD. There are also more than a million books, including 8,000 published during the first 50 years of the printing press. Virtually all civilizations and cultures in the history of humanity are represented somewhere in the Vatican Library. The wealth of content is phenomenal and scholars from all over the world are deeply interested in studying it in detail. The result will be an advancement in the general understanding of the history of the world. That is the good news. The bad news is that due to the cost of travel and the physical limitations of the Library to accommodate visiting scholars, only about 2,000 scholars per year can actually visit. Fortunately, a number of technical collaborations have focused on how to both preserve the treasures of the Library and make them more accessible to scholars.  (read more)

Internet Technology August 12, 2003 12:50 PM

Geocaching Hike

Today was my first attempt at geocaching and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in hiking. The basic idea is that individuals and organizations set up hidden storage places (caches) in various places around the world and place the locations (lattitude and longitude) of the caches on a web site like geocaching.com. An interested adventurer or hiker can then visit the website, some hints about the cache, download the lattitude and longitude into their handheld GPS receiver, and head out on their search for the cache. Once found, the cache may contain a tupperware container with some gifts and a logbook.The visitor makes an entry in the logbook if they get something from the cache, they should replace it with something new. The visitor can also go back to geocaching.com and record their success and upload some pictures. The cache I visited was called Bridge Over Troubled Water.  (read more)

Hiking August 8, 2003 09:52 PM

Old Stomping Grounds

Six months ago I got an email from Stan Birkin who is Chairman & Professor of the Information Systems/Decision Sciences Department of the College of Business Administration at the University of South Florida in Tampa. Stan was thesis advisor to me when I was working on a masters degree in 1971. He was a professor in management science at the time and I was on a military leave from IBM and stationed at MacDill Air Force base. The purpose of the email was to ask if I would be willing to go to Tampa to speak at the AMCIS 2003 Conference. The Association for Information Systems (AIS) is a worldwide professional organization of scholars and practitioners of Information Systems. The conference had an impressive 46 mini-tracks covering a wide array of information systems topics. My opening keynote was titled "The Future Of The Internet". It was not too hard to convince me to visit Tampa since I have some roots there. It was home for nearly two and a half years and it was a great pleasure to re-visit some special places. (read more)

Travels August 6, 2003 04:18 PM

Linux - The Penguin Marches On

Japan's largest national research organization has ordered an IBM eServer Linux supercomputer that will deliver more than 11 trillion calculations per second, making it the world's most powerful Linux-based supercomputer. It will join other Linux supercomputers on the Top 500 List.The new supercomputer is planned to be integrated with other non-Linux systems to form a massive, distributed computing grid - enabling collaboration between corporations, academia and government to support various research including grid technologies, life sciences, bio-informatics and nanotechnology. The system, with a total of 2,636 processors, will include 1,058 IBM eServer 325 systems. The powerful new supercomputer will help Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), well known worldwide for its leading research in grid computing technologies. This situation is yet one more example of the rise of the Penguin. (read more)

Internet Technology August 3, 2003 06:07 PM

Anyone Remember Heathkits?

In the late 1950's and early 1960's, when I was a teenager, building electronic kits from Heathkit was my favorite hobby. During the Heathkit era which lasted from the late 1940's through the mid 1980's, it was possible to build a wide range of things from hi-fi/stereo and ham radio to computers, radio control, and home electronics. Heathkits were first marketed by mail-order, with advertisements appearing in electronics and amateur radio publications such as Popular Electronics, Radio Electronics, CQ and QST. I eagerly awaited the next issue of these magazines to see if Heath had introduced any new kits. Even more exciting was the arrival of a new Heathkit catalog. The largest kit I ever built was the TX-1 "Apache" Ham Transmitter. (read more)

Gadgets August 2, 2003 12:37 PM

USB - What Next?

There is no end to the creativity of the technology industry. The USB (universal serial bus) had the primary goal of creating a more compact, instant, hassle-free way to connect a keyboard, mouse, printer, digital joystick, scanner, set of digital speakers, digital camera, or PC telephone to a PC. Prior to the sleek and simple USB cables we had big and bulky serial and parallel cables. If you had more than one serial device, then you needed a special box with multiple cable connections and you ended up with a mess of cables. Adding a non-USB peripheral device to a PC can be a non-trivial task that requires a lot of technical savvy and a certain amount of luck. First you have to figure out which port to use and then, in most cases, you have to pry open your PC to install an add-in card, set special switches, and figure out various "settings". USB makes adding peripheral devices really easy. First, USB replaces all the different kinds of serial and parallel port connectors with one standardized plug and port combination. With USB-compliant PCs and peripherals, you just plug them in and turn them on. What's next? (read more)

Gadgets , Personal Computing August 1, 2003 09:53 AM