Dave's CS855 Blog

Email "Issues" - Due to Dynamic DNS?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 05:42:00 +0000

My wife sent my son and I an email, and the address for my son got munged somehow. After an evening of sending test messages it appears that when I get my copy of the email through a forwarding service and the forwarding service fixes my email address it also "fixes" my son's address. His address is to a domain at home, and the home system uses dynamic DNS, and the hosting service has a CNAME alias record to the dynamic address at dyndns.com. So I think the CNAME alias is what is causing the problem.

So my solution is to use the dynamic address service at Namecheap. Since namecheap doesn't have a Macintosh client, I had to go looking for something to use. I found ddclient, which is perl based so therefore compatible.

Dynamic DNS client:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/ddclient/wiki/Usage

Now, there are a couple of problems. One is that I host several domains on the same Snow Leopard Server. So I found a patch that allows ddcleint to update several domains.

Patch for multiple domains:

http://www.op-ezy.co.uk/~ian/blog/2010/09/03/making-ddclient-work-with-multiple-domains-on-namecheap/

The next problem is how to get ddclient running on system start.

Startup items on OS X:

http://osxfaq.com/Tutorials/LearningCenter/HowTo/Startup/index.ws

Set it all up and tested. Got bit a couple of times by the cache. It's really important to delete it when changing the config and testing to see if the provider is getting updates.

rm /var/cache/ddclient/ddclient.cache

It did indeed fix the problem.

E-Book Reader Progress

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 02:26:00 +0000

"Plastic Logic demonstrates e-reader"
http://www.eetimes.com/rss/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=210600214

By creating transistors on a plastic surface they can be made less expensively, helping drive the price of the display down.

Prediction Diagram

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 03:42:00 +0000

Seems we are supposed to provide some form of visuals regarding our predictions. I though a fishbone diagram of the factors currently inhibiting the use of electronic textbooks might be useful. Being too lazy to try to draw such a diagram in Word, I downloaded a demo copy of SmartDraw (www.smartdraw.com) which makes drawing the diagrams easy. Here is my diagram (click on it for a larger view):

Social aspects of Web 2.0 - troublemakers

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 03:53:00 +0000

So you have a troublemaker on your forum. They're rude and offensive, and you've warned them to clean up their act but they don't. You'd like to ban them, but they love an audience, and so they would be right back under a different user name. What to do? Use the "bozo" feature. Some forum software is starting to include a bozo feature. This feature is similar to automatically blocking the bozo for all other users. The bozo still sees their posts, but no one else does. The bozo doesn't get the attention they seek, and eventually leave. There's an article here:
http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2008/09/01/the-bozo-feature
The discussion about the article is interesting also.

A longer term solution is "Saving the internet with hate":
http://savingtheinternetwithhate.com/

Web 2.0 - "posting aggregation"

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 04:17:00 +0000

So you blog, tweet, put photos on flickr, bookmark on delicious, and so on, and you expect your friends to subscribe to blogger, twitter, flickr, and so on to see what your doing?

Do them a favor.

friendfeed.com and sweetcron.com will aggregate all of your sources for your friends.

Here's mine:
http://friendfeed.com/davecs855

My Prediction

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 04:09:00 +0000

Following the education trend of other classmate's predictions, here is mine:

Prediction: In 15 years students will have electronic textbooks (which includes a reader)

Factors leading to my prediction:

Mandated material is adding to the amount of content in textbooks, making books bigger.
More graphics are making books bigger.
Bigger books are more expensive to produce and are harder to carry.
Carrying books is necessary because lockers are being eliminated.
States are starting to legislate the maximum weight a student can be required to carry (laws already exist in Georgia and California).
One electronic device that contains all of the material in the textbooks resolves the weight problem.

Electronic textbooks can easily contain graphics, and even richer content such as audio and movies.

The life of a textbook is six or more years.

Textbooks are becoming more "web enabled". Web links in the textbooks lead to rich content on the web, such as animations, audio, and video, that can't be printed.

Electronic textbooks need a way to read them.
Although not as flexible, a dedicated device has the potential to be less expensive than a general purpose computer (such as one laptop per child).
e-book readers are relatively new. The Sony Librié was introduced in 2004.

e-book readers are still expensive. An Amazon Kindle is $359. A Sony Librié is $299.
The population is aging. Older people with grown children are less likely to approve school bond measures and tax increases. Education is already short on cash, and unfounded government mandates, such as no child left behind, means schools will not have ample funding for the foreseeable future (beyond 15 years).
Lack of budget means that there needs to be more price parity between printed and electronic books.

New display technologies are pushing costs down. OLED displays, and electronic ink displays such as Liquavista, show promise for low cost and low power consumption.

Electronic forms of books allow for many disabled students to have access to material through large type or text to speech.

Putting it all together:

There's a lot of reasons to move to electronic textbooks.

Hardware for electronic books is in its infancy, and volume is low, so costs are high.

When the current books are replaced (zero to 6+ years), schools still won't be quite ready to invest, causing them to delay for another book cycle.

Current web augmented books will provide an intermediate step. When the time i ready, publishers will already have content ready to go.

------------

Liquavista: http://www.liquavista.com/
Association of American Publishers - School Division: http://www.aapschool.org/vp_size.html
Amazon Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FI73MA/?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=1746548141&ref=pd_sl_4usif68krl_e
Sony: http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDisplay?catalogId=10551&storeId=10151&langId=-1&categoryId=8198552921644523780
Accessibility: http://www.icdri.org/electronic_textbooks.htm

Web 2.0's most ridiculous sites

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:28:00 +0000

From today's Computerworld. They say: "Here are 14 of the silliest and most redundant, tasteless or mystifying Web 2.0 sites. Warning: Visiting these sites may impair higher brain functions."

It's pretty funny, and spot on as Nigel might say. Rather than repeat it here. Go see for yourself:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9112879&source=NLT_AM&nlid=1

Podcast/feedburner

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 22:55:00 +0000

For my podcast I did a short review of feedburner.com

Like Tracy, I used Garage Band to create the podcast (being on a Mac, it comes for free). It is really powerful in its editing capabilities (great for removing dead air and most of the "uhms"). I has some background music, but I removed it for fear of copyright violation (sad).

As you can see I hosted it at podbean. They give your the source to paste into your blog entry to add a player.

Successful Predictions

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 03:40:00 +0000

I have to admit, I've come up short on a successful prediction. At first I liked Nigel's choice of Moore's Law - but after thinking about it, it was not so much a prediction as an extrapolation.

Since Gartner is in the business of technology prediction, I looked there. After signing up for an account to be able to search, I did get some "tidbits". Unfortunately, even the papers on their own self analysis are outrageously priced (4 pages for $95 in one case, 4 pages for $195 in another). Here are two of the papers that looked interesting, and their synopsis:

Gartner Predictions Where We Were Right About the Event, But Wrong About the Timing, 6 December 2007

"Many of our strategic planning assumptions and predictions have described an event correctly, but have been much too optimistic about how quickly it would occur. Here we revisit a few of the more interesting ones."

Yesterday's Security Predictions Re-examined Today, 10 February 2006

"Some information security and privacy segment forecasts missed the mark. Often, excessive optimism concerning the speed of penetration of new technologies was the culprit when predictions came up short."

What pops out at me about the two papers is that the timing seems to be off due to over optimism.

Gartner does have some free papers, most all of them older ones. One that looked promising is:

Gartner Predicts 2006 and Beyond, 14 December 2005

This paper seems to be a compilation of predictions in other papers. Some of the predictions are:

• By 2008, 20 percent of "office" applications will be selected by users themselves — see "Predicts 2006: The HPW Will Influence Users' IT Choices."

• By 2008, search technology will dominate a user-controlled universe — see "Predicts 2006: Media Segments Face Differing, Uneven Futures."

• During 2006, spending on open-source CRM will increase threefold, creating a viable alternative for many organizations — see "Predicts 2006: Market Consolidation Headlines Developments Among Top CRM Software Vendors."

• By 2008, open-source-software solutions will directly compete with closed-source products in all software infrastructure markets (0.8 probability) — see "Predicts 2006: The Effects of Open-Source Software on the IT Software Industry."

I tried to verify these results, but came up empty handed there (I guess you need to pay Gartner to give you the results!). However, since we are in 2008, my gut feel about these predictions is:

• IT departments are still dictating office applications

• I'm not so sure about "user-controlled universe", but search is a dominant technology.

• Since open source CRM usage was probably a very small number, it's easy to imagine three times a very small number.

• I really don't see head to head competition between closed and open source.

and these prodictions were published at the end of 2005 and are wrong two years later (overoptimism again?)

So maybe the "Fortune Sellers" (such as Gartner) really don't get it right (as per the book.)

By the way - the papers referenced here are available at http://www.gartner.com, but you will need an account and will have to search for them (there are no direct links available).

Web 2.0 - Blogspot

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 02:47:00 +0000

I guess we are supposed to describe some of these Web 2.0 tools in a little detail. A lot of us are using Blogspot, so we have some familiarity already. So you already know you can "Add Page Element" to add one of 18 different "widgets" (mostly displaying Google content such as news and images). I noticed some blogs had other content and wanted to do something different. Searching around I found http://www.widgetbox.com/. They have tens of thousands of widgets to add to blogs. What is really slick is how easy it is to add them to your blog. Just follow the directions, it's only a couple of clicks, and it's added to your blog. There are other sites with widgets, such as mashable.com, but widgetbox seems to have the best selection I could find.

I also wanted to spruce up the look. It seems you can easily change colors and place background images behind page elements, but I wanted to put a background behind the entire blog. Blogger provides the raw HTML for your editing pleasure. With a little searching I found direction on how to edit the background section of the HTML CSS template to point to a URL of an image. Alas, where do I put the image? I found another trick for that. Create a posting with a picture, a picture of the background. Change the date of the post to a long time in the past to push it to the end of the blog. Then view the source of the blog page to get the url to paste into the background section.

Bet on the Future

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 04:11:00 +0000

Why just predict the future of technology when you can bet on it? Popular Science has a site where the "wisdom of crowds" is used to bet on the future.

http://ppx.popsci.com/

Prediction Failure

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 22:11:00 +0000

Should we always predict what is going to happen?

I saved this long ago. Pen Windows was pushed by Microsoft in the early 90s. We were suckered into the business big time - selling with low margins to gain market share. Turns out we gained share in a market that was abandoned by Microsoft. Now "we" are all back at it agin with TabletPCs.

(Click on the image for a readable sized version)

Prediction Bias

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 03:49:00 +0000

As I was looking for a good failed prediction, I ran across the Maes-Garreau Point. Pattie Maes looked at predictions made by colleagues as to when it would be possible to "download" our brains, and therefore obtain immortality. As it turned out, the predictions were the same as the expected life expectancy of the researcher making the prediction. (http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2007/03/the_maesgarreau.php)

Failed Prediction

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 03:27:00 +0000

After searching around for an interesting failed prediction, the one I settled on happened to be in our book.

A committee of the British Parliament in 1878 reported Thomas Edison's ideas of developing an incandescent lamp to be "good enough for our transatlantic friends... but unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men"

Source: Clarke, Arthur C. Profiles of the Future. New York, Harper and Row, 1962. p. 2.

What made this prediction interesting is that even when it was made, there was evidence of benefits of the incandescent lamp. At the time this prediction was made electric light was from carbon arc lamps (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_lamp.) These were high maintenance due to the need to constantly adjust them (they eventually became self adjusting, but still needed new carbon rods on a regular basis). Arc lamps were also very bright, so they were suitable for street lamps, but not home lighting. Getting something wrong 20 years out is one thing. Missing a good thing staring you in the face in another.

Web 2.0

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 03:31:00 +0000

Well, I'm not sure I know exactly what Web 2.0 is. From what I've read it has to do with social, collaborative, and group web services. Using this definition I would say I have been using the following:

Sharepoint (discussions and file sharing used at work)

Wikipedia (group encyclopedia)

PHPBB (discussion lists)

Coranto (and old package for Blogging)

LinkedIn (social networking)

and recently

Pandora (music channel sharing)

Since this class started I've been "playing" with the following:

Blogger (blogging)

Twitter (micro blogging)

PageFlakes (sharing of custom web pages)

Second Life (virtual world)

Flickr (photo sharing)

One of the new sites I'm having fun playing with is Pageflakes. You tile "flakes" onto the page. There are thousands of flakes available. Most of these flakes are blogs and news feeds, but there are flakes for email, weather, stock tracking, etc. Follow the link under my links to see what an amateur can do.

I've been kinda pondering the playlist sharing sites. I like the auto-generated playlist on pandora (under my links), but I'm not sure anyone would be interested in listening to my channel. I've also been poking around imeem. Rather than being a community, seems to be more of a way for independent artists to promote themselves. I wondered onto imeem from my wife's niece's blog link to an artist "A Fine Frenzy" http://www.imeem.com/afinefrenzy/ She sounds good to me.

Keyboard Cleaning

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 17:29:00 +0000

Do it in the dishwasher!

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11029793

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/12/is_your_compute.html

The Get Out Clause

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 17:34:00 +0000

"Unable to afford a proper camera crew and equipment, The Get Out Clause, an unsigned band from the city, decided to make use of the cameras seen all over British streets."

http://tinyurl.com/6obp5y

TED Talks

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 03:59:00 +0000

Since I have an interest in input devices, this talk at TED by Jeff Han is pretty cool:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_touchscreen.html

CS855 Week 1 Introductions

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 23:39:00 +0000

1. Introduce yourself

Hi I'm Dave.

2. Identify your area of expertise or interest (real or desired)

I have a lengthy background in firmware and driver development, and managing the development of drivers. Since I've been managing driver development for graphics tablets, I've also developed a little expertise in human computer interaction. But if we're being desirous, I'd like to be a "generalist". Jack of all trades master of none. I like the concept of cross-discipline. I think that focusing on a single discipline can only go so far, before the really great ideas come for mixing things up a bit. I've enjoyed the areas of study during our time at CTU, since many of those areas are one's I've had little exposure to.

3. Describe your dreams for what will be needed in 10-15 years

Well, a couple of trends are people getting older, and the climate getting more extreme. The latter item has two interesting components - fixing the effects of the climate problem (flooding, drought, etc.) and fixing the reason it all happened - energy.

The old people will probably result in efforts in medicine, and I don't necessarily mean helping people get older still, but helping them in their old age. Things like curing Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, and other ways of improving quality of life, such a mobility.

Solving the effects of climate change will take some creative civil engineering (keeping water from where it shouldn't be and getting it to where it should). There will also be some biological efforts, such as dealing with disease moving to new locations, crops no longer growing in some locations and starting to in others, and species loss.

For the energy problem I'm all in favor of conservation and nuclear power. If a butterfly in South America can flutter and cause a hurricane in Africa, what the heck does a wind farm do (plus the chopped birds)? We can only dam so much water - plus that has decimated fish populations. We can only cover so much area with solar panels. So nuclear looks attractive (BTW - I worked for the EPA during Three Mile Island and was pressed into service to collect water samples - so I do understand some of the downsides of nuclear power).

4. List two cool new technologies that you would like to pioneer

Some cool new device for interacting with computers.

A way to parse requirements written in English and detect missing requirements.

5. Misc.

Since we're (I think) supposed to be blogging, this is also posted to blogger at:

http://davecs855.blogspot.com/

and I started a Twitter feed at

http://twitter.com/davecs855

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 23:04:00 +0000

Just getting started setting this up for class.

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 02:53:00 +0000