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Internet

Issues that cover the whole spectrum of Internet standards and technology.

Uncle Sam Needs You!

Jan 18th, 2012
by Dirk.
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We need your help prevent United States Senate Bill 968 (PIPA) and HR 3261 (SOPA) from becoming U.S. law. These bills are essentially a technical solution (a flawed one) for a business problem.  These laws would short-circuit due process of existing laws and provide a sledge hammer for businesses to take down their competitors.  These laws are the wrong solution for the described problem.  A group of Internet inventors and engineers have voiced their opinion in an open letter to Congress stating their opposition to the SOPA and PIPA bills.  Ironically some provisions in these bills would attack Free Speech in ways we condemn in China and Iran.

Uncle Sam needs youWe need you to help over come the well funded lobbying effort to create these laws!  Some opponents of PIPA and SOPA: Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, craigslist, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, eBay, AOL, Mozilla, Reddit, Tumblr, Etsy, Zynga, EFF, ACLU, Human Rights Watch, Darrell Issa (R-CA), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Ron Paul (R-TX), Tim O’Reilly.

To find out how you representative is voting go to SOPA Opera to find out.  Then contact them and tell them how you feel about keeping the Internet a fair and open place to socialize and work.

Here are some of the people and companies that are working against your interests and for their own profit: RIAA, MPAA, News Corp, Time Warner, Walmart, Nike, Tiffany, Chanel, Rolex, Sony, Juicy Couture, Ralph Lauren, VISA, Mastercard, Comcast, ABC, Dow Chemical, Monster Cable, Teamsters, Rupert Murdoch, Lamar Smith (R-TX), John Conyers (D-MI), Michael F. Bennet (D-CO).

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

Jul 19th, 2011
by Dirk.
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I have been using Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for several years to provide off-site backup and synchronizing files on my numerous systems.  It is a cloud-based service that provides storage for a very reasonable cost ($0.14 per GB/Month as of 7/19/2011).  Access to files on S3 are through web service interfaces (REST, SOAP, and BitTorrent) that are not for general use.  So most access is through some end-user program or service.  Many services have been built that use S3 including Netflix, Tumblr, reddit, and SmugMug with the list growing rapidly.

To use this service, I use a variety of tools including command-line utility called s3cmd, on my Linux systems to synchronize directories and upload/download files.  Synchronizing a directory is as simple as:

s3cmd sync /home/dirk/data s3://bta-bucket/dirk/

This will create a “directory” data in the S3 “directory” bta-bucket/dirk; upload the files that have changed or do not exist on S3 and store file metadata date/time information to make all this possible.  The only problem I have run into is s3cmd’s get and put commands do not use this file metadata to set the file modification time.  This prevents using get and put where you have used the sync command, because the file modification time will not be saved (in S3 headers) or set (on local PC) with get and put.  So to restore one file to a directory AND set the file modification time set during the sync upload use the following command:

s3cmd sync s3://bta-bucket/dirk/data/somefile.ods /home/dirk/data/somefile.ods

The local file date should match the original file’s modification date/time.  Note: the date/time shown by the s3cmd ls command is the upload date/time, NOT the file modification date/time.  The file metadata is stored in the S3 metadata headers with the Key  = “x-amz-meta-s3cmd-attrs” with a Value similar to: “uid:1000/gname:dirk/uname:dirk/gid:1000/mode:33188/mtime:1302623148/atime:1311007748/ctime:1302627027″ to hold the file information.

Other S3 utilities save file metadata in different and incompatible ways, so be careful in choosing your S3 backup software and remember that changing to another utility may cause problems with synchronization based on the file modification date/time.

For Windows users, there is a free client called DragonDisk that uses S3 for file storage.  I have not used it, so this is not a recommendation.

Internet Everywhere

May 19th, 2010
by Dirk.
1 comment

If you do business using the Internet, there are fewer and fewer places that you cannot get an Internet connection.  As an experiment I took my laptop on my lastest vacation (really geeky, I know) to see how good Internet connections were from Cozumel and Akumal, Mexico.  In both the condos I stayed in provided Internet connections (DSL in these cases) with wireless access.  The connections were good and never went down while I was using them, mostly to upload my vacation pictures.

I am currently writing this post on my Delta flight from 36,000 feet, flying at 500 mph over Missouri using a service called GoGo Inflight Internet.  The service is a little pricey at $12.95 per flight, but other options are available and would be worth it if you fly alot and need to use the Internet.

Also Internet access was available for free at many restaurants that I frequented on my vacation, usually requiring a pass code, but in most cases free.  Denver International Airport (DIA, DEN) has provided free wireless Internet access for several years.  I was kind of surprised while waiting for a connection in Atlanta that they do not provide free Internet access.  The Atlanta airport does have several wireless access services available that will charge your credit card for 24 hours of access, but I only needed it for an hour or two between flights.  If the Turtle Bakery in Akumal, Mexico can provide free wireless Internet, why can’t Atlanta.  Come on Atlanta, try to keep up with Denver and Akumal!

So, from 38,000 feet over Grand Island, Nebraska, adiós for now.

Enable spell checking in all text entry in Firefox

Mar 25th, 2010
by Dirk.
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Firefox has in-built spell check, but by default, this spell check is available only in Text area (usually multiple lines with scroll bar) entry fields. Text entry boxes (usually 1 line) will not show spelling mistakes. To activate spell check in text fields, open the configuration page of Firefox. Type about:config in address bar and press enter.  In the filter text-box, type:  layout.spellcheckDefault

Firefox Spellcheck Configuration

The default value of this preference is 1. Double click on this parameter and change the value to 2. Close configuration page and now open any page which has a text-box and check for wrong spelling.  In case the spell check is still not enabled, right click on the text-box to pop-up the menu and check the Check Spelling menu item.