A Bad Sign Of Online Usage

Tagged as: Amusing, Humor, Internet Jun 04

So I was reading PC Magazine (we got it free for some reason), and I saw this little side article that I thought was pretty amusing. It had a list of AIM acronyms that are not all too commonly used taken from America Online, 2007. Now most people nowadays know of things like LOL (laugh out loud), BRB (be right back), and TTYL (talk to you later). But those are maybe just the originals and can’t necessarily say exactly what you want. Or maybe they’re so overused that they’re boring. In any case, if you already knew any of the following, you have been online far too much. You need to get your pale self outside and greet the sun more often.

1. ADADanother day, another dollar
2. DQMOTdon’t quote me on this
3. BITDback in the day
4. SMFETEsmiling from ear to ear
5. GOLgiggling out loud
6. IMNERHOin my never even remotely humble opinion
7. BTDTGTTSAWIObeen there, done that, got the t-shirt, and wore it out
8. PRWparents are watching
9. WYGOWMwill you go out with me?
10. MTFBWUmay the force be with you

Personally I’m a fan of WYGOWM and BTDTGTTSAWIO. Maybe you can find an occasion to use them. ADAD is amusing just because the saying is amusing. If I ever encountered acronyms like this online, I would be totally confused.

Google Web History

Tagged as: Internet, Learn May 31

Have you checked out Google Web History lately? It’s pretty scary stuff. It’s a log of what you have searched for on Google. I know that Google’s slogan is “don’t be evil,” but it is not comforting to be able to look at your past searches for weeks.

Personally I went in, cleared it and then put it on “pause.” I don’t really want anyone to be tracking what I’m searching for and building a profile on me. It just seems so invasive. And I don’t like it.

Amusing Searches

Tagged as: Amusing, Blog, Internet May 22

So another advantage to hosting my own blog (okay it’s not just limited to hosting yourself) in addition to other costs and benefits of running your own server is that you get to see statistics. You can install any type of tracking system. I personally am using Statcounter and Google Analytics, but there are a plethora of options out there.

In any case I’d like to share what some amusing searches on my site have been:

1. pastor “Derek Wong” - Say whaaatt? Haha
2. siafu ant - One would think that I would get no hits on the Siafu Ants since there are other much more reputable sources than my blog on a species of ant. Oh well.
3. tweedle dee tweedle dumb - Apparently nobody writes about Alice in Wonderland anymore.
4. how to use gimp to make a passport photo - I would guess that someone could arrive at my site on this because it’s a pretty specific topic that I wrote a post about.
5. Jennifer Shih facebook - Now that’s just strange. Quit it stalker kids. Or rather, quit it stalker boys.
6. amazing gross photos - I think that’s awesome that they could arrive at my site on these keywords! Of course I probably disappoint because I don’t exactly have amazingly gross photos.
7. wong way poet - That seems pretty specific to me. You’d think that they could just remember “goingthewongway” if they can already remember “wong way.” Or maybe there is just some poet out there named wong who is writing about the way. I bet he wants my domain name.
8. california dmv temporary-operating-permit - I’m very happy that I can provide the answer to this. I know that I would have wanted to happen upon the answer in a quick search!

Okay that is just a taste. And considering that some of these searches are old, I make no guarantees that you will still find me indexed for these keywords. I just wanted to share how amusing it is for me to see these things.

Inconsiderate Internet Browsing

Tagged as: Advertisement, Internet, Learn, Life, Social-Bookmarking, Software May 17

Nowadays as nearly everyone has interaction with the Internet in some way, it is important to stop and think about how people might actually be using the Internet. Actually, right now I want to look at how some people might be inconsiderately using the Internet.

There are a few things that I’ve recently realized are inconsiderate browsing habits. To start off with, you must know that for the Firefox browser, there are programs that can be installed called Firefox extensions. I’d like to use a couple as examples of some of the browsing habits that are inconsiderate. However, it must be noted that they are not the actual habit, but they are rather a means to an end.

1. Adblock and Filterset.G Updater are both super extensions that are often the first that I’ll install when I have a new installation of Firefox. Basically they attempt to take the ads out of your Internet browsing experience. And they work very well. Adblock will basically filter out anything that you you specify. It is as easy as right-clicking on an ad and adding it to the list to be blocked. However this takes a long time to build up a reasonable list. Luckily it also allows you to use some pattern matching (similar to regular expressions) to allow you to make your list useful in a shorter list. Basically it allows you to match multiple things with a single pattern.

   This is not easy for most people. So in comes the Filterset.G Updater! It uses a master list that someone else has taken the time to create. It will match almost all of the ads that you would have normally encountered. Of course some sites are good enough to get around this. Nevertheless it leads to a pretty ad-free browsing experience that is incomparable to one filled with pop-ups and more ads than content.

   The inconsideration involved is this: websites need those ads as a source of revenue. Although I’ve only realized much of this by having my own site, it does make a lot of sense. Many sites that you read are free to use. However, they often need some income in order to stay free. It costs money to host a website (sometimes a good deal of it). When you’re browsing a site with ads, it is similar in idea to watching television with commercials. Television uses the revenue that is garnered by having commercials in order to create the content. Merely by the fact that you’re watching the show (and subsequently in some way affecting the Nielson Ratings), you are allowing the television company to charge more for their commercial time.

   Advertising on the Internet works similarly. I’m talking specifically about Google AdSense because I have experience with it, but this valid for almost all other advertisement programs. There are a couple of ways that users help support a site monetarily through their advertisement program.

   1. Viewing an ad. Simply by viewing an ad with the content, users are helping out the site because many ad programs will allow advertisers to purchase space that ends up paying per view (or impression in AdSense speak). The more views a site gets, the more it gets paid.
   2. Clicking on an ad. This is definitely applicable for all advertisement programs out there because nearly all of them will pay a site publisher (those producing the content for a site) based on how many clicks that an ad gets. There are a number of ways that a publisher might put ads on their website, but that is another matter entirely.

   What does this mean for you? Well I don’t know what it means for you. But for me it means that I will try to browse in a way that supports the website. As I use the Adblock extension, I can easily do this by

   1. Clicking the Tools menu
   2. Going to the Adblock item
   3. Click Whitelist this page or Whitelist this entire site

   Whitelisting a site means that you have given that site priority to not have anything blocked by Adblock. To undo this, on the whitelisted paged you can follow the same procedures as above. On top of whitelisting pages/site, you might consider clicking some ads. Don’t think that you’re giving your life away because ads are getting better and better nowadays. Very often they are related to the content that you’re reading (for contextually-based ad programs). So don’t avoid ads like the plague, they do some good by monetarily supporting sites that you are enjoying for free.

2. Fasterfox is another extension that highlights some inconsiderate browsing habits. This extension will basically tweak the Firefox settings to give you a faster browsing experience. This seems very cool because it helps you out as the end-user.

   However, this is actually fairly inconsiderate some of the time. The way that this extension works is that you can set how much tweaking you want the extension to do for you. At its extreme, it will prefetch (follow the link and load the page before you actually click on it) pages, open multiple connections to servers, and more. Obviously this puts more a load on the server than is necessary because you will not always click every link in a page nor will you absolutely need to load a page 1 second quicker. By putting an extra load on the server, you are unnecessarily making it harder for the server to serve its content to other people who might want it.

   Now, this does not affect low-traffic sites like my own because I could happily handle way more traffic than I currently do. But it does affect higher-traffic sites because they are already closer to being pushed over the edge. And that is just not nice. Other variations of this inconsiderate browsing habit are constantly refreshing pages for no reason, etc.

3. Utilizing Digg is actually somewhat inconsiderate because it often results in a Distributed Denial of Service. Without going into too much detail, this is basically when lots and lots of people will simultaneously access a site and overwhelm its ability to serve pages. This means that either some hardware will go down or people who actually would like to visit a site will not be able to because they are stuck behind everyone else waiting for the page. Granted, I participate in using Digg, but it still can definitely be an inconsiderate browsing habit. Consider using caches that have been made of that page. Hopefully most sites that get dugg will be able to handle the traffic and will actually benefit in some way from it (I try to find good ads to help them out with if I like what they have to say).

In the end, you just basically have to think about how your actions affect others and not just yourself. Apparently, that’s true for life as well.

<edit>
After I thought about it a bit, I wanted to add this little bit. By writing this entry I am by no means asking you to support my site though my advertisements. That would be underhanded as well as a likely violation of the Terms of Service for using their programs. But I think that people don’t really know about all of this. So read my entry, but I want what you do with this information to be up to you. But at least now you know.
</edit>

Cost And Benefits Of Running Your Own Server

Tagged as: Blog, Internet, Learn May 15

There is a cost to running your own web server. I’m not talking about the actual monetary cost, although there definitely is some of that.

I’m talking about the down time and lack of production-level reliability. I just got my Internet connection back up after being down nearly the entire day! I had checked the status in the morning, and it was working. However, when I got to work I couldn’t access it. “Oh great,” I thought.

So basically I just lost a day of traffic, readership, etc. Great, that just stinks. You know I wonder what my uptime percentage is. I was thinking about it today as a result of not having it available, and I am positive that I am up more than 9 days out of 10. However, I’m pretty sure that I couldn’t claim more than 95%. Oh well.

Anyways, I think that the benefits to running my own web server outweigh the cost. Let me share what I think some of them are.

1. Learn more about how the Internet works by becoming more than a user, become a cog.
2. Know exactly where all of your data is stored
3. Don’t have to pay for hosting costs (okay, okay there is the electricity to run the computer which is definitely something. But you’re not getting charged 15 bucks a month like you normally would be.
4. Learn interesting server-related things such as configuring Apache. This is especially interesting for those who have a professional interest in computers I think.

Is it worth it to you? I don’t even know what the percentages are of people who run their own server. I actually don’t know too many people that do. Of course I guess that speaks more about the people that I know than what is actually going on. In any case, sorry for the downtime, and I’m back (for now).