Aleksander Skjæveland Larsen » internet

Internet dunces

ogrim — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 10:58:09 +0000

We all laugh in unison at the dunces of the internet. Usually they lack basic netiquette, and make themselves look terrible stupid. Like desperately trying to control a discussion by deleting fair comments on a blog or other websites, and disregard all reasonable critique. We can only facepalm when reading about musicians, artists and companies suing discussion forums, journalists and bloggers when they get bad press. Another kind of these dunces are those trying to use pictures they find when searching online.

If you find a picture you would like to use on another site, you are supposed to upload it to your own server or service. If you use the image directly you are hot-linking, which is bad practice. Every time someone browses your hot-linked site, you load the image directly from the source, hence stealing bandwidth. In many cases the source has to pay for the bandwidth used, so in some sense it is equal to stealing money. There are ways of protecting against this, but I have not bothered to set this up for two good reasons:

One: the bandwidth from my host is free
Two: it brings much joy and power

Joy and power? Yes, when people are hot-linking you can replace the original image with something horrible, giving you a direct impact on the thieving websites. Recently I discovered some sites hot-linking to the old Statoil logo featured in this post. I decided to replace the Statoil logo with a funny picture that would make no sense in the context. By doing this, I am having quite fun by slightly defacing another persons website. Also I am sending a signal that if I would, I could replace the image with something truly repulsive and disgusting.

Let us look at the bandits in question.

Bandit #1:

after my image replacement:

Bandit #2:

after my image replacement:

Bandit #3:

after my image replacement:

What are the facts?

Swedes are hot-linkers
Hot-linkers are bandits
Bandits are bad
Victims of hot-linking may receive great joy

What can we infer?

Swedes are bandits
Swedes cause great joy
Bandits cause great joy

Haha, contradictions.

Major change, but you can’t see it

ogrim — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:54:49 +0000

I have upgraded to a regular install of WordPress 2.8.5 from an old, useless version of WordPress MU. The MU stands for multi-user, which I thought would save me a lot of time for hosting several blogs. Instead it led to frustration. Releases are lagging behind the official WordPress project, so I could not benefit from new features when a new version got released. There was also no tool to export the database, as I could import it in the first place. This was later solved by exporting the WordPress database in XML format.

WordPress MU had stored all the files and pictures I had uploaded in a special folder, nested deep within the directory tree. URL rewriting made this show up as /files, although it was much deeper than that. By simply extracting the folder and putting it in the root directory, I matched the previous URL rewriting, thus retaining all functionality for images and files. I had put off this upgrade for a long time, in fear of breaking something. After some testing on a local web server, I was confident everything would work out. I’m glad it did!

The minor change, you can see. It is the sidebar featuring tags, latest comments and soon hyperlinks.

How large is the internet?

ogrim — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 18:11:16 +0000

Matilde asks me all the time how large the internet is. I keep telling her it’s not about the size, rather about traffic and people connected. Anyone with a connection to the internet, can easily expand the size by hosting their own webserver, or any other service. I am personally responsible for several gigabytes of the internets size. But that is not important. It is the amount of traffic my content is generating, and the number of people downloading it, that is interesting.

In order to put some internet sense in her, I am going to give her this book when I meet her later today. It is called “Hva er Internett?” and is written in Norwegian by internet guru Gisle Hannemyr. I read it myself, and it is very informative about the more technical parts of the internet, without being very technical at all. The book is for those who use the internet on a daily basis, but don’t know much about the finer details. It’s not going to teach you how to use email, it’s not that basic.

Another fun-fact is that speed also is irrelevant on the internet. Electrons move the same speed trough copper cables today, as they did back in 1995. There is difference in speed with different technologies, such as fiber optic cables, and wireless networks, but even that is not the most important stuff. Bandwith is the measurement used for how much data you can move trough a network, often measured in kilobits per second (kbps). We perceive this as speed, since higher bandwith allows you to download files faster. Still, it is not speed.

Imagine two people standing on opposite sides of a lake. They both know morse code, and one of them has a flashlight. He is communicating with the other person, sending morse code with his flashlight. The other person is standing on the opposite side of the lake, looking at the flashlight in the middle of the night. Depending on his skills, he might be able to understand only a certain amount of morse code per second. This is not the speed of the communication, it is the bandwith. The morse is transmitted with light, which moves at a constant speed. What we might think of as speed, is realy bandwith, and is how much morse code that can be understood per second.

The next time someone brag about their fast internet connection, you can tell them that your own connection is just as fast. What may differ, is the bandwith.