WTVN Radio • Columbus, Ohio • Sunday morning from 8 until 9
Who's in the corner?
Is this information useful? If so, consider
making a contribution, please.
|
|
WTVN Radio • Columbus, Ohio • Sunday morning from 8 until 9 |
|
| Home
• Previous
page Who's in the corner? |
Is this information useful? If so, consider |
|
| |
October 17, 2004 |
Random thought:
|
 |
|
The Bat keeps flyingMy favorite e-mail program has been upgraded again, this time to version 3, but it still has about a 0.005% market share in the United States even though it has a substantial following in Europe. It's not as pretty as Outlook, but it also doesn't catch every virus that floats around the Internet. And it's the most versatile e-mail program I've ever seen.
The developers in Moldova insist on calling it "The Bat!" but I refuse to scatter exclamation points randomly throughout sentences. As far as I'm concerned, it's "The Bat" and that's that. The Bat has been my favorite e-mail program since sometime in the 1990s. I may not be the usual e-mail user. With something like 75 e-mail addresses that forward to one of two "collector" accounts and another half-dozen or so accounts, I need an application that can easily handle a lot of account. The Bat does that quite well. At the left, you see a list of some of the account folders I use.
I have a file that contains several thousand quotations and aphorisms that I like to append as a "random thought" at the bottoms of messages. The Bat can do this with ease -- and it can also omit the random thought if the outgoing message originates from a particular account. I like to display the list of incoming messages with the sender's name at the left of the line in some accounts and with the subject at the left of the line in other accounts. The Bat is the only program I've seen that can do this. The Bat also allows me to set up dozens (or hundreds or thousands) of messages that I can call up by typing a single word and pressing Ctrl-spacebar.
At the left is one of the dialog boxes that controls The Bat's preferences. In this case, it's the editor preferences. Users have a choice of using either of two different editors for outbound messages. Features such as this add to The Bat's powers, but also increase its complexity for users. Problems?
But if you want an e-mail application that is highly resistant to viruses and worms, that displays HTML e-mail safely, that has more capabilities than most people will ever use, that handles multiple e-mail accounts with ease, that can deal with both POP3 and IMAP protocols, that has plug-ins to handle PGP encryption, and on and on and on, this is the program you're looking for. Earlier this week, RitLabs released a "seriously bugfixed version" that "improved the filtering system interface". The filtering system interface had been greatly improved in version 3.0 and I'm not sure that the additional improvements are improvements because some words have been replaced by icons that have no apparent meaning. Fortunately, the mouse-over help still works. There is now a customizable ticker that can tell you when messages arrive. Memory usage has been reduces and the bugfix is described this way: "There is no need to name every fix we made, but we are sure those fixes made The Bat more reliable and run smoother than ever." I was in San Diego all week for PowerPoint Live and, because I had taken only a Mac with me, I wasn't able to use The Bat to send and receive e-mail. I really missed The Bat!
For more information, visit The Bat's website. Do you know where your visitors come from?Most websites run on servers that create log files that capture some information about visitors. One bit of information is the IP address, which “uniquely” identifies the computer. So we should be able to find out exactly who visits our websites, shouldn’t we. As is usually the case, it’s not quite that simple. I currently have 2 IP addresses, one that identifies my computer to the router/firewall that’s connected to the cable modem and one that identifies the router/firewall to the rest of the world. If I run the command “ipconfig /all”, I’ll see that my current (internal) IP address is 192.168.xxx.xx6 (no, you’re not going to get it all!) but I can ask the router what my external IP address is and learn that it is 69.47.233.163. I’m not at all concerned about telling you that IP address because by the time this article is published, somebody else will have that address. Once someone has the external IP address, it’s possible to find out who owns it. Using a procedure called reverse DNS, I can see that WideOpenWest owns it: Trying 69.47.233.163 at ARIN; Trying 69.47.233 at ARIN; WideOpenWest LLC WIDEOPENWEST (NET-69-47-0-0-1) 69.47.0.0 - 69.47.255.255. And that’s where the trail stops unless you have a subpoena. WideOpenWest will know that I was using 69.47.233.163 at 8:39 on Saturday morning, October 2, 2004. That information will be in one of their log files, but the information is private unless someone has a court order. Security and privacy are sometimes at odds with each other and we like both. If you’re a merchant who accepts credit cards on the Internet, you might reasonably want to know if the person who claims to be in Columbus is actually in Indonesia. Or if you run a business that serves customers only in South Dakota and Montana, you might want to know how many visitors come to the site from other states. If your visitor arrives from a large ISP (AOL, for example) you’ll know the IP address belongs to AOL, but is the user in San Francisco, Boise, Toronto, Miami, or Madrid? That information is harder to obtain. A solution?IP2Location.com provides a database that can identify the location of a visitor. The company released a new database in early October that matches an incoming IP address to the country, region, state, city, latitude, longitude, and Internet service provider. Knowing this information in real time instead of finding it later with a log-analysis program allows the website to display localized content, balance server bandwidth, and prevent fraud. The IP2Location database contains more than 2.5 million records and the company claims a 95% matching accuracy at the country level. They don’t mention accuracy at the state or city level, but it clearly will be less than that. If you visit www.ip2location.com, the site will tell you where you are. I was surprised to learn that I’m currently in Michigan, even though what I see outside the window looks pretty much like the Worthington scene I’m familiar with. Here I am: Live Demo Using IP2Location - October 2004; Your IP Address is 69.47.233.163; You're located in (US) United States, Michigan, Dearborn; Your latitude/longitude is 42.3165° Latitude and -83.205° Longitude; You're connecting to the Internet through WideOpenWest Michigan. Well, not exactly. I’m about 186 miles from that location. So I connected to the computer in my office and used it to view the ip2location website. Now it thinks I’m here: Live Demo Using IP2Location - October 2004; Your IP Address is 67.98.xxx.xxx; You're located in (US) United States, Ohio, Columbus; Your latitude/longitude is 39.986° Latitude and -82.988° Longitude. Close. If I’d actually been in the office, quite close: The actual location of my office is Lat: 39.972892 Lon: -083.077034. Because I’m at home, it missed by about 15 miles. Still, not bad! The database costs $500 per year, with monthly updates. There are other costs involved, though. If you’re not running your own server in a dedicated data center, you’ll at least need to work with your Internet presence provider to determine how (or whether) you can implement the application on your website. Frightening the record companiesChris Stamey is the kind of guy who probably scares the Recording Industry Association of America speechless. That's because he's the kind of guy who creates his own CDs. When I say "creates", I mean that besides being a musician, he's also a technician.
I heard about Stamey on a National Public Radio program that played a bit of his most recent album, Travels Through the South. Because I liked what I heard, I went to Apple's Itunes website, found the CD, bought it, and downloaded it. It's on a small indie label (YepRoc) that's located in the town where Stamey lives, Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The equation is changing for the recording industry. The big labels still control most of the music we hear, but the Internet and operations such as Itunes are making it possible for independent recording companies to break through. When I sent a note to Stamey complimenting him on the CD, he replied in just a few hours and a follow-up message included a series of three "V.O.T.E." public service messages that he'd recently put together. You'll hear some of these on Clear Channel radio stations in Columbus, or you can just click these links...
What does "V.O.T.E." stand for? According to Chris Stamey, "One camp feels that it's the same kind of non-acronym as "R.O.C.K." (". . . in the U.S.A"). "Very Obvious Total Emergency" might get my vote. Hey, you can pick your own slant on the way to the polls. See you there" Nerdy NewsThe Internet on your power line?Surprising nobody, the Federal Communications Commission this week announced a plan that will allow broadband Internet signals to use power lines. Broadband over Power Line (BPL) depends on modification of "Part 15" rules that have previously dealt with devices such as low-power walkie-talkies and garage door openers that need no license to operate. Amateur radio operators are concerned that the new technology will create interference and commissioner Michael Copps, while approving the new rule, said that he remains concerned about that issue. "I believe that the FCC has an obligation to work hard to monitor, investigate, and take quick action where appropriate to resolve harmful interference," Copps said. If interference occurs, he says that the FCC must have a system in place to resolve it immediately. If an amateur radio user makes a complaint and an agreement between the BPL provider and the amateur radio user cannot be reached, Copps wants the FCC to resolve the matter. "These cases must not take years to resolve," he said. The FCC, while recognizing that BPL could cause interference to other signals, decided that the advantages of more widespread Internet access is a more important consideration. BPL has the potential to provide Internet access to areas that are not currently served because of the high cost of running cable or DSL service to sparsely populated areas. Initially, though, BPL will probably come to cities and suburbs to give those who already have access another choice. Besides being a revenue source for power grid operators, BPL will also "facilitate the ability of electric utilities to dynamically manage the power grid itself, increasing network reliability by remote diagnosis of electrical system failures," according to the FCC. The FCC has been conducting tests that the commission says prove that BPL systems will be able to operate successfully on an unlicensed, non-interference basis under the Part 15 model. To avoid interference, the commission's order creates "excluded frequency bands" that BPL operators must avoid so that the new service won't interfere with existing services. There are also "exclusion zones" in which BPL may not operate at all. Lost and found: PeridotPeridot (which may be pronounced "pair-ih-dot" or "pair-ih-doe") is the name of a pale green gemstone. Legend says that the stone was used in ancient cultures to help people find something they had lost. Nobody has any stones, but interns at IBM's UK unit have named a new application they've developed "Peridot" and IBM says it could put an end to broken links on the Web. Peridot maps and stores information from websites so that it can detect when the content changes. The developers say this allows it to automatically replace outdated links with the new ones. Most of this editing is done manually now. You'll probably find at least a few bad links on the Technology Corner website because some of the pages I've referenced over the years have disappeared when companies that owned them have disappeared or been acquired. Keeping links up to date isn't exactly entertaining or rewarding work. Similar applications already are able to detect which links are broken, but what Peridot brings to developers is that it detects not just broken links but changed links and it can be adjusted to make its own changes or to call a human. The application is still in test, but IBM says the prototype is running reliably on an intranet with 100,000 pages. Let us know what you think about this program! Write to: |
||||||
|
|
Privacy Guarantee:I HATE SPAM and will not sell, rent, loan, auction, trade, or do anything else with your e-mail address. Period.
|
This is the only ad you'll ever see on this site. It's for my website host, BlueHost in Orem, Utah. Over the past several years, they have proven to be honest, reliable, and progressive. If you need to host a website, please click the banner below to see what BlueHost has to offer. As if you didn't already get enough weather on the radio! Annoying legal disclaimer
[an error occurred while processing this directive] |
||
< CLICK ANY OF THE SMALL IMAGES TO SEE A LARGE VIEW
Sure. The programmers are in Moldova, so their first language is Russian. They speak and write much better English than I speak or write Russian ("Ya ni russki schpion!"*) but the documentation still leaves a lot to be desired -- particularly that dealing with the more powerful features.
To quote Stamey's bio on the recording studio side of his 
