As the resident "computer guy", I'm asked for advice on fixing computer problems all the time. I get queries from friends, family, acquaintances and occasionally random people I've just met. Usually the questions are pretty vague and it's often difficult to figure out exactly what the problem is so I spend a lot of time asking different questions back which can sometimes be pretty frustrating.
Usually when you go to a website and ask for tech support, you're asked to specify all kinds of information in advance - usually way more than is actually important - so the people on the other end won't have to ask you later.
I found a site that went the opposite route.
From the GPSBabel FAQ:
What's the worst way to get help with a problem?
There may be worse ways than this, but it's a start.
* Vaguely describe a problem you're having some place other than the GPSBabel-misc mailing list
* don't list the operating system in use
* don't list the versions of anything involved
* don't offer a test case.
* Be evasive when asked about the precise steps to reproduce the problem.
Classic.
A team of volunteers launched a rocket up 77 miles above earth last week. Very cool. Who needs NASA?
I've been thinking a lot recently about why I find Geocaching so compelling. There hasn't been many things in my life that have caused such a difference in what I do in my spare time.
There are some things that's I've stopped doing entirely and others that I do much less - like sleeping. Weeknights are for solving puzzles, creating tools that make geocaching quicker and more efficient, and plotting my next trips. Early weekend mornings, while Anne is still asleep, is for going out and grabbing a few caches before whatever we decide to do that day, which might just be more Geocaching.
What could possibly make going on long hikes, risking snake bites, ticks, poison oak and other personal injury just to find some tupperware with cheap trinkets inside? And repeat it coming up on 1000 times? Here's what I've come up with so far:
1) You get to play with gadgets. A GPS is a pretty amazing device on its own, but you get to use all kinds of geek equipment like my Treo and hiking gear.
2) You get to play with maps. Maps are very interesting to look at. There's near infinite detail and it's personally relevant. It's not just your paper fold-out maps either. Most of the maps I use are on my laptop, the web, or the GPS itself. There are street maps, arial maps, satellite maps, and topographical maps providing more and more detail. I spend hours looking at caches overlaid on these maps and creating new ones based on my travels.
3 I've always enjoyed hiking, ever since my trips with the MOTD back in high school. There's a lot of hiking involved in geocaching if you choose to go for those.
4) Geocaching, especially in the Bay Area is about mental challeges as well as physical. Puzzles here range from looking up simple information to solving complex crytography. Others have no particular strategy - you just have to stare at them long enough until you see the pattern and can produce coordinate numbers from it. While my job is full of intellectual challenges, I don't often have the time to sit down and focus on a particular problem which is purely intellectual.
Sometimes the mental effort comes when you actually go to find the cache to unveil some clever camoflauge. Caches can be disguised as sprinkler heads, stumps, rocks, dirt, fences, or have plants glued to them.
5) Geocaching is a great way to satisfy your curiosity of your environment.
When I was a kid, I would often go 'exploring' which just meant wandering through the small wood behind our backyard. I guess I'm still just exploring.
I've seen amazing places I never would have known existed, just a few miles from home. I've certainly gotten to know my way around the Bay Area much better than before too.
If you were to ask Anne why she'll go with me on hunts, this is the reason (and probably the only ONLY one she'd give).
6) Every kid imagines he's a spy on a secret mission. In the real world there aren't many secret missions (except if you really are a spy) but geocaching is pretty close. Not everyone would leave a geocache intact if they were to run across it by accident, so they're hidden and you have be stealthy when looking for a cache. This can be a real challenge in busy places like a store parking lot.
7) I wouldn't call myself a particularly social person, but I do enjoy sharing my experiences geocaching and reading about other peoples experiences at the same caches. Through event caches, trading hints, and group gatherings for hikes, I've met some interesting people and some really nerdy and strange people as well!
8) People like to collect things. It could be baseball cards or tea cups for some people, but for me it's collecting caches. My particular aim is to see how big a radius I can create from home where I've found all the caches. With a few exeptions I'm at about 9 miles right now. It's challenging because as you clear out an area, new caches are more likely to appear and then you have to go back. It also means that you can't skip any of them, including all the super-difficult puzzles created by silicon valley engineers.
Other people have different goals, like finding 365 in one year or solving just the puzzles.
That's quite a few reasons why I cache, but caching is also good for me in ways I never expected.
For one it's great exercise. On a typical weekend I'll end up getting outside and hiking or walking 20 miles.
Apparently it's also a good way to lose weight. Someone recently asked me if I had lost weight and I responded with "I don't think so." I found a scale and decided to see. To my astonishment, I had lost 20 pounds since I last checked!
I used to run to try to keep in shape, but it was always hard to motivate myself to do it and I never really lost any weight because of it (not that it was ever the primary goal.) Since geocaching I've given up on running because I'm much better at exercising when there is an easily identifiable goal - in my case, a cache!
I've definitely learned a lot from geocaching, in areas I never would have thought of. To find caches, I've had to learn braille, several foreign languages, cryptogrphy, trivia of all sorts and had to refresh some of my math skills. Oh, and I'm now an expert at identifying poison oak.
Geocaching.com also promotes its "Cache In Trash Out" program so I'm picking up trash at the same time.
Finally I've made some new friends through caching. We didn't know many people in the bay area when we moved here two years ago except for those people we had met in other places and happened to be living here now and most of them have moved away by now.
Most of the friends we've made are not people we would have met otherwise. For some reason, we don't fit the Geocaching demographic. They mostly seem to much older - often with kids that are of signifigant age themselves. No matter - they're still good people and we've come to know pretty much all the serious cachers in the area, often running into them at cache sites.
I'm not sure when or if I will burn out on caching. Sometimes when I'm finishing a long weekend of 30+ caches I think I've done enough, but a few days later I'm motivated again to go out and find a bunch more. There are over 3000 caches I haven't found within a hundred miles of home, so it's unlikely I'm going to run out. The top geocachers have thousands of finds. Having close to 1000 puts me at only #16 - in just the bay area.
If you haven't tried Geocaching yet, I highly recommend you pick up a cheap gps and go for a few. It's simply a lot of fun.
"Somebody would have to be sitting near your network to do this. And they'd have to hate you."
- Mani Dhillon, product marketing manager at Linksys, talking the real probability of a hacker breaking into your wireless network
I guess that's a good reason not to play your music too loud.
Something that's bothered me for a long time is how we get to stuff on the internet - URLs.
Let's look at a common example. Say I want to go to Yahoo. I go to my browser's address bar and type this:
http://www.yahoo.com
Now let's break that up into its components:
http - a web protocol. Great. Why do I care?
:// - a delimiter between the protocol and the hostname. Isn't that obvious?
www. - the 'hostname' of the web site. Stands for world wide web. When this is used, it generally means the 'default' site. It's also completely unnecessary. Ever wonder why you usually can send email without a hostname, like [email protected] and not [email protected]? Well that's because when you send an email, it looks for a special addess where email to 'boulter.com' called an MX record. That means you can send email to @boulter.com and also get to a website at http://boulter.com and they could be completely different computers serving these purposes.
yahoo. - this is actually meaningful. I want to go to the site called yahoo.
.com - Yahoo is a commercial site. You don't really care about that, but it's in there.
So we've taken a 20-character URL and found only 5 characters that are meaningful to humans. That's just wrong.
To be fair, many modern browsers like Internet Explorer will accept a url like 'yahoo', make some guesses, and eventually get you to Yahoo. Unfortunately it also changes the url displayed to http://www.yahoo.com/, basically telling people that this is the correct way to get to sites.
The first time I saw a URL on a billboard (at least 8 years ago when the web started to go mainstream) I thought to myself "How geeky? Do they actually expect people to remember that and type it all in?"
This bothered me so much in 1996 that I decided to try to fix it myself. The result was QuickFix, a little utility that allowed you to type in a 'real' name and sends you to the right site.
As I look at it now I see premonitions of the web today. The frames interface looks like the browser tools such as Yahoo Companion or the Google toolbar. The 'type it and go' interface is just like Google's "I'm feeling lucky" button.
On the backend, QuickFix used DNS lookups, whois queries and yahoo searches to figure out the 'best' site to go to.
To be fair a tool like this was more useful then because the rules by which domain names were much less developed. A first come, first served system meant that domain 'scalping' and 'squatting' made many simple domain names dead or home to less prominent sites. The Weather Channel, for instance, could only be found at http://www.weatherch.com. No one was going to guess that one. One forward-looking company, virtualoffice.com, made a bundle when then secured a bunch of later extremely valuable domains like ofiice.com, news.com, and download.com.
I was so excited about QuickFix at the time that I got in touch with the people at Yahoo and tried to sell them on partnering with me on providing the site directory on the back end. They could in effect define addressing of web sites, making domain names irrelevent.
They told me they didn't get it, but they were working on this site called 'My Yahoo' and were interested in having me come help build it. I said 'no thank you' because I had recently finished a summer internship in the Bay Area and decided I'd rather work in New England, close to my family and friends. I like to call that my 10 million dollar mistake. Yahoo stock options at pennies would be worth a fortune now. But hindsight is always 20/20 and I probably wouldn't have gotten married if I moved west right away, so no regrets.
Back to URLs, a decade later, we still haven't fixed the problem. Instead people have given up on trying to use URLs. They just go to their search engine of choice and try typing in what they're looking for. This is why search engines are so important right now.
Many people are so search-engine oriented that they go into autopilot mode when surfing. A telling example is the fact that one of the most popular search terms on Yahoo is 'yahoo'. Uhh, you're already there.
There have been some attempts to fix this problem. Realnames was a startup that sold intuitive site names that would redirect users to the real URL. To use them you had to go to their site and there just wasn't enough reason to do that. Eventually they did get integrated into Internet Explorer but quickly went bust after that.
AOL's keywords are really nice and are popular enough that you'll see them sometimes on billboards along with URLs. The problem again is that they're often sold, only work when using AOL to access the web, and often send you to AOL's own sites.
The problem doesn't end with the first part of the URL's either. It continues with the rest of the part after .com. One bandaid solution is sites like tinyurl.com and snurl.com which allow you to create very short urls that redirect to longer urls. These have to be created manually for each long URL however.
The good news here is that search engines tend to rank sites with simpler URLs higher, especially if search term is contained in the URL. The rapidly growing industy of 'Search Engine Optimization' is reinforcing better URLs.
Think of the cumulative wasted effort of hundreds of millions of web users typing in these unnecessary keys. Most people type very slowly anyway. How many cases of carpal tunnel syndrome could be avoided? You even need to use the shift button to get the colon.
As difficult as URLs are to type, they're worse to speak. In english, the letter 'W' requires three syllables to speak. That's nine syllables just for 'www'! There was a great Crank Yankers episode recently where they made a crank call and had a guy write down this ridiculously long web address. I think he gave up after about 100 letters.
Well, I think I've adequately expressed my displeasure at the current state of addressing on the web. I hope you've learned some things about how the web works and you can use that to get around the web more efficiently.
There are a few things you can and should do to make surfing easier:
1) stop typing unncecessary parts of URLs. If you want to go to Yahoo, type 'yahoo.com'. Skip the www. And all that other stuff.
2) if you try that and it doesn't work (but www. does) send an email in to their site and tell them their site is broken and they're losing traffic because of it.
3) if something like 'site.com' does work but it redirects you to www.site.com, also let them know. It should be the other way around.
Anne and I have recently discovered that we've developed supernatural powers.
Me, I have the amazing ability to generate vast amount of static electricity. I'm able to zap people and occasionally make computers reboot just by touching them.
Like all superpowers, its power is also a curse. I've become afraid to close car doors because I often shock myself. Someday I fear I might just spontaneously combust.
Anne now has the amazing ability to blow lightbulbs just by turning them on. She flips the switch and poof! the bulb blows. This has happened a lot recently. Her curse is that she has to go change all these lightbulbs.
Like all people with supernatural powers, we're planning on using our powers to fight crime in our spare time. All we have to do is find a criminal and lure him into a room. Then Anne will blow the lights, disorienting the criminal, while I shock him until the authorities arrive.
Hmm, I wonder if we have to join some sort of superhero union before we start fighting crime?
"Turn it OFF. This affects ALL of us!"
- Guy in front of me on a plane, freaking out that some other guy had a cell phone powered on just before landing.
Two very odd but cool things I discovered tonight:
Vibrated shear thickening fluids
Isn't physics fun?
Lately I've been hearing a lot about immigration and how immigrants are stealing American jobs, particularly high-tech ones.
Wired recently published an article about how Indian workers are replacing American workers at lower wages and other "the sky is falling" logic to make us panic. Phooey.
Check out this recent Business 2.0 article which includes the vital facts that the Wired article misses - the demand for high-tech workers is dramatically increasing while the number of college-educated Americans is holding steady while the baby boomers are retiring. Not even a continent of Indian tech workers will be able to fill the needs we'll have for engineers in the coming years. We'll have to offshore development of software simply because if we don't, nothing will get done.
I'm sure this more practical article sells more to Business 2.0's pointy-haired readers than Wired's unemployed technogeek freaks.
Hmm, my hair was a bit unruly this morning.
Even with all the Indian workers "stealing" jobs, I'm having a lot of trouble finding a good engineer for one of my open positions.
It seems those are complaning are those who demand too much for too little skill. I don't know a single good programmer out there today who can't find a job.
But I dare you to prove me wrong by sending me your resume.
Well, I'm back from my weekend in Syracuse. I'm tired. The only thing worse than getting to the east coast via an hour drive, a 4 hour flight, followed by another one hour flight and an hour and a half drive is doing the whole thing in reverse 36 hours later - against the jet stream and with an hour and a half storm delay sitting on the runway.
Some highlights of the trip:
- I spent most of the trip there blogging, so I've finally finished some posts that have been languising in notes stage for a while now. I think this is the first time I've spent more time writing than reading on a trip, thanks to the keyboard on my Treo.
- Dunkin Donuts!! I still haven't to the only Dunkin Donuts in California, but I got my fill this weekend. It was about the only thing open when we arrived in Syracuse, so we had a dinner of sausage, egg and cheese croissants with some munchkins. It was gooood.
- Killed the February issue of Wired. My, I'm behind on my magazines.
- I got a lot more Geocaching done than I thought I would. I found at least ten and with the others I did earlier in the week, I'll have easily kept to my goal of 14 per week (average of 2 per day).
- My brother in law graduated and is headed off to work at IBM. Hooray! It seems like he just started.
- I had a chance to go back to Syracuse University campus. I didn't remember much from my trips in 1995 when I was dating a girl from high school who was going there. Gradudation and a dinner the night before was inside the dome, so it was neat to go in there.
- Lowlight: Quality Inn, North Syracuse. It's sleepable assuming you can deal with an overactive heating system, non-smoking rooms that smell like smoke, and the noise from the two highways right next door.
Overall it was a whirlwind trip, but good. I'll be thankful for a relaxing weekend at home next weekend though.