Quote of the Day

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“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.

The Problem of URLs

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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.

StaticMan and LightbulbWoman

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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?

Get a Job

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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.

Back from Syracuse

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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.

Boulters Everywhere!

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I’m intruiged by things with the word “Boulter” in them. Mostly because it’s my last name and it’s fairly uncommon.

I even started a website way back when, Everything Boulter to try to collect all the boulter stuff.

Not too long ago, I set up a search on eBay to email me anytime things appear with ‘Boulter’ in them. Most of the time I get the same couple of CDs where boulters appear in the liner notes, but I also see some interesting stuff occasionally.

Last week, I noticed someone was selling a UGS Quad map of ‘Boulter Peak’. Geez, I didn’t know there was a Boulter Peak! It’s apparently in Utah somewhere. I forgot to bid on it, but I emailed the seller afterwards and he agreed to send it me for $3. What a bargain. Apparently he’s a geologist and found he had two.

I got it in the mail today and found Boulter Peak (8306 ft). It’s right here, about 50 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. Now that I know where to look, I found a bunch of other interesting Boulter places in the area. There’s Boulter Summit (6080 ft), Boulter Creek, Boulter Springs and even a tiny little dot that’s labelled Boulter, but doesn’t appear to be an actual town. The whole area is old mining country.

Interesting stuff. Anne were thinking of taking a trip for a few days to Salt Lake City and now I really want to go to visit my namesake mountains. Maybe while I’m there, I can figure out who this Boulter guy was anyway.

That’s what I said, booby twaps!

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TiVo finally fulfulled my wishlist for The Goonies. Awesome!

What could be better than a movie with Sean Astin (Sam from the Lord of the Rings), Corey Feldman, “Short Round” from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Joe Pantialo from The Sopranos, produced by Steven Spielberg, written by Chris Columbus, has a soundtrack featuring Cyndi Lauper, and features cool Rube Goldberg machines. Definitely a classic of the 80’s. The whole adventure reminds me of Geocaching.

My favorite quotes:
“”That’s what I said, booby twaps!”
“In third grade, I cheated on my history exam. In fourth grade, I stole my Uncle Max’s toupee, and I glued it on my face when I played Moses in my Hebrew school play. In fifth grade, I knocked my sister Edie down the stairs, and I blamed it on the dog!”
“God put that rock there for a purpose. I’m not sure you should move it.”
“Rocky Road? Heh Heh!”
“I love you Chunk!”

Now I just need TiVo to record “Gremlins” and “*Batteries Not Included”. 🙂