My philosophical wonderings of illumination
Sep/09Comments
Back in high school, I worked with a man who wrote on a small, scrap piece of paper “Light in the absence of eyes illuminates nothing.” At the time I did not think much of it, but that saying has remained with me for quite some time.
Lately, I’ve wondered about the authenticity of such a bold claim. A light, after all, provides illumination. As light falls upon a subject, it makes that subject visible. On the surface, it would seem like such a statement is clearly and entirely false.
But what is “illumination” exactly? Isn’t a subject illuminated only if viewed with eyes? The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word illuminate as: “brightened with light”. A fairly generic definition, for sure. I am not at all convinced that it provides much clarity to this discussion.
I suppose this question comes down ultimately to how you define illumination. Without eyes, can something truly be illuminated?
Hackers attack popular Facebook, Twitter sites
Aug/09Comments
Representatives from both Facebook and Twitter have confirmed today that attackers executed successful Denial of Service attacks against their respective web sites causing downtime and confused users during the event. Twitter was down for a couple of hours. Both web sites claim to have completely restored functionality for all social networking fanatics the world over.
A Denial of Service (or Dos) attack occurs when single computer endpoints (like a web site) are flooded with network requests at the same time, slowing the response time for legitimate users down to a crawl. A DoS attack can also be distributed, which means a collection of compromised computer systems simultaneously (but separately) send requests to an endpoint, quickly bringing almost any network to its knees.
News reports have not indicated any motive from the attackers. In fact, they haven’t identified the attackers at all up until this point. My money is on a group of computer nerds who dislike the idea of social networking sites and wanted some attention. DoS attacks aren’t used to steal information or cause malicious harm to the targeted network. It’s more of a nuisance attack than anything – even though DoS attacks can, under the right circumstances, result in financial losses as networks and services become unavailable during the attack.
During the attack, Twitter posted this message on their web site:
“On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack,” wrote Twitter co-founder Biz Stone. “Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate.”
Web site publishes hacked Twitter documents
Jul/09Comments
According to TechCrunch, a popular technology information center, they were sent more than 300 sensitive documents that were “easily” obtained by a hacker. The documents contain everything from financial predictions to meeting minutes and even pass codes that can be used for Twitter office buildings.
TechCrunch said they won’t publish more sensitive information like pass codes, but they have published Twitter’s financial forecasts, which indicate their first profit in Q3 of this year, $400,000. According to the documents, Twitter expects more than 25 million users by the end of 2009 and a whopping $140,000,000 in revenue by the end of 2010.
TechCrunch says they’ll provide more information into what the product is that Twitter expects will net their first quarterly profit.
PHP 5.3.0 has been released to public
Jul/09Comments
PHP 5.3.0 is out of “Release Candidate” stage and is now the latest stable version of by far the easiest programming language available for web use, PHP. Run over to the PHP.net web site and pick out the update to take advantage of some of its new features, like namespaces and garbage collection.
PHP Logo
From the PHP web site:
The key features of PHP 5.3.0 include:
- Support for namespaces
- Late static binding
- Lambda Functions and Closures
- Syntax additions: NOWDOC, ternary short cut “?:” and jump label (limited goto), __callStatic()
- Under the hood performance improvements
- Optional garbage collection for cyclic references
- Optional mysqlnd PHP native replacement for libmysql
- Improved Windows support including VC9 and experimental X64 binaries as well as portability to other supported platforms
- More consistent float rounding
- Deprecation notices are now handled via
E_DEPRECATED(part ofE_ALL) instead of theE_STRICTerror level - Several enhancements to enable more flexiblity in php.ini (and ini parsing in general)
- New bundled extensions: ext/phar, ext/intl, ext/fileinfo, ext/sqlite3, ext/enchant
- Over 140 bug fixes and improvements to PHP, in particular to: ext/openssl, ext/spl and ext/date
This release also drops several extensions and unifies the usage of internal APIs. Users should be aware of the following known backwards compatibility breaks:
- Parameter parsing API unification will cause some functions to behave more or less strict when it comes to type juggling
- Removed the following extensions: ext/mhash (see ext/hash), ext/msql, ext/pspell (see ext/enchant), ext/sybase (see ext/sybase_ct)
- Moved the following extensions to PECL: ext/ming, ext/fbsql, ext/ncurses, ext/fdf
- Removed zend.ze1_compatibility_mode
For users upgrading from PHP 5.2 there is a migration guide available here, detailing the changes between those releases and PHP 5.3.0.
For a full list of changes in PHP 5.3.0, see the ChangeLog.
Google wants share of operating system market
Jul/09Comments
Now I’m convinced – Google truly does want to take over the world. It’s only a matter of time before the search engine giant starts manufacturing smart weapons for the military. In their latest iteration of computing dominance, they are putting together an operating system, called Google Chrome OS, that essentially works entirely online.
One of many Google logos
“Operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web,” wrote Google in their official announcement of Chrome OS. “Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds.”
Instead of the operating system controlling your computing environment like they do now, Chrome OS will act purely as a means to connect to the Internet, and your network access will provide the majority of the computing power and resources that you’ll need to interact with software products. For example, forget Microsoft Office and instead use Google Docs, which is a web-based word processing and spreadsheet application available through Google’s servers.
GOES-O satellite blasts into space from Cape Canaveral
Jun/09Comments
Here’s a nice shot of the GOES-O satellite riding aboard a Delta IV rocket blasting into space that will end up more than 22,000 feet above the earth’s surface. The satellite was built to provide the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) with weather and environmental data.
Delta IV rocket blasts into space (NASA)
From Wikipedia’s description of GOES-O, “The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (or GOES) program is a key element in United States’ National Weather Service (NWS) operations. GOES weather imagery and quantitative sounding data are a continuous and reliable stream of environmental information used to support weather forecasting, severe storm tracking, and meteorological research. Evolutionary improvements in the geostationary satellite system since 1974 (the launch of the first Synchronous Meteorological Satellite, SMS-1) have been responsible for making the current GOES system the basic element for U.S. weather monitoring and forecasting. Spacecraft and ground-based systems work together to accomplish the GOES mission.”
What’s up with the recent high profile deaths?
Jun/09Comments
McMahon, Fawcett, Jackson and Mays
The last month or so sure has been a deadly one for high profile American personalities. The first to die was late-night announcer Ed McMahon, then “Charlie’s Angels” star Farrah Fawcett sucummed to her battle with cancer. Next in line was the “King of Pop”, Michael Jackson, who apparently died of a heart attack. And finally, this morning, television pitch man Billy Mays was found dead in his Tampa, Florida home.
So, what’s going on?
McMahon suffered a series of ailments recently including a neck injury. He was hospitalized earlier in the year with a case of pneumonia. He was said to have died “peacefully” in a hospital bed.
When merging into traffic, find the gas pedal!
Jun/09Comments
Car accident
I’m the first to admit that I’m a fast driver – not a reckless driver, but a fast driver. You’ll usually find me cruising about as fast as other people will allow on the roads. Sometimes that works out great, other times not so much. One of my biggest pet peeves is watching (from behind) people merge into a lane of traffic and causing a potential traffic hazard in doing so by not stepping on the gas pedal.
Every day going home from work, I come across an intersection where a four-lane road merges into a two-lane (one lane in either direction). On one side of the intersection, four lanes exist. On the other, the right hand lane merges into the left lane fairly quickly – going the same direction. Drivers know that. Whenever I’m in the right hand lane approaching the intersection, I always make sure to safely merge into the left lane, generally by getting myself ahead of traffic to avoid an accident.
Is Internet Explorer 8 a decent product?
Jun/09Comments
I’m a web developer by trade. I spend my days in front of a computer screen typing away code that makes web applications work. One of the biggest gripes web developers have about this business is compatibility between browsers. Each browser manufacturer each has their own interpretation of HTML, CSS, Javascript and other technologies that go into making this page — and every page — work. When browsers don’t interpret things the same way, you find sites that break in some browsers but not in others.
Internet Explorer Logo
Internet Explorer 7, and especially 6, was notorious for breaking web standards compliant web sites because of how Microsoft interprets web technologies. Browsers like Firefox, Opera and Safari aren’t perfect either, but they’re closer to that arguably unachievable mark. But what about IE8? Has it finally decided to adopt technology standards that are more consistent with the rest of the industry? Is the browser more convenient to use than major competitors like Firefox and Opera? I took a look around the Internet and here’s what I came up with.
Computer World
Computer World generally sings its praises by mentioning respectable improvements in the new version, like a superior tabbing feature compared to its earlier versions. For example, “When you open a new tab from an existing page, the new one opens directly to the right of the originating one, and both tabs are given the same color. That way, all related tabs are automatically grouped and color-coded,” the article states. Also, CW likes the new address bar, which now searches previously viewed web sites in a fashion that Firefox and Chrome already do.
Deep sea photography captures striking images
Jun/09Comments
Underwater photography is a lot of fun – so long as you’re using an underwater camera and not thoroughly destroying your regular one. This photo was taken by a National Geographic photographer by the name of Emory Kristof who was involved in the design of an underwater robot (equipped with photographic equipment) that found the Titanic.
Deep sea photography of a sea nettle (National Geographic)
This photo of a sea nettle shows the spendid quality that the remote-controlled robot cameras can get at very low depths. According to National Geographic, this photo was taken in the Canada Basin, Arctic Ocean.