Jason’s Random Thoughts

This is pretty cool.  The people at OpenDNS have released a tool to allow users to create shortcuts for web sites.

I think this is a great idea.  Instead of typing in something like this:

We can simply enter:

What I like most about this is that the shortcuts would be globally available to every computer on your network.  So if everyone visited the same site often enough, the same shortcut could be used by everyone while at home.

Shortcuts like this have been available for quite some time (Opera and FireFox do this quite well), but they often require being set up computer by computer, and login by login.  If five people were sharing the same computer, that would either mean five items in everyone’s “Favourites”, or potentially five people setting up their specific shortcuts in their browser of choice.  OpenDNS gets around this.

All this said, there are a few issues that may need to be worked out.  One of which is how many current browsers try to make sense of what people type.  If someone were to type in “mail” in Safari or Camino, the application would automatically assume you mean to have a www. in front and a .com at the end.

Despite all the ranting on OpenDNS’ blog for the feature, I think this is a great little tool.  It will save a bit of time in the long run and I’m sure developers are already thinking of ways to extend this for their applications.

Great work, OpenDNS.  I look forward to the potential benefits of this tool.

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Everywhere you look, people are talking about the weather.  This subject alone has probably accounted for 30% of all conversations since the beginning of language, and it’s presense in the media has only intensified with such highly polarizing subjects such as Global Climate Change.  So what better way to capitalize on the subject than by creating a tense drama regarding the potential hazards of humans interfering even further with the weather?

Superstorm is a 3-part mini-series airing on BBC Two.  Much like every other drama on BBC, the characters all carry with them personal baggage regarding the matter they try to control.  In this case, it’s the weather.

The jist of the story is this; the US government puts together a team of talented scientists in the hopes of creating a mechanism to avert seriously damaging weather patterns such as hurricanes.

While this is an incredibly noble jesture that can be paraded around under the banner of “protecting lives”, this can also be used as mankind’s most potent weapon.  It would make the fruits of the Manhattan Project pale in comparison.  Several medium-sized hurricanes carry enough raw energy to power every city on the planet for weeks.  The atom has nothing on Mother Nature.

The idea behind this drama is to get people thinking about the role humans should play in controlling the weather.  In the span of 200 years we have already modified the weather patterns of almost every ecological system available.  But these have been small-scale byproducts of our global market expansions.  Direct access to the weather has never (as far as we know) been successfully implemented on such a grand scale.

So there’s the question:  Should humans interfere with weather patterns that could cause havoc for the markets?

That’s what this is all about, after all.  I doubt any government as powerful as the US (or many European and Asian countries) would worry too much about human suffering.  It’s much easier to deal with gross loss of life involving people we’ve never known than watch our financial net worth plummet amidst a market collapse, right?

I don’t think we are responsible enough as a planet to try and control the weather.  In the right hands, this sort of technology could bring regular rain to drought-ridden areas of the world and improve the lives of billions.  In the wrong hands, this could send countries to their deaths as decade-long winter storms lay seige to the land day after day.  It doesn’t take long for governments to collapse when people can’t eat.

Controlling the weather is definately something we will learn one day.  I’m sure it will play a pivotal role in the teraformation of Mars and other planets as we spread the species throughout the galaxy.  But at this point in our evolution, I think we’ll just be getting in way over our heads.

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This should be on the front page of every newspaper on the planet today, but chances are, it will be just a footnote.

Astronomers with the European Southern Observatory have discovered the most Earth-like planet to date outside our solar system.  One, they say, has the potential of holding liquid water … an essential ingredient to life as we understand it.

The planet was found orbiting a red dwarf star about 20.5 light years away, and it’s one of the smallest extra-solar worlds found to date.  With a diameter 50% larger than our own planet, and five times the mass, the planet orbits its cold little sun in under two weeks.  Just to make things more interesting, it also lays 14 times closer to the star than we are to ours.

But because red dwarf stars are smaller and colder than our bright yellow sun, the planet’s close proximity potentially puts in a temperate zone for water to remain between 0 and 40 degrees Celcius.  Using models, Stephane Udry, a scientist from the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland and the lead author of the report, predicts that the world will either be rocky like our Earth, or covered in oceans.

This is the second planet discovered around this red dwarf (Gliese 581).  The first one has a mass 15 times that of Earth and orbits the sun every 5.4 days.  It was discovered two years ago.  There is also the potential for a third planet with about eight Earth-masses, but this has not yet been confirmed.

Exciting news in the realm of the exo-planets.  While I doubt that I will live long enough to see them with my own eyes, I would love nothing more than to know that my children might have the opportunity to venture out into space across these seemingly vast distances to witness the marvels and complexities that are in this little corner of the Milky Way Galaxy.

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WTF with these two port scanners?

I seem to have a bit of a dilemma.  There are two IP’s sending an average of 125 hits to my DSL modem per second, scanning my TCP ports between 30000 and 65000.  Once they reach 65000, they start over again at 30000 and continue in a seemingly endless cycle.

These cycles happen daily between the hours of 5:30 PM PST and 2:30 AM PST, and have been happening for weeks.  Of course, because of the constant cycling, and the excessive calls to the very-consumer-grade DSL hardware, my modem freezes every 5 to 15 minutes and resets itself.  This, naturally, interferes with my downloading, IRC, MSN and a few other applications that I use on a regular basis when not doing the work that I should be concentrating on.

I’ve tried asking my ISP to block the IPs from their end, but they seem to be either unwilling or incapable of providing such service.  For the moment, my firewalls are able to keep the offending computers from gaining access to my network, however, because the attacks are hitting the modem so hard, I can’t block the traffic before it even hits my hardware.

This is quite frustrating.

Does anyone on Telus know if there is a way to block an IP right at the ISP level?  Is there some kind of account management screen that I could log into and manage permissible IP ranges?

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It appears I’m at an impasse.

Yesterday I mentioned that I was going to build myself a NAS (Network Attached Storage) with a good amount of space that would also be easily expandable.  Before the thought was even coherently formed in my mind I had thought to myself: “Hey, if I can build one for a good price, why not try to market them on eBay?”

Why not, indeed.  These devices fetch a good amount of money, and if I could construct a good looking unit that came with a decent amount of space, could easily be expanded by people, and was super simple to maintain, then I’d be laughing all the way to the bank … maybe.

Being the geek that I am, the hardware was all spec’d out before yesterdays post was even available online (most all posts are future dated by a few hours or days).  I can build a respectable 1 Terabyte NAS with good expansion in a small form factor for under $600 CDN.  Less if I make use of old parts from eBay.  The problem came when I tried to find an OS for the box.

FreeNAS and Darma NAS came to mind immediately, as did Windows Home Server.  FreeNAS and Darma NAS are open source projects that are freely available and, unfortunately, Darma is no longer being maintained or enhanced.  Windows Home Server is currently in testing and is most definately not free to use.  From all accounts, WHS is going to be an OEM-only package that may or may not be made available to the masses.

That said, I investigated each of these potential platforms to find which ones might work best for me.  But when it was all said and done, none really solved the need that I see in the market.  FreeNAS is alright for people who understand what they’re doing, but it can’t be used by the average user.  Darma has some really nice features, but if it’s no longer supported, then I can’t in good conscience put that in a box that leaves my sight.  Windows Home Server, I thought, has lots of potential … but I was disappointed by the lack of hot-swap-ability.

No, I don’t think any of these solutions will fill the need that I have.

So to that end, I might just take the plunge and start developing my own NAS system.  It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch, either.  I still have my source code from a Solaris-based network indexing system, and I could easily take OpenSolaris and integrate my requirements into that OS.  The base platform would run light enough that it could be implemented on almost anything, and because it’s Solaris, I know it will work like a charm.  The functions and requirements that I require from such a network device could certainly be built into my existing code-base, and I’m sure that it would be an enjoyable project.

Now the hard part … what should I call it?

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