Jason’s Random Thoughts

The sky has certianly been full of local celestial events lately.  Only a week ago there was the Perseid Meteor Shower, and this coming Tuesday we’ll see a total lunar eclipse.

This will be the first lunar eclipse I’ve had the chance to see, as it’s often only visible from the other side of the planet.  That said, now that I am on that side of the planet, I’ll get to see it
An eclipse of the Moon can only occur at Full Moon, and only if the Moon passes through some portion of the Earth’s shadow.  The shadow is actually composed of two cone-shaped parts, one nested inside the other.  The outer shadow, or penumbra, is a zone where Earth blocks some (but not all) of the Sun’s rays.  In contrast, the inner shadow, or umbra, is a region where Earth blocks all direct sunlight from reaching the Moon.

If you live outside Japan, you can still see this event.  Most of North America and almost all Pacific nations will get to see this total eclipse, and some of the farter reaches will see only a partial eclipse.  People observing Eastern Standard Time can see this on their drive to work, as it’s expected to happen at 7:22 am.  Pacific Standard Time observers will get to see it at 4:22 am.  People in Japan can expect to see it around 8:22 pm local time.

Hopefully the cloud cover will be light, as I’d love to capture some great pictures of this event.  Unlike the solar version, we do not need eye protection when observing a lunar eclipse.  Because the Moon appears quite small in the sky, you’ll need a fairly powerful telephoto lens (400 mm or more) or even a small telescope to attach your camera.  A typical ISO400 speed (either digital or film) is a good choice.

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1997 was quite the year.  Hong Kong was returned to China, and a few weeks later I started my post-secondary education.

It didn’t take long to rack up $18,000 in student loans and, shortly after leaving school, the bank was starting to ask questions like:  “When can I start making payments, and how quickly can I repay the debt?”

These were fair questions, but what I wasn’t too happy with was the fact that I had four loans, each with their own repayment schedule.  This also meant there were four payments every month, and it was quite a strain considering I was working at Burger King rather than using the education I had just dropped $18K for.  Although it wasn’t available at the time, I would have welcomed a program like Financial Aid’s online student loan consolidation.  I had tried to work something similar out with the bank, but since I had no real assets, nor any real amount of money, my attempts to consolidate the loans had been denied.

The reason I had tried to consolidate the loan was to both obtain a lower interest rate, and to make a single payment every month.  This would have allowed me to pay off the debt faster with the very same payment amount.  Based on the interest rates at the time, as well as the amount owed to each loan, I could have saved $120 a month and put that amount towards the principle owed rather than interest.

If you’re just getting out of school, or still have student loans to pay for, consider making use of a department of education student loan consolidation program.  The sooner debts are paid off, the sooner you can plan for the next stages of life.  Paying for a wedding or buying that dream home is quite a bit harder while still making payments for your education.  I learned this lesson pretty late in life, but you don’t have to.

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I’m sure most of us has done this, or at the very least tried, at some point in their computing lives.  You’re not home and you need to access the internet for a bit to get some email and maybe fire off a few if you have time.  After a quick site survey by your notebook, you find that someone has an insecured access point and you connect.

But is this theft?  Is it immoral?

We’ve all thought about this, and there has certainly been quite a bit of this in the news over the last few years, but after reading this article on the BBC’s site, I wanted to get your opinion on the matter.

The jist of the story goes like this:  A man was arrested on a street in West London for standing outside a home to access their unsecured wireless network.  There have been at least two others arrested for the same thing, and such actions can be deemed as illegal according to Britain’s Communications Act of 2003.  But regardless of the legalities of said actions, is it immoral to knowingly and secretly connect to a person’s network for your own purposes?

I see this as one of those “Yes and No” situations.  I don’t think it’s immoral to connect to a person’s open network in order to read email or maybe surf some legal sites while killing time.  We’ve all heard about the dangers of keeping a wireless network unsecured, and it’s even written into the manuals of every wireless device sold in the last few years.  If anyone were to use the installation/setup discs that come with the routers, they’d often be asked for both an administration password, as well as given a simple and easy way to configure something as simple as WEP.

However, if you’re connecting to a network in order to download illegal files, visit illegal websites, or use excessive resources (massive downloading), then I would consider this immoral.  In Vancouver, there were three neighbours that not only had open networks, but also shared files and printers.  It would have been insanely simple for me to access those files, tie up their bandwidth, or send massive documents to their printers for the heck of it.

But this would have been wrong … and they didn’t have anything I wanted ….

Open networks at resterants and hotels are open to promote patronage.  Open networks at residences and businesses are open because the people who configured the devices either didn’t know what they were doing, or didn’t care enough to educate themselves about potential risks.

So, if you had a neighbour that could give you free internet, would you consider cancelling your service and using theirs?  If you were trying to download some rather large files and had to pay for your bandwidth consumption, would you consider using someone else’s?

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Considering how the universe is expanding in all directions, all the time, one would think that there are gaps that are completely devoid of matter and energy.  Scientists have known for quite some time that these desolate regions do exist, but were not prepared for the sheer size of one found in the Eridanus region of the sky.

University of Minnesota’s astronomy professor, Lawrence Rudnick was quoted saying: ”Not only has no one ever found a void this big, but we never even expected to find one of this size.”  Naturally something as large as the universe would have these pockets of null space, but most are much smaller than the void found by Rudnick and his colleagues.  In addition, the number of discovered voids decreases as the size increases.  What they found does not fit in with our understanding of “normal” based on either the observational studies or the computer simulations of the large scale universe.

The astronomy team drew the conclusions by studying data from the NRAO VLA Sky Survey (NVSS), a project that imaged the entire visible sky to the Very Large Array (VLA) telescope.  The study on the NVSS data shows a remarkable drop in the number of galaxies in a region of sky in the constellation Eridanus, a region that’s southwest of Orion.

It was already known that there was something different about this spot, and it had been dubbed the “WMAP Cold Spot”, because it had stood out in a map of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation made by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite launched in 2001.  This cosmic radiation is the faint radio waves remaining from the Big Bang and is the earliest picture of our Universe.  Irregularities in the CMB show structures that existed only a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang.

The surprising results are still in need of independant confirmation, but the slightly lower temperature of the CMB in this region appears to be caused by a huge hole devoid of nearly all matter roughly six-to-ten billion light-years from Earth.

It will be interesting to see if another team agrees with this assessment or offers another possibility.  This could be the discovery of the seperation force of a concave lens, for example.  Voids as fossilized huge emission energy still have the seperation potential to act as a concave lens against the light behind them.

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I wrote a few days ago how I was giving PayPerPost a try and, aside from the insanely slow response times from advertisers, it’s not too bad.  I doubt I’ll actually reach $100 a month with their service, but it’s quite alright as I harbour no illusions of getting rich this way.  One issue I have noticed, though, is that in order to get many of the better paying gigs, I need a better Alexa score.

For anyone that doesn’t know what the Alexa Score is, it’s similar to Technorati’s Authority or Google’s Page Rank system where a particular website is graded based on various criteria.  In this case, Alexa is using three months worth of aggregated historical traffic data from (potentially) millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users reach.

For the most part, I have not really paid much attention to this site’s Alexa score because it’s not aimed towards the general internet population that uses the necessary toolbar; that being technically inclined people who use toolbars.  However, after seeing some incredible numbers for relatively new blogs, I felt that it was time for me to at least try and boost this number … even if it was boosted artificially.

So, for the last month, I have been using two automated services that have promised some dramatic results, and they were certainly correct.  However, instead of going from 855,000-ish, I went up to 910,000-ish.

Thanks … I think?

Let’s start with, UpMyRank.  Due to the number of problems I’ve had with both the software, the web-based version of the software, and the quality of crap that’s being shared, I won’t even do the service of providing a link.  On that note, I think they should change the name of the software to UpYoursRank … at least people would be semi-prepared for the memory-hole intensive, dangerous site-harboring shenannigans associated with this service.

First off, we’re supposed to use some specific software that calls IE or FireFox and visits a bunch of other users sites with our Alexa toolbar-enabled browsers.  Each site equals one credit, and one credit equates to a visitor to a site of our choice.  Sounds pretty good, right?  Almost like a BitTorrent kind of sharing.

In theory this works pretty good (just like communism), but in practise if you “spend” 500 credits to get 500 visitors, chances are you will only have about 120 uniques.  Alexa doesn’t count repeat traffic on the same day, so this typically turns out to be a waste of 380 credits.  It doesn’t seem to matter what time of day you use these credits, either … you will typically top out around 120 uniques, even when spending 2000+ credits at once.

Now, while you’re earning these credits, the supplied software is going to other people’s sites as well.  This is a completely automated process, but I wouldn’t suggest doing this while you’re actually using the computer.  If you’re anything like me, the constant lost cursor focus and piss-poor coding quality of the application will leave you either mildly frustrated or in a blind rage.

I am not an IE user anymore, but this is the only browser on my machine with the Alexa toolbar installed.  The UpMyRank software will remotely call the browser and open a page every 90 to 120 seconds.  When this is done, if you were in the midst of typing something on your machine, or watching a video in full screen mode, you’ll notice that you have to put the current application back in focus before you can do anything.  Of course, you can get around this by running the application in “stealth” mode, but this seems to cause some rather ugly exceptions after an hour or two on my otherwise perfectly stable notebook.  On top of this, the application seems to be written by a first year college student that has not yet learned how to properly release threads and memory back to the pool.  After three hours of use, my machine had slowed to a crawl.  A quick investigation showed that I had 142 instances of IEXPLORE.EXE running in the background, with each instance tying up anywhere from 4 to 48 MB of resources.

Now I’ll admit that I’ve made this mistake a few times, too.  But I typically catch it in the first stage of testing, which is way before the deployment stage.

The next item that really wound me up was the quality of sites my system was silently being sent to.  It seems that some of the seediest, most icky websites online were using this very tool to increase their Alexa ranking.  After seeing some of the warnings McAffe popped up, I was tempted to bring my notebook to the gas station so I could hose it down with the pressure washer.  Even if I swap the hard drive, my notebook will never be clean again ….

So, that said, good-bye to bad rubbish.  Perhaps if there was some kind of quality control in place to ensure systems weren’t being blindly sent to scam sites, and if the credits spent meant “unique visits in a day”, the tool would have value.  But until such a time (and until they can write some proper automation software), I think I’ll just keep my sub-million Alexa score.

The next tool falls under the same premise as UpMyRank.  AlexaBooster.com offers to send X number of users to your site, where X is the approximate number of members that are using the service at the moment.  They also require that you install some of their software that will make your PC into a mindless surfer, and it seems to be written a bit better than the previous package.  That said, I was never able to get more than 180 uniques in a given day with their tool.

Fun?  Wow.

At the end of the day, these two services actually hindered my Alexa ranking more than anything else.  Add to that the fact that you need to install some software and let your PC roam potentially dangerous websites while you’re away, and it’s just not worth it.

Thank God for VMware.  I would never want to run questionable software on my primary installation, and this company’s VMware Workstation package makes sandboxing an incredibly painless task.

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