Week5: The Importance of Research

To be able to give a presentation about your given subject you must first understand it yourself. If at the end a question is asked to which you have no answer you have failed not only the attendees, but yourself. Submerging yourself within a subject should come naturally to anyone who enjoys said subject.

Following links to learn more and more about a subject is a great way to learn. Simply reading preset material will only give you a very limited view of information, potentially leaving vast holes in your understanding of key concepts.

Week4: Mobile Email

The web is accessible from anywhere at anytime so it is only logical that access to email should follow this paradigm. The advantages are numerous, but for the sake of brevity here are the most relevant two.

Mobile email can be thought of in much the same light as mobile phone calls. It is one of those progressions that seems natural, ensuring that we are always able to communicate regardless of our current location and/or access to computer/internet. Been able to always check for new mail or send off a quick reminder (even to yourself) is great. Another advantage is the fact that email is often a cheaper and more useful form of text messaging. A SMS is limited to a small amount of characters where as an email can be as long as required. With many plans now offering unlimited data usage it often be a cheaper alternative to email a friend rather than text them.

The disadvantages are few and becoming increasingly rarer. The first and foremost in my opinion would be security. Using a wireless network connection is inherently dangerous as any passer-by can easily intercept data and view there contents. Another disadvantage is the cost. Internet access, be it through phone or café, can be expensive and may not offset the advantages of having such access.

Week3: Why IP Addresses Are Running Out

The IP address is intrinsic to nearly every event on the Internet, from performing a Google search to playing an online multiplayer match in a videogame. They are the unique identifying addresses of each node upon the Net. However, due to the nature of the IPv4 Protocol the maximum number of IP addresses is 4,294,967,296 (256x256x256x256, or 2³²). This limitation is caused by the fact that the IPv4 address header can be a maximum of 32 bits long.

However, this ceiling is further limited by the assignment of large blocks of IPs to various uses. For example multicast has over 270 million address assigned to it along with another 18 million for private networks. Some allocated addresses are unused and as such take up value space from the public sector assignments.

There are two methods to overcome this. The first involves restricting and controlling the use of existing addresses i.e. allocating only what is necessary and avoiding waste. However most experts feel this is only a short-term solution as at the present rate we will run out of addresses in approximately 3 years.

The second solution is to switch to IPv6, the hopeful successor to v4. IPv6 supports addresses up to 128 bit long raising the ceiling to 3.4x10⁴⁸ addresses, or in more human terms each person on this planet could have a billion, billion, billion addresses of their own with room left over.

The rollout of IPv6 has so far been very slowly with large corporations reluctant to make the jump as it would be very costly. However it may eventually become a requirement as every fridge, phone and arm (Kevin Warwick) gets their own address.

Week2: Search Me The Web

Yahoo has been around for a long time, the lumbering giant of the web world. As of last year Google accounted for nearly half of all web searches with Yahoo pulling in a distant second at roughly 25%. From 1994 to 2002 Yahoo used human editors to add lists, until making the massive shift to web-crawlers following Google’s lead. It follows the standard web crawling means with a slightly less efficient algorithm than Google. Yahoo offers a much wider choice of search categories along with access to its old human directory. However, it is often thought of as second best in terms of search results.

The secret to how Google has gotten so good at generating relevant search results is exactly that, a secret. They follow the standards paradigms as many other web search engines in that they use an automated program, called a robot or spider, to trawl through the billions of webpages on the Internet. However this is where Google differ from most other search companies in that they process their data using a few choice algorithms of which PageRank is the main one. PageRank works by analysing which sites link to the page it has just crawled and assigning a weight based on how ‘important’ these pages are. In this way Google can find the pages with the most relevant data as judged by the web itself.

Google store their crawled data as shards, small chunks of information duplicated and spread across multiple facilities such that if anyone cluster fails others can take its place. They also built their own filing system to more efficiently manage these vast quantities of data.

Obviously the most important advantage of this method is that, 99.9% of times, it returns the most relevant results first. A disadvantage however can be that should a site be assigned a low PageRank, perhaps through others actions, it may find it very difficult to pull in visitors from the Google search engine.

I personally prefer the Google search engine, as the vast majority of the Internet now does. In my personal opinion it provides the best results in the quickest time with the simplest design. Also, Yahoo Maps features terrible UK mapping compared to Google Maps (which both use their respective parents search engine).

Week1: Is a blog message personal to its Author or is it public on the Internet?

I think this message boils down to the idea of intellectual property and just how publishing a piece of text on the Internet can affect your rights over your own property. UK Copyright Law is pretty good at granting the individual power over their own creations, yet the Net can become an unseemly grey area over what others can do with your work.

Ultimately it is up to the blog owner to control their work. I personally release all of my work onto the public domain under the Creative Commons 2.0 license, ensuring that other can see and share them but are prohibited from using them for personal gain, and must provide full accreditation to the original creator.

Another point of view though would look at the very content of the message. A typical blog post could range from the latest news out of Redmond to what the author had for breakfast that morning. In the end you must treat a blog how you would treat a soapbox, you can stand high on it and shout any message you want, but you have to understand the implications that your message could reach a far wider audience than any other communication method before has offered.

As a final conclusion, anything posted on the internet and not protected by some form of access control should be thought of as public. The message may be personal to the author, but once it is placed within the public domain it is fair game for spiders, lechers and regular visitors.