Category Archives: Net Tools

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Google … an amazing entity …
From my early days on the Internet, I have been facinated with Internet Directories and Search Engines. The various players have come and gone … and some have stuck around. Yahoo! is still one of the “old-timers” in the industry, as Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, and Altavista have all gone there own ways.

The one “newer” player that has come to dominate the landscape is Google. With their radical new architecture for gathering, storing, and indexing web content, and then “ranking” based on URI linking frequency, they have created an amazing solution for managing the wealth of information on the Internet. Ouside of all of this technology, there is also the “clean” and lightweight design of their website. Google appears to be the most used resource for searching the web.

There is another side to Google that many people do not see, nor understand. It is the core technology, and how is can be used and repurposed … and expanded. This is what I am most interested in with Google. If you have not visited their Advanced Search page, or explored the Google Labs, then you might not have seen some of the other aspects of Google.

Over the next month of so, I am going to be posting about a model that I have created in my observations of Google and what they are developing. I am hearing more and more about the impending IPO of their company … and I have to admit that I believe they are on to something. I believe they are creating something that is truly amazing.

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The continued growth of RSS and blogging …
This is an awesome example of the breadth of coverage and use of RSS as a standard for information syndication. PRWeb is now offering a broad range of RSS news feeds of information for free.

I still believe that this is simply the tip of the iceberg for the various uses of RSS. Some friends and I are currently looking at using this as a medium for the distribution of work and applications to do work. What would be delivered to me via RSS would not be just a flow of inforamtion, but instead a flow of work for me to do.

416 new RSS 0.91 feeds from PRWeb. # [Scripting News]

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Peer to peer secure connections …
It is great to see more and more work on VPN solutions being developed in the public domain. I truly believe that these are the technologies that are going to provide a freedom in communications between communities and their members, communities and other communities, and between individuals.

LinVPN 2.4 (Stable). Allows you to create a VPN (Virtual Private Network) from Linux to Linux. [freshmeat.net]

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Visualization of the collective brain …
I have always been a visual thinker … and so I always like to find solutions for producing visual representations of what is going on in the net. I worked for years in network management and still have ideas for solutions that would display the real activity going on in the infrastructure.

The more that I have been working on memetics and Web Services, the more I have started to look at how the real-time activities of “humans on the net” can be represented in a graphical manner.

This is a very cool article and web site that provides a very cool way to render the traffic of visitors at a web site.

Visualizing Crowds At Web Sites [Nooface: In Search of the Post-PC Interface]

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Distributed memory spaces for distributed applications …
One of the key requirements for an effective distributed application is a distributed memory space … something discussed by David Gelernter in Mirror Worlds.

This particular implementation has some interesting twists … an XML version tuplespace, implemented as a SOAP service. A very cool idea!

Rogue Wave release XML tuple space implementation. Ruple
is a technology that allows disparate applications to collaborate,
and is an implementation of Linda tuple spaces. [xmlhack]

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Interesting “virus-free” Internet Cafe solution …
I was thinking of various solutions for securing Internet Cafe computers from viruses and trojan-horses. This is an issue for both the owner of the computer and the customer using it.

When a customer walks in to use the computer, they are expecting a system that is ready to use, and one that does not contain any viruses or software which might compromise their security. The issue is that viruses and trojan-horses can be installed by other customers – either by accident or by malicious intent.

What would happen, however, if I took my own operating system on my own CD-ROM into the cafe and booted it? I could then be reasonably assured that the entire computer would be running my OS and applications … on a storage medium that can not be infected. If my data is all stored out in the net, I would be able to access all of it.

Of course, this does not take into account the possibility of a ‘hacked’ keyboard or BIOS … but it’s getting much better!

Lnx Bootable Business Card 1.618 (development). A bootable rescue CD cut to the size and shape of a business card. [freshmeat.net]

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Down at Comdex … creating the future …
I’m down in Las Vegas … spent the whole day, and will be here all day tomorrow as well. It’s been a fun day so far. The registration was light, there was security present at the doors, and the number of people on the floor was light.

I’m walking the floor with a good friend, John Pugh, who I haven’t seen in quite a while. I’s a blast to get a chance to brainstorm with him … spew ideas at him … and catch up on things.

It’s been a fun show, and as usual I spent my time looking through all of the little booths that are here representing the various Pacific Rim countries – Korea, Thailand, Tiawan, etc. I have to say that the Korea booths were filled with some cool stuff … a lot of wireless, new funky computer cases, and some other cool products. I barely made it half way through the Tiawan section, and so we are going to pick up there tomorrow morning.

I spent some time at the Xybernaut booth … I’ll be working closely with them as we move forward with HumanXtensions. Here at the show, most of the folks are oriented towards WinCE, Palm, and the new PocketPC 2002 … but Xybernaut and few others are seeing the future … full blown PCs with full power operating systems.

I found a large number of interesting technologies and products … I found the LCD panels that I wanted for one application … and I’m searching for the others tomorrow. I found some cool peripherals, and several interesting security peripherals. There are large numbers of “Internet Appliances”, or appliance developer kits …

I’ll be writing all about this in the upcoming month or so … there is a lot going on in the market place!

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Distributed, replicated file and data storage …
This is a project that resembles the work of the Freenet organization … only this has the backing of Microsoft! They are creating a distributed set of shared storage as a solution for fault tolerant data protection. A group of people form a “replica ring” of sorts … and begin to store files on each others file systems. There is encryption and meta-directory capabilities which make this a very likely future.

MIT Technology Review: Fault-Tolerant File Storage. That earth-shaking experience got Theimer, then an operating systems researcher at Xerox PARC, thinking about how to make computer file storage systems radically more fault tolerant. His work has helped to lead to Farsite, a fail-safe storage technology being created at Microsoft. [Tomalak’s Realm]