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]
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]
A good note on the state of browser support for DOM …
This is a good article on some of the various differences in implimentations of DOM is the various browsers. Good info to know if you are developing JavaScript on the bleeding edge …
Waiting for the DOM. Though great strides have been made towards the ultimate goal of a single DOM for all browsers, some implementation differences still remain. Guest author Kenneth Tibbetts provides some browser-specific scripting gotchas to watch out for. From the WebReference Update. 0315 [WebReference News]
XPath and DOM Documents …
As I continue my learning of JavaScript I continue to learn some of the rich infrastructure. This is a very good article that applies well to many of the exact DOM operations that I am writing currently. I continue to be very impressed with this site, and this series of articles!
Searching DOMDocument Nodes. It’s easy to load XML data into Internet Explorer using JavaScript; the real fun starts when you try to find specific information within the DOMDocument tree. Learn how to search for and select specific nodes using XPath notation. By Yehuda Shiran and Tomer Shiran. 0226 [WebReference News]
More support for DSML and LDAP Directories …
As we started to renew our efforts on digital identity, we quickly embraced the DSML standard as an xML solution for representing directory information. These tools appear to be a very endorsement of the DSML standard and can assist Java developers in writing more and more directory enabled applications.
Open-source DSML tools. Gerv
Markham has released DSML Tools,
a suite of open-source Java
utilities for handling Directory Services Markup
Language (DSML) data. [xmlhack]
Peer to peer and community proxies will wipe this out …
If you read this article, you might get the idea that people can track down your geographic location accurately when you are cruising the web. Although this is true for now, it is becoming easier to “mask” your location with simple peer to peer or community proxies.
A proxy is a machine that someone places on the internet which allows you to “relay” your web requests through. Any web site that you then visit will see the requests coming from the proxy, rather than your computer! In the example in the article, if you were to locate a proxy in the UK, you would be able to visit the UK gambling sites since they would see the traffic coming from a UK computer … not yours in the US.
This entire situation gets more and more complex as more people allow for the sharing of computing resources on their laptops and home computers. As the desire for more privacy increases … at least among groups of computer users … I believe that people will begin to install proxies to share for a variety of purposes …
Geolocation will not have a chance against these types of proxies and relays …
A very cool proxy/redirection script …
I have recently been working on learning Perl. It’s a fairly amazing and flexible language, there is a ton of open source code written in Perl, and it’s available for almost every platform out there.
In looking around recently, I found this Proxy script that is a very powerful script. It provides a flexible proxy for HTTP and FTP that can strip various content, manage cookies, and provide nearly anonymous browsing. There are a whole slew of things that I can think of possible using this code. The author even added a number of features similar to the Crowds proxies with groups of proxies.
I’m going to install this on a couple of my servers and do some experimentation. If you want to see a demo of this, visit the authors homepage and he has a demo version up and running!
CGIProxy 1.5. Anonymizing, filter-bypassing HTTP proxy in a CGI script (in Perl) [freshmeat.net]
Web Services and Information availability …
I really liked reading about this project since it truly shows the level of information that can be obtained via the web. This raw information, and making raw information available, is what will allow wide ranges of web services to be made available … and whole new generations of distributed applications to be created.
Imagine the web service that uses this weather data to automatically suggest outdoor (or indoor) activities in a city based on the temperature and weather. Or even forecasting the likelyhood of star gazing that evening, and suggesting what to wear.
Web services are going to be massively distributed applications which build on the raw data, and eventually provide a user interface – through a browser or other visual/audible notifications. In between these two ends will be more services built on top of other services and raw data … massive networks of objects communicating with each other using standardized protocols.
So this is a cool raw data source … 😉
GoWeather 2001.10.24. Graphically displays current conditions and 5-day forecast for a location. [freshmeat.net]
RSS continues to grow and be recognized …
This is a cool little application that was created to support RSS new feeds. It allows a user to specify a set of feeds to monitor, and then gathers the new articles and provides an interface that can launch a web browser to read the full article.
This is yet more information indicating the growing interest and support for RSS format publishing.
HotSheet 0.90 alpha. A cross-platform RSS news reader with a friendly GUI. [freshmeat.net]
Comdex … slow, but a valuable trip …
I just returned from Comdex, and there were some real valuable finds … in a wide range of areas. I’ll be writing about a number of the companies and solutions in future stories, and as I get to evaluate the products. There were also a number of trends that were noticeable … the prescence of numerous tablet computers, wearable computers, heads up displays, 802.11b, Bluetooth, 802.11a, and solid state disk drives.
Tablets and wearables …
It seemed that there were a large number of WinCE tablet computers at Comdex this year. I am not impressed with these machines … although they appear to provide some level of features and functions. WinCE is still a limited OS, and the application support just isn’t there. Although the current price point is very good, most of the vendors were even pushing their solutions as a Windows “thin-client” solution … remotely display applications that were running on another machine. This just doesn’t make sense to me.
Peppered throughout the various WinCE solutions, were a few unique solutions that caught my attention … of course Xybernaut, along with PaceBlade, and a few others. These are full blown PCs, running full operatings systems. The PaceBlade was actually impressive as a tablet PC. I’m thinking that I will have to get one to try!
Wireless … why Bluetooth is lame …
I really wanted to check out the situation with Bluetooth wireless … and I found that it is in a miserable state! The products are coming available … most are already falling into commodity pricing due to Pacific Rim manufacturers. The software however sucks … big time! Most every vendor had their own little applications that would display Bluetooth devices and services, and allow for you to interact with these … but all in their own unique ways. The worst part of this is that I could not find a vendor who was willing to give away a developer kit that would allow the creation of new and innovative applications! When I found a vendor who seemed to think it was a good idea, they immediately indicated that they could put one together for me for thousands of dollars … yeah, right! Why would I pay for a dev kit to sell more hardware for a company? They could be paying me to assist them! How do they expect the “killer app” to be created for Bluetooth, when no one is releasing the foundation for new applications to developers? Bluetooth is doomed, IMHO, unless the vendors do something soon.
I’m meeting with a friend who works on the Bluetooth standards commitee on Monday … I am going to have a long talk with her and see what can be done …
Solid state flash disk …
One last thing for this post … the solid state disks are looking good. There were several vendors who offered IDE solid state flash disks with up to 2GB of capacity. This is going to be very good for the mobile market, and also for more fault tolerence in server boot drives of Internet appliances. These things are lightweight, fast, and reliable. They can take 1MM writes per sector … so it’s a lot of data. You will want an OS that does read-after-write verifications though …
I’ll be writing more soon … but the trip was inspiring … there were a lot of the components that I have been looking for … so that I can continue to create the future …