From gmail

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, nunc iaculis, pellentesque tristique eu quis felis enim metus, cum libero, quis magnis felis eget vel dignissim ultricies, cras ac nunc. Parturient curabitur nibh dui quisque, nibh rhoncus in arcu, et condimentum sed dui et velit, vestibulum fusce sagittis eget. Euismod varius nostra interdum nec gravida. Viverra vitae et natoque orci cum, vestibulum vel ultricies cras ac. Facilisis id at nam nec. Augue vitae, lacus nec ultricies magna arcu donec, sagittis sit in in magnis at, at massa rutrum aliquam. Cras nunc sem in vero suscipit sit. In rutrum malesuada, elementum et. Elementum a donec vestibulum tincidunt in sed, diam tellus massa, consequat nulla et amet quam. Dictum lacus, purus pede ut arcu leo luctus, consectetuer mauris quisque viverra maecenas consequat. Eget pellentesque, est imperdiet rutrum, sed eget, elit ipsum tincidunt nonummy, cras neque risus mauris dignissim. Id in eget magna aliquam ut.

Sit lorem dolor curabitur orci tortor, massa varius ut in aliquet, mus odio eget augue hendrerit lacus, ac integer justo ut dolor. Nascetur volutpat dui in orci. A lectus erat mauris, amet vestibulum pellentesque id mauris auctor. Scelerisque nec sapien aenean, enim condimentum. Tellus consectetuer proin turpis aliquam. Et neque convallis earum ipsum, natoque sapien quam nec in. Erat vel, etiam in molestie quis, sem libero, ullamcorper sit interdum, phasellus tortor dui. Suspendisse nam orci semper fringilla nonummy venenatis, pretium rhoncus sit tortor turpis, sed magna amet viverra lacus, ipsum integer enim vitae sit curabitur, pellentesque mi scelerisque lorem elit sed eget. Cras ultricies et, mauris ac molestie tempus urna, molestie ultrices lacus.

Purus euismod enim, faucibus proin ligula, orci platea at elit, ultrices massa pulvinar convallis ac pharetra et, varius facilisi ante lectus. Wisi massa vulputate iusto nullam mauris, accumsan commodo suscipit, amet lectus et sociis sollicitudin magna arcu, quis feugiat ipsum nulla. Nec ad interdum eros, mauris curabitur ut odio fringilla pretium vestibulum, sit elit turpis porta scelerisque. Libero sem nisl in vivamus erat lorem, tellus aenean lorem potenti aliquam etiam. Sed nam orci neque nam, aenean tincidunt diam magna, eu ut, donec vestibulum nunc, id in eget amet curabitur. Nascetur orci etiam metus a, suspendisse magna ultrices. Eget in tincidunt omnis ut, cum nibh ante ut, scelerisque mollis consectetuer vestibulum mi iaculis lacus. Porta sed fusce, velit sem purus eget ac mauris et. Varius varius dui non, lobortis in pretium eget lacus sagittis, eleifend ipsum mauris euismod imperdiet a. Donec eros vestibulum commodo fermentum nibh, quam vitae nulla, venenatis ipsum lorem dolor. Justo nonummy nec diam justo ultricies, dui scelerisque etiam consequat, mauris rutrum turpis sed tincidunt felis, erat scelerisque.

HTML Today

HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language, is the main markup language for Web Pages on the Internet.  By markup language I mean tags (code) that are used to surround content so that the content can be manipulated by those tags, depending on which tags you use and how you define them.  HTML has been around since the early 1990’s.  Tim Berners-Lee is widely considered to be one of those most responsible for the widespread use of HTML and the birth of the World Wide Web.

HTML has gone through many version upgrades over the years:

Version	Year – Month
HTML 2.0	1994 – Nov.
HTML 3.2	1997 – Jan.
HTML 4.0	1997 – Dec.
HTML 4.01	1999 – Dec.
XHTML 1.0	2000 – Jan.
XHTML 1.1	2001 – May
(X)HTML 5	2012 – 2022

So when a new version comes out do you have to upgrade your website(s) to the new standard?  No.  Web browsers are the applications that “read” the HTML code and render the code into the visual web page that you see on your screen.  When your web browser gets updated to a new version it will be able to read and conform to the new standards of HTML, but most of the time the browsers grandfather in the old standards.  So the new HTML code will work but the old HTML code will probably still work as well.  The idea is that eventually the web browsers will not provide any support for the old standards, but they are phasing them out over a long period of time.

If you were to build a HTML web page from scratch today I would suggest that you code it in xhtml 1.0 strict.  How would that look?

Which would produce the web page that looks like this:

Notice from the code the first line <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>.  That DOCTYPE belongs as the very first code in any webpage you build.  It is not part of your website but it tells a validator exactly what to expect when reading your code.  Then should come the root element “html” which would have an “xmlns” attribute <html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>.

From there comes the familiar HEAD tag where you would put your META and TITLE tags.  You would also put any SCRIPT or STYLE tags in there.  Then comes your BODY and inside goes all your code to build your web page.  Then at the very end you need to close BODY and close HTML.  And you have a valid xhtml 1.0 strict webpage.  Of course only if you have the proper code inside the BODY tags.

One of the changes in xhtml from html is deprecated code.  The CENTER tag is not to be used in xhtml. If you want to center a table in xhtml you need to use a “style” and make the table’s MARGIN-RIGHT set to AUTO and its MARGIN-LEFT set to AUTO.  Or if you want to center text you would need to use the style TEXT-ALIGN set to CENTER.  And there are many other examples of deprecated code from earlier versions of HTML.  However even if you code improperly it is very likely that modern browsers will try to fix your mistakes when it renders the code.  This fact has led to lots of messy web page coding.  As it turns out that might have been the best thing for the Internet because it encourages creativity and production which in turn has led to the unbelievable growth of the Internet.  And I would argue that the explosion of the Internet into our world has been an extremely positive and productive force.

Is Your Internet Fast?

Everyone has an Internet connection in today’s world (in this blog post I am focusing on the USA).  Some people have Satellite, DSL, Cable, or Wireless (e.g. phone), and I suppose there are a few people out there who have dial-up connections.  Many users pay for multiple Internet connections, I am thinking of those who pay for data plans on their phones and pay for Internet in their homes through cable or other means.  As for me, I have Charter’s cable internet at my home and I have internet access through my iPhone.

When buying access to the Internet you can pay very little ($10 per month) or pay a lot ($150 per month).  One of Netzero’s commercials said, “…All Internet Service Providers take you to the same Internet so why pay more”? So how can there be such a difference in price?  The answer is: speed.  Internet speed is measured (for most household consumers) by “kilobits per second” (kbps) or “megabits per second” (mbps).  A kilobit is 1,000 bits; not to be confused with a kilobyte which is 1,000 bytes where a “byte” is equal to 8 bits.  So kilobit is 1,000 bits and a kilobyte is about 8,000 bits.  And a bit is the basic unit of information for computing.

Dial-up Internet is the slowest at 56 kbps and that’s why it’s the cheapest ($10 per month).  Fiber Optic cable connection to the Internet can reach speeds at around 50 mbps but are 15 times more expensive ($150 per month) than dial-up.  Although the Fiber Optic will give you Internet speeds 1,000 times faster than dial-up.  I have Charter Communications cable Internet at 16 mbps for downloading.  (Note: this blog post will only cover download speeds)  However just because I pay for 16 mbps service from Charter does not mean that I always get it.  That is why I suggest checking your Internet speed on a regular basis.  I have listed below four different sites that test your Internet connection speed.  Click on a picture below to go to that site to check your speed.  The images below show actual tests I did on my connection at home.

When this CNET one opens you need to fill in some fields before you can run the test.

When the AT&T one opens you will need to “rerun” the test to get the right results.

The Charter one will only work if you are a Charter Internet customer.

Speettest will allow you to choose the server you use to test your connection.  Very important!

As you can see from my results I have speeds ranging from 2.5 mbps to 20 mbps.  Now, I pay for 16 mbps from Charter but as the results show your speed is never a fixed thing.  Depending on Internet traffic, technical difficulties, and server distance your speed may be less than advertised (sometimes much less).  What’s great about Speedtest.net is that you can pick servers close to you and you can see that you get good speed, then as you choose servers farther and farther away from you you will see your speed drop.  My speed from CNET (show in 1st image above) is probably due to the fact that CNET is headquartered in San Francisco, CA,  I was testing a server from California.  That is quite a distance compared with the test to a server in St. Louis.

So the moral of the story is this: you can pay for any Internet speed you like but remember that the advertised speed is only an estimate based on the best-case conditions, and we all know that the world rarely has a best-case condition.

Your Computer can be Infected Easily

From your automobile to your phone, today’s world is dominated by computer technology.  Also important is not only the computing power of an individual piece of hardware but also the connection of all these devices to the Internet so the computers can “talk” to each other.  These innovations have made the modern world a much more efficient and productive place.  Think about how cheaply you can send information in today’s world; from St. Louis I can write a 100 page report and send it electronically to my company’s headquarters in Seattle for free, not to mention that its travel time will probably be a couple of minutes (depending on its file size).  That speed and low-cost would have been inconceivable in the not-to-distant past.

But what this high tech world has to deal with that the low tech world didn’t is: insecurity.  When you grab your mail from the mailbox that was delivered by USPS do you worry that when you open the letter your coffee maker will stop working?  Or your car will not start?  Because that scenario is analogous to the chances you take whenever you open electronic mail, or anything that is downloaded, on your computer.  You may open a link in an email and quietly you download a virus or malware onto your computer that makes your computer stop functioning properly.  Or worse yet you download something onto your computer that doesn’t have any symptoms at all because that virus/malware wants to sneakily take your personal information (e.g. bank passwords) to steal your identity and possibly steal your money.

So what are some threats that are out there right now?  Conflicker was one of the big scares of 2009.  60 Minutes did a feature story on Conflicker.  Well Conflicker is still around lurking on computers that do not have adequate anti-virus software installed.  In March 2009 CERT (Computer Emergency Readiness Team) Coordination Center, located at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, said that:

Simple capture-recapture estimation based on our monitored networks suggests a total population of approximately 2.3 million IP addresses on March 30. We’ve observed between 350,000 to 650,000 addresses online during a given hour of the day, with 13:00-15:00Z being the most active time of day.

It is scary to think that there are things such as Conflicker just floating around out there in Cyberspace looking for vulnerable computers to infect.

Just recently there is the case of the Energizer Duo Charger.  Energizer made a battery charger that you could check the status of the charging from your computer if you downloaded some software onto your computer.  It turns out that the software you could download contained a Trojan.

“The installer for the Energizer Duo software places the file UsbCharger.dll in the application’s directory and Arucer.dll in the Windows system32 directory,” the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team said in an advisory on Friday. “Arucer.dll is a backdoor that allows unauthorized remote system access via accepting connections on 7777/tcp. Its capabilities include the ability to list directories, send and receive files, and execute programs.”

So Energizer has stopped selling the product, but the product and download have been available since 2007.  So how many computers have been affected in that time?

So the moral of this story is to keep your computer’s anti-virus software up-to-date, always install important updates from Microsoft (if you have a PC), and never install software on your computer that you don’t trust.  Don’t click on links in emails that are from people you don’t know.

The modern age is fantastically more efficient than the systems of the past but the technological foundation that the modern system is built upon is very fragile if unprotected.

Computers/Networking can make you go crazy!

So I’ve got a wireless router setup at home.  It is a Belkin N wireless router.  I’ve had the thing for about 2 months and never had a problem.  Guess what happened this week?  You guessed it; I’ve got a problem with my router.  I have a 10 Mbps (megs) download speed from Charter Communications (yeah, I hate Charter too but they’ve got the speed!), but recently I was only getting about 1 meg.  So I contact Charter and they say everything is fine on their end and my modem signal is strong.  They say try bypassing the router.  So I do and guess what?  I get my 10 meg speed back!  So my slow internet connection is due to something going on with my router.  So great, I’ve got the problem narrowed down and now I can solve the problem, right?  Well, of course not!

So next I naturally reset my router to its factory settings and reinstall it in with my system setup.  Now of course everything should be good, right?  Wrong!  I still have a 1 meg download speed.  Just to be sure I disconnect the router and just have my modem go directly to my computer and yes, there is my 10 meg speed back again.  So the problem is with my router, which worked perfectly for 2 months until a week ago, and it doesn’t properly at all anymore.  What could have possibly changed with the router?!  So I’m about ready to throw the router off my roof just so I could hear the sound it would make when it met the pavement!

Anybody have a solution to my problem?

Test your internet connection speed here

Can the USA get a Handle on IS?

Information technologies and the systems that tie those technologies together are seemingly ever-increasing in complexity.  In our individual lives, in our businesses, and in our government there are systems built upon systems and technologies whose shelf-life can be measured by the weeks.  To get a sense of scale consider: The US government spends 76 billion dollars a year on its IT budget and is responsible for 10,679 IT systems.  Those figures are courtesy of Vivek Kundra.  Vivek is the first CIO (Chief Information Officer) of the USA.  It is Vivek’s job to understand, analyze, and plan the Information Systems that connect and organize the Federal Government of the USA.  I think that he has quite a task in front of him.

However is it only the US Government that has its hands full when it comes to tying all the IS together?  Surely not!  While the US Government has a massive IS network it also has large ranks of talented and knowledge IT/IS employees ready to solve problems.  While the small businessperson might have a very small IS capacity he/she also has a very small budget and probably little to no expertise in dealing with IT issues and problems.  And think about the individual consumer who buys a new laptop and then gets a new smartphone, that person now must learn how to use those products effectively on their own time.

There is nothing that gets simpler as technology progresses, things are only becoming increasing complicated and systems are becoming increasing integrated.  A large federal government, the small business, and the individual consumer are all trying to keep up-to-date in a world where “up-to-date” only lasts about 2 weeks!

AOL Radio

Does the Internet make everything better?  The answer is yes!  At least when you are talking about listening to the radio.  In the somewhat distant past there was only your local radio stations broadcast on FM or AM frequencies.  That old radio was free but had a very limited number of channels and had many minutes of commercials in a given hour of listening.  Then came satellite radio which had many more channels and less commercials but it made radio no longer free.

But now there is Internet radio.  Internet radio has scores of channels, there are not that many commercials, and it is free!  The Internet radio that I like is AOL Radio.  With AOL Radio you can skip songs or commercials (up to 6 times in one hour), and pause the music and restart it later exactly where you left off.

Well that’s great at home but what about my car?  Well if you have an Apple iPhone you can download a free AOL Radio App which will let you listen to AOL Radio on your iPhone.  So if you plug your iPhone into your car stereo system via an AUX input then you can listen to Internet Radio in your car!

1st post

Well it works.  Now, what to say….