It’s been a while since I posted here. Too keep you entertained, I categorized all 184 of my Facebook friends by primary relationship type.
Category: Interesting
Wikipedia wastes my time
Last night, I finally gave up Wikipedia editing. It’s not worth it.
Wikipeida is a bona fide nonprofit, and work on it is charitable. But what makes charitable work “worth it”? Here’s a few reasons:
- Have a connection. Charity work with a group of friends counts, as does charity work for an organization in which I have a relationship.
- Get value out of it. I like my volunteering with Boy Scouts and my neighborhood association because it’s as much an education for me as it is a benefit for them. Also fulfilling a religious calling is a value.
- Some kind of permanence. My charitable effort must make a lasting difference in someone’s life.
Wikipedia does none of these.
I have no connection. I only know two editors, and I have met netiher in person. I value relationships, but I only have “so much time” to develop them. I’m not interested in spending that scarce resource on people whose connection is only editing an encyclopeda.
I get little value out of it. I see no “higher purpose” merit. Sure, maybe a little entertainment on the debates, maybe a little pride in knowing I affected some articles. But whatever value I get is totally offset by the lack of permanence described below.
Among Wikipedia’s largest flaws is the lack of authority. Any clown can destroy your changes. Content that is both not part of common sense of laymen and not easily verifiable will be destroyed by successive edits.
I think it was Science magazine that found that Wikipedia is remarkably accurate for scientific articles. Maybe so, but it’s only because the facts are so easily verifiable. The accuracy and verifiability of other articles are debatable. I’ve especially noticed this in articles with a political slant; way too often they conform to how political authorities market things in ways they aren’t.
Good bye Wikipedia. It was interesting, but you’re not worth my time.
IPv4 exhaustion unrelated to ICANN’s new TLD rule
A huge error is in many articles discussing ICANN nascent TLD rules. Here’s a quote from PC Magazine, which should know better:
The additional domains will also probably accelerate the shift to IPv6, an expanded IP addressing scheme that will provide roughly 3.4×10E38 IP addresses, or ten billion billion billion times more than those provided by IPv4, the current scheme. (source)
In fact, there is no direct relationship between IP addresses–abstract numbers–and domain names–the human-friendly, text-based names.
IP is the addressing system of the internet. Every internet-enabled device talks from its own unique IP address to the unique IP address of another machine. It’s just like when you send a postal letter, you sent it “from” your house’s own unique address, the return address on the letter, to the unique address of the recipient.
When you type a web site name in a web browser, such as www.smu.edu, the browser looks up the web site’s IP address. The browser then “talks” to that IP address.
It’s similar to correlating a person to his cell phone number. If I want to call John Smith, I can’t dial “John Smith” in my phone. I have to look up and dial his phone number instead. During the call, I know I’m talking to John Smith, but the phone is simply communicating with an abstract phone number.
IPv4 is the current IP addressing scheme. The is, under the most dire predictions, all available IPv4 addresses will be used up in a few years. In that event, no new devices can use the internet.
An analogy: Suppose a road is very long, and road’s houses have three digit addresses: 001 to 999. With that scheme, only 999 houses can be on the road. If the address changes to 6 digits, the road could allow 999,999 houses because addresses range from 000,001 to 999,999.
IPv6 addresses are like adding those additional digits. In fact, it has so many digits that each person could have fifty octillion (50,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) IP addresses before that system becomes exhausted.
(Truth be told, the predictions of IPv4’s collapse are grossly exaggerated. Simple workarounds are already available that could allow IPv4 to work fine for a long time. And because of the way it assigns IP addresses, IPv6 in fact cannot deliver nearly the number of addresses advertised; as is the case with IPv4, but for different reasons, there will be significant numbers of unusable addresses. But it is true that IPv6 really does have several orders of magnitude more addresses than IPv4, and IPv6 also has several convincing technological advantages that justify its use.)
Back to the point of this article: the IP systems’s current address space crunch is a technical artifact of the IP system. It has no relationship whatsoever to the domain name system. Domain names are merely pointers to certain IP addresses. Nothing more, nothing less.
Industrial Boulevard poll = Dallas City Council looks like dummies
Dallas City Council members have traded entertaining barbs over a recent poll about renaming Industrial Boulevard. The winning choice was Cesar Chavez.
The problem is the poll is complete bunk. In no way could it accurately represent the voice of Dallas citizens.
The poll allowed people to vote over fax, email, and phone. How do you ensure that voters only vote once, and how do you ensure that voters are actual Dallas citizens? You can’t!
The Dallas Morning News says that city staff attempted to “weed out vote-stacking” by eliminating “more than one vote … from the same computer” Also, “a three-vote maximum was allowed per phone…” (link)
First, there is no way to accurately enforce one vote per computer on this poll. Since the site did not let users log in (and reference some kind of credential), there are only two ways to ensure uniqueness:
- One vote per IP address. I doubt they chose that; it would effectively block most users of ISPs that proxy users behind few IP addresses, such as AOL.
- Set a cookie. The cookie can easily be discarded. As soon as that is done, the vote server would have no idea it was the same old browser!
Second, there is nothing preventing someone from calling, faxing, and computer voting (several times). It’s impossible to accurately cross-reference computer votes to phone calls!
Third, without some kind of pervasive, city-issued ID system, it is utterly impossible to validate that votes came from Dallas residents. Without advanced techniques well beyond the scope of this survey, it is utterly impossible to link computers to specific cities. And even if phone numbers were validated, how do you know the person on the other end of the line isn’t a commuter from the ‘burbs?
City council: please stop. You’re making yourself look like idiots.
With way it was conducted, this poll is only good for entertainment value. Nothing else!
Memorial Day treat from the Dallas Symphony Orchestra
The Dallas Symphony Orchestra gives us a treat every Memorial Day. As part of its Community Concerts series, the DSO does a concert at Dallas’s Flagpole Hill, a part of White Rock Lake Park. The audience sits on a gradually sloping hill facing a small band shell that contains the orchestra.
The orchestra sweats through several patriotic or traditional songs, and it’s capped off by a nice, small fireworks show.
Halfway through my 8th grade year, I switched from trumpet to euphonium. I stuck with it through my junior year at SMU.
Even though they have too much firewood string instruments and no euphoniums, I really enjoy when they do Sousa marches. I still remember most of the fingerings and “play along,” sometimes getting the 4th valve fingering right for the lower D and D flat.
The program never indicates the fireworks show. What always happens is they do one last surprise song kind of like an encore, and the fireworks go off during then. The fireworks are shot off across Northwest Highway (6 lane surface road) from Flagpole Hill. The cops block off traffic during the fireworks, possibly because of the smoke and distraction.