Journal #8 - Making Meaning

                After reading Tubes by Andrew Blum, I will never see the Internet in the same perspective again.  This book kept me engaged from front to back cover with Blum's personal journey to the center of the Internet, the center being in Palo Alto, California - one of the most expensive cities in the United States.  During my reading of this book I actually Googled the PAIX because that particular chapter interested me when Blum's adventures took him to Silicon Valley and to the Palo Alto Internet eXchange (PAIX).  When I read that chapter I imagined the PAIX being a room full of bundles and bundles of cables (some bundles being as big as tire tubes) running from one end of the building to another and then through giant whole in the walls to the other rooms, and then making connections to all the different routers and switches along the way.  It created a spider web network.  Companies rented real estate in the PAIX like it was a lot for lease.  These companies saw the PAIX as their manifest destiny; companies like Verizon, Sprint, and Facebook expanded their presence on the Internet by having a piece of land in the PAIX.  Having a server close to the center of the Internet meant faster web sites and faster load times.

                This particular chapter got me wondering about Silicon Valley and Palo Alto, but mostly about California and the plans I have for post-graduation.  I started to wonder what I am going to do after I graduate from K-State with a degree in CIS.  In Palo Alto, so many high technology companies such as Hewlett-Packard and Apple started with nothing to become leaders in the technology we use every day.  Maybe it's something in the water that makes people great in Palo Alto because the city is home to the most educated people in the nation.  Even today information technology in California is a growing business.  Most companies are downsizing and laying off employees except for IT companies, these are the only ones that are growing and expanding in this broken economy.  After I get my degree in CIS from K-State I plan to move back to California because there are so many job opportunities in information technology.  There are a few over here in the mid-west and only if you don't mind teaching or working as a contractor for the military.  Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong about doing either one of those, they are just not for me.  Dealing with soldiers for four years when I was enlisted in the Army is enough.  Now I can only handle soldiers in small doses.

                I would recommend this book to everyone who has a curiosity of how the Internet works.  This book provides a personal insight of the backbone of the invention we use every day - tubes .  Without these personal and physical connections the Internet wouldn't have evolved and expanded at such a rapid rate in such a small amount of time.  These tubes bring access to the entire world at our fingertips.  On a personal note, this book brought some enlightenment to what I plan to with my degree after K-State.  I now know a bright future waits for me in my birthplace in the land of tubes and silicon known as California.  Why did I even California in the first place?

Journal #7 - Web Technologies

                Originally developed by Micheal Widenious and David Axmark in 1994 and released on 23 May 1995, MySQL is now the world's most popular open source database.  The official pronunciation is My S-Q-L but a lot of web developers pronounce it My Sequel.  Many of the world's largest and fastest-growing organizations including Facebook, Google, Adobe, Alcatel Lucent, and Zappos rely on MySQL to save time and money powering their high-volume web sites, business-critical systems and packaged software.  MySQL is a relational database management system (RDBMS), and ships with no GUI tools to administer databases or manage data contained within the databases.  Users can use the command line tools or download the official front end tool MySQL workbench which is actively developed by Oracle.  Another popular front end tool that I personally find easier to use than MySQL workbench is phpMyAdmin.

                If a web site has an option to login and personalize your web experience, most likely it is using MySQL to administer a database where your user information is stored.  Most web sites you visit on the Internet are being hosted on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) servers because everything involved to set up this type of server is free and open source which makes it easy for web developers to find help and support when they need it.  I run a LAMP server on my Raspberry Pi and use phpMyAdmin to administer MySQL databases, and I installed ddclient so the public can find the dynamic IP address of my web server at http://braineurysm.flashserv.net.  ddclient is a script that updates a DNS server with the dynamic IP address of the machine every 600 seconds so when my web server's IP address changes the public can still find my web site at the same domain name.  Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, phpMyAdmin, and ddclient are all free and open source and has made the process of setting up a web server cost me nothing. All I spent was time.

                Free and open source are the two main reasons why web sites are popping up everywhere across the Internet.  The world has set their eyes on the Internet with Manifest Destiny in mind.  Average Joe can find a tutorial video on Youtube that gives step-by-step instructions on how to install and set up a LAMP server on their machine, and for $35 they can buy a Raspberry Pi to run the web server on a separate machine.  With a few command lines and a few tweaks on the router they can have a web site online with just about anything.  A new social network is born?  A new business store front?  A new browser-based game? The possibilities are endless.  PHP will handle all the server side scripting and MySQL will manage all the databases.  Who knows, Average Joe can be the next Mark Zuckerberg.

Journal #6 - Are We Too Connected?

                We are living in the Information Age, when the answer to anything is just around the corner of a Google search.  We don't search something, we Google it.  Web 2.0 has changed our society to be more interactive.  Our society feels that we must be constantly connected to the Internet to update our friends and family about our mood, post a funny picture of a dancing cat, or rant about how Captain Crunch scratches the roof of our mouth.  Web 2.0 has made the Internet more dynamic and constantly changing, just like our daily lives; and this breathes life to the Internet and makes it a living entity.  We feel lost unless we are plugged in.  GPS helps us find our way again.  Is all this necessary?  Or are we too connected?

                I think being constantly connected to the Internet is what our society has evolved into, and I believe this step in evolution is a good thing because the Internet makes our daily lives easier by allowing us to access information on the go with just a flick of a finger.  The Internet is a big place, a vast place filled with a lot of information and we naturally want to have it at our finger tips.  I can't even remember a time before the Internet and now having a constant connection to the Internet is necessary to keep ourselves informed and track our friends and family.  Google knows this and wants to make our interaction with the Internet more seamless.  That is why they are marketing this idea by releasing their Google Glass at the end of this year.  The relationship between the Internet and humans has evolved into something symbiotic, the Internet helps humankind complete daily tasks and in turn we build and expand the Internet with more information.  "Help you help us" is the motto we seem to have with the World Wide Web.  Google's new product will be a more efficient tool to help us utilize the Internet just like the smart phone was.  Next will be implants.

                Like all great inventions we want to use it and push it to the limit.  This explains why new technologies are being developed specifically for the Internet all the time.  I remember a time when there was no HTML 5, 4, or 3.  It was just HTML.  Another technology that has evolved is IPv4, it has approached the end of its life time because the human population has outgrown the number of IP address the technology offers.  IPv6 will supply enough IP addresses to satisfy the human population for a while.  This idea supplies evidence of the symbiosis between the Internet and humankind.  We develop new technologies to make the Internet better in order for it to better serve us.

Journal #5 - Making Meaning

                Not many books can keep me engaged from front to back cover and I can honestly say that W. Daniel Hillis did a great job in keeping me interested from beginning to end with his book The Pattern on the Stone.  It gave me a straight answer to one of the questions that I have always had while growing up - how do computers work?  He gave me a new perspective on the concept of computers, one specifically was the computer made out of water pipes and valves.  He explained that with infinite resources and time I could build a computer like the one I have on my desktop out of water pipes, water valves, and use water to pass through the pipes to switch the valves on and off.  The computer that I use to play Star Wars: The Old Republic, watch and edit movies, compose music, and use to write applications, that one.  This water pipe computer will probably be the size of New York city when I'm done building it and probably be only as fast as the water current that is switching the valves on and off, but none the less it will be a complete and working computer made out of something that I would have never imagined before reading this book.

                After the water pipe computer concept was stuck in my head I Googled "computers that are made from other materials" and I found a computer that is made from DNA and other biological molecules.  These computers are called bimolecular computers and are the smallest computers in the world; they are so small that a trillion fit in a single drop of water.  One version of this device can detect cancer in a test tube and releases a molecule to destroy it.  This is not a science fiction concept in a new George Lucas film, this is happening right now.  And this happened back in 2004 so this is an old technology; imagine what new innovations we have today.  This to me is mind blowing.

                In my close circle of friends, all of us are computer Gods in one way or the other and I think this book will give my friends an insight that they would enjoy just like it did with me.  I would recommend it to my friends in a heartbeat so we could engage in a variety of interesting conversations about computers.  I'm confident each of my friends will find a different chapter that pulls them in and will bring something different to our conversation and enlighten each other with new and exciting information.  And that is what I enjoyed most about this book - each chapter is different and brings a wide variety of information to the reader.