I've been busy like crazy finishing off this PhD depth oral which I will present before the end of this term. Plus, I have to finish up 2 projects, TA work, and writing an exam all before the Christmas holidays. I'm going to be extremely busy, so I'm looking forward to the Christmas holidays!
But I'm also finished writing the depth oral which I'll give to my PhD committee and give the depth oral in about 2 weeks. Then I'll complete two of my PhD milestones, which is presenting my research paper (My Masters thesis) and the depth oral (literature review). Next term, I will have to present my PhD thesis proposal and then hopefully I'll finish my PhD in a year. Then I'll be looking for either post-doc positions, research positions, or perhaps a professor positions. We'll see, as the saying goes, one step at a time.
On Technorati: depth oral
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Friday, November 24, 2006
Lilia Efimova and Jonathan Grudin's blogging paper
Jonathan Grudin, who was here at U of T and from whom I met during the student and faculty meet and greet session (check my blog post here), along with Lilia Efimova (who's prominent in the blogosphere and also with her blogging research), have written a paper at HICSS (Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences). I should have a look at this paper, as it's very relevant to my research and I'm interested in how they were able to conduct the study and what methods they used and how they analyzed that data.
On Technorati: Microsoft blogging, HICSS, Jonathan Grudin, Lilia Efimova
On Technorati: Microsoft blogging, HICSS, Jonathan Grudin, Lilia Efimova
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Jonathan Grudin talk
Jonathan Grudin Talk
Emerging Technologies and Knowledge Management
The wireless does not appear to be working here in BA 1180, so I’m going to blog locally on Microsoft Word and then transfer to Blogger. There will be a meeting with grad students and faculty later this afternoon. I’ve just also noticed that this talk is being recorded by ePresence. Jonathan just mentioned that he’s glad to be back in Toronto. Anyways, I've just realized that this talk is very similar to the video talk that I attended and blogged while at PARC. He’s now talking about irresistible forces in technology, there is an imperceptible change of exponential growth of technology. From psychological studies and effects, even when aware of non-linear growth, we reason poorly about it. Even though we have more data, it doesn’t help. He’s now showing the visualizations of exponential growth, in particular Moore’s Law. The basic curve of Moore’s Law doesn’t change, but you have a long tail which becomes longer and longer in time as you increase in time. There have been professions that have been affected by this change in hardware, like hardware R&D, software R&D, user interface R&D.
OK, the wireless is back on, so I'm going to continue blogging in Blogger beta.
We now see effects in consumer behaviour and in organizational and institutional behaviour. There's a new generation of technologies and students are picking up these skills and behaviours (note: he mentioned that weblogs are a waste of time for students, hehe, well I'm blogging right now but I think it depends what the blogs are talking about, I think blogging can be constructive to find community, hence my research). Jonathan is doing research into these new collaborative technologies. Ah yes, the ever popular emerging technologies hype cycle from Gartner, this is what he is showing. Gartner is optimistic about these technologies like wikis and blogging. The research that he is doing in MS Research include a qualitative study of blogs at MS with Lilia Efimova (who's a PhD research doing similar work to finding communities in blogs like I am). They've found rapid evolution of product blogs, Microsoft employees are heavily into blogging. They found that blogs are good for communicating with businesses and customers if the employees had lots of experience in blogging.
The second part of his research is talking about Managing Knowledge: Challenges and Potential Solutions. Digital documents are difficult to find, adding metadata is work. One type of adding metadata is unstructured tagging like Flickr. Almost everyone in the room put up their hand to say they've visited the Flickr site, in contrast to not many people from our survey that we did in the Business of Blogging workshop from CASCON 2005. It's so easy to search for photos in Flickr based on tags, Jonathan mentioned how he had to write a trip report for table top displays, and so just did a search on that in Flickr and found all these photos from the recent CSCW conference in Banff that ended couple of weeks ago. Flickr has an innovative approach, bu the question is how far can bottom-up go? Flickr also has automatic clustering of photos and create structure based on number of visits, the most recent time. You can quickly navigate through the photos space of Flickr. There's also been a recent study of Flickr from Cameron Marlow and his colleagues from Yahoo Research from the Hypertext 2006 conference.
Jonathan is now talking about how blogs are affecting the workplace, we explored this in the Business of Blogging workshop at CASCON 2005. Employees can get up to date information from events, for monitoring comments on products, to put a human face on your enterprise and connect to customers (including Microsoft), and internally-facing to communicate about project visibility and knowledge management. Blogs can then be used to link to document repositories to provide context. In other words blogs can provide documentation to projects. How do blogs provide context? Blog entries briefly describe documents and it's easier to blog a comment than to email it. It doesn't add work.
One of the questions that Jonathan gets is the blog a limited structured format? He thinks that there will be a merger between blogs and document repositories because blogs can add that missing context to document repositories. This also includes wikis which is good for deadline-driven collaborations. Building expertise locators hasn't succeeded so people bypass the system. Why they don't work? It's because it's difficult because the processes are highly social and complex.
In conclusion, he encourages us to look ahead of the curve and how rapidly things can change. There's now a paradigm shift in HCI and its social computing and it's great to know that I'm in the right area for research!
On Technorati: jonathan grudin, knowledge management, emerging technologies, social computing
Emerging Technologies and Knowledge Management
The wireless does not appear to be working here in BA 1180, so I’m going to blog locally on Microsoft Word and then transfer to Blogger. There will be a meeting with grad students and faculty later this afternoon. I’ve just also noticed that this talk is being recorded by ePresence. Jonathan just mentioned that he’s glad to be back in Toronto. Anyways, I've just realized that this talk is very similar to the video talk that I attended and blogged while at PARC. He’s now talking about irresistible forces in technology, there is an imperceptible change of exponential growth of technology. From psychological studies and effects, even when aware of non-linear growth, we reason poorly about it. Even though we have more data, it doesn’t help. He’s now showing the visualizations of exponential growth, in particular Moore’s Law. The basic curve of Moore’s Law doesn’t change, but you have a long tail which becomes longer and longer in time as you increase in time. There have been professions that have been affected by this change in hardware, like hardware R&D, software R&D, user interface R&D.
OK, the wireless is back on, so I'm going to continue blogging in Blogger beta.
We now see effects in consumer behaviour and in organizational and institutional behaviour. There's a new generation of technologies and students are picking up these skills and behaviours (note: he mentioned that weblogs are a waste of time for students, hehe, well I'm blogging right now but I think it depends what the blogs are talking about, I think blogging can be constructive to find community, hence my research). Jonathan is doing research into these new collaborative technologies. Ah yes, the ever popular emerging technologies hype cycle from Gartner, this is what he is showing. Gartner is optimistic about these technologies like wikis and blogging. The research that he is doing in MS Research include a qualitative study of blogs at MS with Lilia Efimova (who's a PhD research doing similar work to finding communities in blogs like I am). They've found rapid evolution of product blogs, Microsoft employees are heavily into blogging. They found that blogs are good for communicating with businesses and customers if the employees had lots of experience in blogging.
The second part of his research is talking about Managing Knowledge: Challenges and Potential Solutions. Digital documents are difficult to find, adding metadata is work. One type of adding metadata is unstructured tagging like Flickr. Almost everyone in the room put up their hand to say they've visited the Flickr site, in contrast to not many people from our survey that we did in the Business of Blogging workshop from CASCON 2005. It's so easy to search for photos in Flickr based on tags, Jonathan mentioned how he had to write a trip report for table top displays, and so just did a search on that in Flickr and found all these photos from the recent CSCW conference in Banff that ended couple of weeks ago. Flickr has an innovative approach, bu the question is how far can bottom-up go? Flickr also has automatic clustering of photos and create structure based on number of visits, the most recent time. You can quickly navigate through the photos space of Flickr. There's also been a recent study of Flickr from Cameron Marlow and his colleagues from Yahoo Research from the Hypertext 2006 conference.
Jonathan is now talking about how blogs are affecting the workplace, we explored this in the Business of Blogging workshop at CASCON 2005. Employees can get up to date information from events, for monitoring comments on products, to put a human face on your enterprise and connect to customers (including Microsoft), and internally-facing to communicate about project visibility and knowledge management. Blogs can then be used to link to document repositories to provide context. In other words blogs can provide documentation to projects. How do blogs provide context? Blog entries briefly describe documents and it's easier to blog a comment than to email it. It doesn't add work.
One of the questions that Jonathan gets is the blog a limited structured format? He thinks that there will be a merger between blogs and document repositories because blogs can add that missing context to document repositories. This also includes wikis which is good for deadline-driven collaborations. Building expertise locators hasn't succeeded so people bypass the system. Why they don't work? It's because it's difficult because the processes are highly social and complex.
In conclusion, he encourages us to look ahead of the curve and how rapidly things can change. There's now a paradigm shift in HCI and its social computing and it's great to know that I'm in the right area for research!
On Technorati: jonathan grudin, knowledge management, emerging technologies, social computing
Saturday, November 18, 2006
It's gonna be a busy hectic couple of weeks
I'm in for a busy hectic couple of weeks (as if I'm never busy). But especially for these coming weeks, because I have to finish up assignments for 2 courses, projects in 2 courses, write an exam, mark assignments for a course I'm TAing, mark final exams in December, and also complete my PhD depth oral and research paper presentation which will be in middle of December as well.
Then I can concentrate on my thesis proposal in January, I will have finished all my courses by end of this year, and hopefully if all goes according to plan, I will finish my PhD by end of next year (hopefully!). So, if you don't hear my blog that often, you'll know why.
On Technorati: busy, PhD depth oral
Then I can concentrate on my thesis proposal in January, I will have finished all my courses by end of this year, and hopefully if all goes according to plan, I will finish my PhD by end of next year (hopefully!). So, if you don't hear my blog that often, you'll know why.
On Technorati: busy, PhD depth oral
Friday, November 17, 2006
When anti-spyware is actually spyware
My laptop got infected with spyware today, the exact same case as my sister's in the post I did here. Fortunately, it did not require me to reinstall Windows! Basically, what was happening was that I had two programs that were installed in the system tray. The first was a red circle with an exclamation which kept constantly giving me a message saying that Warning: you have spyware on your computer and to click this balloon to download all necessary software. However, this program is clever because to the average user, he/she would click and start downloading other anti-spyware programs and anti-virus programs like WinAntivirus Pro. The second item in my system tray was a "Critical system error" message prompting me to download their anti-spyware software to clean it. Actually, these programs are spyware but are cleverly disguised as anti-spyware. Don't download their anti-spyware! (this is examples of what is called rogue spyware, it seems legit but it isn't, so it may fool you). If you actually look at the message, there is a misspelling on balloon, it's spelled "baloon", so I could tell that I had spyware installed. But using your average anti-virus program (Symantec Antivirus in my case) and Windows Defender and Lavasoft Ad-aware could not remove it. Ad-aware did detect malware and removed some of it but not all.
As I start getting fed up and concerned about this, I did a Google search for "Critical system errors system tray windows", and up came a whole bunch of articles on how to remove it. Some were very complex, saying you have to install this and that, and I was like what? Others had to post something called a HijackThis log, and I wasn't in the position to do something like that. I finally found out how to get rid of both of my spyware programs and these are the steps that I did.
1. I came to this article which is a blog post from PC's Ancestor, which was the top search in Google. Thanks to this, I was able to download SmitfraudFix.zip and follow the instructions to remove infected items in the registry in Safe Mode. So, that got me to remove the "Critical system error" message in the system tray.
2. Then I rebooted back into Windows XP and Windows Defender came on and detected a program called Toolbar888 which is called Browser Modifier, this is what happened and modified the browser so that popups are displayed. So, Windows Defender removed that.
3. To make sure I had no other infections, I rebooted back into Safe Mode and ran Ad-aware. I found out that I still had some type of spyware called Virtumonde which is a program that causes popups to happen. Ad-aware couldn't kill it or quarantine it so it said that I need to go and download a Virtumonde removal tool.
4. I'm currently downloading the Virtumonde removal tool from Symantec.
Now, I don't have the "Critical system error" message or the "Security warning" messages in the system tray anymore.
I also just realized that there were two URLs that were installed in my Start menu about online and security troubleshooting but I've removed them (that's the easy part).
I've never seen software this sophisticated before, it just shows that you have to be careful when you're downloading and on the internet, and install a firewall, anti-spyware (a valid one!) and anti-virus programs. Hope these instructions will help others who have the same problem.
On Technorati: spyware, smitfraudfix, browser modifier
As I start getting fed up and concerned about this, I did a Google search for "Critical system errors system tray windows", and up came a whole bunch of articles on how to remove it. Some were very complex, saying you have to install this and that, and I was like what? Others had to post something called a HijackThis log, and I wasn't in the position to do something like that. I finally found out how to get rid of both of my spyware programs and these are the steps that I did.
1. I came to this article which is a blog post from PC's Ancestor, which was the top search in Google. Thanks to this, I was able to download SmitfraudFix.zip and follow the instructions to remove infected items in the registry in Safe Mode. So, that got me to remove the "Critical system error" message in the system tray.
2. Then I rebooted back into Windows XP and Windows Defender came on and detected a program called Toolbar888 which is called Browser Modifier, this is what happened and modified the browser so that popups are displayed. So, Windows Defender removed that.
3. To make sure I had no other infections, I rebooted back into Safe Mode and ran Ad-aware. I found out that I still had some type of spyware called Virtumonde which is a program that causes popups to happen. Ad-aware couldn't kill it or quarantine it so it said that I need to go and download a Virtumonde removal tool.
4. I'm currently downloading the Virtumonde removal tool from Symantec.
Now, I don't have the "Critical system error" message or the "Security warning" messages in the system tray anymore.
I also just realized that there were two URLs that were installed in my Start menu about online and security troubleshooting but I've removed them (that's the easy part).
I've never seen software this sophisticated before, it just shows that you have to be careful when you're downloading and on the internet, and install a firewall, anti-spyware (a valid one!) and anti-virus programs. Hope these instructions will help others who have the same problem.
On Technorati: spyware, smitfraudfix, browser modifier
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Microsoft Zune launch today in US
Microsoft today launched their Zune player, the competitor to Apple's iPod. I blogged about the Zune in an early blogging post. The Zune comes with the following features:
WMA, MP3, AAC, JPEG,WMV, MPEG-4, H.264 media playback
Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g) connectivity
30 GB Hard Drive
3 inch video LCD 320x240
White, Black, and Brown Colors
FM Radio
Dedicated song download site zune.net
Podcast playback
Updateable Firmware
Tested 13 hr battery life for audio, 4 hr video
3 day playback of Wi-Fi transfered songs from friends
XBOX streaming
XBOX (Microsoft) points compatability
Preloaded music videos
Over a dozen accessories at launch
5.6 ounces in weight, 4.4 x 2.4 x 0.58 inches size
Metric: 158 g, 112 x 61 x 14.7 mm size
Custom background images
WiFi transfer of photographs
Tag based storage system (Will not appear as drive)
PC Compatability (no Mac client at launch)
Zune tag enabled
Horizontal and vertical video orientation
It's $249.99US, but it's not coming to Canada until next year. Don't expect Microsoft to make a bite out of the Apple iPod. But with Microsoft's muscle into entertainment and the digitally connected home with XBox360, Windows Media Edition, TabletPC, UltraMobilePC, they may be able to carve out a market in this space. As with all Microsoft launches, there's huge media and launch party, some pictures from the event are shown below from the Zune web site.
It's pretty funny, on the Zune web site, there's a Google ad for a free iPod! I guess, there's no context-aware ads yet, context awareness would say, hmm iPod competes with Zune, if the iPod is free, doesn't this go against buying a Microsoft Zune?
This is interesting also, a survey shows that many iPod users will buy a Zune? What kind of a poll is this?
A new survey conducted by ABI Research has shown that many prospective MP3 player buyers—even owners of iPods—would be likely to choose Microsoft's Zune player. 1725 teenage and adult US residents were asked whether they planned to buy an MP3 player in the next 12 months. Of those responding that they were likely to do so, 58% of those identifying themselves as existing iPod owners and 59% of those who owned other brands said they would be "somewhat likely" or "extremely likely" to choose a Microsoft Zune player over an iPod or another brand of MP3 player.
"..iPod users don't display the same passionate loyalty to iPods that Macintosh users have historically shown for their Apple products."
source ABI
So, the ultimate question, will GadgetMan buy one? I still haven't replaced my Palm Zire 71 yet, in fact, I've found out I don't use much of my Palm that I used to 2 years ago, just use it mostly for making appointments, for synchronizing contacts, and reading the Bible. And also, the occasional camera shot if I feel like it. So, I don't see myself buying one anytime soon.
On Technorati: Zune
Monday, November 13, 2006
U of T CS is #1 at ACM programming competition!
On Saturday, the U of T CS teams competed in the ACM International Collegiate Programming Competition regionals, and we won!
Our two teams took first and seventh places, beating Waterloo and over 100 other teams from Ontario, and 3 US states.
The final scoreboard is here.
Toronto 1 will go to the finals in Tokyo in March.
Congrats to the team!
On Technorati: ACM Programming Competition, U of T
Our two teams took first and seventh places, beating Waterloo and over 100 other teams from Ontario, and 3 US states.
The final scoreboard is here.
Toronto 1 will go to the finals in Tokyo in March.
Congrats to the team!
On Technorati: ACM Programming Competition, U of T
From Web 2.0 to Web 3.0
I'm sure people have heard about this Web 2.0 phenomenon that's all over, about AJAX and mashups, blogging, podcasts, tagging, basically making the web usable for humans. Now, we're getting to the next upgrade to the web, or maybe a leap, called Web 3.0. It's the first time I've heard of this term, coming from this article from the New York Times.
Note: a Google search already shows that Web 3.0 has already been used a lot now, I just never knew about it!
Thanks to my supervisor for sending this to me. It's basically talking about when web sites begin to understand each other and when you make a request, then the results you get are relevant to what you're looking for. What do I mean? For example, right now, if you want to book a conference trip, you need to find a web site for the conference and do registration. Then, you need to book your flights so you go to a travel web site to find the lowest fares that suit your dates of travel. Then, you have to find the accommodations to stay at in the conference (if you don't want to stay at the conference hotel). On top of that, if you want to do some sightseeing, you have to go the city's web sites or Google or find other travellers who have gone to those places like TripAdvisor. Basically, this is all time consuming, I know for me it is! I spend so much time, trying to find the best bang for the buck and for the experience.
So, what if instead, I enter in the query that I want to book a conference and give the conference name and want the travel itinerary. I log in, it knows my profile and finds that my favorite airline is Air Canada, it also knows that I've stayed at many Best Western hotels so I have a discount for Best Western. Furthermore, it knows the dates that I'm travelling because it consults the conference web site and finds out the dates of the conference. It then also consults with my calendar to know what my schedule is, and then decides the best dates for me to travel with Air Canada, with the lowest cost (since I'm a grad student and I'm poor). Then, it knows how many days I'm staying at the city of the conference, and how much money I have from my bank account, so it recommends a schedule of places to go that will suit my budget and my time. That's what I want, and that's what the vision of what Web 3.0 will be like, it's the Semantic Web, touted for a long time by Tim Berners-Lee.
Basically, the web becomes an exchange of data and meaning associated behind that data, as well as translating the human queries into machine level web service transactions divided into mini transactions and rules that execute the query of "Booking a conference". What are the technologies that Web 3.0 will involve? Right now, the ground work is ontologies, or creating categorizations of data. We need to have classifications so that web sites are able to talk to each other. The Semantic Web effort at the W3C is dealing with RDF and OWL-S, and there's lots of research being done in academia and research labs on semantic web. For example, MIT has something called the Simile project, and you can easily Google to find more people working on Semantic Web.
There also will be a need of inference and AI type of work. I'm a big fan of this kind of stuff, I did a little bit of semantic web research as part of my Masters thesis when I was investigating disconnections and crashes in mobile pervasive environments, and how web services can be used to stitch this together as service-oriented computing where computing is not about dealing with data but it's about finding and interacting with services.
When will we see patches to Web 2.0 or incremental releases like Web 2.0a or Web 2.1 , will there even be a Web 4.0 or will the numbering change to like Web 2007 just like software releases? Maybe there maybe alphas and betas and RTWs (Release to Web, just like RTMs like Release To Manufacturing in Microsoft speak).
On Technorati: Web 3.0, Semantic Web
Note: a Google search already shows that Web 3.0 has already been used a lot now, I just never knew about it!
Thanks to my supervisor for sending this to me. It's basically talking about when web sites begin to understand each other and when you make a request, then the results you get are relevant to what you're looking for. What do I mean? For example, right now, if you want to book a conference trip, you need to find a web site for the conference and do registration. Then, you need to book your flights so you go to a travel web site to find the lowest fares that suit your dates of travel. Then, you have to find the accommodations to stay at in the conference (if you don't want to stay at the conference hotel). On top of that, if you want to do some sightseeing, you have to go the city's web sites or Google or find other travellers who have gone to those places like TripAdvisor. Basically, this is all time consuming, I know for me it is! I spend so much time, trying to find the best bang for the buck and for the experience.
So, what if instead, I enter in the query that I want to book a conference and give the conference name and want the travel itinerary. I log in, it knows my profile and finds that my favorite airline is Air Canada, it also knows that I've stayed at many Best Western hotels so I have a discount for Best Western. Furthermore, it knows the dates that I'm travelling because it consults the conference web site and finds out the dates of the conference. It then also consults with my calendar to know what my schedule is, and then decides the best dates for me to travel with Air Canada, with the lowest cost (since I'm a grad student and I'm poor). Then, it knows how many days I'm staying at the city of the conference, and how much money I have from my bank account, so it recommends a schedule of places to go that will suit my budget and my time. That's what I want, and that's what the vision of what Web 3.0 will be like, it's the Semantic Web, touted for a long time by Tim Berners-Lee.
Basically, the web becomes an exchange of data and meaning associated behind that data, as well as translating the human queries into machine level web service transactions divided into mini transactions and rules that execute the query of "Booking a conference". What are the technologies that Web 3.0 will involve? Right now, the ground work is ontologies, or creating categorizations of data. We need to have classifications so that web sites are able to talk to each other. The Semantic Web effort at the W3C is dealing with RDF and OWL-S, and there's lots of research being done in academia and research labs on semantic web. For example, MIT has something called the Simile project, and you can easily Google to find more people working on Semantic Web.
There also will be a need of inference and AI type of work. I'm a big fan of this kind of stuff, I did a little bit of semantic web research as part of my Masters thesis when I was investigating disconnections and crashes in mobile pervasive environments, and how web services can be used to stitch this together as service-oriented computing where computing is not about dealing with data but it's about finding and interacting with services.
When will we see patches to Web 2.0 or incremental releases like Web 2.0a or Web 2.1 , will there even be a Web 4.0 or will the numbering change to like Web 2007 just like software releases? Maybe there maybe alphas and betas and RTWs (Release to Web, just like RTMs like Release To Manufacturing in Microsoft speak).
On Technorati: Web 3.0, Semantic Web
Saturday, November 11, 2006
New feature on my blog: get notified by email!
I've just added a new feature on my blog which is e-mail notification. Instead of having to check or subscribe to my feed and having to read the feed, you can subscribe via e-mail. Whenever my blog gets updated, you'll be the first to know! Thanks to blogarithm for providing this feature. I'm using blogarithm right now for tracking when blogs that I read get updated. As you know, it's a chore having to read blogs when you're so busy. But having a notification via e-mail is great, I can see which blogs get updated and decide whether I want to read them or not.
You'll see this feature on the sidebar of my blog which looks like this:
Also, I've added another feature to see what my blog readers are also reading.
Try it out!
On Technorati: Blogarithm
You'll see this feature on the sidebar of my blog which looks like this:
Also, I've added another feature to see what my blog readers are also reading.
Try it out!
On Technorati: Blogarithm
Friday, November 10, 2006
IT housekeeping today!
Today, I had to be the computer tech guy in fixing a computer for my sister, she had all these pop-ups and spyware. I tried removing them with Ad-aware and Windows Defender, and SpyBot Search and Destroy, but apparently it didn't quite clean them all. So, I just got fed up and decided to reinstall her machine. I finally was able to install remote control software to control her machine so I can fix it remotely. I've been wanting to do this, but never really found the time to really complete the job. I tried to use Windows Remote Desktop which is included in Windows XP Professional (the host has to be running Windows XP but the client to remote control the host can be any Win95/98/2000/XP client), but it works on the LAN but not from outside, I have to either VPN or enter an external IP address. So, the solution that I finally got working was the following. Here are the steps, so if anybody else needs to do this, follow these steps.
1. Set an external hostname on the internet for your host computer
First, the host computer needs to be recognizable on the internet. It needs an external IP address and hostname. You can get an external hostname from DNS providers for free, I got one at Dyndns.org. You set up an account and add your host machine to the account. From the web browser, it will be able to detect the external IP address (which is the one sent to by your ISP, this is the IP address that is assigned to you when you have your DSL or cable modem connected to your router). You select the external hostname that you want.
2. Install client to manage your external hostname
Then you install a client on your host computer that manages the external IP address, ie. if your IP address changes, then you can still connect because your external hostname will automatically synchronize to it. Since I went with Dyndns.org, then I just downloaded their client.
3. Install remote control software on host
I decided to choose RealVNC which they have a version that is free. I installed it on the host machine as the server and configured it with authentication.
4. Forward ports on your router
Next, you need to take the port numbers that is selected for outgoing and for Java version of RealVNC from the server and put those in the port forwarding page on your router. In this way, when packets get sent to your hostname, they go to the router which then forwards it to your host computer.
5. Install remote control software on client
You then install the remote control software client portion on the machine that you want to use to connect to the host. In my case, I installed RealVNC client.
6. Test the remote connection
I then tested the remote connection with the RealVNC client to make sure that I could connect to the host machine.
So, that's it!
1. Set an external hostname on the internet for your host computer
First, the host computer needs to be recognizable on the internet. It needs an external IP address and hostname. You can get an external hostname from DNS providers for free, I got one at Dyndns.org. You set up an account and add your host machine to the account. From the web browser, it will be able to detect the external IP address (which is the one sent to by your ISP, this is the IP address that is assigned to you when you have your DSL or cable modem connected to your router). You select the external hostname that you want.
2. Install client to manage your external hostname
Then you install a client on your host computer that manages the external IP address, ie. if your IP address changes, then you can still connect because your external hostname will automatically synchronize to it. Since I went with Dyndns.org, then I just downloaded their client.
3. Install remote control software on host
I decided to choose RealVNC which they have a version that is free. I installed it on the host machine as the server and configured it with authentication.
4. Forward ports on your router
Next, you need to take the port numbers that is selected for outgoing and for Java version of RealVNC from the server and put those in the port forwarding page on your router. In this way, when packets get sent to your hostname, they go to the router which then forwards it to your host computer.
5. Install remote control software on client
You then install the remote control software client portion on the machine that you want to use to connect to the host. In my case, I installed RealVNC client.
6. Test the remote connection
I then tested the remote connection with the RealVNC client to make sure that I could connect to the host machine.
So, that's it!
Thursday, November 09, 2006
Migrated to Blogger Beta
I just finished migrating my Blogger blog to the new Blogger beta. According to Blogger beta, it provides more robustness and new features. The old Blogger was from when Google acquired Blogger around 3 years ago or so. That explains why there were those Blogger woes that I couldn't publish. So, I'm trying out the new Blogger beta.
What I found out from the new Blogger beta is that I can see all the comments. I didn't know that I had comments from people and since I enabled moderation then I have to approve them. But from the old Blogger, I had no clue how to approve them. In WordPress, it's easy there's a section on Comments and Moderation, but I couldn't find the equivalent in Blogger. So, I just finished spending some time to approve comments and respond to people, so apologies for that. And guess what? Finally, Blogger beta has that capability of adding tags or labels, I've been waiting for that! So far, I've been tagging using Technorati.
I'm going to keep trying out this new Blogger beta. Another new thing, I've found out is word verification for your posts and allowing of reader comments or not. If you haven't migrated, when you login to Blogger, you will see a message that says you can migrate to Blogger beta. It will preserve your existing format and blog entries, however they do mention that if you have third-party services, then you may need to update the links as it may not work. Also, this is important, you can't switch back to the old Blogger once you've migrated. You have to then login using your Google account, and you'll get an e-mail to say when Blogger beta has successfully migrated your blog.
On Technorati: Blogger beta, blog migration
What I found out from the new Blogger beta is that I can see all the comments. I didn't know that I had comments from people and since I enabled moderation then I have to approve them. But from the old Blogger, I had no clue how to approve them. In WordPress, it's easy there's a section on Comments and Moderation, but I couldn't find the equivalent in Blogger. So, I just finished spending some time to approve comments and respond to people, so apologies for that. And guess what? Finally, Blogger beta has that capability of adding tags or labels, I've been waiting for that! So far, I've been tagging using Technorati.
I'm going to keep trying out this new Blogger beta. Another new thing, I've found out is word verification for your posts and allowing of reader comments or not. If you haven't migrated, when you login to Blogger, you will see a message that says you can migrate to Blogger beta. It will preserve your existing format and blog entries, however they do mention that if you have third-party services, then you may need to update the links as it may not work. Also, this is important, you can't switch back to the old Blogger once you've migrated. You have to then login using your Google account, and you'll get an e-mail to say when Blogger beta has successfully migrated your blog.
On Technorati: Blogger beta, blog migration
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Happy 35th Birthday, Intel 4004
I read this post that says that November is the 35th birthday of Intel's 4004 chip that started Intel's road to CPU dominance. It was November of 1971 that Intel started its birth to becoming a major semiconductor and chip company. I was at the Intel museum when I was doing a summer internship at PARC this year, and I took pictures from my trip to the Santa Clara facility. Check out my blog post here.
On Technorati: Intel
On Technorati: Intel
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
When Google works better than the publication web search
For getting scholarly articles such as conference and journal publications, my university and all universities provide free access to the conference and journal e-indexes of publications. Most of the time, when I'm looking for a paper, I'll naturally go and search for it in there, because not all papers are widely available for free on the web. However (and I'm sure others can attest to this), the publication search sucks! Big time. I enter the exact name of an article, but either the article I'm looking for comes up way down the list of returned results, or the article is not located. However, if I do another different type of search (like modifying the title a bit by deleting some words), then it sometimes works. When I get fed up of not finding the article, I enter the same search in Google, and lone and behold, the pdf link to the article comes up usually in the first 5 results (or I may have to go to Google Scholar).
Don't the publication web sites like IEEE and ACM use Google search to power their results? Apparently not. I just find it a waste of my time having to look through the e-index, when I can just find it in 2 seconds on Google. There are many things that Google publicly cannot index, because they don't have the rights to those publications like IEEE or ACM (unless other people download those articles and then publicly post them on the web). The publishers should make a conscious effort to vastly improve their search to tailor towards the publication domain by using search technology from Google or Yahoo.
What do other academics and researchers do when searching for articles? Do you primarily use Google, Yahoo, Citeulike, publication web sites, Citeseer, or a combination of these?
On Technorati: publication search
Don't the publication web sites like IEEE and ACM use Google search to power their results? Apparently not. I just find it a waste of my time having to look through the e-index, when I can just find it in 2 seconds on Google. There are many things that Google publicly cannot index, because they don't have the rights to those publications like IEEE or ACM (unless other people download those articles and then publicly post them on the web). The publishers should make a conscious effort to vastly improve their search to tailor towards the publication domain by using search technology from Google or Yahoo.
What do other academics and researchers do when searching for articles? Do you primarily use Google, Yahoo, Citeulike, publication web sites, Citeseer, or a combination of these?
On Technorati: publication search
Friday, November 03, 2006
Blogger woes
Aha, no wonder I've been having Blogger problems publishing my posts on my blog this week. It was because of some outages at the Blogger site. One of the Blogger engineers explained the outages on his blog. Apparently, it has to deal with the infrastructure of the older Blogger and how it wasn't handled to deal with so many new features and changes, and scalability. Google has a new Blogger beta to replace that ailing infrastructure, I want to try the new Blogger Beta, but is there a way to keep my existing data and transfer over to the new Blogger Beta, without having to start from scratch? I tried but I couldn't seem to figure out. If someone knows, send me a comment.
On Technorati: Blogger
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