When names collide

ACK in 2002, I chose to work on a project which dealt with the game Othello, also known as Reversi. To put rigour into development, I chose a name for it. I did so without paying much thought to any future potential. A careful and exhaustive investigation of name collisions simply did not seem worthwhile at the time.

Having searched the Web at a shallow level, I did not know of any name collisions when I chose the title “Othello Master”. I even explained about the choice of the name in my report and proposal. It refelects on the way I viewed the choice of the name at that time:

This project has been set to produce an application which will be titled Othello Master due to some visual similarity to an older game called Chess Master. It will require knowledge of game theory and advanced computer graphics.

The name was therefore conceived in a most innocent way. It was only less than a year ago that I became aware of a name collision, for which I am to blame. Search engines had revealed a game from the mid-eighties, which suddenly resurfaced in results from archival pages. It ran on the Amiga, but perhaps on other platforms too.

I sometimes wonder if I should get a hold of this game and play it. Mine is Open Source and GPL‘d so no-one is prevented from playing it for free. In fact, the downloads page is always there for those interested. As for the number of downloads, I believe it itches 1,000, but I rarely keep track of the numbers. It can run on all platforms and there is even a Windows executable.

Other items on Othello Master:

• Collaboration Sought
• OM Gets a Home

OU can help yourself to a quick glance at Google’s complex at London, which is going to be accommodated with hundreds of engineers fairly soon. Be warned that the ZDNet server, which is flooded by Slashdotters at the moment, is extremely unresponsive. It must be suffering from the ‘Slashdot effect’. In fact, it was only hours ago that ZDNet engineers got mentioned here at the datacentre in Manchester Computing (where I am at the moment). I am not sure what the reason was, but I saw the memo on the desk and wondered if ZDNet plan to upgrade or migrate. I would like to believe that.

Back when I was in touch with Google’s recruiters, only the headquarters in Zurich and Dublin were in question. I wonder why London was not even mentioned at the time. Perhaps it is a newly-erected branch for their future operations, which are said to take advantage of dark fibre and mobile machines with 3.5 perabyte (3,500,000 GB) of storage.

“We’re talking about 5000 Opteron processors and 3.5 petabytes of disk storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig. The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid.”

CLI anywhere, at any time

CCESS to particular computers can be crucial, especially while travelling. There are a variety of ways for achieving full remote access, though simple, text-based shell access is supported by even weaker devices and light-weight software.

I recently read about someone who thought of handling Web servers from a Palm Treo, using E-mail, which is supposedly a universal API. I consider E-mail to be the wrong tool for a simple task, even if one uses cron jobs and collects the output via E-mail (similar to a hack I once mentioned. Alternatively, shell access can be obtained in one of the following ways:

• Cellular telephones: using CUTs
• Web-based: MindTerm, e.g. from Duke University
• Windows: PuTTy
• Windows mobile: I have seen an SSH client in action and it looked quite clean
• UNIX variants and derivatives: Built-in functionality
• Palm O/S: pssh, free and apparently based on PuTTy, though it is hard to tell for sure
• Blackberry: For that, one might have to pay nearly $100. That’s the chance one takes when steering away from Open Source. Palm may not be Open Source-oriented, but its users’ ideaology differs.

NOWLINGLY or unknowingly, whether deliberately or not, Google is striving to become a Web monopoly. As the Web is bound to become the centre of all, such monopoly can affect each and every aspect of our lives.

Google’s primary target appears to be Web services and their constant expansion, often superseding and replacing desktop equivalents in the process. What has Google implemented thus far? Below is nothing more than a partial list:

• Statistics: notably Google analytics, which can now help study the roots of traffic, in-site PageRank distribution, crawling patterns and so forth. This requires Webmaster to sign up with yet another service: Google Sitemaps.
• Web reading – e.g. Google Reader (for feeds), Google News, and Google Blog Search.
• Image search – equivalent to a digital photography library, which neglects or discourages fair use
• Desktop search
• Google Wallet – potentially making on-line banking and highstreet banks obsolete
• Mapping services
• E-mail and broader communication (Google Mail, Google Talk)
• Google Directories (DMOZ)/Google Base
• Literature – Google Print (just been renamed for fairly valid reasons)

What have Google not implemented yet? Can we identify what Google set as potential revenue targets?

• Games
• Office suite
• Music management (video gets closer)
• Graphical toolkits
• Web design facilities and/or hosting (Geocities) – Blogger and Blogspot make the exception
• Photo album management
• Bookmarks like del.icio.us (with the exception of Google Personalised that is only a step away)

Google can never replace very few elements:

• Hardware
• Operating system
• Web browser, with the exception of Google’s Web Accelerator (proxy/cache)

[Note: The lists above are intentionally incomplete. They are intended to serve as support for an argument rather than be a comprehensive reference]

Google have already teamed up with Firefox (Mozilla), Sun Microsystems, and a variety of other cross-platform advocates. Google are also avid Linux users and supporters, so one wonders if Open Source or openness in general can take the place of Windows and give Google collateral control at the expense of Windows.

Bill Gates considers major losses to Google as an option. Google were portrayed as the main rival/threat and Gates urged his employees to focus on so-called ‘Live Software’ and on-line services. Mapping services, book scanning and the like have already been copied by Microsoft in what appears to be a catch-up game.

Google have seen enormous growth owing to constant innovation and superb recruiting. Meanwhile, Microsoft failed to evolve, refusing a move to the Net at the expense of their own shrink-wrapped software monopoly. Commercial software in general appears to be taking a slow dive, so the next 5 years will reveal a significant change. We are currently standing at the busy interchange.

Windows 98 screenshot from the 6-year-old Compaq Presario (click to enlarge)

HIS blog post is not concerned with giving away a laptop, but rather about my recent decision to give up laptops altogether. In this item I have collected some notes on my reasons for neglecting the world of mobile computers that are simply over-sized and are thus not contributory quite so often.

For increased productivity (e.g. dual-head, fast Ethernet), I find desktop machines to be an absolute necessity. I have learned this over time and I recently gave up the laptop which I had lugged for 6 years. It used to serve me fairly well while travelling, yet travel is the exception, which does correspond with daily requirements.

There are endless issues with laptops: hardware upgrades, components that become difficult to replace or even find (e.g. built-in speakers). These are just a few among the more prominent factors. One cannot ignore inflexibility with regards to hardware probing and peculiar vendor-specific drivers. I am not necessarily referring to Linux to Windows (or vice versa) migrations, but also to ‘intra-O/S’ migrations where drivers may be missing and so-called QuickRestore CD’s (factory defaults) can never resolve recurring incompatibilities.

I ultimately decided to stick to a PDA, preferably with folding keyboard. Along with desktop wordstation/s it works flawlessly unless one travels all the time. I have become accustomed to this over time. Synchronisation of memos with the desktop gives me the convenience I have probably sought all along.

OR several years I have retained one spreadsheet on my Palm handheld. This was, in fact, a crude timesheet which was needed for work. Several months ago I decided to migrate everything to OpenOffice and access that spreadsheet using SSH from virtually any connected Linux box. This sounded reasonable at first, but frequent updates made this rather impractical and cumbersome.

Later on, I decided to export all data from OpenOffice as plain HTML tables and then repeatedly modify the HTML files on my Web server. This was rather time-consuming, so I sought alternatives which I knew existed.

I wound up using a Web-based spreadsheet application that is very light and retains all data as comma-separated values (thus no database needed). That powerful tool was Open Source, as always.

phpWebSheet has powerful and advanced (from a Web-based point-of-view) features such as tabular copy-and-paste, Wiki-styled formatting, and support for formulas/functions. In my perception, it is yet another winning application for PHP. There are many similar free applications at freshmeat.net, but I only investigated two which appeared better-suited for the purpose and rather mature too.

Spreadsheets are of course password-protected, but can still be accessed rapidly from everywhere at any time. All in all, the transition was a rewarding one. I sometimes wonder if I should have just stuck to the Palm PDA rather than make a progressive 3-step transition (as outlined above).

Spreadsheets have been on my Palm for years, virtually seconds away at pocket’s distance. Nonetheless, Being a Web technologies fanatic, I am always enthusiastic about ‘Webward’ transitions. On that same batch of installations, I set up phpshell which enables me to obtain shell access to my shared Web server. I can even see what the administrators are up to. This does not require a cron job hack as I once described.

Access to so many free packages (roughly a dozen of them on my domain already) is why I love Linux and the GNU ideaology.

Plenty of Web traffic and computer power drained in vain

OMBIE attacks on this site have persisted for over a month and have shown no sign of abatement. In fact, it only gets worse as more diverse locations get targetted for the puspose of referrer spam injection.

I have ultimately grown tired of these attacks rather than become accustomed to them. Each day, over 1,000 attacks are launched against my domain (2 of them actually) by hijacked Windows-powered machines. To remain kind to all genuine visitors, thus far I have re-directed suspicious page requests internally, displaying a forbidden (error 403) page. This has gotten me nowhere as the attackers are not deterred by any of this. Only more and more Windows computer get hijacked and ‘puppeteered’, so brute-force is never an issue.

Yesterday I became slightly more emotional and perhaps courageous enough to forward all of these leeches to microsoft.com/this-is-YOUR-zombie-NOT-mine. Let us wait and see how Microsoft handles nearly 50,000 of these zombie attacks per month. In my defence, all I do is merely pass on the zombies to the domain which I find responsible for their misfortunate existence. I look forward to some form of response from Microsoft with great anticipation.

A week back I enquired in nntp://uk.legal as to whether Microsoft could be held accountable directly for these attacks, which are due to major loopholes in their flagship O/S. Opinions which I received in response were mixed, but no doubt Microsoft’s faulty product, which allows computers to be used as weapons, ought to take at least part of the blame. I previously explained more on that stance of mine and arguments regarding liability.