Computer Programming is a great career that can take you so many different places and let you do many different kinds of jobs. The two most important things to remember:
Things I mentioned:
You may have heard about Net Neutrality lately. The FCC has recently made a rule change that removes protections that kept those that carry internet traffic from charging extra fees to content providers to allow their services higher priority. You may have heard that the Net Neutrality rules were needless government intervention in the internet and that winy content companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook trying to get their way. I have to disagree with this take. In my opinion the real losers from this change will be the majority of internet users. You and me. We will suffer from the lose of new innovation, the monopolization of content, and an increase in the stranglehold that large corporations have on all that we do. All of the current large companies, whether content companies or ISPs (Verizon, Comcast, and AT&T) will be the winners in losing Net Neutrality and the losers will be you and me and all of those currently not in control.
I wrote several years ago about the risks of losing Net Neutrality, and the risks have come home to roost. Net Neutrality (NN) is a term that means that ISPS (the people who bring the internet connections to your house) can not treat some data differently than other data. The term itself sounds very friendly; neutral. The lose of NN means that ISPs can charge a content provider a higher rate to give their content priority on the network. This can mean that you get your YouTube videos faster than your emails which means higher quality video and shouldn’t impact your emails. That in itself is a good thing. However, we need to be thinking beyond that short term gain. Killing NN will reduce the amount of innovation from NEW PLAYERS in the content area, the very thing that has driven the internet forward since the early days. Many have argued that we didn’t have the NN policy when the internet began and things were just fine, why do we need it now. I was there in the early days, and I can tell you that this wasn’t a policy then because there wasn’t enough money in internet traffic. All the players were ALL small and so who was winning was always changing.
The way the industry stands today, there are two opposing giants. On one hand you have the Googles, the Facebooks, the Amazons (the content companies); on the other hand you have Verizons, Comcasts, and AT&T (the ISPs), and not many others. It’s true that these two groups are competing and with the death of NN the content companies will likely have to pay the ISPs more money if they want their products sent to us, the consumers, faster. But let’s think about which of these two groups is most likely to face new competition.
The ISPs are in the hardware business. They have large infrastructures that have been built up over years and years. They have run last mile connections to many homes and they have peering relationships with each other that basically closes the door on new competition. They even stomp out community based efforts to stand up better internet access in places that aren’t well served by them. They are not likely to face new competitors in their current state. The content companies on the other hand, while they are definitely well entrenched and have their own infrastructures that have been built up over years, face constant competition from every person with an idea. ANYONE can create a new service and put it on the internet to be weighed and evaluated by the world. That is why places like Yahoo, MySpace, AOL, and many many others are now fading or gone; replaced by new companies and Verizon and AT&T are still here, the same as they were 25 years ago when things got started.
So, if the ISPs are the same ones that were here from the beginning and they didn’t abuse their power then, why should we be worried now? The money! The internet has become THE WAY we get most of our news, entertainment, and communication. With NN dead the barriers to entry will go way way up. Likely, Google will have to pay Verizon extra to get their YouTube videos to you. Bad for Google. But very few new companies will be able to raise the money needed to create a competitor to YouTube. We won’t get the new competitors that move things forward and the real losers in all of this will be us the consumers. We will have to pay more for less choice and less innovation.
A neutral net allows new competition, new ideas, and new voices to come through and win on their merits. A non-neutral internet means less competition and more control by those in power today.
It’s been 2.5 years since the last post to our site. The site got lost in some technical moves and I’ve only recently been able to sit down and restore things. We’re back with a much simpler look and I’m hoping that will keep it from getting into trouble through future upgrades. But, as I tell my website clients, the CONTENT is what should really make a site and no amount of fancy web design will make up for that. So, with that out of the way we’ll start posting here again. You’ll find opinions, tech tutorials, baking tips, and annual newsletters. We hope you enjoy reading!
I’ll be running for School Board in April for Unity School District and I’d love to have your vote. I want to have a hand in setting the direction of the school my children will be attending for the next 14 years and help continue the fine tradition of Unity schools.
I’ve lived in the area most of my life, and in the Unit 7 School District for the last 12 years. My wife and I currently have 5 kids in school and one that will start Kindergarten next year.
A few weeks ago, my youngest turned 13. Our first teenager. I was discussing with a group how many teenagers we’d one day have in the house at one time (6, Lord help us). It reminded me of a tool I had built several years ago. The tool allowed me to see the ages of each of my kids on a timeline and then slide the whole group along to see what their relative ages are. I dusted it off and added some extra features to make possible for anyone to load their own children. You can load in your kids and see what combinations you’re going to be dealing with as they grow up. You can also click the “Load Demo Data” button to roughly see our situation.
I’m headed on a new journey. I’ll be running for School Board in April, and I need to collect 50 signatures to get on the ballot. I want to have a hand in the direction of the school my children will be at for the next 14 years and help continue the fine tradition of Unity schools.
I’ve lived in the area most of my life, and I’ve lived west of Sadorus, in the Unit 7 School District for the last 11 years. My wife and I currently have 5 kids in school and one that will start Kindergarten next year.
Net Neutrality has been in the news off and on for the past several years, and it’s something that many people don’t understand and generally just ignore. I’m here to say that you should definitely NOT ignore it and it could have a very big impact on the way you get the Internet
What is Net Neutrality
The European Parliament passed a law in April of 2014 that defined it this way.
“Net neutrality” means the principle according to which all internet traffic is treated equally, without discrimination, restriction or interference, independently of its sender, recipient, type, content, device, service or application. ((http://gigaom.com/2014/04/03/european-parliament-passes-strong-net-neutrality-law-along-with-major-roaming-reforms/))
There’s a nasty vulnerability out on the internet right now called Heartbleed that could be making the secured sites you go to unsecure. Normally I would say that if you see the padlock icon in your browser you are ok and can trust all the traffic you send to get to it’s destination safely. This security hole calls that into question, and worse it could mean that anyone who has been gathering and collecting encrypted traffic could now decrypt it.
There’s not much you can do yourself right now as a website consumer. There is a fix for the vulnerability, but it has to be applied at the server level. Responsible server admins will be patching this very quickly as there is an update to their software and it’s fairly easy to apply. I would give them a day or two to patch their systems and then seriously consider changing the passwords to your important things like your bank and places that have your credit card on file. Otherwise, someone who has squirreled away your old traffic could now decrypt it and find out your passwords.
Do you sometimes feel that you don’t take full advantage of all the free services on the Internet or wish you could make all these different things talk to each other? This is part 5 in a series of articles describing “Cloud Services” that offer some great functionality like Offsite Backups, Password Storage with LastPass, Note taking with Evernote, and Dropbox for Sharing files for little to no money and show how you can use the Internet for more than web browsing. This article is about a service called IFTTT that can tie all of these services together to get even more out of them.
Despite the strange name, IFTTT is a non-technical way to link all of these services together and get them to do more for you. The name stands for If This Then That, and that’s exactly what it does. You define the This and the That and IFTTT does the rest. For example, you can have IFTTT monitor Facebook and when you are tagged in a photo, IFTTT can copy the photo to your Dropbox. IFTTT can do that. To get the most out of IFTTT, you do have to give it access to your accounts on different services, but in many cases IFTTT doesn’t even get to see your password, since many services are able to approve access without it.
Each of the services you tie into IFTTT is called a Channel, and if you can get over the bit about granting access to many of your accounts to IFTTT, it can help out a lot. Each of these rules you create are called recipes. You can create your own recipes from scratch, or use some of the pre-built ones. Each recipe has a trigger channel and an action channel. The trigger is what starts things off, and the action is what gets done. Probably the best way to explain what IFTTT can do for you is to give some examples of my favorite recipes.
Get a text message when certain people send you emails
There are certain people that are so important that you want to know right away when they send you an email. This recipe will send a text message to your phone as soon as an email comes in from a certain email address.
Copy receipt emails to Google Drive Spreadsheet
If you haven’t used Google Drive before, it’s a great set of free Google tools that stand up well agains MS Office. This recipie uses the spreadsheet tool to collect your recipt emails into one place. Whenver you get an email with the word receipt or order in it, the email is saved into a Google Drive spreadsheet
Craigslist or Ebay search alerts
Have you ever been looking for something on Craigslist but you just can’t find what you want? And then when you do find it it’s snapped up before you see it. This recipe will send you a notice whenever items you’re interested in show up on Craigslist or Ebay.
Download Facebook photos people tag you in to Dropbox or Google Drive
Facebook has become the place to share photos, but when somebody posts a photo of you wouldn’t it be great if you could automatically get a copy of it. This recipe will download any photo that you are tagged in to your Dropbox or Google Drive account.
Record your Facebook posts in Evernote for a running diary
Another way to tie Facebook into another service is with Evernote! It’s often hard to find what you’ve posted on Facebook earlier. This recipe will add any status update you make on Facebook to a continious Evernote note. You can easily go back and see what you were posting day by day.
Get an alert when it’s going to snow
If you’re like me, you don’t always follow the weather forecast as close as you should. This recipe will send you a text message when it’s going to snow tomorrow. You can also create recipes for rainy or cloudy conditions.
Get a text message when weather alerts happen
There are many ways to get weather alerts on your phone, but this one has the simplicity of using text messages that makes it usable anywhere. Start with this recipe and change the zone code at the end of the feed url to match the county you want to watch. You can find a list of zone codes on the NOAA Public Alert site.
Download school newsletters or other regular updates in your Dropbox
Our old friend Dropbox is a great IFTTT channel and here’s one neat use for it. Our kids’ school classrooms post PDF newsletters every week, and this recipe will pull down the current version and put it into Dropbox. Just change the file url field to the location of the file you want to pull down and set the time you want it to check and you’re off to the races.
Get National Geographic image of the day emailed to you
Lots of websites make content available in a computer readable stream. IFTTT can watch the feed and send you an email when something new shows up. This recipe monitors the National Geographic Image of the Day feed, but you can monitor anything. Comics are a popular thing to get in your inbox. This recipe will send you Dilbert cartoons, and there are many more.
Copy Gmail attachments to Dropbox
When you get attachments in your email, you often want to keep them around. This recipe will take any attachments to your Gmail and copy them to your Dropbox account.
Get a text message when a book is ready at the library
I love ordering books at my local library. The books can come from almost anywhere, so I’m never sure how long it will take to come in. The library will send me an email, but I don’t always see it when I’m at work and drive right by the library on my way home. This recipe monitors your email and looks for emails from the library with the subject “Requested items are ready for you”.
Lifehacker wrote a great article recently that covered IFTTT, and since I began this article IFTTT has come out with some iOS specific features you may be interested in.
Go out and get an IFTTT account and start playing with it today!
The days have been getting cooler lately, so I’m getting back to walking the mile or so from my office to the parking lot rather than taking the bus. During the summer it gets so hot that by the time I make the walk I’m drenched in sweat and not very nice to be around. But these cool days make for a great 15-20 minute walk to the car to unwind at the end of the day. Yesterday I wanted to go ahead and make the walk, but 15-20 minutes seemed like too long. How could I make the walk go faster?
Walking across campus I thought back to my days in the Marching Illini. Our director, the incomparable Gary Smith, used to say that the quickest way to move a band around a crowded college campus is to march it there. Nothing makes people get out of your way like 350 brightly dressed college students accompanied by a 30 people banging drums, and being led by someone in a ridiculously tall hat and carrying a large mace. It even worked marching through Columbus, right through a crowd of Buckeye fans and into the stadium. I wondered if my own walk to the car could be helped by this marching mentality. Sure I don’t have the presence of a full size band, but maybe the music alone would keep me going.
And it worked great. I popped on Street Beats 1994 and started off. In no time I found myself stepping in time to the cadence and measuring my steps so I hit the line every 8 steps (marching bands often take 8 steps per 5 yards for those of you not in the know). I was flying through my walk, and when I got to the end of the 4 minute song, I started it over and kept on going.
The one caution I would give to other people wanting to try this is to remember that you are by yourself and listening to music that no one else can hear. You don’t want to start calling out “Go Illini, Beat the Hawkeyes” or yell out “Big White Spats!” at any point during your walk. As I was nearing the last third of my walk, the parade cadence ended and the pregame show started. For a second I considered doing a quick step run on to Revised Entrance #3, but then I remembered that my marching career was 20 years ago and I’d likely draw some stares as well as make myself totally out of breath. And when Patriotic Medley came on, I had to physically stop myself from doing an Ankle Knee step at one point. Obviously old habits die hard.
So the end result of my experiment was a success. I shaved a few minutes off my walk, raised my heart rate a little, and relived some old memories. Now I just need 349 friends, a cape, a hat and some big white spats and I’ll really be flying!
