wm161.net

Winter Break

Whew, end of the fall semester. It seemed to fly by rather quickly. So anyways, I’m finally at home and able to do some full-time KDE hacking. I originally came home wednesday night, and found that Kuiper (my firewall box) had bit the dust some time ago. It’s fedora core 3 (hey, remember that one?) install seemed to have eaten its root partition alive somehow, as fsck couldn’t recover it, complaining about missing superblocks and such. I didn’t really want to spend a lot of time on a fancy recovery process, so I opted to install m0n0wall on it. I eventually got that accomplished. It took a while (I’ll explain it later this week), but it more or less works now. I need to add more memory to Kuiper’s case, as 64Mb isn’t cutting the mustard for the latest beta. I’m using the beta for the IPv6 support, which is really cool by the way. Yay modernization.

My internet on campus for my last few weeks on campus wasn’t cooperating (in short, I no longer trust UA’s network with /anything/), combined with finals kept me from pouring a lot of effort into KDE into KDE/Glovebox/Pointything. I haven’t been entirely out of the loop though, as I’ve managed to keep up with the commit mail and KDE mailing lists.

I’m not entirely done settling in yet though. I’ve got a few important things to do I didn’t get done last summer:

• Rebuild my music collection server
• Figure out how to remove the dependency on LDAP for my network-wide logins
• Detatch Neptune from my network and bring it to Akron next semester
• An IPv6 tunnel
• Dynamic DNS

I already knocked one thing off my list with my install of m0n0wall: figure out port forwarding. Right now wm161.kicks-ass.net should have my home network’s IP address, and port 80 redirects to Saturn, while ssh goes to Jupiter. Both of those machines are down right now, as Jupiter is being stubborn and not turning on. Without Jupiter’s LDAP, saturn is clueless. I’m thinking its getting close to retire Jupiter from constant service anyways, now that Kuiper is capable of supporting an IPv6 tunnel and dynamic DNS updates to permit remote access to my network.

A negative of the social web

Sure, the social web is great and all with everyone sharing stuff and syndicating content from everywhere, but it makes things pretty damn hard to find. Out of curiosity and bored, I did a google search for linux boredom. The first two pages point in one way or another to the same article, or someone commenting about that article. Useless cruft in my opinion. I’m looking for something to occupy my time while I compile the latest Qt for Glovebox.

Digging further into the results, it appears that the original article was posted to Linux.com. Two of the results point to the same Digg article, one points to reddit, one points to a forum robot syndicating the article (and apparently claiming it as its own), and yet another points to the friendfeed item of the person submitting the digg article. Thats a lot of useless garbage. The only other useful link out of all those 20 might be the link to the print version, but even then thats useless with the print CSS.

Overall, its a signal-to-noise ratio of 1:20. Live Search and Yahoo aren’t much better either.

I’ve heard some people around the ‘net say that “web 3.0″ won’t be based on the social user-created-content aspects of “web 2.0″, but instead be based around actually finding the signal in the sea of static. The web 3.0 search engines should be able to discern between “content” and “discussion about said content”. The web isn’t all content as it used to be (oh, and what glorious days those were). Slashdot writes a quick article linking to something interesting, and 90% of the slashdot page is discussion about the article. Most of the time the discussion is longer than the article itself and sometimes is more interesting. However, on other sites–sites like digg–the discussion is mostly people writing simple one-sentence responses to a link, usually along the lines of “cool!”, “good find”, or just plain trolling.

The next generation of search engines should group that kind of stuff together. If did this same search in the future, I should just get one link to the article, with maybe a link next to it that says “Discussion” and gives a list of all the discussion pages for that article. I shouldn’t have to wade through huge lists of links, all eventually pointing me to the same information. I wanted to find something to cure my boredom, not a list of comments on an article.

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