Friday Feb 20, 2009

So what's going on with SchneeWorld?

The SchneeWorld LLC computer server facility took a hit a couple of weeks ago. All servers were down until earlier this week. Most data was recovered, but there were a few blog postings missing and HappyCoop.com lost a couple of transactions.

I think I've completed the process of rebuilding the blog and HappyCoop is back on line. The Farktography Statistics Manager is taking far too long. I probably need to figure out a better way to do the FSM - it is too fragile.

Anyway, we now return to our regularly scheduled content.

Posted at 09:43AM Feb 20, 2009 by schnee in General  | 

Wednesday Jan 21, 2009

The Onion Router

As I write this on my laptop, the packets of information - the letters, the numbers, all the little bits that computers need - flow from my laptop through Washington DC, through Hudson Wisconsin, through someplace called Ljubljana, SI and finally to my blog server. Since the blog server is located just down the hall - a whopping 20 feet - this seems like a pretty round-a-bout way to communicate.

I'm using something called "Tor", which is an acronym of sorts for "The Onion Router" (the link goes to the Wikipedia article). Tor is used to ensure something called "perfect forward security" between the various links in the chain and the way the chain is arrainged, it can be used to foil many network analysis attacks used to reveal web-surfing sessions. Basically, it works like this.

Suppose Alice wants to talk to a webserver hosted by Bob, but she is afraid that Chuck is watching her computer traffic. She turns on Tor, which goes out to the Tor network and finds three proxies (call them Mary, Nancy and Owen) for Alice's traffic. Tor then builds a circuit - a chain - of each of the proxies. Tor encrypts the packet so that only Mary can read it and then routes the traffic to the first proxy. From Chuck's perspective, all Alice did was connect to some random, small IP address, Mary's address. Mary decrypts the packet and then re-encrypts it so that only Nancy can read it. Mary then sends it to Nancy. Nancy decrypts and encrypts for Owen. Owen gets the packet, notices that it is intended for Bob and Owen send it to Bob. Chuck is foiled, unless Chuck is also watching Mary, Nancy and Owen. But, if there are many people using Mary, and if there is more than one middle layer like Nancy, and more than one exit layer like Owen, Chuck's job is very difficult.

From Bob's perspective, Bob sees a web request from Owen, not Alice, so assuming there is nothing in the request that identifies Alice, Bob doesn't know he's talking to Alice. That can be beneficial if Bob is collecting statistics to sell to advertisers and Alice doesn't want to be part of that aggregation.

Tor supports SSL between Alice and Bob, giving End-to-End encryption (so credit card numbers are safe) (the way SSL works, it foils man-in-the-middle attacks so even if Mary, Nancy or Owen wanted to, they couldn't get to the End-to-End encrypted data (well, not easily)).

The downside? Tor is slow - all this encryption and hopping around the world takes time. But, if you don't want Chuck to know where you go, Tor really help.

(There are other things than can foil Bob's attempt to gather statistics. Something called "Privoxy" integrates seemlessly with Tor, and somthing else called "Vidalia" bundles it all together. If you use Firefox as your browser, something else (bundled with Vidalia) called "TorButton" makes switching between Tor and non-Tor quite easy (but I use "FoxyProxy" for that).)

Posted at 10:11AM Jan 21, 2009 by schnee in General  | 

Tuesday Jan 20, 2009

To Facebook or Not to Facebook

Recently, I wrote about deciding to move the photographic portion of the Schneeworld Blog to Facebook. As it turns out, one has to join Facebook to see images posted there and since Facebook doesn't incent me to bring them users, I'm not going to do that.

Join me as Schneeworld resumes its regular operation.

 Still, I can be found on Facebook. Please friend me (but only if I know you, I have standards)

Posted at 08:33PM Jan 20, 2009 by schnee in General  | 

Friday Sep 05, 2008

Sitegeister, huh?

I recently mentioned something called "Sitegeister". This is a little concept I came up with back in the Spring and wanted to do something with it.

The name is a play on both "web site" and "zeitgeist", and a "sitegeist" is a summary of the topic of a site, in much the same way a "zeitgeist" is the topic of an era. "Sitegeister", then, is the actor that determines the sitegeist.

Sitegeister subscribes to RSS/Atom feeds from various websites (news aggregators, blogs, whatever) and analyzes the content of the feeds to determine the topics (topics are reset weekly). These topics are located at the bottom of the main Sitegeister page. For example, as I write this, the top topics (or concepts) on the Yahoo! most popular news feeds are  "candidate palin", "candidate sarah", "gulf hurricane", "hurricane orleans", "palin running", "running sarah", and others. Obviously, some overlap between these concepts exist.

After determining the top concepts, Sitegeister then draws the blob on the top of the main page. This is a link-map and tries to connect sites to other sites. Each blob is a Site and is surrounded by it's top concepts. Concepts from one site that are related to another site's concepts are linked via an edge. This is all good stuff and relies heavily on Latent Semantic Indexing and Vector Space Models and angles between vectors and really helped me marry my math background with my love of language.

Unfortunately, I geisted the wrong sites. Most of my sites are news aggregators and they all tend to converge on the same concepts. That means that the blob-map tends towards fully-connectedness (which means it is a mess) and really doesn't reveal anything. I need to choose other sites that may or may not be related, like various blogs. It may be interesting to determine links between blogs that advertise different topics.

Or maybe not. Either way, it was a fun excercise, and demonstrates that Google AdSense works really, really well. The FAQ at Sitegeister.com has more information.

Posted at 12:52PM Sep 05, 2008 by schnee in General  | 

Friday Aug 29, 2008

Yay! Tag Cloud

Wow, I got the tag cloud back. That was quite hard to debug, and I would have been lost if not for my google-fu and reading the very last bit of this 8 month old problem between MySQL Connector and Roller 4.0 (Roller is what I am using to blog).

Just to be clear, this wasn't a problem with Roller. Well, not much of one.

I recently upgraded to MySQL 5.0.x. At the time, I did not notice that my tag cloud disappeared. Turns out, I was running with a very old JDBC provider (Connector 3.0.8) which is not qualified to work with MySQL 5.x. Everything else seemed to work, but not fetching the tagclouds (with the getPopularTags method). Once I replaced the 3.0.8 version with the latest 5.1.x version, my tag cloud came back.

I know you all were dying without the cloud and are grateful for its return (and the explanation).

Posted at 04:06PM Aug 29, 2008 by schnee in General  | 

Saturday Dec 22, 2007

Hey What Happened to SchneeWorld?

Meh, I'm just refreshing. The tag-cloud will be back shortly.

Posted at 03:02PM Dec 22, 2007 by schnee in Meta  |  Comments[1]

Thursday Nov 15, 2007

I'm Viral

I collect statistics on visitors to SchneeWorld.com. I know, for example, that I average 236 requests for pages per day, I've served 4000 distinct hosts and that I serve up about 10 MB of data each day. At this rate, I'm not taking over the world. Which is too bad, really. I'd make an excellent benign dictator.

I also get to see who links to me. So, for example, if Cool Site of the Day said "Hey, go check out SchneeWorld.com", I'd see that Cool Site of the Day referred many people to SchneeWorld. SchneeWorld consists of two main sections - this Blog, and the Farktography Statistics Manager. The FSM gets about 65% of the hits, but these words pull in their share. Most (in not all) of the referrers come to see the FSM. Here's a list (# = number of referrers):

Most of my hits come from my sister site.
Many hits come from Fark.com, which is nice, but since I'm listed each week during a Farktography contest, expected.

Lord knows how that happened.

Apparently, enough people search for stuff and come to SchneeWorld.
These are the fun ones. Steve Collis ('swampa2' on Fark, and a Farktographer) is an Aussie with a Blog. I have no idea what 'ottosuch' is, nor 'saufark'. Peachy92 has a Flickr stream and links back to the FSM. The 'tetongravity' link really threw me - someone was asking for photographic examples and someone else pointed back to the FSM. That's cool. That's viral.

None of it means that I'll be taking over the world. I know how big my sphere of influence is.

 

Posted at 09:24AM Nov 15, 2007 by schnee in General  | 

Monday Jun 11, 2007

New Blog Server Instance

I installed a new version of the blog server software over the weekend. You may notice a few changes and things that are apparently broken as I go through and make the old compatible with the new. Chief broken thing? The Category links (look to the Right Hand Column) are borked. Why is this not a big deal? I've enabled a "tag cloud" up at the top. See those various sized words? Those are tags - the bigger the word, the more the often the tag is used. Click on a tag to get linked to the other entries with that same tag.

One can also click on the "Tags:" list at the end of the entries. Like right below here.


 

Posted at 10:12AM Jun 11, 2007 by schnee in Meta  |