A Great World Communuty Grid Article

Here is a great article about participating in the World Community Grid.

http://www.t4tcolorado.org/article/volunteer-computing-background

I think the idea of making your computer a volunteer is a great way to think about it. Also the BONIC client is a better way of participating in the grid than I have shown before.

DoF (Denial of Fans)

The Rockies site may have been attacked by too many hits using a technique called a denial of service attack or DoS, but this would not have happened if the Rockies had not first created a DoF attack. The Internet is a great tool, but it is not the solution for every problem and it does not eliminate the need for people to get together to celebrate the victories of their team. That being said, a quick explanation of what happened and why things appear to have gone down the way they did.

The extremely big sites like the mlb.com, Amazon.com, Google and others survive by sharing the load of the traffic amongst many computers. The problem with this is that there still is a bottleneck trying to get into the server. Imagine only one gate into the baseball stadium....it would be a mess. When your computer goes to that gate to get routed to one of the many sub gates (servers) your connection may time out and give up. This is for the protection of your computer and of the site you are trying to visit. Avoiding this kind of problem requires planning and lots of bandwidth. In the event of a DoS attack the gate is blocked by so much extra traffic that no one can get in.

Now what happed to those people who got in and then got kicked out?

The first thing that may have happened is that the servers behind the site were not powerful enough to handle everything. The other possibility is that there was a single gate to pay once you waited to get the tickets. Either scenario is very possible.

The Rockies and their vendors are not likely to release server logs of the events, so knowing exactly what happened is unlikely. Rest assured, tickets or no tickets, watching the game will be a blast. We cannot let management’s attempted DoF attack taint our excitement for the players and their great accomplishments.

GO ROCKIES!

Jott Vote

The people at Jott (the service that transcribes voice message to email see bellow) are now bringing you the ability to Jott Presidential candidates. This means you can share your opinions with them....no promise on them listening. http://jottthevote.com/

Another Backup Story

The other day my computer was having trouble so I decided I should just reformat to clean it up. I made a complete backup of all my files and when I went to use the drive I had made the backup on died. Fortuantly, I use Carbonite, to keep an updated offsite backup of my files and though it is a slow retreival proccess I will get my files back.

What would happen if your hard drive died? What would you loose? If these questions scare you - then you need a better backup plan!

Blogger Code of Ethics

More and more the world is being shapped and cometted on by bloggers. As blogging grows bloggers are now debating a code of ethics. http://www.cyberjournalist.net/news/000215.php

Just something interesting to see.