Jacob’s Blog

Firefox 3 is the best thing to hit the web since Firefox 2, or maybe Opera. If you are still using a big blue e called Internet Explorer, stop! Start using Firefox 3 today. Click this image to download:

A couple of weeks ago, I began aggregating the posts from some of my other blogs into this blog. I’ve now updated some of my feeds to represent those changes. There are now two feeds associated with this blog, depending if you want the aggregated content or not.
Continue reading Two feeds for the hungry…

Brigham Young University’s Internet filters continue to block the popular video sharing website, YouTube. BYU blocks the site completely “because it allows inappropriate sexual media throughout its URLs,” according to an article in the student newspaper. I appreciate that BYU wants to block inappropriate content, but YouTube contains so many videos that it is unreasonable to block all of YouTube content because there might be a few bad videos. Likewise you could argue, that BYU should block the whole Internet because there are a few bad sites.

By blocking YouTube, BYU is prohibiting students from accessing great video content. For example, recently The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the sponsoring organization for BYU, has published public affairs videos on YouTube that show Church Leader Elder Ballard explaining church beliefs. Students trying to access this content from BYU campus Internet are blocked from the site.

Other educational materials are also on YouTube. Recently, UC Berkeley started posting full lecture videos online. So far, they’ve posted over 300 hours of video taped lectures online for free access to the public. These lectures could help BYU students supplement their own studies, except that BYU blocks the UC Berkeley’s YouTube site.

BYU’s efforts to block video content come in addition to Google’s own safe-search program anyway, which limits access to inappropriate “adult” material. Why does BYU feel they need to be extra restrictive about YouTube? When does blocking bad content at the consequence of blocking good content go too far?

I’m excited to share that Google Maps has expanded its street views to include Portland, Oregon. Google announced the addition recently on its LatLong blog. Portland is such an interesting city, I’m excited that people can explore all the many many miles of street view photos available. You can see the Portland LDS Institute Building, where I took classes last fall, or the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.

Please have lots of fun exploring Portland, Oregon.

A few months ago there was a discussion on ProvoPulse.com about blogs and how they can be public and representative of their authors. I’ve given that discussion a fair amount of thought. Continue reading My secret blog…

Facebook is a social networking site that allows you to post a picture and have links to friends. On Facebook, you can view all your friends photos as a grid. To do this, select “My Friends” from the left menu, and then select “—-” from the drop down menu next to the text “Show.” Normally it will show “All Friends” or “Recently Updated” friends, but if you select to show “—-” then you get the grid. These images here are scaled down because I have so many friends it would take too much space to show everyone in full size.

ldsWebguy recently blogged about the growth of broadband usage. He was very wise, I think, in not overreacting to the unprecedented rates of the growth. We need to continue to remember all the dial-up modem users out there and that they aren’t able to access Internet content at premium speeds.

I think websites sometimes neglect out dial-up friends for at least these two reasons:

1. Those in the web design industry are very likely to be accessing the Internet over broadband connections. Because the creators and authors of Internet websites have such a fast connection to the Internet, they tend to forget how slow downloads take for dial-up users. The content and websites they create are then larger and take longer for dial-up users to download.
2. An increasing number of trend-setting websites sell products, and their customers who can afford their products are the same people who are more likely to afford broadband Internet connections. In free-market enterprise, consumer-producer communication happens monetarily. Thus, those who can afford high-speed Internet also have a louder market voice to commercial Internet content providers.

Only conscious efforts on the part of web designers to keep sites slim and fast will keep the web accessible for everyone.

As explained in the about page of his blog, Larry Richman has started his own blog at ldsWebguy.com. His blog is not an official Church publication, but it does provide some interesting insight about what goes on behind some of the Church Internet strategies. I’ve read some of his posts, and some of them are ok.

Pornography is evil. I am disgusted with anyone who would seek out pornographic material. That is why I get a bit upset when I find in my server statistics that someone arrived at this blog by typing the phrase, “I AM TRYING TO FIND A PORN MOVIE,” into MSN search.

Don’t search for porn, and don’t expect to find any around here. I looked up some information about the person who performed that search, and I will publish it here to show that the Internet is not anonymous.

On July 6, at 19:09:41 MST, a user from IP address 206.192.18.14 arrived at my website while “trying to find a porn movie.” This user was using the computer host18-14.ecpi.edu at ECPI College Of Technology. This user was using Internet Explorer 6.0 on Windows XP.

For the record, the user accessed my January 2006 blog archive which contained a post where I questioned the dependency of Google’s business on porn.

I suspect that by publishing this post, I’ll see an increase of people coming to this site looking for inappropriate material. If you are one of these people, you won’t find any inappropriate material here. I encourage you to stop searching for porn. If you can’t stop, you may be addicted and I exhort you to seek professional help.

I like watching the Sci-Fi show, Stargate SG-1. In this series, there is a group of Jaffa who are fighting to free their enslaved people from a race of false-gods and conquerors.

According to a Google Blog post about the debate over net neutrality the big phone and cable TV companies want to modify the Internet and enslave Internet users by controlling who can access what content. If this were to happen, the Internet would no longer be a free place where innovation can flourish and social statuses are non-existent.

Please take a look at Google’s blog post to see more and what you can do about this issue.

Recently there has been new legislation introduced in congress what would ban minors from accessing social networking sites. The bill, known as the Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006 was introduced by Michael G. Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania.

The bill uses broad language to define a social networking site as one that: “allows users to create web pages or profiles that provide information about themselves and are available to other users; and offers a mechanism for communication with other users, such as a forum, chat room, email, or instant messenger.”

This language is so broad, that many websites would fit into their definition, possibly even this blog. Blogger, slashdot, even Gmail might all be banned under this description.

What this bill does is effectively limit minor’s abilities to speak freely on the Internet.

While I’m against predators from using the Internet to find minors, I don’t think banning minors from using certain Internet technologies is the right way to solve the problem. The bill encroaches on parental responsibilities to encourage their teens to be safe online.

Sure it may be unsafe to post personal information online, just as it may be unsafe to cross the street–you may be hit by a car! Does that mean we need a law that bans minors from crossing the street?

For work, I’ve been working on a new search engine called LDSsearch.com. It is finally to the point where I feel like I can start showing it off and get feedback on it.

This search engine only indexes Internet content which has been identified to be LDS-friendly material. The idea is to help members, and investigators to find accurate information about the mormon religion without having to sort through anti-mormon sites.

LDSsearch.com uses the open-source search engine, Nutch. Nutch made it faster and easier to set up a search engine. We’re using version 0.8-dev, which is in need of some very good documentation.

Please take a look at it, and tell me what you think by commenting on this post.

I’ve been enjoying Firefox Flicks for the last couple of weeks. They are short little videos which promote the Firefox web browser. I just saw this one and I thought it was funny:

Oh, and you can download Firefox with the Google toolbar by clicking here.

Google can, at your option, keep track of things you’ve searched for. Sometimes you spend a while searching for something, you find it, only to not remember the next day what you found. Google search history remembers for you. But they also provide some interesting statistics to go along with this. Much like the statistics on this blog whch show posts, the Google statistics show what hours of the day or what days of the week you do most of your searching.

I found that I do the most Googling in between 1-2am, followed by the midnight hour. This is close to when I do most of my blog posting. So I guess the trends are that I like to do most of my web surfing late at night. At least I use Firefox to do so.

I work for a computer support group. A lot of what our group has to deal with is cleaning viruses and spyware off of computers. Many times our users don’t even know that they have a virus or spyware on their computer, they just notice things not working quite right or things are working a little slower than they used to be.

We always suggest using the Firefox web browser to all of our users. It keeps computers clean. I found this great video which promotes Firefox and its ability to keep your computer clean. Watch it, and then download Firefox with the Google toolbar by clicking here.

I was looking through my live bookmarks on Firefox, which is simply the titles of RSS feeds (or in this case, the Atom feed), and I found something unusual.

Where I usually find the latest posts to the Official Google Blog I found instead a title that read:

Google, fix your blog pleeasssee! <3 (P.S. Just t…

That was all I could see. When I clicked on the live bookmark, I was taken to the following URL:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/google-fix-your-blog-pleeasssee-3-p.html

which turns out to give a “Not Found” error. Furthermore, the Offical Google Blog and its Atom feed also return 404 errors.

So what happened to the blog? Was it hacked?