Tenthline

There is a story that has been making the rounds on tech sites about Rogers, one of the two major ISPs in Canada (the other, of course, is Bell).  Apparently, they’ve begun hijacking DNS in order to provide a “helpful” search for domain names that don’t resolve…  which is, of course, filled with their advertisements.  The major problem is that this also applies to subdomains that don’t resolve, meaning that it is possible for Rogers to be putting advertisements on domains that do actually exist.

Some might wonder what is so sinister about this.  As an example, it means that Rogers is putting the Yahoo! logo on Google subdomains.  Personally, I think that’s in bad taste.  Also, I strongly believe in net neutrality and hijacking common Internet protocols like DNS and HTTP (see here) to inject your own content flies in the face of everything that net neutrality stands for.

While I would like to write something provocative and/or witty about this, the Computer Science Canada blog has already done it for me.  They detail the slippery slope we could be in for if we accept this kind of behaviour from ISPs.  The screenshots are very well made, too.

This is one of the many reasons why it is important that we have a neutral Internet.  We are not just consumers of the Internet and the Internet is not just a series of tubes; it is the most important communication tool of our time.  It is the catalyst and enabler of the Information Age.  And there are those who would want to restrict or corrupt this communication tool so that they can line their pockets with some extra money.

And don’t believe the FUD about there not being enough bandwidth to go around — why, then, can the Japanese get fiber-optic cable to the home, 100Mbps best-effort service, for about $30/month?  We “happily” pay approximately that much for a tenth of that bandwidth.  No, we are victims of a lack of competition in last-mile ISPs, the ISPs who directly provide Internet service to our homes.  If Bell and/or Rogers are the only game in most towns, what incentive is there to provide better service?  Even the smaller ISPs are usually just resellers for one of these two.

I am thankful to find that I’m not the only one who thinks this way.

I found a really cool story here.

Turns out that the Fedora Project is rolling out a new system called “Fedora Talk” that allows contributors to sign in using standard VoIP hardware and software to talk to other Fedora contributors.  I think this is a really cool idea and a great application of VoIP technologies.  While I don’t mind exchanging e-mails or using forums and wikis, sometimes it is great to just be able to talk things over when trying to collaborate on programming projects.

If this little experiment is a success, maybe we will see systems like these in other open source projects.  I could also see systems like these becoming a staple for agile development.  While many would argue that people can just use Skype, opening up the floor to any standard VoIP software and hardware makes the service that much easier to use and therefore encourages even better communication.

Just caught this article as I was reading technology news this morning.  Apparently, Best Buy will soon be selling Ubuntu Linux 8.04 in a retail box, with manual, quick start guide, and 2 months of support, all for $19.99.  It certainly beats the pants off of the pricing for Vista.

Ubuntu has made some excellent progress as a Linux distro and the development team has worked very hard to bring down the barriers to entry for non-geeks, especially with regard to drivers, software packages, and X Windows.  For example, Ubuntu releases rely less and less on editing of the X Windows configuration file for simple display changes.

This is promising, though the author of the article has an interesting thought:

Yes, it brings Ubuntu to a whole new audience, but I wonder whether the audience that needs to have Ubuntu sold to them on a CD is actually ready for Linux.

Maybe Ubuntu is ready and maybe it isn’t, but I find it admirable that they’re willing to go this far.  And if Ubuntu still isn’t ready for the average end-user desktop, I can imagine it will be in the very near future.  In the best case, sales of Linux in retail could cause a reaction from software vendors and hardware manufacturers and we’ll (finally) see a lot more ubiquitous support for Linux in the computing marketplace.  I, for one, am hopeful.

The fine folks behind TOJam have finally posted all of the games from this year’s jam. Among them is the game we created that weekend: “Mousetrap Mania“. We’re quite proud of how it turned out.

The game was semi-inspired by “ChuChu Rocket!“, a quirky puzzle game for the Sega Dreamcast that was developed by Sonic Team. The player places arrows on the grid but instead of directing the mice, the arrows direct the car, which is strapped to a large wheel of cheese. The player needs to use the car to lure the mice into the traps but avoid allowing the mice hit the car. If the mice hit the car, they eat some of the cheese. If all of the cheese is eaten, the player loses. To win, the player must survive the mouse onslaught for 3 minutes. The victory screen shows both the number of mice caught and the number of slices of cheese left on the car — feel free to use both of these for bragging purposes. =)

You might also want to try “a game about bouncing“. Voted the best game at the jam, it sports a simple-but-fun gameplay mechanic centered around grabbing and bouncing off of bumpers and avoiding missiles. The visual and aural style are quite cool as well and, most amazing of all, it was all made by just one guy. He didn’t even need any graphics or sound “floaters” like we did. Graphics, audio, programming, all were done by him and him alone.  That’s some awesome talent right there.

Michael and I very often browse Reddit for interesting articles on all sorts of topics, including computer science and IT.  Today, I was looking through Programming Reddit as usual and the link at the top of the front page was to this site.  Reddit has made their code available through a public git repository and is encouraging programmers to take a look at it and submit patches.  They’ve included some basic guides on how to get started as well.

Pretty cool.  =)