Again, you should read this webcomic.

TPB says that they want to have their servers flying over international waters.

While I’m sure that this is pretty unrealistic, though certainly do-able, if they actually get it to work then there’s only one real response I can make:

On another note though, I don’t see how this solves their basic problem. They still have to have that radio link on some shore somewhere. In a sense, this is no different than if they put the things on a boat and ran a bunch of cables to land. Ignoring potential attacks on the boat, those cables have to touch ground somewhere, and that’s the point of attack. Unless you have lots of them and have them possibly mobile, which is at least more feasible with radio than with undersea cables.

I suspect that the idea is more of a political talking point. They do seem to love coming up with those.

I would never recommend NetSol for any sort of service of any kind, but damn if they can’t make a funny parody.

This tweet got me to thinking about the myriad uses of technology used for rather simple things.

Weather Station Example

For example, the weather. The National Weather Service has set up climate observation stations throughout the US, at places like airports, on top of tall buildings, alongside freeways, random places in the countryside, even on ships and buoys in the ocean. These monitor the temperature, humidity, and a bunch of other things of that nature. Sometimes they’re integrated into the overall system, like at an airport tower, sometimes they’re just self contained boxes mounted somewhere with power, like on a freeway sign or beside the road. Anyway, these boxes record this information and generally use radio transmitters to send updates back to some centralized location in each region. Usually a local university, TV station, NWS local offices, etc.

This information is then sent on to the next stop via various methods. As the technology evolved, old methods like phone lines got replaced with the internet, or on other more secure lines. They call this overall system The Gateway, and it has its own special protocols and methodologies along with it as well. Anyway, the data is sent back to the NWS’s central server center somewhere. Probably in DC, although they likely have multiple redundancy in various other locations. This information is naturally combined with all the other information from all over the world, so that a complete up-to-date system of meteorlogical data of the entire world can be maintained.

Thousands of other organizations read from this data via various protocols of their own. For example, The Weather Channel gets a lot of their information from this large, distributed, database via some kind of real time feed. They even re-serve the data themselves using various formats, such as the XOAP system.

That XOAP system is interesting because it’s a pretty good feed of weather related data for various regions. I use it myself, indirectly. On my iPhone, for example, I have the Typophone Weather application, which uses the 3G network (which is itself a highly connected system of radio towers using multi-spectrum packet switching technologies), to connect to the internet (this big system of pipes which is in reality not all that well put together but nevertheless works because of incredible fault tolerance in its various protocols), in order to query that XOAP system (which uses XML and SOAP standards for its interface).

All this happens in order to display the current temperature on my iPhone’s lock screen, while I sit here on a couch, not four feet from a friggin’ window.

The future is awesome.

A while back, the personal genetic testing company 23andme offered a special sale. They discounted their normal price from $500 to $99 for one day only. Naturally, I jumped on it.

Just got my results back. Nothing particularly surprising here, but it is neat.

• My blood type is A (A/O). I knew this, good to see it backed up by genetics.
• I have an elevated risk for Type I and II diabetes (no news here, my sister is diabetic).
• Apparently, I can’t taste “bitter”. This does explain why I love Brussels Sprouts.
• I’m lactose intolerant. I was pretty sure of this already.
• I have a natural resistance to norovirus (stomach flu). Didn’t know that.
• I am a carrier for Cystic Fibrosis. I don’t have it, but it’s possible that my children could.
• I am a slow caffeine metabolizer. It says that drinking coffee increases my heart attack risk (duh), but I’m not sure what this really means. Caffeine typically doesn’t do a thing to me, at least not immediately. I go through a fair amount of it on a regular basis.
• Paternal Haplogroup: I1*, Maternal Haplogroup: H1. This basically makes my ancestry 100% European. Very vanilla there. However, this does conflict with my known ancestry slightly, in that it says I don’t have any Native American ancestors (within 5 generations). But then again, I don’t have a whole lot of reliable information on that branch of the family tree.

There’s a ton more information (apparently I’d respond really well to Interferon Beta Therapy, whatever the hell that is), and I haven’t gone through it all yet.

One thing I did note is that they do allow you to download the raw data, which is pretty cool. However when I looked at it, I noticed that it’s not a complete record of your DNA, just a sampling. Basically it’s like 500,000 markers of it instead of the full 3 billion or whatever. Clearly you don’t need the complete sequence to draw useful information out of it.

Still, kinda neat that this is within the reach of the average person.

Since people have been emailing me and asking for it…

WordPress Plugin: Simple Twitter Connect

It’s similar in concept to the Simple Facebook Connect plugin. In fact, it rips off quite a lot of the same code. But instead of Facebook, this integrates your WordPress site better with Twitter.

Now, there’s a lot of Twitter plugins out there already. And this plugin by no means competes with them (yet). This plugin can’t, for example, send a post to Twitter (yet). Nor can it pull posts from Twitter to display on your own site (yet).

What it does is to provide the framework for a more complete Twitter integration. Right now it can do:

• Login via Twitter
• Comment via Twitter

Not much, really. But it has the backend code necessary to make it easier to connect your site to a Twitter Application, and to make plugins surrounding it that won’t interfere with each other. That’s the same basic reason for the Simple Facebook Connect plugin.

So yes, eventually this plugin will send and receive stuff from Twitter. But for now, it lets you allow users to Login and/or to have users Comment using their Twitter credentials.

Expect frequent updates.

Edit: This post has moved to here: ottopress.com/2010/dont-include-wp-load-please/. Take your comments there.

Time for Otto’s general griping: WordPress plugin programming edition.

Here’s a practice I see in plugins far too often:

1. Plugin.php file adds something like this to the wp_head:

   <script src="/img/spacer.gif"> 
   

2. Script.js.php has code like the following:

   <?php
   include "../../../wp-load.php";
   ?>
   ... javascript code ...
   

The reason for this sort of thing is that there’s some option or code or something that the javascript needs from the database or from WordPress or whatever. This PHP file is, basically, generating the javascript on the fly.

Usually, the case for this turns out to be something minor. The code needs the value from an option, or some flag to turn it on or off. Or whatever.

Problem is that finding wp-load.php can be a bit of a chore. I’ve seen extreme efforts to find and load that file in plugins before, including searching for it, examining the directory structure to make decent guesses, etc. This sort of thing has existed even before wp-load.php came around, with people trying to load wp-config.php themselves and such.

But the real problem is simpler: This is always the wrong way to do it.
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Note: This post has been moved to here. Please leave comments there instead.

The majority of the email I get from users of the Simple Facebook Connect plugin is questions regarding how to setup their Facebook Application. It’s really not that hard to do, but the plethora of options can seem somewhat intimidating. So here’s the basics of what you need to do.

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I saw this morning that Jesse Stay had created a rather neat little chicklet for his FBFoundations plugin. I thought it was a clever idea, so naturally I stole it and added it to Simple Facebook Connect as well.

Of course, just copying an idea is no fun. So I had to improve upon it a bit for my version.

I ended up not using any of Jesse’s code, but I did (mostly) keep the format of his chicklet output the same, so as to try to be compatible with it for styling rules and such.

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