Category: Internet/Links

Here’s something that I’ve played with before… A while ago I had a friend who could talk to me via MSN, and could connect to my PC directly but he couldn’t get to website X but I could get to website X.  So his ISP had problems getting him there, but no problems getting him to me and my ISP had no problems getting me to X and no problems getting to him.

At that point I wanted to setup some kinda proxy type thing on my PC and then let him use that to browse to the server he was looking for.  Now with Tor (from EFF) you could kinda do that.  I read about it from a Wired News article called “Tor Torches Online Tracking“.  It looks really cool, you connect to a server near you (or any server) encrypting your data with a key and it passes you on to a random server (encrypting your data with a key another key) and that server passes you to another random server (encrypting your data with yet another key) which finally goes and gets the data you were requestion.  This aparently works not just for web traffic but other traffic too. (Unfortunately its a bit slow so file sharing/p2p apps wouldn’t work so well)  But that’s pretty cool!

Best of all its FREE!  Check it out!

I’m not sure where I found the link but its cool so I’m posting it.  Sometime on Thursday/Friday I found a link to Cube.  Its an open source/free “Quake” like game.  If you’re going to install it on a windows machine, go to Quadropolis and download the Win32 Installer.

Its pretty easy to setup and run.  It was aparently designed to let you play fairly well even when you have high pings.  I was playing farily well on the weekend with pings of around 500ms.  There seems to be one regular SA based server as well.  I’ll try leave mine running when I’m not at work so other’s can join.  I’ll be the server with the WBS machine name. (They look up the DNS name from the IP address of the machine)  Try it out. 🙂

It seems that not all processors are equal, but at least the other 1/2 of the Animal Farm slogan holds true – “but some are more equal than others.”

I just read a post by Matt Davey about the MSN Messenger Server Farm where he quotes from Paul’s WinHEC 2005 blog:

“The MSN Messenger server farm handles over 70 million concurrent sessions every single day. Until recently, they were using 250 32-bit servers to manage that load. When they switched to Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition running on x64 hardware, they reduced the size of the farm to just 25 servers”

250 32bit processor servers ==> 25 64bit processor servers.  Of course they don’t say much about the specs of the servers so its not a very functional comparisson – but its still a cool statistic.

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For those who didn’t get the Animal Farm references – its a book about a farm where the animals revolt and take over the farm.  They have some key rules, number one being “All animals are equal”… At some point the pigs(I think it was the pigs) start becoming dictators and running the show and they modify the slogan over night to “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others”.  The reference in the subject is from when they take over and the sheep chant “Four legs good, two legs baaaaaaaaad”.

I can’t remember which blogs I got these off, but there are some cool photo’s of Abandoned Places and I saw a link to an old favourite Engrish.com.

I read via Scoble that MSN Messenger 7.0 is now out, and MSN Spaces is aparently official too… MSN 7 is kinda cool, and I’m begining to wonder if I should start using Spaces a bit more…

And in the coolest news so far today, Bill Nye is coming back, check out his new website Eyes of Nye.  Now I just have to wait for one of our little stations to bring the series over here.

I just read a Wired News article “The Book Stops Here” about Wikipedia, which just re-affirmed my enthusiasm about Wikipedia.  So I popped onto Wikipedia to see if I could add anything to it and I saw that they had a link to articles that have been requested for over a year.  I’m gonna try and see if there’s one that I can add when I get home. 

The question I pose to you is not what can Wikipedia do to help you, but what can you do to help Wikipedia?  🙂