Welcome to Jon's Journal. This is my personal website where I post my random thoughts, pictures, projects, and anything else I feel like writing about.
Spring is in the air and with that comes Spring cleaning. For the computer geeks among us this is also the time we clean off hard drives, go through old disks, etc.
I decided to go through some old CD’s and Zip disks I had stashed away and came across some old-school stuff, including this gem:
That there is the “Welcome” screen from version 1 (actually 1.1) of Netscape Navigator. Sir Tim Berners-Lee may have invented the World Wide Web, but Netscape Navigator is pretty much the browser that changed the world. I know that sounds like a really bold statement, but it is the truth. This browser almost launched the “new economy” by itself.
The highly successful IPO of Netscape Communications led to a huge influx of capital and creation of tens of millions of jobs in a virtual gold rush with companies trying to out-innovate each other for the next big thing. 16 years later and trillions of dollars of economic activity later it is almost just a footnote in the history books now but Netscape Communications deserves full credit for launching the New Media revolution.
Without getting into a whole history lesson, Mosaic Communications (which went on to become Netscape Communications, then gobbled up by AOL in 1998) had the first successful commercial web browser, Netscape Navigator, which was based off of NCSA Mosaic, a project developed by students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champain, among them Marc Andreesen who co-founded Netscape with SGI co-founder Jim Clark.
Finding the program for this browser was a real treat for me. As someone who got my start in technology at the dawn of the dotcom era, it really brought me back to the exciting beginnings of the web. It brought me back to the days of hacking HTML trying to make shit work, the days of worrying about the size of gif files and making sure they do not take more than a few minutes to download on our 14.4 baud modems. The days of having to actually submit your site to Yahoo in hopes they would include it in their directory.
Looking back I feel privileged to have been a part of this – working in the industry when it was just taking it’s first baby steps. Sometimes looking back I still can’t believe how far things have come and how fast. Now we do full-blown video, animation, games etc over the web on cell phones and other portable devices at speeds that are mind boggling.
So back to the browser – I went to run it (this version did not have an installer – it was a self-contained single executable) but it did not want to run on Windows 7 64-bit. Tried setting compatibility modes etc and still could not get it to run.
Copied it to a Vista 32-bit machine and that did the trick.
So I run the program and first thing you see is that the interface has a lot of the same basic features as they do now. You have the toolbar with forward and back buttons, home, stop etc. At the bottom you have the progress bar which would also show you the URL of a link you mouse over. About the only thing this version did not have in the interface that is standard now is the URL bar where you can type in a URL to visit. To visit a URL you had to go to the file menu and select open location.
First site I tried since it was one of the oldest was Yahoo.com but it did not work. I got the error above which looks like it is simply a case of an old browser not supporting the needed HTTP header.
I found that trying most sites it simply did not work. If I did not get that error I got other errors about supported character sets (this browser did not support UTF-8 or other unicode formats) or the browser simply did not have a handler for a given file type.
So failing that, I went on to play with the navigation buttons Net Search and Net Directory.
These options also brought up some neat old-school web stuff.
First button I tried was Net Search which brought up a page with links and descriptions of the few web sites one could use to search the web at the time.
This is really amazing because not only is this pre-Google, but it is pre-Yahoo as well. At this point in history Yahoo was a hierarchical directory of sites and Google was still a couple years away.
At this point in time there were really just a handful of options for searching the web – among them AltaVista, Lycos, and WebCrawler.
All three of these domain names still seem to work but none of them are their original owners anymore and for the most part have changed drastically where one could say they are simply just the the same names and that is about it.
In this screenshot one thing that I noticed was this list pre-dated Lycos even being a commercial entity. The URL on the bottom when I moused over the link shows it’s original URL from when it was a still a research project at Carnegie Mellon University.
Next on my little journey down memory lane was the Net Directory button. Interesting how we used to delineate between the two methods of finding sites – “search” and “directory.” I think these days due to the sheer volume of content on the web and the pace of change, hierarchical directories of sites are all but gone other than perhaps DMOZ.
Like the Net Search button, Net Directory brought up a page with some links to directories of sites, most notable among them being Yahoo.
This page REALLY shows how young (and small) the web was compared to now. When I moused over the link for Yahoo it shows their original URL before co-founders David Filo and Jerry Yang incorporated Yahoo as a business – akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo – where you could browse through the directory of 13,000 pages.
Contrast those 13,000 pages to now – even a simple Google search with the keyword “USA” returns 741,000,000 pages. The exponential increase in availability of information online is almost hard to grasp.
–Jon
I have been playing the beta for StarCraft 2 for a bit now but have not had a chance to write about it until now. After waiting nearly 12 years for this game to come out I’d hope you could forgive me for being too busy playing it to write about it.
While I mentioned in a post about Command & Conquer 3 a couple years back that I felt many of the real-time strategy games had kind of evolved to re-skins of previous versions, at first glance that is what one may think when they first fire up SC2. Many of our old favorite units are in fact in SC2 and re-skinned such as the Protoss carriers, Terran siege tanks, Zerg ultralisks etc.
But there is much more to this game than a simple re-skinning, even though I will admit I am in absolute awe of the graphical beauty of this game especially with all the video options at ultra, I am going to focus more on the newer stuff.
The first major change you will see right from the beginning you can see Blizzard built this game around the online experience tying into the company’s flagship online gaming platform, Battle.net, which they originally introduced way back in 1997 for the original Diablo. Battle.net has since evolved to be the platform for all of Blizzard’s titles including World of Warcraft and now SC2.
Battle.net in it’s current incarnation serves as an authentication and matchmaking platform as well as competitive arena, but I expect to see many more changes unveiled over the coming months.
The matchmaking as it currently stands I am guessing is not as good as it will eventually be as the system gets more data to work with since most nights there are typically only 3,500 players or so on in the beta. So far I have found it quite poor at finding suitable matches for me based on skill. I have had 2v2 matches where my team was shown to be favored and we get blown out and other matches where the other side was favored and we decimated them.
Blizzard’s intent behind the new Battle.net seems to be leading toward making it into a full-blown social networking platform for players of their games.
For one, when Battle.net 2 as it is being called finally goes live, players of all Blizzard games will be able to chat across games. You could be in a skirmish match in StarCraft 2 and whisper a friend who is raiding Icecrown Citadel in WoW.
They have also mentioned that you will be able to unlock achievements, badges, emblems etc for your profile (similar to XBox Live) so the truly exceptional competitors will be able to display their accomplishments.
I wonder if they will eventually do something with StarCraft 2 profiles as they have done on the World of Warcraft armory where you can look up a particular player on the armory web site to see their achievements etc, and even subscribe to an RSS feed if you are one of those obsessive stalking types.
In the first StarCraft forming up a custom game with a group of friends required you to create the game and set a password and have everyone join up and then you can start it up. StarCraft 2 is not so different but a changed a little bit. Someone can invite multiple people to a “party” that can join games as a group and play as allies, teams, free-for-all etc.
Once invited by a host to a game you end up in the game lobby screen where players pick their races, the map, and the handicap and you are set. If someone in the game does not have the map, it downloads it to them and on the loading screen for the game it will show which team/player is favored and who is downloading the map if anyone is.
Right now my only complaint and it is a minor one is that the Battle.net interface still does not seem very friendly. Some of the options due to it being beta are ghosted as unavailable, but then some of the options that are currently accessible are not quite straightforward. Many sections of the user interface do not have text labels, but are rather generic looking icons that one has to mouseover to determine what they do. I imagine over time and familiarity it will become second nature but I found the user interface to be the one thing that really needs improvement.
Gameplay while similar to the old StarCraft seems to be less around the rush and more about resource management. Yeah if someone is slow and does not build any offensive units early on you may get them with a rush, though on some maps this is not too easy as the only land access to a base may be blocked by debris that actually has to be destroyed (and has a decent amount of hit points to boot.) While I have found that it is much harder to be rushed than previously, defensive structures such as cannons, turrets etc seem to be less effective than in the past.
I remember a common Protoss strategy I had in the original game was to use cannons to lock in someone. I’d create some pylons and cannons near a resource field close to their base to keep them from being able to build there too easily. I have tried that strategy in SC2 but so far found it ineffective as even a handful of decent ground units can rip them up.
Some folks will likely beg to differ, but I honestly do not see any racial balance issues. Blizzard has done as usual a fine job keeping the playing field level. Any unit that can be perceived to be overpowered usually has some counter. And some of the units from the original StarCraft that were quite potent have been nerfed since then such as the Protoss carriers which now hold only four drones as opposed to eight (post-upgrade at Fleet Beacon) which was kind of a bummer. Anyone who has played Protoss will tell you how much fun it was to send in a dozen fully upgraded carriers in to decimate an enemy base.
One thing I wish I could write about is the single player campaigns, but unfortunately they are not in the beta at this time. Part of me hopes they do not put them in beta so that they will be a surprise. I am sure they will be quite enjoyable.
In the mean time I am quite enjoying the multiplayer skirmishes on Battle.net. Should you get beta feel free to add me, Griggsy.sctwo.
Cheers,
–Jon
A few weeks ago Apple formally announced the long-rumored iPad and my first impression was that I HAVE to have one. I think the device is really a cool, neat toy that would be nice to use around the house.
Like any other Apple device it has generated a lot of buzz. Some early reviews have been quite positive and others were more measured.
The more I thought about it as a device though, the more I began to think of it as going down a path I am not sure I want to go down.
One of the things many of us take for granted with our computers is the ability to install whatever software we want whenever we want. You buy a Windows machine, a Mac, or a Linux box and you can go on the Internet, download freeware/shareware, or buy commercial apps, install them, etc.
Contrast that to a device such as an iPhone (and many other phones for that matter) that require applications to be digitally signed before they can install and run on the device.
In our phones this has been par for the course under the guise of it being in our best interests so that when we need to count on the phone it works (though it is likely in the interest of carriers to keep certain apps from interfering with their lucrative business.)
But for our actual computers this has never been the model. We have always had the “freedom to tinker” with our PC’s.
While some folks are quick to point out that the iPad is basically a larger and enhanced iPhone, the cynical side of me thinks this is a gateway device to Apple (or other large companies) being able to change the locks on our digital front doors.
What if the next generation of Macs and Mac OS X used an app store model and required signed apps? What if Microsoft Windows adopts a similar model in order to “keep us safe” from all the malware?
Of course this is all what if’s at this point, but there has been a trend with corporations like Apple, Microsoft etc acting more and more like gatekeepers of content and information. Look at what happened with Amazon’s Kindle. It had it’s own beacon of irony when they remotely removed Orwell’s “1984” off of users’ Kindle readers.
Even Apple’s app store is not without it’s own controversy. Many developers have cited Apple for their glaring inconsistencies in the approval process and in some cases exercising some behavior that seems to be anti-competitive such as removing applications from the app store for mentioning competitor’s services or in some cases denying approval to an app such as Google Voice.
Sure one could say this is all tin-foil hat territory and that I am reading too much into it but am I really?
Guess only time will tell. Either way I have to admit I do like what I see in the device from a technology and user experience standpoint. My only hope is that Apple is more open with the platform and more forthcoming with the application approval process than they have been with the iPhone.
UPDATE – Somehow I missed this when digging around but it seems the Free Software Foundation has some similar concerns.
–Jon
If you have ever had a computer die on you, you know it REALLY sucks. Sometimes it is something minor that you can fix, other times even the most seasoned computer folks among us scratch our heads and wonder wtf happened.
Unfortunately, I got to experience first hand a significant hardware failure on my Windows XP machine, Megatron (yes, all of my computers on our home LAN are named after fictional characters from TV, movies, mythology, etc.) I have had machines fail before and usually I have been able to salvage them, but this one was different as it seems it completely “fried” itself – the connector from the power supply to the motherboard had actually melted, and the connector from power supply to the nVidia GeForce 7900 was melted as well. Turning on the machine, the fans would spin up, but the board would not do any of the POST beeps, and the hard drive would spin up, but the operating system would not boot, and my monitor showed it was getting no signal.
Not wanting to be bothered I figured I would just forget about it. But after a few short weeks I kept finding times where I needed to have a Windows machine. One night a bunch of the guys were playing Counter Strike: Source but running it on OS X is kind of pain so I did not bother. Another night I needed to test out this database GUI app but it only ran on Windows.
Yes, I am still a proud Mac user, but as a software/web developer and gaming geek I would be remiss not to have multiple platforms available to me. Any given day working in the information technology field I may spend time in Windows, Mac OS X, Linux or Solaris.
It goes without saying that my Windows XP box was a part of my workflow and entertainment more than I had realized so I decided to rebuild it.
Megatron was a good, reliable machine for a few years. It had a nice Asus motherboard with an Intel Core2 Duo CPU, good hard drives, 4GB RAM, etc. Most of the components were premium.
Sadly though, the cost for replacing a lot of the Intel components is not cheap and I was reluctant to buy previous generation items or end of life items that may not be supported in the coming years.
So I opted to build a new rig – Gigantor – built based on the AMD platform this time. AMD has really come a long way over the years. Their performance is comparable to Intel’s offerings, but at a much better price point. I wanted a high-performance machine but on a budget and the economics of the AMD platform worked out well.
Once I decided on the platform, the rest was easy to fill in based on research and word of mouth.
Here is the rundown of the components (pictured at top of post):
MSI 790FX-GD70 motherboard (solid socket AM3 board, DDR3 RAM support, loads of goodies)
AMD Phenom 2 955 black edition (AMD’s current top-of-the-line quad core CPU)
Corsair 750 watt power supply (great reviews – my only complaint is that the cables are a pain in the ass)
OCZ Platinum AMD Edition 4GB DDR3 1600 RAM (really nice, fast RAM – currently running at a conservative 1333 6-6-6-24 timing)
HIS Radeon 4890 1GB graphic card (all I can say is this thing is a BEAST)
Creative X-Fi Titanium PCI-E sound card (for some reason most onboard sound cards still suck after all these years)
Pair of Western Digital Caviar 1TB drives (RAID 1 mirror at the moment – eventually moving boot drive to SSD)
Lian Li black aluminum case (great cases but the documentation is BRUTAL – all written in Engrish lol)
Thermalright TRUE heat sink (due to ordering issues I subbed in a Zalman until the TRUE arrived)
All of these components probably retail for $1,500 or so but with rebates, sales, coupons, and some leftover credit on PayPal I think it was all under $900 bucks, which of course I will write off on my taxes next year.
One thing I did not order (completely forgot) was an OEM Windows license. My previous XP license had been activated many times, and I did not want to mess around with XP on bleeding edge hardware, and I hate Vista so I went an alternate route and installed the Windows 7 Release Candidate (I will write up more on this experience later) and it has worked well.
So here is the machine is all built:
The inside of the case has good airflow, and the fans are pretty quiet. At idle my CPU cores are measuring at 28 degrees celcius and under 100% load about 55 degrees celcius which is not bad for air cooling.
Only a couple of annoyances in this process – one was all the extra cables from the Corsair power supply that as you can see in the picture above I stashed in the unused optical drive bays, and the other would be the tiny connectors from the motherboard to the case. They never label them well, and sometimes the pins are not an even match, ie connector might have four pins, but cable only needs three.
Other than that, it has been a smooth experience.
–Jon
A couple of years ago I met a guy online who was working on a book (he is still working on as far as I know) about the rise and fall of the New Jersey shore communities throughout the twentieth century. Through our conversation I mentioned how I grew up in one of the small shore towns, Cliffwood Beach, and we got into talking about the resort destination it apparently once was.
The thought of Cliffwood Beach as a resort community was always beyond me. Through my childhood years there it always seemed to me like just your typical middle-class blue-collar family town. Sure, we had beaches but not many would go swimming in the bay being that it was so polluted. And there really was not much to do down at the beach other than look across at New York or set off illegal fireworks.
But the fact is that throughout the 1950’s Cliffwood Beach was a popular resort community on the NJ shore. It featured a board walk, a saltwater swimming pool, a restaurant, and some amusements. Every summer people throughout the area would gather to enjoy their beautiful summer days at this Raritan Bay community.
This came to an abrupt end in September 1960 when Hurricane Donna came ripping through and pretty much erased the resort area off the map.
I remember hearing stories from family members about the pool and the boardwalk, and the restaurant etc but there was pretty much no trace it ever existed other the stories that were passed down. I had been all over the town as a kid and up and down the length of the beach. Yet still nothing.
Last summer (2008) I decided to go back to my childhood stomping grounds to see if I could find anything that would give me clues to the town’s history as a resort. I really did not see anything other than some old wood from piers (pictured on left) which may or may not have been part of the boardwalk. Still working on determining that.
Despite my best efforts though, I could not determine where the pool was. People I had spoke to told me the general location of where to find it but no dice. A few teens I talked to down at the beach were not much help either.
On a whim I decided to look at some aerial views via Google Earth and almost immediately something jumped out at me – a wooded rectangular area right near the beach. (Highlighted in image to the left – click to enlarge.)
What made this location fitting was it’s proximity to the Green Acres park which apparently was built in the aftermath of the hurricane.
Unfortunately due to being too busy, it has been almost a year, but I FINALLY managed to make a return trip to Cliffwood. I set out right for the rectangular area in the Google Earth aerial and the image to the left is what greeted me. For being so close to the beach it was actually quite grown in with mature growth – trees, plants, etc.
Once I walked up the sandy path a little more to get closer to the overgrown area I immediately saw this aqua-colored outline of what was probably the top edge of the concrete outer wall of the pool. The paint was peeling, but surprisingly intact considering it has been almost 50 years since this pool last saw any use.
Here is a closer view of the top of the wall. As you can see, the color is quite bright and hard not to notice. Once I looked in the right area, the remains of this swimming pool were actually quite easy to find, though I think if you walked by this area regularly you probably would not have any idea unless you were specifically looking for it. The pool itself seems to be completely filled in with soil or sand, and is completely overgrown with vegetation. I am not sure if this was just a natural occurrence or if done by the town to avoid having to deal with it. Either way, it is quite hidden and it was pretty cool to find it.
–Jon
