My First Internet Connection in my house… (Doooh!!!)
Posted by ardnet | Filed under Some Stories
“Doooh!!! where have u been dude? baru sekarang lo pasang internet di rumah lo”
Gimana si gw, masa baru sekarang pasang internet… di rumah sendiri, norak ya, hehehe. Ya abis mo gimana lagi, situasi dan kondisinya sekarang lagi pas koq untuk pasang internet di rumah gw. Soalnya kan biasalah… ada masalah keuangan sedikit waktu itu, makanya baru pasang sekarang.
Gw pun juga baru tau si klo internet dirumah gw baru akan di pasang sekarang2 ini, meskipun gw pun uda rencana sebelumnya untuk pasang internet, cuma belum tau kapan. Waktu itu, bokap gw dan adek gw lagi ngomong ma tamu yang waktu itu pake baju hijau, gw kira salesmen gitu, tau2 pas gw tanya… “ada apa nih?”… ternyata itu orang dari First Media. Mereka lagi membicarakan soal seputar koneksi internet dan kabel TV gitu.
Yup, just like i said, First Media, gw pake ISP itu untuk providernya. Gw pake paket yang namanya FastNet 768, dan itu sudah dengan penyewaan modem nya. Dan gk hanya internet juga donk, tv kabel nya juga donk. Jadi gw sekarang gk nonton sinetron2 bodoh itu lagi.
Tapi, hiks!! gw pun juga gk begitu merasakan nikmatnya browsing dan ntn channel luar di rumah gw, cuma hari2 libur aja which is sabtu dan minggu, hari2 kerja gw ada di kosan, yg dimana blm ada internet, dan blm ada tv, hiks!!
Tp ntr de, klo ada rejeki lebih, gw mo pindah kosan yg lebih bagus, jadi bisa bawa tv dan langganan tv kabel. Dan juga yang lebih penting, gw harus langganan internet, apalagi untuk orang sepeti gw yang bekerja di bidang IT, sigh!!! masa harus ke warnet ato gk nginep di kantor si, hehehe…..
Ya ud de… that’s all for now, gw mo browsing2 dulu ya…
Tags: internet
What the Google Intranet Looks Like
Posted by ardnet | Filed under Things I Got
What do around 16,000 Google employees stare at in the morning when they’ve arrived at the office? They might be looking at Moma, the name for the Google intranet. The meaning of the name of “Moma” is a mystery even to some of the employees working on it, we heard, but Moma’s mission is prominently displayed on its footer: “Organize Google’s information and make it accessible and useful to Googlers.” A “Googler,” as you may know, is what Google employees call themselves (they have other nicknames for specific roles; a noogler is a new Google employee, a gaygler is a gay one, a xoogler is an ex-one, and so on).
A Google employee in Hamburg (photo taken in mid-2007).
In the beginning, as ex-Google employee Doug Edwards told in a blog post in 2005, Moma “was designed by and for engineers and for the first couple of years, its home page was devoid of any aesthetic enhancements that didn’t serve to provide information essential to the operation of Google. It was dense and messy and full of numbers that were hard to parse for the uninitiated, but high in nutritional value for the data hungry.”
Here’s a picture of the Moma homepage that we got hold of – please note that large areas have been grayed out or whitened out:
On the top of the Google intranet homepage, you’ll find the logo reading “Moma - Inside Google.” Next to it is a search box allowing you to find information from Moma in general, information on specific Google employees, information on availability of meeting rooms, building maps and more. You can choose to include secure content or not via a checkbox. Another checkbox offers you to use “Moma NEXT” for a more experimental variant of search results.
To the top right, there’s an option to switch to iMoma, an iGoogle-style tool prepared by the company which allows further customization of the intranet start page. This way, employees may be able to select their own news and service widgets of interest to be displayed when they log-in.
The actual content of the homepage in the picture is split up into 4 columns. To the left, there’s a “My Office” section, with information for employees and a way to choose your own office for more relevant links. It’s followed by the sections “Survival Kit” and “My shortcuts.” In the middle columns, news gadgets are headlined “Welcome to Google!,” “Communications,” “HR” (human resources), “Company Info” and “Internal Google news,” all in common soft shades of Google base colors. The right column is listing Google teams.
Searching Moma
When you perform a search on Moma, you will see a result similar to the following; this screenshot, which was edited by Google to include comments, has been published by the Google Enterprise Blog in a post of theirs in July to show-case the kind of functionality available:
On the image, you will see a “universal search” style result including employee information, bookmark results, documents hosted on Google’s intranet, and a list of related queries. Users get to choose between ordering by date or by relevance. One can also limit the results to different segments like “Tech,” “Official,” or “Community.” Google in their blog said the use the Google Search Appliance to power this service.
Ex-employee Doug Edwards mentioned how he came to take for granted everything was available on the intranet, “from the status of products in development to the number of employees at any point in the company’s history.” He adds that the transparency was also a motivator, as “Your failures are also visible to everyone in the company, which provides an even greater motivator to continuously improve performance in the areas for which you are responsible.” These days however, as Doug writes, Google “clamped down on who had access the complete state of the business.”
The following photo shows a result for what seems to be an employee search. The photo is used with permission from Zach at HannaCabana.com, though Zach tells me it had been anonymously submitted to him (note we added blurring to the phone numbers of the zoom version):
On the employee results page, everyone is listed with their name, a photo, their job title, telephone number and more. Clicking through to an employee lands you on their full profile page. Ex-Googler Doug Edwards remembers how many Google employees used “alternative images and titles” for their Moma listing. “I recall photos of samurai warriors and masked figures with titles like ’Shadow Ops’ and ’Black Ops.’ These were later weeded out as part of an upgrade”.
Employee data may also be rendered in different forms. Below is a screenshot we first posted on in February of an internal application called Google Percent:
This service simply shows how many employees are newer than a particular other employee (some areas in the image have been blackened out).
How employees access the intranet
Photo courtesy of Zach, again. The dialog reads, “Many internal apps. One login page.” The input boxes ask for the user’s LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) credentials.
A Google employee can log-in to the intranet from within the office, or with a so-called Virtual Private Network (VPN) connection. This connection comes pre-installed on laptops Google hands out, and can be reached via a desktop icon. A Google employee is required to authenticate their sign-in with account credentials.
From within a Google building, an employee may likely reach the intranet via the address corp.google.com. We previously found out Google additionally uses many sub-domains in their intranet, like album.corp.google.com, agency.corp.google.com, alien.corp.google.com, karma.corp.google.com, periscope.corp.google.com, pineapple.corp.google.com. You may also likely just enter e.g. “m” (which maps to “http://m” which is “http://m.corp.google.com”) to be taken to a service like your Gmail-powered email account.
Externally, like from a laptop at a conference – or if you’re one of the employees mainly working from home, as there are some – employees can access the VPN servers located on sites like Mountain View or Dublin, Ireland, with different hostnames each like man….ext.google.com or de….ext.google.com (we depleted part of the hostname).
Google “eating their own dog food”
Google employees use many of the tools Google produces. They even have launched an internal “dogfood” campaign in 2006. But what they see may be newer versions of the services than those released to the outside.
Photo by Andrew Hitchcock from July, Creative Commons-licensed (edited for brightness/ contrast).
If you work in a team for a product, you may also get a prototypical version of the service. Below for instance is a screenshot from a nightly build of Google Spreadsheets – codename “Trix” – which we were able to take a look at (note several areas in this image have been grayed out):
In above image you can see the disclaimer “Warning: This is NOT production. Data can be lost.” Special links to debug windows are offered to developers as well, one of them being opened in the screenshot. Google employees also get to see previews of completely unreleased tools, such as wiki service JotSpot (which is being integrated into Google Apps), or Platypus, the internal Gdrive client for file-sharing.
For code reviews, Google created Mondrian, a “Perforce backend with some custom Google wrappers on top,” as Nial Kennedy, who shot the following photo (Creative Commons-licensed), notes:
And the following image shows Google in-house tool Trax (this is part of a larger photo by Google employee Andrew from Flickr, but it is not available anymore; we’re not quite sure how this tool works or what it achieves):
But, Google doesn’t just use their own tools. For instance, we came across information indicating that many Google employees prefer social network Facebook.com to their own production, Orkut (e.g. some Google employees considered Orkut too spammy, or too buggy in the past).
If a Google employee encounters trouble with any Google tool, they can call their internal support hotline named “Tech Stop.” The hotline promises 24-hour availability. Numbers like +1 877… (last part depleted) are partly toll-free and partly with toll, and accessible from all over the world. Internally, a Google employee may also simply press 3-HELP (3-4357). Tech Stop centers aren’t just located in the US, but also in places like Hyderabad, India.
Tech Stop support wasn’t always that luxurious though, as Doug Edwards noted in another article. When he left the company in 2005, a supportive Tech Stop was available in every building – but in the beginning when he joined, he notes that for instance not all operating systems were supported. When you were facing an issue with corrupted Windows DLL files, a common response was, “Why aren’t you running Linux?”
Tags: internet
It’s The (Other) Algorithm, Stupid! Understanding DiggRank
Posted by ardnet | Filed under Things I Got
Have you ever wondered what it really takes for a story submitted to Digg to get to the home page? Or why a certain story—even a really good, social media friendly story—never got to the home page? I’m frequently asked the question “Hey, my story has [number] of Diggs but it still hasn’t been promoted to the home page. Any idea what’s wrong?” And relatively less frequently I hear someone saying in amazement, “Wow, all it took was 29 Diggs and that story rocketed to the home page!” I’m always tempted to reply “It’s the algorithm, stupid!”
Digg has an algorithm?
Yes, just as PageRank and other algorithms are used to rank web pages by search engines, some social sites use algorithms to determine which stories become popular. Call it DiggRank, if you will. Let’s take a deeper look at what the Digg algorithm is and venture a few guesses about how it works.
What is the algorithm?
Unlike editorially driven sites like Fark or Slashdot where news is handpicked by a tiny group of individuals, socially driven sites use the votes aggregated by the community to decide what content gets promoted to their home pages to be viewed by the masses. At the same time, content promotion isn’t as simple as just comparing absolute number of votes that each submission gets and then promoting the ones with the most votes. There are several other factors that come into play. Some of these factors we are absolutely sure about, whereas others we can only venture guesses about.
Before we look at what factors may be taken into account by the algorithm, it is important to know that the algorithm is used to ensure that community participation is fair and that no one can unduly influence content promotion. Therefore, the algorithm is kept secret from the community to prevent people from bypassing or manipulating it.
So what does the algorithm take into account?
Having been a member of Digg for over 2 years and several other communities for over a year, I can confidently say that Digg’s algorithm is the most complex and therefore hardest to manipulate (though by no means is it completely fool-proof). Based on my experience, the elements Digg’s algorithm takes into account include:
Recent participation rank of user and followers. Depending on how successful you have recently been on Digg, subsequent successes may be more difficult. For example, I have had 7-8 stories submitted and promoted to the home page one day, only to see 3-4 stories get 100+ Diggs and not be promoted the next day. At the same time, if I decide to take a few days off, the “algorithm bias” seems to adjust itself and I have no problem getting good content promoted again. The rank and recent successes of a user are taken into account both when you are submitting a story and also while Digging (voting on stories). If you get a quick succession of Diggs from “high-value” users, you are likely to be promoted faster and at a lower number of Diggs, than if even dozens of new users Digg you. This, of course, is to ensure that the Diggs are of good quality and the community is actually doing its work by voting for good content and burying bad content.
Voting activity. The number of Diggs your story will require to reach the home page is directly correlated to the number of votes (Diggs) generally being cast on Digg at any given time and how your story compares to the average.
Submission category and activity in the category. Competition in some categories (Technology, Word and Business) is much fiercer than in other categories (Sports, Entertainment) and therefore it is much easier to submit and have something promoted in the Sports/Motorsport category than Technology/Tech. Industry News. Also, along with being compared to general voting activity on Digg, your content is compared more directly (and probably with more weight) to content in its category. For example, it is possible to have a story promoted at 50 Diggs even though it’s not high on the upcoming queue for all sections, as long as it is at the top in the queue for its category.
Speed of votes and diversity of voters. The faster a story gets votes, the lower the vote count has to be at which it is promoted. For example, a story may collect 120 Diggs over 24 hours and not be promoted. If the same story gets 90 Diggs in one hour it will almost certainly hit the front page. At the same time, however, it is incredibly important to have diversity in votes. Diversity helps prevent people from banding together into “voting-rings” (i.e. circle-jerks) and unfairly pushing their stories to the top. This is one of the reasons why you see stories from top-ranked users sit at the top of the queue for hours waiting to fulfill the algorithm’s diversity requirement (i.e. they are penalized for having a following of users that Digg every one of their stories).
Buries received. This is quite straightforward. The more buries you, the longer it will take for your content to be promoted. If the Bury to Digg ratio (which is not 1:1; buries are weighted more heavily than Diggs) is too high, your story will completely be removed from the queue. That said, it is possible for a story to acquire enough votes to outgrow the Buries it gets. Each bury, however, can be taken into account as a certain number of negative votes, which increases the total vote count the algorithm will require from your story before promoting it to the home page.
Comments and comment ratings received. Participation in the comments can help push a story over the edge. People think that inserting “great article—thanks!” will help further their cause, while in reality these fake comments have the exact opposite effect. There is nothing easier than spotting a spammy submission with fake comments and burying it to oblivion. Naturally acquired comments (and ones that are voted up by the community), on the other hand, help tip the content promotion algorithm in your favor.
Misconceptions about Digg’s algorithm
Now that we have covered the basics of the content promotion algorithm, let’s examine some common misconceptions about Digg’s algorithm.
Wrong: An absolute number of votes is required. There is no absolute number. The number varies daily and even hourly. As mentioned before, the number of Diggs you need varies based on submission category, recent participation record of the submitter and subsequent Diggers, as well as the number of votes and the time in which they are aggregated and the diversity of the voters.
Wrong: You’re doomed if your story isn’t submitted by a top-user. There is no such thing as content being automatically promoted to home-page. Even the best content, submitted by the most consistent user can get buried if enough people don’t like it and Bury it. The algorithm tries to ensure a level playing field for all users (though this doesn’t always work), and in fact is sometimes harsher on top users than on newer ones.
Wrong: Number of friends is important. The number of friends you add on Digg is completely irrelevant. What Digg looks for is diversity in the Diggs a story receives. The fact that a user is your friend and votes for your story is irrelevant. Even if someone is consistently Digging you without being your friend, those Diggs are weighed less.
Wrong: There is a 24-hour window for success. This is true of most content: If your submission doesn’t get promoted within 24 hours it usually has no chance of being promoted later. However, a small number of submissions do get promoted—even 2-5 days after submission—if people continue to regularly show interest in them.
Tags: internet
In All Fairness… Internet Explorer Still Stinks
Posted by ardnet | Filed under Things I Got
Yup!! IE is still stinks. Sometimes I got a hard time to design web template with CSS in IE, just like I want it in Firefox.
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If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll have caught the subtle (and not-so-subtle) hints that SitePoint has been quietly working on a series of references, beginning with The Ultimate CSS Reference.
What hasn’t been revealed (until now) is that this reference will be released not just as a slick SitePoint book, but also as a freely-accessible Reference section right here on sitepoint.com! Our aim with this project is to produce the definitive CSS reference, both on the Web and in print.
Obviously, a big part of assembling this reference has been compiling browser compatibility information. And although our hard-working authors might disagree, one of the trickiest parts of the project has been determining how that information should be presented.
The Inherit Issue
A good example of this is the inherit value, which according to the spec is supported by all CSS properties. A little over a year ago, David Hammond’s site that rates browser standards compliance generated an uproar on Chris Wilson’s blog when it counted the lack of support for inherit as a point against IE for each and every CSS property.
Our reference will similarly indicate the level of support for each property in each of the major browsers, but what level of support do we indicate for IE, which doesn’t support the inherit value? Do we count this as a failing in IE’s support for each and every property, or do we set that aside as a single unsupported feature, and rate IE’s support of properties in the absence of inherit?
On the one hand, declaring that IE fully supports a property when one of its supported values doesn’t work could be seen as misleading. On the other hand, if the best support level we can list for any property in IE is ‘partial’, then you can’t tell at a glance when IE does fully support a property (within the limitations of its CSS implementation), and our reference becomes that much less useful.
After lengthy discussion with the authors, we decided to treat inherit as a separate unsupported feature, and to list properties that would work perfectly in IE if not for inherit as fully supported. The vote was certainly not unanimous, but I felt like we were doing the right thing by IE—giving the work that Microsoft did in IE7 a chance to shine.
Except … it didn’t
In ignoring inherit when rating property support, our intention was to enable the many newly-supported CSS features in IE7 to show up in our compatibility tables.
After all, IE7 now supports position: fixed across all elements, completing (except for inherit, of course) support for that property. And IE7 introduced plenty of other new features, such as support for the child selector (>). It would be nice for our compatibility tables to reflect this, we thought—naively, as it turns out.
Once the authors had compiled all this compatibility information, what we discovered was that arguing about the difference between ‘partial’ and ‘full’ support in IE had been an academic exercise … because the vast majority of CSS features are too buggy in IE to rate either!
The position property does support fixed in IE7, but setting this property to anything but static causes that browser to mess up the stacking of overlapping elements by incorrectly establishing a new ’stacking context’, so we are forced to rate this property as ‘buggy’.
And Microsoft did implement the child selector as a brand new feature in IE7, but even in this golden age of standards, this new feature came with obvious parsing bugs (e.g. A > /* comment */ B will fail to work).
After racking my brains for a CSS feature that would have newly achieved ‘full’ support in IE7 without being afflicted by bugs, I happened upon the dimension properties. width and height had serious bugs fixed in IE7, and IE7 added support for min-height, max-height, min-width, and max-width. And as of the current draft of our CSS reference, these properties are listed with ‘full’ support in IE7! Hooray!
Sadly, a little research has revealed reports of a bug in IE7 that affects all of these properties. We have yet to confirm this bug, but if it’s the kind of thing that will impact real-world use of these properties, they’ll lose their ‘full’ rating as well.
Internet Explorer Still Stinks
All this adds up to Internet Explorer making a very poor showing in our compatibility tables, despite us going out of our way to give it a fighting chance.
CSS features that we can honestly list as having ‘full’ or even ‘partial’ support in IE are few and far between (color is one, font-size is not). Most of them are ‘buggy’, even in IE7 … and we expect even more IE bugs to come out of the woodwork once we release the Web version of the reference for public comment.
Obviously, with IE7 Microsoft made great strides in correcting the most glaring and painful issues that plagued developers in IE6. But the unavoidable truth revealed by this reference is that Internet Explorer is still miles behind the competition.
Perhaps the new layout engine and other improvements coming in IE.Next will make up some of the difference … or perhaps Microsoft just isn’t interested in fixing (and in the case of IE7, avoiding) bugs that aren’t painfully obvious.
by: Kevin Yank
Source: http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2007/11/22/in-all-fairness-%E2%80%A6-internet-explorer-still-stinks/
Tags: internet