While browsing one of my favorite tech-news sites, Digg.com, I found out that PREI has plans to demolish the old Bell Labs Holmdel Research Facility. While I am not old enough to have been a direct part of the historic research which was conducted at the facility, I am directly indebted to the men and women who did groundbreaking work there. Without them, I probably would not be pursuing a degree in Computer Science.

I first learned of the Holmdel Facility in my Networks class sophomore year. We learned all about cellphone technologies, network protocols, topologies and interfaces, as well as encryption algorithms. All these things were pioneered in the Holmdel Facility. Without that facility and the people inside, technology would not be what it is today. Hell, I might not be writing this entry on my blog if it weren’t for the folks in the Holmdel facility.

I think it is important that PREI looks past the financial gains which may be had at the expense of the destruction of one of the birthplaces of computing. Surely there is a fate more suited to such a historic site. It has been suggested that the site be converted into a technology and computing museum, or used to house offices for new technology companies. Sadly, this is probably a fate the site will never see.

Link: http://www.engadget.com/20…ace-of-the/

If it weren’t already obvious, I’m a geek.

198 (I’m not joking either!)

The above video is very informative. Everyone should help to fight companies from taking over the internet.

Well, over 24 hours and almost 1000 unique hits (that’s a lot for my site) later, the truth is revealed. Turns out, it was just some 23 year old guy from Florida, named Mike, playing a trick on the masses of the internet.

Eon8.com was a work of pure genius. It accomplished exactly what it set out to do; act as a social experiment to guage the reactions of the masses. Whether or not you felt let down after the whole thing finished, is up to you. But I for one, think it was a great hit. It was a wrench thrown into the machine of mundane internet browsing. People all over the world were posting on forums, IRC channels and AIM chat rooms trying to figure out exactly what was going on. And I’ll be the first to admit, there were some pretty obscure ideas thrown around, but all in all, the major consensus was that it was probably a viral marketing campaign.

Applying occam’s razor, the advertising bit was probably the reason for the whole thing, but something about it didn’t sit right with me. It didn’t have advertising written on it. Maybe if there were a bunch of AdWords posted on there, I could have understood, but it didn’t have that kind of large-scale “HAHA we tricked you!” feel. Oh well, in the end, no one was adversly affected by the whole thing, save for a few sleep-deprived geeks. Whether or not you’re pissed is up to you, but I for one can accept the fact that I was an unknowing pawn in Mike’s social experiment. No harm, no foul.

If you would like to read up on the history of www.eon8.com you can see my previous post, eon8.com — WTF!?!

By the way, if anyone’s interested, you can get some merchandise at cafepress.

Here are some screenshots from the resulting page:

237
A screenshot of the deployment page of eon8.

240
Eon8.com stats since 2005.

Here is all the information which was posted under the “Reveal the Truth…” link in the above picture:
Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATE!!! Eon8 has been deployed!! Read about it here!!

So, browsing online tonight, I ran across eon8.com. If you ask me, the whole thing kinda creeps me out. But then again, I’m somewhat of a conspiracy theorist.

Ok, so here’s what I’ve gathered from different sources on the internet:

1. The site includes a countdown timer to 12 midnight on July 1st 2006 (00:00:00 2006/07/01)
2. The site logs the ip address of all users and any http referers that link to the site
3. An MD5 hash of a date and time are then created and stamped on the site when a visitor displays the main page.
4. The Distribution List contains MD5 hashed dates as well. (Maybe… the last one usually isn’t the correct length for a hash, i.e. 32 characters)
5. IP addresses of visitors are probably logged and displayed on a world map using red dots for indicators.
6. Speculated that the dots on the map correspond to nuclear power plants/missle silos.
7. There are several links on the main page which forward the user to protected areas of the site.
8. The server is running Apache 1.3.33 at a colocation hosted by The Planet.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is one I struggled with for a long time. The menu at the top of my site was always giving me trouble. It would always be two pixels off when I looked at it in firefox vs. IE. This is because IE screws up the box-model. I won’t go into what exactly it screws up, but I’m telling you it does.

There is a simple fix to the problem though. It requires the use of a wrapper div. By creating a wrapper div, the two pixel difference is correctly compensated in both IE and other CSS2 compliant browsers. Here is the code:

#wrapper {
  border-style : none;
  width : 750px;
}

#mydiv {
  width : 100%;
}

Then the HTML is pretty straight forward too:

<div id="wrapper">
  <div id="mydiv">
    <!-- Put some content here! -->
  </div>
</div>