Thursday, December 18, 2008

Module Two - Email

Delays, delays. Seeing as it's been.... 11 days since I've last posted something, I suppose I've ignored one of my tips for bloggers - "update regularly". If anyone asks I shall simply say that the lull was a part of my Cunning Plan, that I hope they've learned something from it and that any further details or explanations for the lack of posts are restricted due to the overall Cunning nature of the Plan.

Right. Email. Let's have a look at the reflective questions and reflect upon them a little, shall we?

"1. What information about a user's email, the origin of a message, and the path it took, can you glean from an email message?"

Lots of things, really. The email address itself can hint as to the users location and occupation - eg. ending with a .au pretty much says that email address is an Australian one. Similarly .edu.au implies a university/educational address, .gov.au implies someone with an Official Capacity In Government is conversing with you. Addresses ending in .com or .net don't mean much these days - anyone can get one - and .org was once supposed to be used for not-for-profit type organisations, but the lines have been blurred over the years by indifferent domain registrars.

Typing in the base domain of the email address in your browser (eg internode.on.net, which is my ISP) can often reveal the company or ISP the sender is associated with. Of course, typing in random domains can be hazardous to your computers health so avoid it if the message is obviously spam.

Delving into the headers of the email can tell you a lot more. The servers that the email has passed through,that date/time that happened, the originating IP address of the sender, the email client they were using. If you're having to track down some annoying git that keeps sending you abusive emails, the headers can lead you in the right direction, even if the reply address is incorrect.

"2. In what cases would you find it useful to use the 'cc', 'bcc' and 'reply all functions of email?"

CC is useful if you want to copy someone in on an email. That was the whole point of it, really. It indicates to the primary recipient that someone else is in the loop with them and that possibly they should be involved too. Normally in a business setting, you would inform the recipient that you're CC'ing someone else in and the reasons why eg. "I'm CC'ing Paul from Accounting in on this as he needs to keep track of out-of-budget expenditure. Let him know if anything else crops up." This introduces Paul, lets Paul know when he reads the email why he was suddenly involved and makes recipient aware of it.

BCC is not often ussed - in my opinion, it should be used a lot more.Why?

BCC - "Blind Carbon Copy" means that the recipients do not see the other people that the message is addressed to. So if you're emailing twenty clients the same message (about needing to discuss non-payments for example), generally BCC is the way to go, for privacy reasons. Sticking twenty clients in the "To:" field in that case is considered bad form - you're giving out the addresses of everyone to everyone else. Oh, you could just send separate emails to each recipient, but it's labour intensive, chews up a heap of bandwidth on your connection and you end up with 20 identical emails in your "Sent Items" folder. Just use BCC: instead.

Regarding "Reply All" - it's rare that I would use it, unless *everyone* has specifically requested to be kept in the loop. Usually I would single out the person that I am replying to and possibly cc someone else in. Having been the recipient of a "Reply All" storm in a corporate environment where six hundred people were in the To: field of an email, I can tell you it's not pretty:

Replyer #1: Re: Office Party, "Ok."
Replyer #2: Re: Ok, "What?"
Replyer #3/4/5/6: Re: Re: Ok, "What are you on about? Who are you?"
Replyer #7/8/9/10/11/12/....../45/46: Re: Re: Re: Ok, "Stop hitting REPLY ALL! ARRRRGH!"
Replyer #47-92: Re: Re: Re: Re: Ok, "You guys are idiots. Just don't reply!!1!!"

(repeat until system administrator has to put out the email server which has suddenly burst into flames)

"3. In what ways can you ensure that an attachment you send will be easily opened by the receiver?"

Mainly I would either establish what software they're using beforehand, or alternatively if I've already had an attachment from them I would reply in kind. If it's a document, an informal standard is Acrobat Reader. Most offices have this installed, the download for the reader is free for anyone and most importantly, *the formatting remains the same*

Anyone who's received a multi-page Word document from someone else knows how hopeless it is for reproducing faithfully what the sender wanted - in Word's case specifically, different printers means different pagination, so all the hard work the sender did in putting in page breaks,etc is just a jumbled mess when you open it on your end with your different printer. Not too good for that final submission.....

"4. What sorts of filters or rules do you have set up, and for what purpose?"

I have a few filters, mainly for directing messages from moderate traffic mailing lists into separate folders. Keeps the main inbox tidy for day-to-day messages and makes it easier to browse through the mailing list messages at my leisure.

"5. How have you organised the folder structure of your email and why?"

You bet I have. When you're trying to find that email from your architect amongst 4200 other emails in your inbox, it's a lot easier to just go check in the "House Plans" folder. Same for the "eBay" and "Flights" folders. My email client has a pretty good search function, but when your current email store goes back 5 years.... it's hard to remember a subject or sender specifically enough to find an email quickly. Folders help immensely.

Well, I'll leave it at that for this post and wander on to the "Email Lists" section.













Monday, December 8, 2008

Module One - Internet tools

Here's a traceroute to the curtin.edu.au server, from network-tools.com

TraceRoute to 134.7.179.53 [curtin.edu.au]

Hop(ms)(ms)(ms)
IP AddressHost name
111117
72.249.0.65 -
2131818
209.249.122.73209.249.122.73.available.above.net
3621117
64.125.26.205xe-0-0-0.er1.dfw2.us.above.net
4876
64.125.12.5464.125.12.54.available.above.net
5779
129.250.2.173ae-2.r21.dllstx09.us.bb.gin.ntt.net
6647873
129.250.4.25as-3.r21.snjsca04.us.bb.gin.ntt.net
7585352
129.250.4.118ae-0.r20.plalca01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net
85452Timed out
129.250.3.79p16-0-0-0.r05.plalca01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net
9545255
129.250.10.226p4-0.aarnet.plalca01.us.bb.gin.ntt.net
10212210210
202.158.194.173so-3-3-1.bb1.a.syd.aarnet.net.au
11211209209
202.158.194.198ge-0-0-0.bb1.b.syd.aarnet.net.au
12226226222
202.158.194.33so-2-0-0.bb1.a.mel.aarnet.net.au
13233233233
202.158.194.17so-2-0-0.bb1.a.adl.aarnet.net.au
14260264265
202.158.194.5so-0-1-0.bb1.a.per.aarnet.net.au
15264293259
202.158.198.178gigabitethernet0.er1.curtin.cpe.aarnet.net.au
16261259259
202.158.198.186gw1.er1.curtin.cpe.aarnet.net.au
17Timed outTimed outTimed out

-
18Timed outTimed outTimed out

-
19Timed outTimed outTimed out

-
20262264268
134.7.179.53 -

Trace complete

Looking at that, it tells me that there's 20 hops from there to curtin.edu.au (134.7.179.53) and the average time looks to be about 265 milliseconds, which isn't too bad for a source address in the US. The jump from nnt to aarnet is the main culprit (at hop 9 to 10), with 150 milliseconds being tacked on there. Well, you can't beat the speed of light and that's pretty much what it takes to for light to get from one side of the globe to the other via the fibre-optic cable that's in that hop.

Pinging curtin.edu.au from the nettools site returns an average of 261 milliseconds - pinging from my computer however returns a much more wheezy 1100 milliseconds on average. This is mainly due to the satellite link adding on average about 800-900 milliseconds to everything I access.

Looking then at a traceroute from my computer, it never completes fully to curtin.edu.au, getting lost somewhere in the last few hops of curtin's computer network.

traceroute to 137.4.139.53 (137.4.139.53), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 192.168.5.100 0.517 ms 0.556 ms 0.661 ms
2 192.168.1.25 978.378 ms 1030.286 ms 1299.785 ms
3 203.169.16.37 838.609 ms 926.173 ms 1014.289 ms
4 203.169.16.33 901.807 ms 878.245 ms 1169.051 ms
5 202.142.142.150 690.752 ms 942.883 ms 1346.864 ms
6 202.142.142.145 813.088 ms 1445.575 ms 721.957 ms
7 202.142.143.97 668.695 ms 1432.124 ms 706.238 ms
8 210.80.189.77 1541.364 ms 864.133 ms 690.344 ms
9 210.80.34.221 967.395 ms 1121.390 ms 707.247 ms
10 210.80.33.9 1263.788 ms 917.024 ms 1471.170 ms
11 210.80.50.58 2331.318 ms 1171.324 ms 861.684 ms
12 210.80.4.46 788.692 ms 1401.905 ms 1220.459 ms
13 202.249.2.110 1009.805 ms 1244.279 ms *
14 59.128.7.129 887.954 ms 59.128.7.130 881.134 ms 59.128.7.66 957.427 ms
15 59.128.4.166 1129.960 ms 59.128.4.174 1289.874 ms 59.128.4.70 1041.359 ms
16 203.181.100.158 1007.284 ms 1411.495 ms 203.181.100.174 1087.519 ms
17 59.128.2.74 1781.460 ms 1225.797 ms 892.894 ms
18 63.146.26.69 1534.297 ms 1288.753 ms 1112.930 ms
19 67.14.7.70 1329.015 ms 1215.824 ms 1248.874 ms
20 67.128.87.186 1525.588 ms 1268.134 ms 1104.466 ms
21 198.26.99.25 1725.893 ms 1207.306 ms 1079.079 ms
22 140.52.117.53 1421.106 ms 1084.493 ms 1229.883 ms
23 214.20.22.133 1180.716 ms 1220.947 ms 1087.384 ms
24 214.40.22.178 1348.568 ms 1107.809 ms 1156.763 ms
25 132.3.32.193 1249.906 ms 1061.992 ms 1114.932 ms
26 10.100.32.6 1118.107 ms 1151.573 ms 1338.672 ms
27 137.4.120.11 1110.450 ms 1322.924 ms 1382.136 ms
28 * * *
29 * * *
30 * * *

The first hop from my computer to 192.168.1.25 is the jump across the satellite link and shows the typical delays that I encounter. Every single request performed by my computer has to suffer this delay, so my patience with complex websites that use many tiny images to assemble the page is pretty short.

And speaking of short, it appears that battery life here on my laptop is becoming an issue, so I'll wind it up for today.



Module One - FTP

FTP? Well, it all mostly worked.

My usual ftp client - (Midnight Commander, a multipurpose text-mode file manager), didn't enjoy the server at all and complained bitterly about not being able to parse the directory listing. Seeing as one really needs a directory listing to navigate about an unfamiliar server, it made it a little difficult.

So I switched to plain old command-line text-mode ftp, which was perfectly happy with the directory listing. Found the file in a subdirectory, transferred it to my computer with a get command (ignoring the warning about the 60 bare linefeeds received in ASCII mode) and disconnected. And yes, as any non-windows person will tell you CAPITALIZATION (tsk, spelling) matters.

Again, like telnet, ftp is a no-nonsense protocol. You want a file? Log in and get it. Done. Oh, you can cover that with pretty clients that provide seamless integration into windows if you want. But the full functionality is still there with a simple client like the one I used. Four commands ("ls", "cd", "ls", "get readme.txt") was all that was needed to get the necessary file and it took about 20 seconds to do it. Which is the way I like it.

Module One - Telnet

Ah, telnet. When function is more important than form.
Using the telnet interface to the library database shows just how much crud is tacked onto applications now. Even on my satellite connection - where everything I type is delayed a good second or so before it appears on my screen - it's still quite usable.

I suppose that I'm comfortable with telnet, having used it for many years and having been brought up on quite a few text-based adventure games on my first computer ("You are in a deep dark jungle. It looks a bit clearer to the west."). I wonder if those that have only ever had exposure to a GUI (be it windows/mac/whatever) would have had their eyes opened by this.

You don't need a fancy interface or pretty graphics to do most tasks. Bulk data entry operators would prefer everything gets out of their way so that they can type. Not having a keyboard shortcut means precious seconds are lost for them as they take their hands from the keyboard and reach for the mouse to manipulate something in the gui. And they hate it. From them, the scale gradually shifts from function to form, to the point where your average application is covered in curved edges, drop shadows, colour gradients, animated drop-down menus and a bunch of other stuff that Marketing hopes will get you to buy the new version of their product, even though the actual underlying function is mostly the same as the previous version, just with bugfixes.

But the average person likes the bling and gui's do make some things easier to do - multitasking being the obvious thing, with the pieces-of-paper-on-a-desktop metaphor. I was going to say that applications are easier to use with a gui, but that's a crock - a well thought out text application, with good menuing, performs just as well as a similar gui app - I use them all the time with my linux laptop. A poorly designed user interface, be it text or gui, is a hinderance no matter what.

And as for towel.blinkenlights.nl - it's a creative use for something that was never really intended to work like that. Sure, telnet (and terminal emulation, specifically) allows for putting the cursor here and there, to help make nice menus, and areas for text entry and so on. I find it interesting that the star wars movie was done in telnet many years (2001-ish) after the rise of http (1993-ish) - basically, briefly reviving a system that some internet users had never seen. It's anachronistic quality appeals to those that like to think outside the box - it's doing something (playing a lo-res, soundless animation rather laboriously) that any cheap cellphone could do a whole lot better.

There were plenty of other telnet-style tricks out there that were common before the multimedia marvel that is the current computer came into being. Dot matrix printers grinding out ASCII pinups, PC speakers that usually just beeeeeped churning out polyphonic music, text-mode graphics adaptors suddenly tickled into strange undocumented resolutions for blocky versions of Space Invaders - all of them made by people who bent the staid, only-for-business-purposes image of computers into something else entirely.

Top five tips for new bloggers.

Let's begin.

Top Five Tips For New Bloggers.

  1. Don't. Seriously, think twice about why you're wanting to start a blog. Nobody wants to read your drivel. If you're starting a blog in the hope that somebody will read your drivel, then you're likely to be disappointed.
  2. If you are hell-bent on blogging, browse the millions of blogs out there on the internet, find a few that you like, and simply read them instead. Save yourself a lot of time - don't go to all the effort of posting insightful blog entries, just post insightful replies to entries other people have posted. Or, do what seemingly 90% of the blogging world does and post either inflammatory or plain stupid replies. It's great fun, and if you're good at it, you can often distract a blog for days and possibly even lead a blog to destruction as the author loses patience.
  3. Write a blog as if you don't care for your audience. Don't hold back, let them have a piece of your mind. You'll often find the most interesting blogs are full of rants - rants are great discussion starters. Try not to actually abuse your audience specifically though, they get upset. Libel cases are never fun either, so if you're talking about a person specifically, keep it factual. Feel free to make provoking statements that generalise great swaths of the population though. That always gets a bite from someone.
  4. So, if you're actually doing a blog, update it often, but not too often. Daily is good. Hour-by hour is getting a bit much, unless it's a quick status update or an observation. 1500-word manifestos every 15 minutes is getting a little obsessive.
  5. Don't let it get to you. Some clown thinks you're wrong? They're a clown, let it go! Don't go feeding the clowns, they only multiply and then you'll spend all your time arguing with clowns, and who needs that?
Is that five? Yes? Good, I was starting to run out of ideas. Once you list "Don't" , it kind of all goes downhill after that.

Greetings, etc.

Welcome to my Imaginatively-Titled Net11 blog.

Used for the sole purpose of completing a unit at university, this blog is unlikely to evolve into a sheltered haven for intellectual thought and reflection, even though that is one of it's stated goals.

So, If you have stumbled across this page by accident, then you have my sincere apologies - I can only suggest the "back" button on your browser. Press it now, and pray thanks to some non-specific deity that you have not yet viewed the remainder of this blog - packed full of literary (and no doubt, grammatical) horrors, which - once seen by the unsuspecting net denizen - cannot be unseen. The previous sentence was a mere hint of the perils within. Leave now.

If you were actually directed here for Official Purposes, then welcome! Let me lavish upon you a heaping pile of disjointed words and associated drivel, direct from the cynical psyche of someone who has seen too many good intentions turn to dust. The blog awaits your critical eye, and I humbly await your approving tick in the box marked, "Assessment 1 - complete".