Internet

Facebook is going to start tracking you on 44 sites…so what?

November 7, 2007 von Harald Puhl

Google is already tracking you on millions of sites, thanks to this little piece of code:

Do you use GMail? Well, Google is scanning the contents of all your messages, and they also log the IP address you use to check your email – thus, they can tie all your browsing habits to your individual email account and the content of your emails. This is a huge amount of information for any company to gather about individuals. Additionally, Google keeps records of the searches you perform on their engine, thus giving them yet another layer of data to check. Scared yet?

In contrast, Facebook announced that they will be launching a targeted advertising platform with 44 partner sites, which will add a tracking code informing Facebook of your browsing habits. More by Om Malik here. I personally don’t care about 44 sites, but about the millions of sites using Google Analytics, and about the people using GMail to check their corporate email accounts, thus potentially having sensitive material indexed by Google. Food for thought.

Internetzugang über DSL

Oktober 10, 2007 von Harald Puhl

Ein DSL Zugang besteht aus drei grundlegenden Komponenten: DSL Anschluss, DSL Hardware und DSL Tarife. Einen DSL Anschluss bekam man bis vor einigen Jahren ausschließlich bei der Telekom oder einen ihrer DSL Reseller. Reseller heißt Wiederverkäufer, womit die Unternehmen gemeint sind, die die komplette DSL Technik der T-Com nutzen und einen Internetzugang nur unter dem eigenen Firmennamen vertreiben. DSL Kunden mussten, um die Reseller Angebote nutzen zu können, immer auch einen Telekom-Telefonanschluss haben.

Dies hat sich inzwischen geändert: Immer mehr Provider bieten einen DSL Anschluss inklusive DSL Telefonanschluss an. Der DSL Zugang läuft so völlig unabhängig vom „Rosa Riesen“ und insgesamt sind diese Komplettpakete oftmals deutlich günstiger. wer Internetanschluss und Telefonanschluss aus einer Hand bestellt nutzt einen weiteren Vorteil: Man bekommt die monatliche Abrechnung von einem Provider und spart sich sonst anfallenden Papierkram.

Ein DSL Anschluss hat immer eine bestimmte DSL Geschwindigkeit. DSL Geschwindigkeit bezeichnet die Leistungsstäke, mit der ein Internetzugang datenübertragungen durchührt. Will man beispielsweise nur Surfen und chatten ist kein DSL Anschluss mit hoher DSL Geschwindigkeit vonnöten, da die Datenrate bei diesen Anwendugen vergleichsweise niedrig ist. Anders sieht es aus, wenn mit dem DSL Zugang Multimedia-Funktionen vorgenommen werden. Um für Online-Games oder eine Übertragung live gestreamter Spielfilme eine geeignete Performance-Qualität zu erreichen bedarf es eines extrem schnellen DSL Zugang.

Bevor man sich einen DSL Anschluss zulegt sollte also auf jeden Fall eine Bestandsaufname dessen gemacht werden, was man von seinem Internetzugang erwartet. Und wenn der bestellte DSL Zugang im Nachhineien doch nicht genügend DSL Geschwindigkeit bietet lässt sich dies in der Regel schnell ausbessern; sofern man nicht bereits die höchste am Standort zu Verfügung stehende DSL Geschwindigkeit nutzt. Denn so ziemlich alle DSL Anbieter ermöglichen ein Speed-Upgrade auch nach Vertragsabschluss.

Open WebMail

Oktober 1, 2007 von Harald Puhl

Open WebMail is a webmail system based on the Neomail version 1.14 from Ernie Miller. OpenWebMail is a full-featured webmail, addressbook, calendar, and webdisk system that is designed to manage very large mail folder files in a quick and memory efficient way.

Started in 2001, it is written in Perl and available for free under an open source BSD license.

Latest Official Releass of OpenWebMail are packaged as tarballs and are available at

Some image application programs that can do image modification and/or format conversion

August 20, 2007 von Franz Hieber

MS Paint, Visua, Irfan View, Adobe Photo Deluxe and Paint Shop Pro will be mentioned here. This group has been cited because they are often found among the software available to users.
MS Paint is installed with Windows. It can be used for cropping and re-sizing, among others.
Irfan View is a free download. Irfan View is full-featured viewer/modifier/converter.
Visua can be obtained from private archives and is mainly an easy-to-operate viewer and format converter, which can be used to crop and re-size.
Adobe Photo Deluxe is often bundled with purchased peripherals like printer, scanner, or camera. It is a full-featured viewer/modifier/converter. More complete image application programs like Adobe PhotoShop LE have occasionally been sent as free software with the purchase of a peripheral.
JASCs Paint Shop Pro has many uses, and is suitable for colorizing and some types of retouching. It also is an image format converter, with the standard supported file types. It has a collection of tools that allow a user to make many types of midifications to an image. In the Colors|Adjust tool, there are six menu choices that provide dialog screens for making modifications. Among them are a gamma tool adjustment where the gamma values selected for red, green, and blue may be selected independently or together.

Altering the image content (in addition to the modifying steps shown above) can include:
Smoothing edges, reducing granularity, reducing moir patterns, adding special effects, balancing brightness from one region of the image to another, retouching, rotating the image by multiples of 90 degrees, rotating the image by a selected amount, and flipping an image horzontally or vertically.
Printing features may include:
Print preview, an image scaling and positioning feature, rotating the image by 90 degrees, presence or absence of header, footer, pre-set margins, etc.
Viewing features may include:
Manual or automatic stepping through a collection of files, viewing a cluster of files as thumbnails, reproducing sound files along with images.
Applications to add displayability to images include:
Adding captions and/or legends, adding automatic presentation features to an image collection.
Displaying animated images:
Animated GIFs are a stepped sequence of GIF images which simulate motion. Animated GIFs wont work in all viewing software. They are commonly used on web pages, as they will display properly in web browsing viewers.

A brief discussion on images which are produced in scanner formats or in image converter formats.
When working with images in scanner software or in image converter software, it is useful to remember that these are temporary image files with formats which:
Can modify the appearance of the image file that was imported. Can be used to make a print of the modified image. Usually wont be useful in this current format to share but will allow you to see what you have Must be saved or exported to a folder elsewhere on a drive which has a folder assigned to accept it, if you wish to share it or archive it. Dont alter the source image that is, not unless you save or export the file and assign the same file name and place it in the folder from which it came.
Although such scanned temporary files may be retained by some scanner software, they will only serve as your own archived images for later retrieval, and then generally for short retention periods.

Free File Hosting – Disk Space

Juni 21, 2007 von Harald Puhl

Disk space is essential to any web site. Disk space is essentially the space that is allotted to a web site in comparison to the amount on the hard drive of the server, or the computer that the information is being stored on. If you order 5 GB’s of disk space then you are allotted those 5 GB’s on one of the server’s hard drives.

Disk space is purchased along with bandwidth in hosting packages for web sites and is related to bandwidth in every way. While bandwidth is the amount of data that is being downloaded from the server, the disk space is the space on the hard drive that holds that data. Basically, disk space is the space where the files and images are stored and the bandwidth is how many times that stored information is being downloaded from the server to other computers.

Disk space allows web site owners to use that space for whatever they’d like to store. Disk space is, in essence, a web site owners virtual storage room. The web site owner has access to this storage room via his or her own computer and can access that storage room at any time and store any file they’d like in there. They can have private sectors of files they don’t want downloaded and then other areas related to the web site itself that can be downloaded. Disk space is like having a hard drive on someone else’s computer that you can access and use yourself on any other computer.

In larger terms, the disk space for a file hosting company is related to the file uploading of a user on that file hosting web site. Users upload files and images to the web site which can then be accessed at any time. By uploading, the users are submitting their file to the disk space that the file hosting web site has purchased in their hosting plans on the server. A user uploads their files and those files join countless numbers of other files from other users all over the world on that same server. Those files on that disk space can then be downloaded from anywhere.

Free File Hosting – Free Online Storage

Februar 2, 2007 von Harald Puhl

What is file hosting, you ask? Well, it is quite an easy concept, really. File hosting is a process that allows users, such as yourself, to upload files and images online. These files and images are uploaded and then can be accessed by typing in the web address that was assigned to the files when they were uploaded. By visiting this address, these files can be seen and/or downloaded at any time and from any location.

File hosting is a fairly simply process by which a computer that is acting as a server takes in the files that are being uploaded to it and saves that information onto its hard drive. This data, once on the server, is able to be accessed like any other information on the web. The server assigns that data a web address from which it can be accessed. When a user visits that address, the data that is stored on the hard drive of the server can then be downloaded as many times as necessary from anywhere in the world.

The usefulness of such a tool is only too obvious. One is able to easily upload a picture to be able to share with their friends anywhere in the world at the click of a button. Having trouble printing a document or just need to be able to open it elsewhere and have no other way to transport it? Simple, upload the document and download it from another location with ease. File hosting allows users the ability to share and host their files with ease.

The best part about most online file hosting is that, unlike regular web hosting, it is free.