On Friday, a few of you were confusing Bing – the search engine – with a browser. I want to clear up what bing is, what a browser is, and how they, or any search engine, can be used.

Bing is a search engine like Google or Yahoo or Ask; really nothing more than a webpage. You can use it in any browser you’d like. Whether you use Firefox, or Chrome, or Internet Explorer, or Opera, or Safari, or any other browser, if you type in www.bing.com the browser you are using will take you to Bing’s home page. Likewise, if you type www.google.com you will be taken to Google’s page, regardless of the browser you are using.

Below are screenshots of Google and Bing in various browsers, so you can see that it’s the same regardless of which browser you choose. (Blogger doesn’t let me align them horizontally, so this is the best I can give you).

I was going to include Internet Explorer and Safari, but to be blunt it would look exactly the same; it would just be Google and Bing in that browser.

The search engine you choose, whether it’s Google or Bing or whatever, is independent of the browser you use to view it.

Or lunch lounge or university food hall. Remember the white noise machine I posted a while back? Coffitivity.com is in the same vein as that, except instead of white noise it presents background noise to simulate being in one of the places mentioned above. So there will be the gray noise of chatter, clinking glasses, laughter, and other appropriate ambient sounds. Like white noise, it’s supposedly able to help you concentrate on whatever it is you’re trying to do. Now you don’t have to put up with those pretentious latte-drinking socialites at Starbucks, you can just stay home, make your own coffee, and do whatever you were going to do anyway! Maybe that’s not as fun as it sounds.

I’ll just leave these here. Prepare to never sleep again.

Unlike the previous two, I love this spider one. Not only is it 3D printed, It moves accurately, the same way a spider moves by coordinating legs on both sides of its body so the ones that aren’t moving it forward form a triangle keeping it upright. It’s threat pose and lateral moves are also accurate based on actual observations and measurements of multi-legged organisms (that right-left look it does in the beginning isn’t something real spiders do, though. Yet…). 

You all know my deal, so I’ll say it again: Bing! Hint: You can steer that background with the mouse or on-screen controls. Another interesting bit, this is done – as are all their animated backgrounds – through the use of the somewhat new HTML 5.0 specification, which among other things allows rich content such as videos, music, and other interactive content without requiring additional software be installed. In other words, if you click on a video link, it can play right in the browser without needing a separate piece of software installed such as MediaPlayer or Quicktime or VLC or whatever else instead. Also, notice the news story along the bottom in the screenshot about Microsoft releasing the source code of DOS and Word? Well guess what’s posted right below! See how it all comes together?

You may remember our discussion of the command-line interface and DOS in particular, as well as some of our discussions about Word, including its metaphorical design and the presentation/action language.

In what I feel is a gross misuse of technology, it has been reported that Malaysia Airlines notified families of flight MH370 that it had likely crashed into the ocean and their families and loved ones, and did it by text message.

We are already living in a world where people often communicate by text and social network as opposed to voice, some interpersonal relationships exist solely via text/online, and immediate responses are expected (you know if someone doesn’t respond in 3/5ths of a second to your text, you wonder what’s taking so long). For casual conversation I can understand, but it is not appropriate for dumping someone, threatening/harassing someone, and certainly not doing…this kind of thing.

And above all, it is not appropriate for telling people their families and friends have perished. Malaysia Airlines defended their method, which on first read almost makes sense, but there need to be some circumstances that are simply off limits, and I definitely think this is one of them.

Ah, the good old days.

Remember in class, when I played you the noise that the old dial-up 14.4/28.8kbps (kilobits per second) modems would make whenever you called in to an ISP? Remember how I said it was the process of (most) of the 7 layers of the OSI – Open System Interconnect – model doing their thing? In case you missed it, here’s the video again so you can relive the glory days of old.

But I’ve done you one better! The image below, which is pretty big so you can zoom way in, shows you each step of the handshake that sets up the connection. For each noise that is made, this diagram explains exactly what’s going on.

It’s somewhat complicated, I know. Mapping what’s happening in the video of the sounds to the image above isn’t exactly intuitive. So I’ve done you one MORE better! The video below is the image above, but with the sound superimposed over it, and it shows exactly what is happening as each noise is heard over the modem. This makes everything much easier to understand, although it’s still a lot.

The reason I’m showing you this is that even though we don’t have to hear that infernal modem noise anymore, modems still work the same way, cable or dial-up. This will help give you an idea of how machines make connections and send packets across a network, the process is still the same.

In our discussion of networking, we talked about how messages are broken up into ‘packets,’ which are like envelopes that have a part of the original message, some error-tracking information, a destination and return address, and some other info. Now, I’m going to show you how to see the individual packets as they pass along your node of the World Wide Web.

First, download a program called Wireshark, which you can do at this link. You can download it for Windows or Mac, in 32 or 64-bit versions. To find out which version you need, you can go to the control panel in Windows Vista/7 and select ‘System and Security,’ then select ‘System’ and near the bottom of that window you will see whether you have a 32 or 64-bit OS. On Windows 8, slide-in from the right on your screen or move your mouse to the upper-right corner of the screen, select the ‘Settings’ charm, then select ‘PC Info.’

On Mac, click the Apple logo in the upper-left corner of your screen, then select ‘About this Mac’ from the menu (if a window appears that has a ‘More Information’ button, click that). In the window that appears, click ‘Hardware’ and on the right side it will tell you your processor type. If it says anything other than ‘Intel Core Solo’ or ‘Intel Core Duo’ it’s 64-bit. If it say one of those two it’s 32-bit. This install guide is for Windows, but it will be almost, but not quite the same on a Mac.

Once you’ve downloaded Wireshark, double-click on it to install. It will ask if you want to install all the components as you see in the screen below, which you should. Keep in mind that Wireshark will also install a program called WinPcap, which actually captures the packets.

One the Install starts, you’ll see a screen something like this, with the green progress bar scooting along the top:

It won’t get far, however, before you are asked to install WinPcap. You do want to do that, Wireshark won’t work without it. You can set it to run at boot time or not, but if you don’t and try to run Wireshark after a reboot, it won’t work.

Once WinPcap has installed, the main Wireshark installation will finish and you will have an icon for it on your desktop. When you start the program, you will see a screen like this:

This is known as packet-sniffing, and it’s an incredibly valuable tool that can help you diagnose issues or simply see what is being sent across your network. Usually, when you see an IP address beginning with 192.168.1 or 255.255.255, that is your network sending data to your network.

I think you’l be amazed at how much data is sailing across your network all the time, and how much information you can get from watching it. Be amazed!

In class on Friday, a story was told about someone who went to Office Depot (I think it was Office Depot. Office max? Staples? One of those) and bought gold-plated Ethernet cables. Or gold-wired, or gold-something. I interpreted that to mean the ends of the cable were gold plated as sometimes happens with other analog cables like this one or this one or these. I was intrigued, because gold-plating Ethernet cable connectors would do absolutely nothing.

So I went to the local office supply store to see what they had. I found the Belkin Cat6 (Category 6) Ethernet cable that you can see below; Ethernet cable is usually the blue or grey networking cable you may have at home. Cat6 has higher transmission speeds than Cat5, but is also more expensive. Both Cat5 and Cat6 are a type of Ethernet cable, which is a type of twisted-pair wire as we discussed in class. Standard phone-line is also twisted-pair but a much lower transmission rate. Cat5 Ethernet cable usually has about 3 twists per inch, although manufacturers differ.