Back in 1995, the Internet came to my hometown of Timmins, Ontario. Vianet was the lone ISP and I signed up for an account while I was still in highschool living with my parents (yes, I myself paid for the service). With the floppy disks of tools provided by Vianet (Trumpet Winsock, Netscape Navigator, Eudora and PowWow) a new world unveiled itself to me that was far beyond the local BBS I had become accustomed to. The sheer amount of information available on the burgeoning World Wide Web fascinated me. I had to learn how websites were made.

After learning what a search engine was and how to use one (in this case, it was Altavista), I queried to find out what a web page actually was and how to make it available to the world. I learned that in order to allow people to access the web pages you create with HTML, you need someone to host them for you. In 1996, when I began to seriously experiment with HTML, Geocities was the free web host to use.

A friend and I put together our first website, the Lords of Digital Consciousness. It was, by today's standard, extremely basic and horribly tacky. We abused repeating background images, the MARQUEE tag and animated GIFs. The point I'm trying to make, though, is that Geocities made it super-simple to put together a site for the entire world to see at no cost. Geocities allowed you to store your website in neighbourhoods that matched your site's theme; Area51 for sci-fi, WallStreet for business, Colosseum for sports and so on. Naturally, we parked our Lords of Digital Consciousness website in Silicon Valley - the neighbourhood for computer-related websites.

Even if Geocities becomes just another footnote in Internet history, I won't forget the impact it made on me. In 1996, while working on the Lords of Digital Consciousness in my spare time while I was in university, I wanted to improve and understand the process of creating websites by reading more. Being a pre-pharmacy major at the time, I should have had my nose in biochem and human physiology text books, instead of the HTML, JavaScript and Perl books I had been buying and reading for "fun". I eventually switched my major to Computer Science and the rest is, as they say, history. However, every once and a while - when I'm deep into modern frameworks, n-tier architectures, and enterprise design patterns, I think back to simpler times when completing a project only involved editing some HTML and JavaScript in Windows Notepad and storing it in my place in one of Geocities' neighbourhoods.

Mozilla released Firefox 3.5 last week with loads of new features like the zippy TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. It also includes another feature that I don't think I can ever warm up to - a revamped NSS module that causes ridiculously long launch times on Windows computers.

The NSS is responsible for handling encryption tasks via SSL, TLS, etc. When we're talking about encryption, random numbers are par for the course. I'm not sure how they generated random numbers in previous NSS versions, but for 3.5, Mozilla decided that using various temporary files on people's computers was a stellar way to calculate a seed for a random number generator. Generating truly random numbers on computers is hard. Hell, randomness itself is hard. Yet whatever Mozilla was doing before seemed to work well. Why they decided to use temp files now is anybody's guess. Especially given the fact that typical computer users don't even know of the existence of the various temporary folders on their systems, so we could be talking thousands of files that the NSS has to iterate over to generate a random number generator's seed. Thankfully, this issue has been logged as a Priority 1 bug, so we (hopefully) can anticipate a speedy resolution. In the meantime, if you like Firefox 3.5 on Windows but its slow startup has you at your wits' end (and you don't want to revert to a 3.0.x version), keep the following folders on your computer as clean as possible until this is fixed in a point release:

Windows 2000, XP and 2003

• C:\Documents and Settings\[user_name]\Temp\
• C:\Documents and Settings\[user_name]\Local Settings\Temp
• C:\Documents and Settings\[user_name]\My Recent Documents
• C:\Documents and Settings\[user_name]\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files
• C:\Documents and Settings\[user_name]\Local Settings\History

Windows Vista, 2008 and 7

• C:\Users\[user_name]\Temp\
• C:\Users\[user_name]\AppData\Local\Temp
• C:\Users\[user_name]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent
• C:\Users\[user_name]\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files
• C:\Users\[user_name]\Local Settings\History

There are those on my Facebook friends list - acquaintances, really - whom I speak with sporadically if at all, yet if they provide status updates and post pictures, I have a pretty good idea what's going on in their lives with no actual conversation between us required. I've seen pictures of their vacation to Cuba, the house they just bought, their newborn children and the wicked kegger they went to last weekend. I know when they're happy/sad/at work/[insert any number of life's banalities here]. So when meeting face-to-face with someone I haven't seen in a while whose recent life events are available to me on Facebook, a few awkward moments can occur. For example, people post lots of pictures on Facebook:

Them: Wanna see pictures of our baby?
Me: I saw them when you posted them on Facebook.
Them: Oh, ok. [down-cast face]
Me: [summoning enthusiasm] Let's see them again.

Awkward! It's like entering a room where people are supposed to shout "surprise" at you, but you caught them off guard when they weren't ready, so you're requested to leave and enter the room again and act just as surprised.

Another confusing situation is when you meet a person whom you haven't seen in some time and struggle to start a catching-up conversation. They may have posted status updates about how they hate their boss or renovated their kitchen or bowled a perfect game or bought the Dalai Lama a beer - and you, in turn, commented on these status updates or wrote on each other's walls. The whole face-to-face catching-up chit chat that would normally take place in the good ol' pre-Facebook days is eschewed, and what you're left with is something akin to an old Chris Farley sketch from SNL when it was still watchable:

Me: Hey, remember when you when said you bowled a perfect game and I'm like "three-oh-oh my God, that rawks" and you were all "ya, I was so pumped"?
Them: Yeah.
Me: [giddily] That was awesome.

Admittedly, I'm a staunch technology advocate and early-adopter, but I am concerned about where we're headed as a species. Once upon a time, the concern was that email, IM and IRC would erode our social skills, leaving us tethered to computers in darkened rooms incapable of having in-person conversations ever again. The thing about email, IM and IRC is that they're still essentially two-way communications; you bring up a topic of conversation, then you get a reply, then you reply, then you reply and so on. Social websites like Facebook, on the other hand, allow people to broadcast the goings-on of their lives and an audience comments and rates the activities. It's like we're all Jim Carey's character in The Truman Show, except that we know we're the show and we play it up. Yet because Facebook is our window into everybody else's life, it leaves us with little to say to our acquaintances that we've reconnected with on Facebook when we're standing in front of them once again. Some of our interactions will have to evolve, but how?

I know I'm not part of the blogging and Twitter elite - I'm a scrubby Z-lister blogger and Twitter-er - so I'm clearly doing it wrong. Yet I could not fathom a need to drop that kind of cash on a device to "try it out" or even out of a want for the thing, and here's why - if Apple starts selling books on iTunes or the App Store, it's game over for the Kindle.

The Kindle is a little device that allows you to purchase ebooks from Amazon via a built-in 3G-style wireless and read them. That's all well and good, but what about books with full-colour images and illustrations? To me, that would be like ditching your Nintendo DS and picking up the original GameBoy. The other knock I have against the Kindle is its inability to display monospaced fonts. Almost anything I read is related to software development and reading code in a proportional font is unacceptable - you be the judge:

Monospaced Code:

// You should see this in a monospaced font. Yay : - )
using System;

public class HelloWorld
{
   public static void Main(string[] args)
   {
      Console.WriteLine("Hello, World!");
   }
}

Proportional Code:
// You should see this in a proportional font. Boo-urns : - (
using System;

public class HelloWorld
{
public static void Main(string[] args)
{
Console.WriteLine("Hello, World!");
}
}

It's a no-brainer.

Which is why I say Apple can destroy the Kindle if they decide to sell ebooks on iTunes or the App Store. The iPhone and iPod Touch have beautiful full-colour displays, can render monospaced fonts and feature full 3G and 802.11 wireless connectivity complete with Web browsing abilities.

What's so special about January 1, 1970, you ask? Officially, it's the moment that Unix time began. The Unix operating system uses the total number of elapsed seconds from that date to internally represent dates/time. Therefore, at 6:31:30 PM (EST) today you may proudly salute your Mac Book Pro, Linksys wireless router, or your Facebook account, because those Unix-based products and services will have reached a worthy (but admittedly useless) milestone.

Web technology progresses at a brisk pace, enriching the browser experience via AJAX, Flash, and video. Broadband has kept pace with this to mitigate the bandwidth requirements of these new technologies. When I first signed up with Rogers' broadband Internet service nine years ago, download rates were a tad under 1Mbps. Today, without changing my tier or paying more, I can currently get up to 7Mbps, although it's more realistically in the neighbourhood of 4-5Mbps.

While at Dena's father's house, it became apparent that the sites that I visit on a daily basis (Gmail, Ping.fm, Twitter, Facebook) would be barely usuable on a 40Kbps dial-up connection. The four aforementioned sites do have clean designs, but their use of AJAX (and the amount of JavaScript code required to be downloaded to the client) choke a dial-up connection. This made me realize that even in my own development work, I write a fair amount of JavaScript code for AJAX use to improve user experience, but I now am aware that dial-up users won't be experience much while they wait for the page to load. We spend plenty of time optimizing back-end code running on the web server, but perhaps we've neglected tweaking the client-side code. If there were reliable statistics regarding broadband vs dial-up users, we'd have a valid business case.

In the end, to make these sites usable on my father-in-law's computer, I resorted to using the mobile versions of the websites:http://m.ping.fm, http://m.twitter.com and http://m.facebook.com. As a nice touch, GMail offers a basic HTML version of the site while the JavaScript code loads. It was better than nothing.

Modem Handshake Sound