Tech Weekly

Every standards-compliant, Google-sensitive image reference should contain 5 key items:

1. A src attribute specifying the URL of the image
2. A width declaration in which the width of the image is specified in pixels
3. A height declaration in which the height of the image is specified in pixels
4. An alt attribute that describes the content of the image—this is the #1 element of image-oriented SEO
5. A title attribute that contains text to be displayed when the user hovers his/her mouse over the image

For this example, we’ll use the image of a yellow hot air balloon at right, which is 220 pixels wide by 212 pixels high.

When we apply the five key items from above with the elements from our example image, we end up with an XHTML image reference that looks something like this:

<img src="http://www.mysite.com/yellow_hot_air_balloon.jpg" width="220" height="212" alt="Yellow hot air balloon" title="Yellow hot air balloon" />

This advice VIA

When I first read the above referenced article I was blown away with how simple something like this should be to have done from the begining. Unfortunately I have not been following these 5 simple steps to make my image postings Google image compliant. I will have to struggle thru correcting this on all of my image postings as I would like for them to be properly indexed. And who knows according to the articles author doing this will have the benificial side effect of eventually garnering more page views. Which is something that I could certainly use.

Labels: Google

The site SpeedTest.net allows you to select servers to ping from around the country on an interactive map and graphically displays connections as they travel with varying speeds along the way. It also lets you store results of tests for your computer and sort them by date, time, speed and distance.

Now what I really like about this site is not only does it do what alot of other bandwidth testing sites do and show you your upload/download speeds it also lists latency numbers between you and the server that you chose. And allows you to play the "I wonder" game. Like are connections from Denmark and the Netherlands faster as you often hear all over the Net. The answer is yes. And will speeds from an island such as Australia and Hawaii be slower? That answer is somewhat strange. Some of the cities on those islands have alot higher latency while others don't. I wondered are the connections traveling via a fiber optic cable along the bottom of the ocean or are they coming back via a satellite.

Anyway the user interface for this site is really I think apealing. And fun to use. And you can even do comparisons with other locations close to you and that use the same Internet service providers. What do you think? Please drop me a comment and let me know. Is there a better site for checking this or is this the best one?

Labels: Site of the Day

The Defense Dept. plans to put a router in space by 2009 to allow troops to access voice, data and video over IP. Eventually DoD's Iris project could allow satellites to send data directly between each other, instead of sending it via ground stations.

IRIS (Internet Router Protocol in Space)
Representing the next generation of space-based communications, IRIS will serve as a computer processor in the sky, merging communications being received on various frequency bands and transmitting them to multiple users based on data instructions embedded in the uplink.
Potential nonmilitary benefits of the IRIS program include the ability to route IP (Internet Protocol) traffic between satellites in space in much the same way packets are moved on the ground, reducing delays, saving on capacity and offering greater networking flexibility, Lloyd Wood, space initiatives manager in the Global Defense, Space & Security division of Cisco, said Thursday.
You save on delays and capacity by not having to go back to the ground," said Wood. "And once you have smarter satellites, you can treat them as not completely separate but as part of your IP network and manage them as you do your IP networking assets on the ground. They become fully integrated with your terrestrial network, allowing you to take advantage of existing management tools and also decrease the number of ground stations. (VIA)

Forgive me but if this doesn't sound like the opening screen from one of the Terminator movies. We inter-connect all of the satellites to themselves. And form some sort of OUTERNET. Now while it makes a lot of sense to me to be able to have reasonable and reliable communications protocols and abilities between machinery that we have circling the earth many miles above. And those machines not having to communicate back to earth then out to space again to get any kind of work done.

What happens if they are hacked for instance? Folks like to believe that the portions of the Internet that are connected to various government systems are rock solid and beyond compromise I would not be so sure that this is the case. And tell me would you really want all of those satellites directly connected to the Internet where there are literally thousands of unemployed and bored individuals with nothing but time on there hands trying to get a little peek at what kind of pictures one of those babies could provide?

Labels: Editorial