Technology

Many tend to use their choice of font and textual arrangement on a whim rather than following good design practices, or functional goals¹. A prime example of this is those who use the automatic^A justify alignment on small blocks of text, such as the center of the paragraph in the image.

IT LOOKS LIKE THIS

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Allowing actions like this to take place could be the beginning of a very slippery slope. I am not a Netflix user but I disagree on the ability to have a communications provider, such as Comcast, charge both ways for the same service. Comcast customers pay a premium for the access to the internet under the assumption that There is only one internet. Actions such as this are the first steps in creating a tiered internet.

Allowing Comcast to impose a fee to service providers on top of what service providers would be the equivalent had the land line phone companies decided that they would charge all businesses extra to receive phone calls from customers. An example of this using the land line analogy would be: ” A customer of the local General store has a question for the store manager about one of the products the store sells. He calls the store’s phone number only to be disconnected with the phone on the other end never ringing. The phone call did not connect because the store owner had not paid an extra fee to talk to customers on top of the store’s existing phone line connection for general use.

If this action is allowed, a precedent will be set that may cause prolonged damage to the open communication pathway that is the internet. A world where communication companies are allowed to charge both their customers and any organization their customer’s interact with.

Worst case scenario only involving charging extra fee’s to businesses: New technologies may not be able to be developed by starting businesses with great ideas due to the increased overhead of paying potential fee’s.

My Background:

I am not a Comcast customer, nor a Netflix customer. I am a software developer by trade.

If you prefer to not sign the petition I urge you to call, tweet(@FCC), or write the FCC.

Thank you for reading and good luck,
Fred Smith Jr.

Link to petition: http://act.boldprogressives.org/sign/petition_netflix/?source=fredsmithjr
Link to reddit thread:  http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/edq8x/breaking_the_new_york_times_just_reported_that/

Yes this post took me a while. I forgot how hectic some work weeks can be and it was a hell of a release at work. Anyway without further ado GIVE CAMP!

For the most part there was some sleeping after the first night of Give camp, some people were even sleeping in style!

Now this is sleeping in style!

We awoke to find a tasty layout for breakfast,

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So I’ve been meaning to post about this event, and now it’s here so now is a perfect time:P

New England Give Camp is the first Give Camp in New England, and so far it is shaping out to be awesome. It goes from today (Friday) @ 5 pm through Sunday @5pm. 48 hours of helping to create, update, and upgrade software for non profits. I am currently assigned to a team to work on updating and upgrading CatchingJoy.org ‘s website with a good amount of Bells and whistles .
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On April 1st (Teaching on a fool’s day, quite awesome) I took up my friend Sara on an offer, teach the students of her school how to be safe online. St Joe’s is a small parochial school in Dorchester, MA of ~ <80 students.

Teaching people how to be safe online is not an easy task.

Problem: Catch the students’ attention spans long enough for them to learn something
Solution: Use proof by induction, show them a hack in a safe environment to open their eyes.

My Lesson Plan :
Verified all the students have or had an IM account at some point. Then I loaded up aim on one machine, sent an IM to a remote machine and packet sniffed the message. The looks on their faces were in a word: Classic.
This peaked their interest as I described that there is no such thing as 100% security on the internet.
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Found Monitor arms on craigslist for a great deal:). My Goal to have as many monitors as possible is nearly complete . Currently 2 monitors per system (L to R, Deja, Mack, DeepWinter)

~Fred

Recently I have been running out of storage space on most of the drives on my main computer. This is partially dfue to a habit I have had since I first had a computer to call my own. My backup practices when moving from machine to machine involved putting everything I wanted to keep in to a transfer folder then transferring that folder. However. If I needed some files before others I would preemptively transfer those specific files. Also I would put them on whatever removable media was available (diskette, CD, thumb drive) This eventually lead to me Having multiple copies of a file.
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One project I worked on recently required the use of MSSQL and Linq for a C# project. During the development of this project I found that I would need to make one of two things: several SProcs to call from tables that were using the same schema just in different ways, or  create one SProc that can take a parameter, and this parameter would determine the table being invoked.
I, hate uselessly duplicating code if it can be avoided so I went the dynamic route.
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I received my new EeePC 901 Linux model from Amazon during this past Wednesday. So far I enjoy it with few complaints.

The Box:
I received it in a sturdy ASUS box with all the pictures of an Eee in use covering it. Inside I find my Eee, a hardware manual, software manual, warranty card, Asus brand Eee sleeve (a nice touch Asus, Bravo) Restore DVD, Linux Support CD, the 6-cell battery, and a special screen wipe.

As with all Lithium Ion batteries a full charge is required before use.  I allowed this to charge immediately and for the rest of the night, about 12 hours was required. The battery indicator is useful (fast blink for 0-10%, slow blink for 10%-80%, and solid for 80%-100%
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My Review of the Pearl White 20GB EeePC Pre-loaded with Xandros. This review should be up within the next week. Depending on when it arrives. Oh waiting for packages, what joy.