What follows is the journal of Don Thornton II. This page contains the entries for the selected month (or the month of the most recent entry if none was selected). Being a journal its main purpose is to express opinions on whatever subjects happen to be interesting on any given day. Any links embedded within entries are subject to linkrot and may or may not be corrected at some unannounced date. Choose a month to see entries for that month, or choose a date to jump straight to that date's entry within this page.

--ArielMT

Thursday, April 3, 2008

[ TRS-80 Model 100. ] [ Web Ads. ] [ NaNoWriMo. ]

What an interesting time off from writing I have had. I'm still alive, but I've been quite busy with several projects.

Among them, I found a Dvorak keyboard driver for the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 laptop PC I use, which means that now I can out-type the world's first real laptop computer. Granted, it's only in short bursts, but still it's quite an accomplishment for me. (It wasn't until switching to Dvorak that I actually learned touch-typing with enough speed and accuracy to use a keyboard well.) The driver is in the file DVORAK.100, a BASIC program that actually creates the driver, and its documentation is in the file DVORAK.DOC (a plain text document in the format used by DOC files before Microsoft co-opted that standard with Word), at the Club 100 site in the Text library.

I'm not going to even try to rearrange the keys, because I want to keep it in as pristine a condition as I can. (I will eventually have to take it apart to clean out all the years of use it's seen, though.) There's still nothing that beats a laptop boot-up time of one second combined with an in-use battery life of about 20 hours, not even 25 years later.

Next on the list of accomplishments is the creation of a Web ad banner network that works. I'm absolutely sick and tired of intrusive and irrelevant ads in the pages I visit, as I'm sure you are as well, but I'm also at the same time aware of the needs of Webmasters to recover the costs of the labors of love that they otherwise provide for free. That problem is needlessly compounded by the complete lack of oversight ad networks have, and the complete lack of control webmasters have, over the content of the ads; and here for the last few years, a disturbing amount of ads served have been quite malicious*. The only alternative offered to a webmaster is to become his own ad network, an alternative that won't bring in enough money to justify the labor. What's needed is an ad network friendly to webmasters, as well as to advertisers who want only to run ads (as opposed to taking over your PC without your consent), and most importantly to visitors, the ones who will be seeing the ads.

*Ad networks are a huge target for malware distribution because they allow for active scripting completely unrestrained by any technical means. Those aren't just harmless random banners showing up on your favorite sites. And sometimes, they bring along more than just tracking cookies. The following sample of news stories show just how unsafe even "safe" Web sites can be, and although exploits can crack the pages directly, the ad networks those pages depend on aren't necessarily any safer.

Dolphins' Web sites hacked in advance of Super Bowl - Robert McMillan, IDG News Service via InfoWorld, February 2, 2007.
Password-stealing hackers infect thousands of Web pages - Robert McMillan, IDG News Service via InfoWorld, March 13, 2008. News that's much more recent.
Trend Micro hit by massive Web hack - Robert McMillan, IDG News Service via InfoWorld, March 14, 2008. Not even an anti-malware software vendor is immune.
It's the applications, stupid - Roger A. Grimes, InfoWorld, April 4, 2008. The most oft-targeted client application is the Web browser, and the most oft-targeted server applications are popular Web sites and large Web ad networks. Put those two together, and you're under attack even from sites considered "safe."
Malicious Web ads - Google News search results. This search returned 149 results within the past month.
Drive-by download - Google News search results. This search returned 53 even more relevant results within the past month.

Another problem with ad networks is that they charge by the impression or by the click, leading to an easy to exploit (and hard to prevent) problem called "click fraud," as well as pricing themselves out of the millions of small Web sites on the 'Net.

This project is going to be a very simple solution to those problems.

The event is still quite a long way away, but now that I'm typing on Dvorak on something as readily available as this Model T, I wonder if I'll have a chance to compete in the National Novel Writing Month ( NaNoWriMo) this November. I've of course got ideas, and I likely won't have a chance to flesh 'em out until then, but I've held on to them for literally decades now, and I shouldn't have any problem getting one out in 50,000 words.