Hashemian Blog

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Tuesday, December 26, 2006

HTML Forms, Part 1

My first experience with the World Wide Web about 13 years ago was in school using NCSA Mosaic running on Sun SPARCstation hosts. Mosaic was the original graphical Web browser from which all modern Web browsers today can claim their common ancestry. It was a giant leap from text-based applications such as Usenet readers that were much more common back in those days.

Soon after Tim Berners-Lee invented HTTP, a bunch of developers from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign got together and Mosaic was developed. The resulting work was eventually licensed to Netscape and Microsoft. The Netscape and Internet Explorer browsers were born out of that licensing and the rest is history.

While today's browsers are much more versatile and dynamic, they are essentially the same utilities at their core as the original Mosaic was. The user initiates a request to a Web server, and a response is returned and displayed on the browser. Initially the interaction with the Web servers were one-sided and static in nature. A page was requested and data consisting of text, images, and hyperlinks were returned to the browser. Tags were used to position and style the elements on the browser area. But soon all that changed when web pages were armed with forms from which users would be able to send data back to the servers.

Of course browsers can’t just sent any arbitrary data to the server. The type and format of that data is dictated by the browser. Data not conforming to what the server expects will be, at best, ignored. But what is the mechanism by which data is sent to a server? For that we need to study the two most common request types (a.k.a. verbs) browsers send to servers; GET and POST. We'll look at these two request types in part 2.
ncsa,web browsers,www,netscape,http,web servers,html forms
Labels: browsers, web, web servers
<HTML Forms, Part 1>

// posted by rh

0 comments |

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

The Middle Class Holiday Bonus Shaft

If you read any financial papers or visit any sites with a financial slant around this time, you’re bound to run into an article or two about holiday bonuses. Generally the newsworthy ones are about bonuses granted to money managers and deal makers in big investment outfits.

The usual suspects are fund managers, top brokers, investment bankers, and the likes who rake in hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in bonuses at year-end. Things were not rosy a few years back so bonuses weren't as generous then. Poor babies had to deal with abject destitute. Now that the good times are back and the financial companies are making money hand over fist, bonuses will no doubt follow the trend. If you're looking to get invited to a posh party this new year, I would definitely suggest getting in on the invite list of a fund manager.

One might rightfully ask me, "If you're so bitter about this, why don't you kick it with these boys?" fair question. Maybe I don’t have the instincts, or the guts, or the interest. Money isn't everything, and it's nothing if I hate my job.

At the opposite end of the spectrum there are those with lower-paying jobs. You know, the trash collectors, cleaning staff, bus drivers, etc. No question that sometimes their jobs are more meaningful and crucial than those of the top guys. But even some collect substantial amounts during Christmas time in the forms of gifts and tips. Certainly nothing to compare to what Wall-streeters rake in, but considerable relative to their regular wages.

What's left is the middle class. A few so called lucky ones get paltry bonuses and the rest, nothing. They are not high enough on the ladder to get the out-sized loots, and not low enough to deserve anything meaningful. And isn't it just splendid that tax season would be just around the corner, when the middle-class is expected to pick up the bulk of the tab? I can't wait to give that huge tip to the Fed.
bonuses,wall street,investment bankers,middle class
Labels: business-finance
<The Middle Class Holiday Bonus Shaft>

// posted by rh

1 comments |

Monday, December 11, 2006

Gmail Mail Fetcher

A colleague of mine sent me a note today regarding a new addition to Gmail, Google's free email account. It's called mail fetcher and it allows a person to import mail from other email accounts using the POP protocol. It's a trivial feature which other services such as Yahoo and Hotmail have had for years, but it gives Gmail another advantage to attract new users who might have needed that excuse to join, while holding on to their current base of users who might have defected to other services if Gmail didn't have this feature.

Not all users have this option yet (including myself), but I assume it will be rolled out to all Gmail users soon. This is indeed a convenient service for those who have multiple accounts and would like to have all their emails flow into one inbox. The catch is that those external accounts would need to provide the POP service for this to work and not all services do. This is specially true of other free services like Yahoo and Hotmail who block POP access as some users might opt to import their emails elsewhere and that would mean fewer page views (thus fewer banner views) on their respective sites. Ironically in a show of goodwill, Gmail has provided its users with a POP download service to allow them to view their emails from other locations. If all services provided a two-sided POP access, it will be up to the users to choose the service that best suits them for viewing their messages. That would mean that the site with the superior interface and features would claim a bigger slice of the much coveted eyeballs.

Personally, I don’t have a need for a POP service. I converted to Gmail years ago when they blew away the competition with their giant 2 Gigabyte storage, and I have been a faithful user ever since. What concerns me however is the old adage of putting all my eggs in one basket. And this is a free basket with no guarantees. What would happen if Gmail suddenly decided to cut off my access? Of course they wouldn't just block access to their users willy-nilly, but suppose they decided to pull the plug on some of their users for whatever reason? Perhaps you unknowingly violate an obscure term of service; off with your head. What would be the recourse? Who can you complain to? How or where would you defend your case? You can write to Gmail support, but who knows if they will answer, or how long it will take before they restore your service, if ever?

It's a free service after all, and I suppose they have every right to terminate whoever for whatever reason. Meanwhile all your incoming emails, all your existing emails, all your calendar appointments, and all your contact lists will be out of reach. What would happen to your business, that solely relied on Gmail for customer contacts, now that your access has been cut off? I wonder if people ever consider the downside of this arrangement. It's easy to forget that when the service has been working flawlessly for years. I do wonder about that sometimes. When I enter my account and password and wait for the screen to reload, I wonder if this will be the time when I will be greeted with the message:
Sorry, your account has been disabled. For more information about Google Accounts, please consult our Help Center at http://www.google.com/support/accounts/.
gmail,mail fetcher,google,pop,yahoo,hotmail,email
Labels: email, gmail, google, hotmail, pop, yahoo
<Gmail Mail Fetcher>

// posted by rh

0 comments |

Sunday, December 03, 2006

The Agnostic Advantage

The other day I was browsing through Amazon's bestseller books page when I came upon the book, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Dawkins is the famed British scientist who authored the controversial book, The Selfish Gene, back in 1976. These days he is better known as a vocal atheist and an equal opportunity denouncer of religion and theology.

The subjects of God and religion have become hot topics these days, perhaps more pronounced than the decades past. Each side has dug in its heels and are duking it out on the public arena. The battle between evolution and intelligent design is only one front on that war. Each side is engaged in a struggle to win as many converts as they can and usher more people into their camps. Having a strongly neutral position, I decided to engage in a bit of research and listen to what each side had to offer.

In the end it became obvious that what each side seems to be targeting is the agnostic. Agnostics offer a tempting target to both atheists and the religious because of their openness, tolerance, and their willingness to listen. They are fertile ground to those who want to persuade them to join their cause against the other side.

Neither religion-oriented nor atheists, they are the Switzerland of the war waging between atheism and religion. I suspect another major reason behind targeting this group is that most people, whether they admit or not, are agnostics in nature. They might label themselves atheists, but still struggle with the 'what if' question, as in what if there exists a supreme being who has had a hand in orchestrating everything around us? Or what if science does prove the existence of God some day? On the other side, many religious people are disillusioned with the current world affairs and wonder if there were a God, would he have allowed the state of world to be in such dire condition? Religion hasn't scored many positive points lately. From terrorism to church scandals, religion's image, as an institution, has been considerably damaged, disillusioning many believers.

Each side of this battle has a treasure trove of arsenals in the forms of theories, testimonials, and evidence (however tenuous) to support its position. They are all compelling points of argument, but when you clear the haze, the crux of both arguments rests on a rather simple, yet fundamental, unknown; the origin of the universe. The religious camp argues that the universe could not have come to existence by chance. That it would have needed a designer or a creator, as everything else does. Even if you trace the origin of the universe to the big bang, someone had to be there to spark that original event and place all matters in their current forms. Atheists, while admitting lack of knowledge on the pre-bang conditions (at least for the time being), counter that time and evolution are responsible for the current nature of the universe. Besides, if everything must have a creator, they respond, then God must have had a creator as well. Following the same argument, his creator must have its own creator. This leads to an endlessly vicious circular reference whose final answer is as clear as the exact value of Pi.

Obviously the old age debate will not be resolved any time soon, if ever. Which is why many have decided (consciously or otherwise) to remain agnostics. They see value in both sides' arguments, but they also see plenty of inconsistencies and contradictions. Fence-sitting has its privileges. You can believe in God, but also believe in evolution. You can believe in having a good moral character without believing in heaven or hell. You can believe in science without believing that it can or will ever answer everything about the universe. Yes, sometimes it's troubling to subscribe to two contradictory views, especially when those views within themselves are contradictory. But given the belief choices available today, why not sample all the good parts? After all, we live in the age of iced-coffee, kosher ham, and veggie burgers. Why not religious ambiguity?
god,religion,atheism,agnosticism,richard dawkins
Labels: god, religion
<The Agnostic Advantage>

// posted by rh

2 comments |

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Tuesday, December 26, 2006

HTML Forms, Part 1

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Tuesday, December 19, 2006

The Middle Class Holiday Bonus Shaft

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Monday, December 11, 2006

Gmail Mail Fetcher

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Sunday, December 03, 2006

The Agnostic Advantage

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