A bit of beginner’s info: whenever you type a name of a website into your browser, such as matazone.co.uk, your computer has a look at what is called the DNS list. This list links together names of websites with their IP address. The IP address is a series of numbers telling your computer where the information for that domain is stored. In other words, it’s the way to find the server where the website resides.
Since the beginning of the internet DNS has been run by the US. All of the DNS admin, and I assume the money charged for it, occured in the US for every country around the world. Understandably, with the internet being of massive importance to almost every nation on the planet, for commerce in the west and for communication in developing countries, quite a lot of places would like to have some more say about how DNS is run.
Guess what? The US isn’t very happy about this idea, but it looks like it’s going to happen anyway.
Nevertheless with just one day remaining, the pressure to seal a deal is intense, and it looks increasingly likely that by 5pm Swiss time on Friday 30th September 2005, the Unites States will be negotiated out of control of the internet.
This is actually a very important event in the history of the internet. It’s going to be very interesting to see what happens next.
Full article here.
This is quite interesting, if you like this sort of thing. Wild mountain gorillas have been seen using tools for the first time in the wild, and not just for finding food either.
Here‘s a great series of photos showing a female gorilla wading across a river, getting waist-deep, then going back to the edge to find a stick to check out the depth in front of her as she crosses.
I think this is great because it shows once again that it’s not only human who have the ability for abstract thought. In particular this is significant because the use of the stick wasn’t to getting food but simply to make her life easier and safer. This is precisely the kind of thing that early humans must have done. It’s very easy to imagine an ancestor or ours poking their way across a river, deciding that they have a good stick, holding on to it, and beginning to find other uses for it. What these photos show is a scene that has probably happened millions of times before, but we’ve never witnessed its like in other creatures. Fantastic.
Full article here.
When it comes to learning Flash, I’m a big fan of the Friends of ED books. My favourite is an oldie but a goodie, Flash MX Most Wanted Effects & Movies UK link
US link
, in particular the tutotial on SoFake.com (which is a lovely little website, with some great design feaures, in particular the use of sound is lovely).
Anyway, the publisher of the Friends of ED books, Apress, also make many other books about (less exciting ;)) computer things like PHP, Java, .NET, etc blah blah rhubarb. They’ve come up with a funky little Firefox extension that allows you to highlight a phrase on the web, right click and do an automatic search of their library for books related to that subject. I think it could be pretty handy when you’re looking to find info about programming and/or Flash. If you think so to then you can download it here: http://www.apress.com/misc/firefox/
Eclectic interesting links and articles collected by a painter, teacher, writer, and ex-PhD student
