Breakfast of Champions

The first video of the three is entitled “Breakfast of Champions” and is the product of the final project for a video production class I took during my undergraduate stay at Georgia Tech. We messed around a bunch in front of green screens and then thought it would be a good idea to illustrate the potential hazards of eating moldy food that has been sitting in the back of your refrigerator for far too long

The Cartoonist!

The second video is yet another product of a class I took at Georgia Tech, this time around being Digital Video Special Effects. My team and I were fans of the movie “A Scanner Darkly,” a movie which has a somewhat interesting plot line with a much more interesting visual style. As I understand it, the idea behind Scanner Darkly was to shoot the film in its entirety and then develop an algorithm to produce the vectorized style that makes the movie so unique (as those of you that have seen the movie are likely aware of). It turns out that once the movie was shot, developing the algorithm was non-trivial. Not being ones to be intimidated by a challenge, my team set out on developing our own approach to the Scanner Darkly algorithm, and this video was produced to demonstrate our finalized product. While we by no means faithfully recreated Scanner Darkly’s style, I would say we made good progress in the short amount of time we spent on it. It should be noted, though, that supposedly the most difficult part of algorithmically producing Scanner Darkly’s effect was in frame-to-frame continuity, an issue which is clearly highlighted by our version.

Noah’s Ark

My third and final offering is, once again, a product of a Georgia Tech course. Our assignment was to produce a machinima video depicting a dystopian environment, and as such we thought it only appropriate to reproduce the story of Noah’s Ark with a flood of man-made trash instead of water. We created the models, rigged them, imported them in to Unreal Tournament 3, scripted the many events seen in the video, recorded footage with FRAPS, and edited and produced the final video in Adobe Premiere.

And that’s it for now, folks! Keep checking back for the next update in the “Guts of a Dynamic Web Site” series, and I’ll hopefully be starting to discuss security topics as I learn them here as well. Until next time!

If I asked you what the best way to distribute an application across mobile devices, tablets, and laptops/desktops was, what would you answer? There are quite a few ways to do it, such as Unity, but all of them come with their own compatibility issues. Unity, for instance, requires a proprietary Unity plugin to be installed if someone wants to play a Unity-made game in a browser. Flash may have decent penetration for traditional devices, but it’s role as a cross-platform distribution method is quickly dying out due to a number of factors (Apple’s crusade against them falling under this category). Then there’s the more traditional approach; develop it once for every platform, meaning you would have it developed once for iOS, develop it again for Android, develop it once more for Windows Phone, and develop it again for traditional devices. None of these choices are particularly appealing.

For those of you that keep your ears to the proverbial internet ground, another alternative may have initially jumped to mind; HTML5. Until recently, developers that were targeting multiple platforms with their applications didn’t have the best options to work with in terms of ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches, and HTML5 changes that. While not every browser supports WebGL yet and WebSockets are a long way from being ubiquitously implemented, the canvas element has been universally implemented. With the canvas element developers are able to work with rich graphical environments across every device that carries a browser, and because HTML5 is an industry standard, browsers don’t have much of a choice as to whether or not they want to implement this functionality (unless they don’t care about staying competitive). Additionally, developing applications with HTML5 can circumvent the app markets of various devices, meaning the 30% that would be taken from developers’ revenues would instead remain in the developers’ pockets.

The canvas element is far from perfect, however, and the tools being built for it are still in their respective childhoods. With a ‘one-size-fits-all’ tool like HTML5 and the canvas element there are a number of questions that must be answered, and I’m writing this in an attempt to answer one of them. In the process of working on a game based in HTML5 and being developed for all browser-bearing platforms I came to the realization that I would have to serve different material based on the device I was serving it to. Customers would not be very happy if we sent them HTML which was designed for a mobile device when they were viewing it on their laptop, and vice versa.

And so this experiment was born, the end goal of which is to determine an acceptable aspect ratio for delivering HTML to mobile devices, to tablets, and to traditional devices (three aspect ratios total). With this information, developers would be able to develop a single application for distribution across all types of devices, with the only platform-specific efforts going towards paltform-specific HTML and CSS. If you would like to participate in the experiment, please click here. The experiment requires no registration and only takes thirty seconds of your time. The idea is simple; open the page, adjust the browser you are viewing the page in to the size and layout you prefer when leisurely perusing the interwebz, and click the submit button. That’s it! Those of you that are TRULY dedicated are more than welcome to participate once on every device you own (ie: cell phone, tablet, and laptop)!

At the time of writing this I have had 166 entries, and I am not looking to draw conclusions from the data until I have at least 1,000 entries. Should I reach my goal, I will develop an infographic that aggregates the data in to an easily understandable set of metrics so that all developers may benefit. Additionally, I will have a URL that prints all of the gathered data as a JSON object so that others may do what they please with it.

So, if you have a few minutes of free time and wouldn’t mind helping me out, your time and effort would be greatly appreciated!

Participate in the experiment!!!

Mandelbrot Zoom

One of the most intriguing concepts behind the Mandelbrot set is that it’s a construct that exists between the second and third dimensions. This may precipitate asking the question, “How in the world does something exist between physical dimensions?” The answer can be found in the fact that the Mandelbrot set does not have any edges. From a particular zoom level it may appear as if there are certain edges in the structure of the Mandelbrot set, but upon closer examination these so-called ‘edges’ are actually intricate swirling patterns. This application was built to demonstrate this fact, as it allows you to zoom in (not to infinity, but reasonably far) to a Mandelbrot set and explore its ‘edges.’ In the application you can click and drag on the set to produce a zoom box. Upon releasing the mouse button, the set will be zoomed in to the specified area. Pressing ‘R’ will reset the zoom level to the initial state and ‘E’ will increase the iterative depth for the Mandelbrot equation (ie: increase the level of detail the set displays).

Mandelbrot Zoom Comparison

Those that were paying close attention to the previous paragraph may have noticed that I stated my Mandelbrot zoom application cannot zoom in to infinity. The main factor behind this is the range of values that a float data structure can store. A float can only store numbers with so many digits, and zooming in to a Mandelbrot set can quickly exhaust the range of possible numbers that a float can represent. In order to demonstrate that Mandelbrot sets can, in fact, be zoomed in to infinitely, I used the Java BigDecimal class (an arbitrary-bit precision decimal representation class) to allow for arbitrarily many bits of precision. In this application I have Mandelbrot sets using BigDecimal, Double, and Float data structures respectively. Clicking anywhere within the BigDecimal window will zoom in to all three Mandelbrot sets at that point. Due to the incredibly long amount of time that the BigDecimal Mandelbrot set takes to render at increasing zoom levels, I have added the option to turn off rendering for a given set by pressing the ’1′, ’2′, or ’3′ keys. If you’d like to use the application, I would recommend pressing ’1′ first, zooming in as far as you can with the Double and Float sets, and then re-activating the BigDecimal set by pressing ’1′ again. You’ll quickly see what I mean when I say that BigDecimal takes a long time to calculate!

Mandelbrot / Julia Set Comparison

Another interesting artifact of the Mandelbrot set is its relationship to the similar Julia set. For every point in the complex plane that the Mandelbrot set exists on there is a unique corresponding Julia set. That is what this application is all about; showing you the relationship between the Mandelbrot set and the Julia set. Simply click anywhere on the Mandelbrot set on the left hand side of the application to see the Julia set that corresponds to that complex point on the right hand side!

4D Julia Set Renderer

Last but certainly not least is the 4D Julia set renderer. While the previous Julia and Mandelbrot sets have been in two dimensions using complex numbers, both fractals also have four-dimensional versions using quaternion numbers as well. One of the most popular 4D representations of the Mandelbrot set is commonly referred to as the Mandelbulb, while the 4D Julia set is still referred to as a Julia set. This application takes a three-dimensional slice of the four-dimensional Julia set and displays it. While this may seem odd to take a three-dimensional ‘slice,’ I am using the term slice to mean removing variability of a dimension. If you were to take a slice of a cube, you would end up with a two-dimensional rectangle (ie: you lose a dimension), and when you take a slice of a four-dimensional object, you end up with a three-dimensional object. I wish I could show you what the 4D Julia set actually looked like, but unfortunately we don’t really have a way to describe a fourth dimension in a way that we can readily visualize. What this application can do, though, is show you the three-dimensional slice that exists for a given quaternion constant. Enjoy!

That’s it for now. You can check out all of the fractal applications and other projects I’ve worked on in the past via my Portfolio.

Photo courtesy of Andrew Dallos

Over the past few weeks / months I have been closely following all of the happenings in the realm of internet censorship and copyright protection (SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, etc). I am heavily emotionally invested in the topic, and as such I didn’t want to write this piece until I felt I had considered both sides of the story thoroughly. Now, after speaking with my representatives’ respective staffers a handful of times, posting and re-tweeting anti-SOPA and anti-PIPA opinion pieces and factual breakdowns ad nauseam, and reading as much as I could about the issues, I feel that I am well equipped to weigh in on the issue. Those of you that have read some other posts I have written may recall that I wrote about how SOPA is more dangerous than you may think. While that could certainly be considered “weighing in on the topic,” I aim to supply you with a much more objective and pragmatic analysis this time around.

The foundation of copyright is valid

A lot of the arguments that I have heard against SOPA and PIPA have taken issue directly with the concept of copyright. I have heard many individuals claim that the idea behind enforcibly owning ideas and art is a flawed concept, as defining boundaries for an idea or a creative work is near impossible. In arguing this, issues such as the patent war between Apple and Samsung are cited as proof that owning a concept serves solely to bully others in courts.

While I think that the people that argue this point certainly have some solid ground to stand on, I would argue that the issue we are currently facing is not due to the concept of copyright itself but instead the inability of legislation to keep up with technology. Copyright was initially created to protect the people that came up with an idea that could otherwise be stolen and replicated by competitors. This concept is, in and of itself, a good idea. I fully believe in open-sourcing applications and sharing brilliant ideas with others, but if I had no way to protect inventions I had made that were putting money in my pocket, then I would have no drive to be an inventor.

Now, this is not to say that copyright in its current form is a good thing. On the contrary, copyright has gotten so incredibly out of control that it is posing a detrimental threat towards the freedoms so many of us hold dear. Where copyright was created to protect the artist / inventor and her assets for a reasonable period of time following conception of the copyrighted idea, it is now being leveraged as a mechanism to cripple market competition and increase barriers to market entry. This utilization is nearly the exact opposite of what copyright was initially intended for; to protect business owners and grow the economy. It is because of this re-defining of what copyright refers to that the idea of copyright is so demonized. For the benefit of all those not directly associated with the titans of copyrighted content, legislation needs to be scaled back to better embody the ideals from which copyright was born.

Piracy DOES need to be quelled

Hopefully the preceding header may have caught a few of you off-guard, as I’m sure a number of people that know me would expect me to say otherwise. Let me be clear though, there is a clear difference between piracy and file sharing. The recent debacle with MegaUpload being taken offline by the FBI has sparked a large amount of controversy, including discussing the legality of the take down. Many internet gathering spots such as Reddit have cried foul, screaming about the over-reach that arresting a non-US citizen in a foreign country demonstrates.

MegaUpload being taken down was a good thing, and here’s why:

• MegaUpload was a site whose primary revenue stream relied heavily on directly stealing and redistributing creative works produced by other legitimate entities. Users would be rewarded for uploading content that resulted in large amounts of downloads, a reward system that ended up heavily rewarding users that would upload copyrighted and protected content. In doing so MegaUpload was a poster child for what the RIAA and MPAA would like you to believe a pirate is.
• MegaUpload was doing this in plain sight and on American soil. They had a server farm located within the physical boundaries of the US, and they were additionally registered with an ICANN-controlled TLD (.com). While other “rogue” websites that have participated in shady business dealings are predominantly located in places that are outside of US jurisdiction to avoid this problem, MegaUpload seemed to think they were above the law and out of reach.
• MegaUpload was taken down with due process. The FBI stepped through all the necessary existing legislative hoops that they needed to in dealing with MegaUpload. They acquired warrants, launched a full-fledged investigation, and acquired enough evidence to step in and take the site down.
• The FBI taking MegaUpload down shows that the legislative and investigative tools the FBI has in their arsenal are more than sufficient to take care of pirates (especially considering the voracity the site was taken down with). They have effectively declawed, dismantled, and defunded the entire corporation, and they have done so entirely within the boundaries of the law. In effect they have proven that SOPA and PIPA are unnecessary for combating piracy.

MegaUpload was a near-perfect example of what the initial idea of copyright served to protect against. They were true pirates in the sense of the name, and they needed to be stopped. This is the distinction that, in a perfect world, the MPAA and RIAA should realize constitutes a pirate rather than a file sharer. To better explain this, consider the following. If I am an otherwise law-abiding citizen that downloads a movie or album every once in a while from a network of peers who have the respective file, then I should not be considered a pirate in the traditional sense (more on this in the following section). If I am an individual or company that directly financially benefits from giving copies of software/video/audio/etc away that I do not own, then I am a pirate. The first of these two should be allowed to prosper, while the second should be taken down accordingly.

File sharing arose from industries that didn’t meet their customers’ demands

File sharing arose due to two issues that the recording, movie, and software industries failed to address; availability and pricing. While Valve CEO Gabe Newell may not agree with me on the idea that pricing was a motivator in the file sharing realm, he is quoted to have said

We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem [...] If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.

This could not be more true. This is the twenty first century. I am typing this on a computer that is constantly connected to the internet. I have a phone sitting on my desk that has more computing power under the hood than space shuttles do. Technology is a fantastic thing, and copyright-based industries will fight tooth and nail to convince you otherwise (keeping in mind that these are the same groups that claimed the player piano, MP3 player, and VCR were all death sentences for their respective industries).

For those of you that have Netflix, when was the last time you downloaded a movie illegally? If you did download a movie illegally, was the movie available on Netflix to stream? The same argument holds true for Spotify and music. The fact of the matter is, regardless of what the MPAA and RIAA would have you believe, that the majority of file sharers are not attracted to the idea of stiffing the rights holders. If there was a movie that I wanted to see that wasn’t available by Netflix instant streaming, I would have two main choices; make sure I look semi-presentable and drive to the store to pay more money than the movie is worth for it and then drive home and watch it, or stay in the comfortable confines of my residency and download the movie in a shorter amount of time than driving would take. This isn’t a tough decision to make, but if I had the opportunity to obtain a copy of the movie free of DRM through a legal avenue at a reasonable price, I wouldn’t even have to make a decision.

The second half of this statement, though, is as important as the first; pricing. We are living in a period where the global economy isn’t doing well. Unemployment is a hot topic in every developed country, and unemployment rates are scarily high in a lot of places. Why, then, do entertainment-based industries think that they can sell their entertainment-based goods at prices that may be many times the cost of a single meal (DVDs and CDs)? When money is tight, entertainment is often one of the first areas where an individual can cut their budget. In addition to the entertainment industries, software companies like Adobe and Microsoft charge exorbitant prices for their products. Charging $600+ for the Creative Suite software package or $300 for Windows 7 Professional may be viable pricing models if your sole customers are corporations that have deep pockets, but it is uninformed to think that these prices are reflective of the free market’s price point.

While the recording titans coalescing behind the RIAA and the motion picture titans coalescing behind the MPAA may not be considered monopolies in the legal definition of the word, these conglomerations serve to steer their respective industries at collective will and abolish free market principles, effectively pricing goods at points that have little to do with actual demand. When there is a readily accessible, high speed method of getting copies of a good that you produce, you must take that in to account when pricing your good. It would seem the RIAA and MPAA understand this, as their approach is not to adjust their prices, but to cut off any alternative methods for content distribution.

What does this all mean then?

I wish I could tell you. I’ve been racking my brain to try and connect the dots between all of these issues to offer a solution that addresses all of them, but thus far I have failed. In my thinking, though, I have come to the following conclusions:

• PIPA and SOPA are clear demonstrations of what happens when people are so comfortable in their own lives that they have become complacent and uninformed. Until Wikipedia went dark and Google weighed in on the issue the vast majority of Americans had no idea what SOPA and PIPA were despite how drastically their lives may be affected by the bills’ passings.
• How quickly the bills were written and rushed through their legislative bodies highlights the power that corporate money holds in politics. This power needs to be replaced with a mechanism which better serves the needs of individual Americans over American corporations.
• Technology grows quickly and legislators have failed to keep up. The immediate flip-flopping of supporters for the SOPA and PIPA bills in response to the black out protest day not only shows how out of touch representatives have gotten with the people they serve, but it shows too that these individuals had no idea what these bills actually involved. This video proves that these people believe that to understand how the internet works, you have to be a nerd.
• Copyright law needs to be rewritten to reflect the ideals upon which it was initially founded. Instead of allowing companies to own all rights for a character in a movie for nearly a century, copyright should directly address intellectual property thieves and explicitly state what constitutes fair use.
• The internet, one of the most important inventions man has ever created, is at risk of being forever changed at the cost of every internet user in the world and at the benefit of a select, obsolete few. We have only just begun to see the possibilities of the internet, and the open internet will play a quintessential role in the survival of humanity. If these select, obsolete few get their way, humanity as a whole will feel the blow. Heck, Chinese sentiments believe that they’re ahead of the curve with their great firewall, stating that the US is just now struggling to catch up to their prophetic censorship.
• We the people must actively fight for our rights. Commonly attributed to Thomas Jefferson, the saying “The cost of freedom is eternal vigilance” could not ring truer than it does today. We the people have forgotten the active role we must take in our governing bodies, and it has gotten to the point where our freedoms are at stake.
• Piracy needs to be quelled. While there is an essential distinction between your common file sharer and MegaUpload, we all still must pitch in and do our part to eliminate blatant theft. Those of you that have HDDs full of pirated movies, music, and software should give more thought to legitimate avenues for obtaining this content. This is NOT to endorse SOPA or PIPA in any way, shape, or form; this is solely to say that those of you that share files too often should take a step back and consider the implications of your actions.
• Corporations need to embrace technology or risk becoming obsolete. Should the MPAA and RIAA embrace new technologies, they could slash distribution costs using torrent files and slash advertising costs by inciting viral advertisement campaigns. This world is quickly becoming less dependent on brick and mortar stores, and more dependent on the virtual world, and those that fight this fact only serve to hold us all back.

To wrap things up, I’ll end on a less-than-sweet note; our fight is far from over. SOPA and PIPA may be tabled for now, but the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (or ACTA) and the grossly misnamed Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 have reared their ugly heads and the call to arms must be sounded once more. For the time being, you can contact your representatives, get involved with your local political organizations, and spread the word through any channels you have at your disposal. I’ll be doing my part here and elsewhere.

This is what eternal vigilance looks like folks, and as unattractive as you may find it, I promise it looks much better than our future should we choose not to get involved.

So now that we’ve gotten the basic idea of clients and servers under our belts, let’s talk about what they specifically do. For the rest of this post I will be using the terms “front end” and “back end” in place of client and server respectively. In doing so I aim to stress what technologies reside where; the back end is the furthest away from you as you are reading this and the front end is what you are reading this on. Recall the following from my previous post:

When you opened up your browser and entered in http://www.moarcodeplz.com/ in the navigation bar and pressed enter, your browser assumed the role of client in a client-server relationship with the server on which my web site resides. Your computer initialized a connection to the server at www.moarcodeplz.com [...] and when the server saw your computer’s request, it found the appropriate files and responded with them, producing the web site that you see now.

Now, before we go any further, it’s time for an experiment. Right-click anywhere on this page. A menu should pop up with a number of options, one of which should say something along the lines of “view page source.” Upon clicking this menu option, you should see something similar to this.

This is HTML, which is the language of communication between a web server and a client. Believe it or not, this HTML is what the browser reads to display the web site you are currently looking at (which is a good thing, as I don’t consider HTML to be all that pleasant to look at)! One of the goals of a web server is to generate this HTML, and there are commonly two separate technologies that are leveraged in unison to accomplish this.

All the way in the back: Databases

Whether it’s MySQL (pronounced my sequel), MongoDB, Microsoft SQL Server, or PostgreSQL, a web site that serves dynamic content (dynamic meaning changing, such as a site that shows you search results based on a search term you provide it) will generally utilize a database technology to store all of the data that their application uses. The databases can hold user names, email addresses, passwords, credit card numbers, and just about anything else you can think of. Sites like Amazon have massive databases filled with product information. Sites like Reddit have massive databases filled with user-generated content. By utilizing database technologies, sites that contain dynamic content can centralize the data that they use to generate their site’s content. Additionally, database technologies are geared for quick data retrieval and other cataloging-based optimizations.

Also in the back: Server-Side Scripting Languages

So now that we’ve got this database with tons and tons of awesome data, what do we do with it? This is where the server-side scripting languages (hereby referred to as SSSLs) comes in to play. Commonly used SSSLs include PHP, C#, and Ruby, and all of these languages are leveraged to accomplish the same thing; generate HTML that incorporates data from the database.

Let’s say we have a site that deals explicitly in selling shoes. In order to provide our customers with the best possible experience, we implement a searching system. On our web site (much like Zappos) we place a search box. When a user types the word “brown” in the search box, the SSSL that we’re using will take the user-generated word “brown” and run a query against our database for shoes that are brown in color. For each brown shoe that the SSSL finds in our database it will generate HTML that contains the shoe’s picture, name, price, and a link to a page that has more information about that shoe. It is in this way that the SSSL utilizes the data in a database to generate web sites; the content of the database is interpreted by the SSSL and subsequently used to generate HTML that your browser can understand.

While the two of these technologies don’t necessarily comprise the back end of a web site in its entirety, they do cover a large portion of it. Other technologies (such as the web server itself) I will be addressing in a later edition. Now that we’ve talked about what happens on the server, let’s shift focus to what happens on your computer (the client).

The medium of communication: Markup Languages

Web sites, like the one you are currently reading, use HyperText Markup Language, or HTML, as their means of representation. HTML is one of two markup languages commonly used on the world wide web, the other of which being Extensible Markup Language (also known as XML). The function of these markup languages is not to do any computation on their own, but to carry information from the server to the client. Data such as a shoe’s price can be encoded in to XML or HTML and then sent from the server to the client, where it can be interpreted and subsequently displayed.

Making things look good: Cascading Style Sheets

Once the HTML makes it to the client, there has to be a way to make it look good. This is where Cascading Style Sheets, also known as CSS, comes in. Before CSS was created, web developers had to write all of the styling attributes for web sites directly in to the HTML themselves. These styling attributes would then be read by the browser and the page would be displayed accordingly. As an individual that uses the internet, you’ve probably noticed that there is a lot of repetition in web sites. For instance, when you search on Google for something you will end up seeing a list of results all styled in nearly the same manner. Granted this content is generated dynamically by a scripting language, but if it wasn’t then if a single small change was to be made (for instance, placing a one pixel wide border around every result) the responsible developer would have to type the same thing in ten different places. With CSS, though, there are selectors which can match a number of different HTML entities. In doing this, so long as each search result has a certain attribute in common (perhaps the same class) then the developer will only have to modify the rules to apply to the particular class in a single place in the CSS file to have the desired effect.

Interactivity on the client side: Client-Side Scripting Language

The same way that the server-side scripting language supplied computational power on the server, the client-side scripting language allows for computation on the client side. While a number of different languages may be supported by various browsers, the client-side scripting language realm is overwhelmingly dominated by Javascript. Recall that the purpose of the scripting language on the server side was to generate valid HTML that could be sent to the client. The client-side scripting language (in this case Javascript specifically), on the other hand, has slightly different responsibilities, two of which I will cover here.

The first of the two is DOM manipulation. What this means in a less-than-technical explanation is that Javascript is used to change what a web site looks like. This can be done for a number of different reasons, ranging from showing/hiding information to creating new HTML elements entirely. Ever had the please of a random in-browser pop up blocking the article you’re trying to read? Chances are Javascript was used to pop that lovely little ad up for you. A good example of some added interactivity that Javascript can offer can be seen at my portfolio page, where I am using Javascript to show/hide additional information about each of my portfolio entries (click the ‘View More >>’ button on any of the portfolio items).

The second of the two is slightly more complicated. Just in case you haven’t had your acronym appetite fulfilled yet, this one is called AJAX and it stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML. AJAX, despite the fact that it has its own acronym, is not a technology that is separate from Javascript; it is merely a language feature. Without going in to much detail, Javascript can be used to fetch data from a URL (ie: a web address). Upon the data being retrieved, Javascript can use the data for whatever it may need and update the page you are viewing if it so chooses. A site that uses a good deal of AJAX that you may be familiar with already is Facebook; whenever you receive a message or a chat or a notification without the page being refreshed, it is AJAX doing the dirty work.

So there you have it, five of the technologies that reside on the client and server that help bring you the web sites you love and cherish. To do a quick run-down, we talked about:

• [Server] Database – store data that the web site needs
• [Server] Server Side Scripting Language – generate valid HTML using the database as reference
• [Client] Markup Language – text generated by the server and sent to the client for consumption
• [Client] Style Sheets – used to make a web site look good
• [Client] Client Side Scripting Language – Interactivity and computation on the client side (plus AJAX)

That about wraps it up for today folks! I hope to have taught you at least a little something in regards to how the wonderful interwebz work. Stay tuned for the next installment of “The Guts of a Dynamic Web Site,” coming soon to a web site near you!

On April 2nd, 2011, my girlfriend and I were perusing the streets of Manhattan, eagerly awaiting the show that would be happening that evening; LCD Soundsystem’s farewell show at Madison Square Garden. The tickets cost me a bundle and the flights even more, but to me it wasn’t about cost. I believe that money is only worth the things you spend it on, and if that’s true then I bought an experience I will remember for a lifetime instead of a new TV. To say that the show was the best show I’ve ever seen would be an understatement, and I’ve seen some good shows. LCD Soundsystem played their entire discography (literally) over the span of 5+ hours. For those of you that are familiar with the band, they even played their 45:33 album all the way through. They even brought a number of guests to the stage, one of which was the band Arcade Fire.

Even if you don’t like LCD Soundsystem’s music, it’s hard to dislike the stance that the band took towards its fans. For instance, when James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem’s lead singer and mastermind) found out that scalpers had caused the MSG show to sell out instantly, he expressed outrage and shortly thereafter announced 5 additional shows in the week before the MSG show, hoping to lower demand for MSG. Its not often that you find a band that so adamantly cares about the people that support them, and to me this act was heartily refreshing.

I could go on and on about the respect I have for LCD Soundsystem and the hard times their music helped me get through, but this isn’t the appropriate venue for such. The reason I am even writing this is to spread the word about Shut Up and Play the Hits, a documentary that follows James Murphy around the time of the farewell show, showing what its like to conduct the funeral for your own incredibly popular and respected band. I eagerly await this documentary, and hopefully I’ve piqued some interest in you all as well. I’ve embedded the trailer below as well as some pictures we took before the MSG show for all you nay-sayers.

One of the best points that my friend brought up was in stating that “this isn’t the end of the world.” To articulate further on this point, what he meant was that bad things had happened in the past that undid themselves once the people fully realized the magnitude of the situation. The example he rested most heavily upon was that of the recent economic crisis, one that could trace its roots to lack of oversight and “shady” accounting. The economic crisis was (and in many cases still is) terrible, but it serves its purpose insofar that we have hopefully learned from it and will be able to avoid this sort of event in the future.

I am of the opinion that mistakes are some of the most important things that an individual can make. Looking back at the mistakes I have made, they may have sucked when they happened, but in the long run they have all offered me opportunities to learn from them and be better off accordingly. I certainly think that this mentality scales as well, meaning that countries can be the ones to make mistakes and after realization can change their policies and legislation to reflect lessons learned. If this is the case then I believe mistakes are made for the benefit of humanity as a whole.

And so was the argument that my friend posed. Sure, SOPA is really bad and it could negatively affect a lot of people, but if it ends up being that bad then the people will rise up and overturn it and we will have learned our lesson(s) and continue on our evolutionary journey. While I agree with the underlying sentiment, I think that SOPA is a special case. I don’t think this mentality can be applied, and I’ll tell you why.

SOPA isn’t about the economy (despite what the SOPA supporters might have you think). It isn’t about a war that is being fought against the will of the people. It is about your first amendment rights as a citizen of the United States. If SOPA passes, then we will need to organize together and push back against our “representatives.” We will need to call everyone to arms to fight for the freedom of the internet. We will need to leverage all possible mediums to spread the word, the most important medium of which being the internet. If you’re reading this and thinking “I don’t know who this ‘we’ is but I doubt I would care about SOPA enough to fight back,” then either you misunderstand the scope of what SOPA actually stands for or I misunderstand the scale of your complacency.

If I asked you to send a link to as many people as you could, how would you do it? Sure, you have some contacts in your email address list that you could send it to. Aside from email, though, you’ll most likely rely heavily on social media. You could use YouTube to upload a video of yourself talking about the link. You could tweet a message to your Twitter followers with the link in it. You could link the page on your Facebook. You could do a myriad of things via social media to spread the word, which is exactly what social media stands for; it is a platform that relies almost entirely on the sharing of user-generated content.

If you have ever tried to watch a YouTube video of copyrighted music chances are you found yourself staring at something like the following:

This is the result of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, or the currently existing legislation that is used to combat piracy. Under the DMCA’s safe harbor provisions, the owners of a site are not liable for site content. However, if infringing content is found on a site, the owners can be notified and are thereby responsible for removing the content. If the owners do not act accordingly within an allotted time, then further legal actions may be pursued. This is a pretty reasonable approach to quelling piracy and it seems to work very well. Under SOPA though, YouTube could be shut down for a single eight-year-old singing a karaoke version of No Quarter by Led Zeppelin. The safe harbor provisions that the DMCA touts would be done away with, making it so that all site owners are entirely responsible for the content their site contains and in many cases the content their site links to. Not only are the safe harbor provisions thrown out, but the ramifications for an infringing site range from DNS black-listing (see: one of the many things China does with its amazingly free and open internet) to stopping all payments to the infringing site via freezing accounts with Mastercard, Visa, and others (see: what was already illegally done to Wikileaks). While this is an incredibly bad idea considering what sites based on user-generated content have accomplished, it wouldn’t be such a horrendous idea if the organizations that would be the primary wielders of the “censor baton” weren’t already abusing DMCA takedown notices.

What this boils down to is the fact that owning and operating a site that relies on user-generated content would not be worth the risk. Currently existing sites that rely on massive amounts of user-generated content (ie: Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter) would potentially shut down or completely change in order to protect their investments. This means that all those mediums that you may be able to leverage to get the word out about repealing SOPA would be at risk of being shut down themselves. How, then, would you organize against it? If SOPA passed and you found yourself realizing that SOPA really was as bad as we made it out to be, you may also find yourself without means of regress.

In my previous post, why humanity needs the internet, I outlined my views about the internet and its importance as a role in humanity’s evolution. To reiterate, I believe that the internet is most important due to its role as a medium for free speech and instantaneous communication, the two of which combining to create a global neural network of sorts. This is what is being threatened by SOPA. It’s not just your favorite video-viewing website or your favorite search engine, its your ability to share your thoughts and media with your friends, family, and acquaintances. Disasters like the economic collapse of 2008 are bad, but at least we can still talk about it after. Disasters like SOPA are worse, as afterwards we may find ourselves voiceless.

Still not convinced? Here are some other good articles on SOPA and its supporters that may sway you.

• Al Gore comes out against SOPA/PIPA
• Do we really want to hand control of the internet to a group that sued a dead grandmother?
• SOPA is a symbol of the movie industry’s failure to innovate
• Study confirms news networks owned by SOPA supporters are ignoring SOPA/PIPA
• Google, Facebook, Twitter may go offline to protest SOPA
• Internet engineers oppose SOPA

Want to take an active stance against SOPA/PIPA? Boycott GoDaddy and utilize the following apps.

• No SOPA: Google Chrome extension that warns you before visiting SOPA supporting web sites.
• Boycott SOPA: a barcode-reading Android app that will warn you if the product is manufactured by SOPA supporters.

While I still have a ton of old projects to sort through and put up here, I’m throwing in the towel for today. I’ll be adding the rest of my projects at some point within the next week or two. That being said, check out what’s up currently if you’re interested!

MoarCodePlz’s Portfolio.

I was reading some articles earlier today (one of which was really good: 91 Ways to Become the Coolest Developer) and it got me thinking about some of the trials and tribulations that I have dealt with in the ~2 years I’ve been doing web development. I remember when I was first getting started that I felt overwhelmed by the myriad of technologies that I had to become familiar with. Sure I could understand HTML, but what is all this about CSS and Javascript? SERIOUSLY?! I have to use MySQL and PHP TOO?! Unnggghhhhh! All of this information initially made my head hurt, but I stuck with it and today am better for it.

In retrospect I feel that there are a number of topics that I struggled with due to a lack of proper explanation on how these different entities fit together as smaller components of a larger, intricately beautiful design. Web development isn’t just about a single language or technology; it is about leveraging the incredible capabilities that the internet has to offer to produce a product the likes of which may not have been seen before. With that being said, I intend to write a series of posts that explain some of the concepts that I struggled with in terms that (hopefully) everyone can understand. So, without further ado, I bring you the riveting, marvelous, action-packed blockbuster of 2012…

The Client and the Server, a Love Story

So you met this hot little firecracker and you want to take her out on a date. Not just any date, you’re going to flex your culinary expertise and bring her to the best restaurant in Atlanta, Two Urban Licks. The night of the big date comes. You pick her up in your freshly washed and waxed 98 Honda Accord coupe and roll on over to the restaurant, valeting your Accord-ian stallion upon arrival. The hostess greets you with a beaming smile and escorts you to your table, which sits underneath the awe-inspiring ~30 foot tall painting on one of the walls. After a few minutes of playful banter with said firecracker, your server comes up and asks you “can I get you anything to drink?” “Scotch, rocks for me and a red bull, vodka for her,” you reply, knowing that the lady across the table from you would pick up on your sophistication of drink choice. And so it goes on for the rest of the evening, with the server coming back out to the table and asking if you would like anything else and then scurrying back to the wait station / kitchen and returning with what it was you asked for. One hundred and fifty dollars later, you sign the check and stand up to leave. After placing your coat around your date’s shoulders and getting your car from the valet, you’re nearly positive this night is going to end well. Little do you know that in fifteen minutes you’ll be dropping her off at her place and subsequently playing SWTOR at your apartment alone with your cat.

While this could potentially be read as a shameless plug for SWTOR, Two Urban Licks, Honda, and cats, its meant to showcase the relationship between client and server. The client (in this case, you) sits at the table and when it wants something it relays its needs to the server (…the server) whose responsibility is to retrieve what the client wants and bring it to them. It is this relationship that the terms client and server are most generally used for in the computing world; at the most general level a client is something that consumes (receives) data whereas a server is something that generates (serves) data. It should be noted, though, that both of these terms are HIGHLY ambiguous and can be used to mean a number of different things. For instance, a server could mean a program running on your laptop (MySQL Server) or it could refer to a physical machine that has hardware specifically geared towards supporting a large number of concurrent connections and processes. That being said, here are the formal definitions of client and server as per Wikipedia:

• Client – A client is an application or system that accesses a service made available by a server. The server is often (but not always) on another computer system, in which case the client accesses the service by way of a network.
• Server – A server is a computer program running to serve the requests of other programs, the “clients”. Thus, the “server” performs some computational task on behalf of “clients”. The clients either run on the same computer or connect through the network.

So what does all of this have to do with web sites? Well, if you are browsing this web site, you have actually already played the role of client in the client-server architecture of the web. When you opened up your browser and entered in http://www.moarcodeplz.com/ in the navigation bar and pressed enter, your browser assumed the role of client in a client-server relationship with the server on which my web site resides. Your computer initialized a connection to the server at www.moarcodeplz.com (this url is, in fact, a way to address your request, but we’ll talk about that some other time) and when the server saw your computer’s request, it found the appropriate files and responded with them, producing the web site that you see now. This is the same for any web site that you access; your browser requests the page from the server at the address you enter and, upon receiving a response, displays it for you. Each subsequent hyperlink that you click on causes this to happen once more, each time requesting a different set of resources from the server.

While this description is skimming over a ton of intricate details (such as caching and the HTTP protocol) I mean it only to explain the role that you, as a user of the internet, play in the client-server architecture of the internet. It is with this understanding that we can go further in depth as to what sort of things reside on a web server and what the web server actually returns to your browser (I’ll give you a hint, its not everything that you see on a page in a single request). Those topics are for another post though, so please stay tuned!

RSA Animate – The Empathic Civilization

The video is from a series of videos from the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts that has a speaker narrating while someone draws out the ideas being discussed (If you have extra free time I HIGHLY recommend looking at other RSA animates videos, namely their video on changing education paradigms). In the video Jeremy Rifkin talks about how mammals display empathy towards one another. He then discusses how humans, as a civilization, have been progressively thinking in larger and larger empathic groups. It is this evolution of a broader sense of empathy that I intend to ground this post with.

If you go to Twitter and read any of the “trending” hash tags you may begin to lose faith in humanity. The broken English and overblown narcissism that can be found is disheartening to say the least. From my conversations with family and friends, it seems that a lot of people boil the internet down to this sort of idea; a medium through which garbage is spewn and ignorance gets you further than intelligence. I won’t contend that in a lot of places on the internet this is exactly what happens, but I will point out that with every invention there is both a light and dark side (har har har SWTOR reference), Einstein’s theory of relativity being a good example of this.

The internet is far more than the broken English of Twitter and “OMG look at what I did last night” of Facebook. It is the compendium of knowledge that is Wikipedia and the instructional resources of Khan Academy and HowStuffWorks. It is the cataloging of data that is Google and the international sales force of Amazon. It is a medium through which near-instantaneous communication between hundreds of thousands of individual brains can collaborate and draw conclusions. It is the next evolutionary step in humanity’s progress.

The video that I linked at the beginning of this post talks about how throughout history humanity has found larger and larger groups to feel empathy towards, and it cites enhanced forms of communication and commerce as some of the driving factors of this. Mr. Rifkin even cites the example of the earthquake in Haiti, where he references the “TwitterSphere” spreading the word about the disaster and inciting worldwide aid within a number of hours.

This is the internet that we all need to know, love, revere, and protect. The internet is much more than commerce that needs to be defended and the “ever-growing” problem of piracy. The internet is a vehicle for the voice of the people in a time where the people have lost their voice, as demonstrated in the Arab spring and the global Occupy protests. The internet is a disaster-relief mechanism as demonstrated by the reaction to the earthquake in Haiti. The internet may be a medium for narcissism and stupidity, but it is much more importantly a medium for intelligent thought and education, serving to connect like-minded individuals that want to solve problems. The internet is a platform for global empathy, which is going to be a critical component of solving crises that face not just Christians or Muslims or Jews, but humans as a species (global warming being a good example of this). The internet is a neural network of human consciousness the likes of which we have never before seen, and we have only experienced the tip of the iceberg in terms of the its potential.

The internet may not always be this way; its current state relies on its ability to allow information to flow freely. When interest groups gain control over the internet, its role as neural network begins to die (China is a good example of this). Groups that gain control over the internet do so with the intention of modifying (or stopping altogether) certain forms of communication. This leads to a fake neural network, or one that only carries approved messages. While this may be detrimental to the nodes (ie: humans) of the neural network at the time, in the grander scheme of things hindering the most important and influential means of communication between humans may end in our downfall. It is because of this that we have to actively fight for the internet to be free, and now more than ever with SOPA and PIPA making their way through US legislation we must take up arms.

While I have condensed a topic that deserves much more explanation in to a few paragraphs, I hope to have gotten my point across. I encourage debate and discussion on this issue, so please comment as you see fit.

For those of you that have some free time, here are some GREAT educational resources that I use:

• Khan Academy – Learn close to anything in a series of short, easily consumable educational videos. There are even games and achievements!
• Wikipedia – So this one is a gimme, but its the largest compendium of human knowledge in existence.
• Stack Overflow – Best place to ask questions about development. Stack overflow has an avid community and a great user feedback system.
• HowStuffWorks – Owned by the discovery channel, HowStuffWorks is similar to Khan Academy insofar that it can teach you about a huge amount of topics. HowStuffWorks is less commonly taught stuff (ie: math, biology) and more niche in its offerings.