All Geekness Great and Small

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Some writing of mind, prompted by this post.

The roar of the wind and surf makes it hard to concentrate. The acrid scent of molecules, once confined to the pages of textbooks, prick my nose and tickle my throat. Turning to face the wind, like a contrarian weather vane, sea-spray and sand scour my face. The salted air mixes with salted water as the onslaught brings tears – tears born, not of emotion, but in an attempt to replenish what the cold rush has wicked away. The world blurs as I am disconnected from all useful stimuli. At that moment, its burdens drop away and for once, I am free.

Many readers will already know this, but I’ve had call to walk people through this process a few times, recently, so I’m putting directions online for future reference.

Let’s say you have a website hosted somewhere, and you’ve bought the domain name from Go Daddy. How do you make that web address point to your website? Well, it’s pretty straightforward.

First, log on to your account. Once you have, you should see a page similar to this:

Select ‘Domain Manager’ and the next window will open up:

On this page, select the domain name that you’re interested in and then click on the Nameservers. The following window will pop up:

Choose ‘I have specific nameservers for my domain’ and insert the nameservers that your hosting solution provided.

Once you click OK, it may take some minutes for the change to propagate throughout the internet. Technically speaking, it can take many hours to get to every part of the Internet, but most people will see the change within a few minutes.

That’s it… easy, eh?

“Cloud computing” is the latest in a long line of technology buzzwords that nobody really seems to understand… or should I say that everybody claims to know what it means, but nobody seems to agree. Today, whurley published an open letter to Barack Obama advocating the creation of a computing cloud for use by all colleges and universities.

By advocating a use for cloud computer, whurley helps define what cloud computing can actually be and what it can achieve. For many researchers, the barrier to progress is not academic insight but technological capability. By making the necessary computing resources available to all, cloud computing can help lower this barrier and ignite a great leap forward in the academic field.

Cloud computing, in this respect, brings to mind such projects as SETI@Home and BOINC. Under these projects, the computing resources of idle desktops and laptops were made available to researchers working on computationally intensive research. While extra-terrestrial life still eludes us, over 1000 teraflops are made available each day to research projects who need them. Imagine what could be achieved with the full weight of government backing and the right infrastructure.

It was 1880 when Joseph Swan got his patent for the light-bulb. It wasn’t until 1926 that the Parliamentary Act to establish the UK National Power Grid was passed, allowing everyone to benefit from electric light. It was in 1951 that William Shockley got his patent for the junction transistor. Fifty-eight years later, it’s time we had a national infrastructure to bring the benefit of computing power to those who need it most.