main page
This page is intended to serve as a place where I can informally dump thoughts
for projects that I'd like to see done at some point, be they hardware,
software,
or socially oriented. Do what you wish with the ideas. If something you see
here
interests you or inspires you, then run with it. If you do end up doing
something
interesting with anything you see here, then I'd really appreciate an email
describing what you were able to do. Enjoy!
5.19.1999
Local IP caching
This is something I'd really like to see done. It'd be great to go to
sites and have the resolved IP of the domain cached in a file so that
I don't have to re-request IPs from the DNS everytime I reboot or
occasionally switch off my system. I think the best way to do this would
be to intercept outgoing requests from OTInetQuery()
calls
(at least in Open Transport), and perform the lookup locally first before
deferring to an external name server if the IP for the domain isn't
located. Other cool features to have would include cache expiration, and
periodic accuracy checks of the list, reverse resolving the IP table to
make sure that it's current.
5.09.1999
Advertising banner filtering / animated gif restriction:
As I'm stuck in a dorm that doesn't have Ethernet access, the only connection my
laptop
has to the outside world is via a 28.8 modem, over an outdated phone system.
This makes moving around on the web rather slow, especially when I have to
contend with
bandwidth wasters like advertising banners and animated gifs. If you've been
following
my quasi-diary entries back on the main page, then you
know that
I've been learning how to program using Open Transport on the Macintosh, and
that I've been
aquiring a more in depth knowledge of the socket API, and the TCP and UDP
protocols in general.
Learning more about the underlying protocols gave me an idea for speeding up
page loads.
I've noticed that more and more, sites are relying on dedicated subnets to serve
ads to
other pages (adforce.imgis.com and enliven.com are two examples that come to
mind).
It seems like it would be fairly trivial to compile a list of ad servers, place
them in a
text file, and write a program that prevents connections being established with
these servers,
thereby preventing them from loading ads and banners which slow down load times.
The list
of servers would be plain text, and user editable, and it'd be possible to
specify specific
port numbers to block (eg. 80, which is the default http port) , while allowing
connections to
ports like 22, 23, and 25, which are the default telnet, ssh and mail ports.
I'd also really like to see a method developed for blanket blocking of animated
GIF files, maybe
by allowing only the first image in the series to load? It'd also stop the
annoying churning
of my hard drive
as it pushes through the downloaded frames while they're in cache.
Context sensitive image caching:
Context sensitive permanent caching is another idea that's been floating
around inside my head
lately. Sites like
Slashdot use a series of standardized
images to denote
news topics. While the images present on the page on any given day change, the
image filenames do
not, and the images are reused frequently. Since I visit the site a lot, it'd
be really nice to not have to download the news icons
for that day every time I visit the site. I'd like to develop a context
sensitive permanent cache
for images of this nature. Such a program might work in the following fashion.
Any image that you'd like to cache permanently can be clicked upon in the
browser,
and included in the submenu that comes up is a 'Context Cache this image'
option.
After clicking on this option, you are offered several caching options, which
are
themselves context sensitive, and may change depending on the URL of the image.
The options menu may look something like this:
- Load this image from cache for:
- All images with this filename, web wide.
- All images with this filename on this site only.
- All images with this filename in this directory only.
- All images with this filename on this page only.
- Cache this image:
- Permanently
- Until page refresh
- For [ user textfield ] days.
Obviously, a fair degree of intelligence and knowledge about a particular site
is required
for effective use of the tool. However, good use of it could successfully
reduce pointless
reloads of standard eye candy on large sites. I'd like to have an advanced
option that would
allow use of regexps for more complex cache loading/decision making.
Meta-Level Neural Networks:
Onto a completely different topic.. I've been thinking about meta-level neural
networks a lot lately, that is, neural networks than encode information on more
than one level. For instance, a single conversation may have relations to
several other conversations. Within a single conversation, there may be
related topics. Within those topics, there are related sentences, and within
those sentences, related words. Within those words are related characters.
Linking all of this information together using a connectionist activation
based model could be exceedingly interesting, especially in the context of
fault tolerant parsing. A major caveat of most artificial intelligence and
natural language processing systems is that they are intolerant of entry faults,
and that they cannot perform context sensitive interpretation on their
input. This meta level approach could be a good way to further contextual
understanding by artificial intelligence and parsing systems.
fib@lumiere.net
5.19.1999
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