Smart Contracts, OB, H2, FLIF, Snowball, Decentralized Reputation, Light, IPFS, Loopback/Localhost

Post date: Oct 11, 2015 5:22:01 AM

• Reminded my self about smart contracts, because this has talked a lot in some circles. Also see What are Smart Contracts. Also checked out Freicoin. It got bit different design aspects than the Bitcoin.
• There's some interesting market development going on OpenBazaar and P2P insurances. But can't tell more details about that yet. It's nice to see that project really picking up the pace. Following all the development discussions starts to be hard at times.
• Studied OpenBazaar insurance contract schema. - As well as reviewed the current JSON RESTful API documentation for the.
• Google is pushing HTTP/2 forward hard. - Improved cloud service performance is naturally really nice thing to have. Google App Engine also uses HTTP/2 when HTTPS is enabled. I wonder when h2c support is coming?
• Checked out FLIF - Free Lossless Image Format - Which also provides better compression than existing lossless compression methods. - New still developing lossless image compression standard FLIF aka Free Lossless #mage Format. I like it. I personally wished that JPEG2000 (JP2) would have been more widely used, but nope. It clearly wasn't change big enough.
• Amazon Snowball - A suitcase storage server for transferring data. I personally think it's nothing new, it's just one adaption of technologies widely used already and for a very long time. "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." - Adaption of old technology. Quite nice way to transfer large amount of data. Of course most of us have done this same using fast USB docs and disks, but this provides bit more high tech solution.
• Studied OpenBazaar Decentralized Reputation in detail and commented it. I'm sorry not sharing the comments publicly. Maybe bit later, before things have been refined.
• Solar time vs time zone - http://blog.poormansmath.net/the-time-it-takes-to-change-the-time/ - I wonder what the meaning of DST (day light saving / summer time is). When you take a look at this map. This shows how 'wrong' times many areas of the world already got. Many places got hour or two wrong clock time. Yet most of countries seem to 'lag behind' the real solar time.
• Light - Not immediately impressed, but I think they got a nice idea there. Of course it's quite expensive. I really would love to see the production model in action before ordering. Also the software used to 'develop' images is very very important, just like it's with Lytro.
• I've asked OpenBazaar team a few times, how they're going to implement potential 'extensible contracts'. So far I haven't received any conclusive answer. It's always hard to line if format should be extensible or not. I've written about this so many times. Truth is that many systems using XML don't actually allow extensions without extensive modifications of schema and software, making it pretty rigid and practically non-extensible compared to any other solution.
• New NameCheap - Advanced DNS allows to set TTL values from 1 minute to 60 minutes or Automatic? What value will the Automatic be? I got no idea. I didn't find any help or documentation about that. It would be just nice to know. I personally hate such weasel words without any additional information. I guess it's something reasonable, but it would be nice to know how long it actually is. - It turned out that making a ticket was worth of it. Even if my ticket was on the very lowest possible priority it got answered pretty quickly. The automatic value is 1799 seconds and it's there just for people who don't have a clue what they should choose and prevent them from contacting support asking stupid questions, like I did. It would be just very nice to mention that somewhere, so people whom do want to know what it means, could. Anyway I posted this data to three other places as well as my blog, so basically you should be now possible to find it using Google.
• Is IPFS a CDN? - In most of cases I would assume it's performance wouldn't meet CDN levels. There are also solutions like user based CDNs using JavaScript already. Which form site specific swarm of users having that content. In theory it could work well for sites like 4chan images or news sites or like downloading Ubuntu DVD Images. I've blogged about such solutions and I've been asked to join a few teams developing such solutions. I also personally like how Freenet and GNUnet also cache data which isn't requested by user making the network and data replication & distribution much faster. If there's high capacity server sitting on idle. Most solutions wouldn't utilize those. Yet solutions with fully automated caching would also use those to deliver high demand content as well as to store low demand content for extended periods. I've thought A LOT about this stuff. There are good and bad sides on every aspect, as usual. Also it's hard to guarantee any TTL. Availability could be really bad, or data might not be available at all. IPFS is NOT permanent.
• I did see too many there's no place like 127.0.0.1 images. So I upgraded it to IPv6. Here's the new image.