Hyper on names, harping on networks and hyping up misnomers

Perhaps it was Sir David Attenborough who had once said that human beings like classifying, organising and naming things around them. Species. Pets. Places. Diseases.

Gertrude contemplates that this is also true in the abstract kingdom of software and technology. Here, distinctly shaped machines, wires, plastic and metal have been labelled, aliased and branded. Untouched spaces, unseen procesess and unheard instructions have been honoured with what are now household names.

People of all ages adopt it rather willingly; learn new jargon, acquire new computer related hobbies and even use their extremities in hitherto unfamiliar finger acrobatics with varying degrees of skill.

All good. Gertrude is fairly amiable to such activity. She was preoccupied all of last evening understanding three letters. www.  Then she realised she must first understand the word Internet. The mass of cables that holds together people around the world with information at each end of the wires. The universe's electronic alter ego. Alter e-go, to be more catchy.

In the real world, people talk to one another over phone, by letters or in person.  The internet is a lot like that. Each method of reaching out is roughly the equivalent of a network, Gertrude reasoned. So there is etiquette, rules and even tools involved in each of these networks. All of these networks, the cables, the satellites, the attached devices and the rules, make up the internet. Not surprisingly, the networks, the cables, the satellites, the  attached devices and the rules - all have names.

Gertrude has heard people say web to mean the all of the internet. She would like to tell them that the (world wide) web is the name given to only one of its networks. The internals of the web, where people visit ebay or facebook, are different to the internals of the POP network where electronic letters are exchanged. Networks may cross each other's paths. Like when Gertrude uses the web to go to gmail and then it uses POP to send the emails to someone else. The web might still be the most frequently used network in the internet.

Within a network, each of its component has a name. The massive computers whirring away in the corners of cyberspace supplying the pages or masses of data are called servers. In increasing order of cleverness, the names of devices that direct the data to their homes are hubs, switches and routers. Cables made of copper wire, aluminium wires or even glass fibre carry the data. They are named twister pair, coaxial and optical fibre in that order. There are probably names for data-carrying invisible satellites in ether whose names Gertrude isn't sure of. She knows bluetooth can carry data wirelessly over a short distance.

Data now arrives at the client computer that asked for the data.  The computers who want to send or receive data from others of their species must have a special bone in their bodies called a network card. These network cards have a unique serial number called a MAC Address tattooed in them. Gertrude is fairly sure that the IEEE and the makers of the network cards who are responsible for this are not likely to run out of large numbers any time soon.

A lot of the data on the world wide web is indexed and labelled and categorised so it can be easily be shown to people looking for them. Spider is the name given to little programs suitable for crawling all over the web and trawling for information sitting on servers. So people take trouble to make their data extra-clear to the spiders. The spiders come back with data about the information to another program called the search engine which classifies and organises this data about the data. To go completely the other way round, it is also possible to hide some pages from search engines. There is a chowkidar-like program named firewall to scrutinise the data between networks to see if it can pass through or not.

So people only need to remember the address of the search engine. The address is called a URL. Not even the most technical of her colleagues think of it as a universal resource locator. Humbug! Its a rather ambitious name.

The URL is typed into a browser. A browser understands the meaning of URLs depending on where you type it in. The URL has a lot of dots separated by words. A URL takes you where you want to go. Gertrude smiles at the verbs - for the internet -  which have a lot to do with  reaching out - navigate, surf, browse and address.

An address proves that a computer exists in the network. This address is a number called an IP address. IP addresses are three dots surrounded by numbers. This is quite different to a MAC address which is physically inscribed inside the heart of a computer. The IP address is a concept. Fickle. Not as committed as a post code. Someone responsible invents this address.

Clients have IP addresses. Servers have IP addresses. The responsible person is a domain name registrar whose sole profession is devoted to naming or numbering. This person or organisation would need to be authorised by ICANN, a superior group of people who assign names and numbers.

Clients may have a different IP address each time they connect to a network. It would be rather inconvenient if servers did. So servers get given a fixed IP address. Trouble is, there may be many servers who provide data on the same thing say, google. What we know as google might actually be a colony of computers with different IP addresses cloaked under a more endearing name.

To prove this, on her little old PC, Gertrude does Start > Run > CMD and then types: ping www.google.com. And she sees an IP address. Then she does the same thing a bit later. Sure enough, a different IP address appears.

So www.google.com is a domain name. The dot com is rather like a surname you cannot get rid of! The ICANN people have a list of close to 300 surnames for domain names which include country codes dot co dot uk and the old fashioned dot com,  dot org and the like. It is exploiting Libya's and USA's country code that unorthodox names like bit.ly, and del.icio.us have flourished.

The surname is a top level domain name. Stuff to the left of it is called a second level domain name. Stuff to the left of that is the third level domain. This can go on for a hundred and twenty seven levels. A most remarkable prime number to be chosen. 127 is 2⁰ + 2¹ + 2² + 2³ + 2⁴ + 2⁵ + 2⁶

A top level domain name usually won't usually be a physical computer on the network. It is only the second level onwards that there are actually computers available for entertainment. At this level and beyond, they are called hostnames.

Gertrude was just talking to Charlie yesterday who visited a place in Angelesey in North Wales to spend time in a caravan. The place is llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogochuchaf. Now thankfully, the ICANN people allow domain names at each level to be up to 63 letters. She wonders if 63 is 1 bit short of 8 bytes (8 times 8 bits is 64 bits is 8 bytes). with the one 1 bit reserved for something secretive. Or just plain superstition. However, in all, a domain name can be 253 letters long. Presumably, this includes the  many dots and the surnames.

Within a domain, there are heaps of structured and categorised pages waiting to be opened and read. Each of these pages has an address too called a URL - carefully named and decorated so that search engines spiders can find them easily. Some pages have ghastly names. Gertrude does not want to name and shame anyone right now. So no examples. But some of them have beautifully crafted ones. Like in the online version of the guardian.

Gertrude has a carefully nurtured grouse against things like tinyurl.com and twitter, which force people to cram and zip these ornamental URLs into encrypted unsightliness causing people to get afraid of them and ban shrunken URLs and for other people to invent things like untiny.com to unshrink the URLs.

When you type the URL in the browser and hit enter, it is called a request to the server, as opposed to an order or an instruction to it. So if Gertrude only types in facebook.com, the browser  automatically sticks the http://www. This is because stuff that is accessed through a browser usually is on the world wide web. Naturally it follows the rules of the web. The  www - dub dub dub - stands for the web. The http stands for the rules of the web. Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Wait a second. Shouldn't it be hmtp://www - as in Hypermedia Transfer Protocol?

IT and Nature: Penguin, Deer and Metal

To an ordinary person, a penguin is a well-insulated flightless aquatic creature roaming in the wild, perhaps in the poles, stomping around like podgy lawyers in their suits. Hardly a symbol of great leaps in technology. Gertrude saw very clearly in the intervals of chomping through some peanuts, that computers had newness bubbling around them. Computers had odd connections to a penguin, a deer and some form of metal. Not to forget, even sometimes the stuff she was eating. Kernels.

Ages ago, Gertrude had taken lessons in computers on the first floor of a three storey builing about six minutes away from home. She had theory lessons and she had lab lessons. In the lab, she used something called DOS. She had to learn by rote some phrases like copy con, mkdir and rename in order to pass her exams and to get the large humpback white and black machine to cooperate with her. She was told that this was the operating system of the computer with who she was corresponding.

To Gertrude, the operating system was like a shop assistant who never went to sleep and ceaselessly handled requests from the customer and from the proprietor of the shop.

Anybody could ask this shop assistant to bring out all the stock from the Personal Accessories section, or a very specific bag from the top shelf on the left most side and he would oblige. The operating system was like that: fetched files and data from anywhere in the computer and knew where to find them. You could shut the shop, but if you knocked on it by clicking a button, the efficient shop assistant would wake up and switch on all the lights, just like the computer booted up.

The Kernel is the part of the computer that manages how people make requests of the shop assistant, and how much the shop assistant remembers and how much he runs around servicing people's demands.

There are operating systems for a computer, for a network and for phones and for routers! There are commercial ones like Windows from Microsoft which everyone's neighbour should own by now. There are also open-source operating systems like Unix. This means that Gertrude doesn't have to pay for the operating system. And if she wanted, she could also write programs herself to make the little shop assistant inside the computer do things that he didn't already do.

That said, for decades now, people have commitedly tried to come up with smarter operating systems (OS) and have been even more committed in naming them. The greatest sorrow for the poet in Gertrude is to have known of an open source OS carelessly named Haiku. The OS called RTOS was created by a company called RoweBots. There is Acorn, an OS symbolic of an eatable. AmigaOS like a friendly Spanish word. Apple again, for fruit eaters with exorbitant variants like Newton, Lisa and Macintosh. The prize for the most proper techie names would surely go to IBM for featuring godimportant and unpronounceable names like OS/2 MVS/XA TOS/360, DPPX, ACP, UTS.

Gertrude could not bring herself to get interested much in operating systems for little hand held things. Sure, there is the Android, iPhone OS, Blackberry (again, fruits) Palm OS and Newton OS. But there is Linux as well. Linux is a remarkable open source operating system created by a certain Linus Torvalds. Apparently Linus had a heated debate about whether Linux was a microkernal or a monolithic kernel. Whatever that means! Linus contracted penguinitis around the time there was a Linux logo design competition. A chap called Larry Ewing designed this now famous little mascot and the bird was named Tux. It was either short for tuxedo or Torvalds UniX. Gertrude gasped when she realised that Facebook runs on Linux (as per the LAMP stack of - Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP)!

Gertude confesses that she is even less inclined to think about router operating systems. She is already struggling to understand Network Operating Systems and would be grateful for any help. Although she has read about Ghost, all she has picked up is that if you have a (dumb?) computer (these days called a netbook), an invisible operating system over on the internet can manage your files and programs. This operating system and all the paraphernalia would be sitting on a cloud. But of course! Several, several people could reach out for this through their web browser. Is a browser operating system different from a network operating system? Novell had the OS called Netware. Perhaps that was used for computers in a private network?

Interestingly, the concept of the deer and the metal are also browser operating systems. The Gazelle is from Microsoft and Chrome OS is from Google. The Chrome OS runs on top of a Linux Kernel. And Gazelle has its own little elf. The world would wonder about corporate battles, the open sourceness, the security, who develops new features, support to various devices like printers, support to competing browsers and assorted programs. Gertrude shares in these questions and adds one of her own. Would they have a mascot?