Richard Farrar’s Blog

Whenever you fill in an online form, you are invariably confronted with a picture of horribly distorted words that you are asked to spell. Are these web hosts just needing a little extra help with their spelling, or is there something more subtle going on?

Filling in online forms nowadays can be a bit of a mission. Not content with forcing you to fill out pages of obscure questions about your first pet etc., before allowing you to hand over your hard earned cash to buy the website’s latest offering, web hosts are now also asking you to decipher increasingly cryptic pictures of words before allowing you to continue.

Is this just a global conspiracy to test the online world’s spelling abilities, or is there a deeper, more important meaning?

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While the term URL may not be familiar to everyone, the chances are that you use them everyday without knowing, as a URL is essentially just a web address. But what do all the different parts of a URL actually mean?

URLs are things we use every day in our general surfing of the web, but they are something that many of us will never stop to think about too much.

So partly in response to a request left in a comment from a reader, Joebunny, and partly as a prelude to a forthcoming post that will require a general understanding of URLs, I hope to explain, without going into too much detail, what a URL is all about.

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When people talk about MP3 files and the like, you often hear the term Bit Rate also mentioned, so what’s it all about?

Until the mid 1980s, commercially purchased music was always in analogue format, be it typically vinyl or cassette. In late 1982, the arrival of the now ubiquitous compact disc (CD), co-developed by Sony and Philips, changed all that and revolutionised how we listen to music.

Digitisation

In order to create digital recordings such as CDs, the conventional analogue audio first has to be digitised. The process of digitisation takes the original audio source and chops it up into lots of thin slices. Each slice represents the volume of the audio source for a particular point in time. A digital number then stores the volume level of this slice on the CD. Each slice, or sample as it’s actually called, represents the level of the audio for a mere 23?s (23 millionths of a second).

To reconstitute the audio track, all of these samples are stuck together and the volume level of each sample is sent out to your speakers every 23?s (in the case of CDs). It’s a bit like slicing a loaf of bread and then squeezing all of the slices of bread together again to make it look like the original loaf. Not perfect, but if you squint, you’d never know that difference. CDs are very similar, because the slices are so thin, you don’t know the difference.

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Communication! It’s all about communication. The internet has given us a host of new communication channels and technologies, with VoIP being another on the long list, but what exactly is the fuss all about?

Since the dawn of time, we have fostered our need to communicate. From our initial development of speech, to the written word, and in latter years the development of electronic communications and the internet, we are constantly developing new and different ways to keep in touch. Perhaps the two greatest advancements in communications in recent history were the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 and the more recent development of e-mail, or electronic mail, over the internet.

Internet Telephones

There is now a new technology called VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol, sometimes also known as IP telephony or internet telephony), that is set to merge the conventional telephone with the internet and change the way that we make telephone calls in the future. However, if you have a computer and an internet connection, you can make use of this exciting new technology now!

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If you’ve been using computers on the internet for a while, you’ve probably heard mention of an IP address at some point, but what is it?

Telephone Numbers

The internet is a massive collection of computers, all interconnected via a multitude of different computer networks, hence its name, internet, derived from inter-network. In many ways the internet is like the existing telephone network, where individual telephones are interconnected worldwide between countries individual telephone systems.

For the global telephone system to work, every telephone in the world must have a completely unique telephone number. Such a number is made up from three different groups, your local number, your area code and your international country code. Using this system you can dial direct to any telephone in the world if you know its number.

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