Two Slashes

Over the past few days, some of the more popular postings that seem to appear on Digg end up having to do with Google’s search suggestion feature.  While the intentions of these suggestions are entirely noble, they can also be used both to prove the skewed nature of today’s society and the inherent “security” that people seem to derive from their use of the Internet nowadays.  Interested, I decided to do a few queries of my own and see what they resulted in (images linked so you can peruse them at your own leisure and discretion; they’re screen captures directly from Google):

• “Why shouldn’t…”
• “Is it possible for…”
• “Where in the world…” *
• “Who can…”
• “Is this a…” and “Is this an…”

I suppose, in a sense, this is a reasonable way to gauge the intimate levels with which we as a culture seem to have lifted from the Internet.  Some of the types of search queries that are suggested are of the same caliber as those one might ask privately to someone such as a counselor, and many are quite surprising.  Other queries also suggest what some of the common thoughts and concerns of the public are; given that the U.S. presidential elections have just ended, it’s not surprising to see that a few of my images mention the candidates, voting, or the current economic instability.

The mere fact that people are willing to accept the advice of complete strangers, without qualification or question and as found by a search engine with little more intelligence than a walnut, and trusting enough to ask these questions of a headless, emotionless entity in the first place suggests both that people are too insecure with themselves and their peers to confide their deepest secrets in other human beings and that they believe that the research they glean for their issue from the Internet is the best help they can get given this insecurity.

With all of this in mind, it’s not hard to connect that this blind trust, if you will, is perhaps one of the reasons such problems as spyware and phishing even exist.  If people were trained not to have this trust, but instead more of a distrust for machine and what comes out of it (and as a result of this training, develop an attraction to the warmth and individual attention that defines humanity), we would be able to eliminate a vast majority of the “evils” afoot.  Such training might even teach people enough about their privacy that they won’t turn their social networking profiles into flagrant and public advertisements of their misdeeds.  (If such training were to include the repeated usage of my favorite quote (”Trust is a weakness.”), I would be impressed.)

As kids, there’s no doubt that one of your mother/stepmother/grandmother/guardian’s favorite things to say was, “Don’t talk to strangers.”  The computer, although at this point a staple of nearly every technologically advanced household, may not be an intelligent and sentient being to talk to, but people forget that their computer has conversations of its own.  And, based on some of those Google suggestions, it’s telling everyone some of the things you might not want publicized at any cost.

* Alright, I added this one mostly as a joke.  Interestingly enough though, the top result is NOT what I was expecting.

Through some useless late-night meandering, I managed to come across this snarky blog post from AOL mocking Gmail’s latest addition to their popular e-mail/instant messaging platform, the ability to send SMS messages to cell phones (which has since been redacted so they can fix a few lingering bugs).  While it’s not ordinarily a big deal, some people without the appropriate plan and/or equipment might find it useful, as might someone overseas who doesn’t want to pay the “long distance text messaging” fees some wireless carriers seem to find all too important nowadays.

I find it interesting that AOL would attempt to play a humor card while they tout their own rusty horn, especially when you consider this is the same AOL that uses Google to power their search engine. Excuse me a second while I point out that this makes everyone at AOL look like a pack of three-year-olds without a babysitter and add myself to the numerous people who agree.

As someone who’s had rather interesting personal experiences with AOL over the past decade or so, I find their behavior here fairly lame.  Given those same experiences, though, I guess I can’t be too surprised.

I do have some words of advice for AOL, though (and I can think of a few others who can take something away from this as well, in a more generalized form, of course):

• When you’re trying to mock a company who may be trailing you in one area, it might be wise to consider whether you’re partners with them or not in another.  Nobody wants to do business when the only words you can say are, “I’m better than you,” especially when you seem to have forgotten that you’re not.
• Just because you’ve managed to beat someone to market with something as silly as an IM to SMS bridge doesn’t make you better.  I can’t exactly call most of Google’s offerings bloated, but I do suggest you go take a look at the whale you call your Internet portal and see how much fat you can trim out.  If it can’t function, I don’t care that it looks all glossy and shiny and can make little noises to notify me that somebody’s picking their nose.
• Perhaps there’s more to the Google branding than meets the eye, especially in professional terms.  Before you make a snide comment about Google only allowing users a Gmail domain, perhaps consider that nobody is going to use an address such as nicktabick@crazyforemail.com to conduct professional business.  (I find that address too stupid for personal use, either.  I also believe I’ve seen that address in my Spam folder before, but I digress…)
• If Halloween is a grand occasion to make fun of one of your partner/competitors, I wonder what Christmas is going to be like at the AOL offices this year.  However, for everyone’s sake, it might be better to ensure that the liquor, sugar, caffeine, and everything else that might get one of the press writers giddy is safely locked up lest someone posts a follow-up entry making fun of Time Warner.

Perhaps someone at AOL had a few too many candy bars before they came in for work (or, from the look of the timestamp on their post, on their lunch break).  Nice try, but next time around, use the sugar rush on something more productive - like decent software.

(That’s ‘cuil’ pronounced cool…bah, you’ll read why in a second, so screw the explanation.)

It’s no mistake that I’ve been a longtime fan of Google…well, everything.  Just about all of my e-mail is handled through them (including through Apps for Domains), I pay $20 a year for extra space on Picasa because I find it so much more usable than Flickr, and I’ve at least tried just about every other service they’ve offered.  I’m also the person who needs to try “the next big thing” much in the same way I have with Twitter and a whole dictionary of other sites that I’ve tried, put to use, retired, or whatever.

With all the buzz surrounding Cuil, I decided to divert my first few searches of the day (and a few vanity/test queries for comparison) to them to see how much more benefiting the results they deliver were to me.  And sadly, Cuil is about as “cuil” (it’s pronounced cool, if you missed that aside) as a sackful of cucumbers in this warmish Chicago summer.  In other words, their current setup renders it useless for me.  (Screenshots have been used throughout this post because at the time of writing, Cuil was bouncing in and out of service.)

Taking a look at their homepage, it’s no doubt that there’s a touch of Google in the air.  It’s simple, with only a few links to their policy and about pages, and the text box.  (Wait a minute…that sounds oddly like a page I see every hour.)  In fact, I think the only differences I can point out between the two are the off-center alignment, the color scheme, and the logos.  Hardly anything unexpected.  But looks don’t change how it works, so I might as well explain what I think of it after using it for a few minutes.

Being one of the founding members of TechCentric, it’s obviously no surprise that I would compare our rank on Cuil with how we’re doing everywhere else (which isn’t too hot given our hiatus, but that’s another story).  On Google and Yahoo, for example, TechCentric ranks right on top as the first result, while we place third on MSN (behind our own Wikipedia entry, for crying out loud).  With Cuil, there’s no “ranking” so much as there is a menagerie of results thrown at you in a somewhat-cool, somewhat-overloading multicolumn layout, with what I assume are supposed to be related images thrown in.  Picture a random page from the classifieds, replace all the advertisements with the typical excerpt from that result, and dot in a few random graphics for spice.  That’s the idea I get from Cuil’s results page.

Now, when I say they add random pictures, I pretty much mean it.  Aside from similar occurances noted by my friends, one of the images suggested by Cuil for my TechCentric search was that thumbnail of the three girls right there next to the link to the Crew listings.  I’ve included myself, Steve, and Will next to the image for comparison, but I don’t think any of those (four if you count the half-head to the right) girls look a thing like us, and they don’t appear anywhere on the TechCentric site.  I do believe they’re trying to suggest I’m something I’m not (namely, female).  They also seem to believe we’re related to The Who, as they have a poster thumbnail next to the suggested result on Wikipedia.

While the lack of relevance towards TechCentric could have been because of our lack of production, I found it quite awkward that searching for ‘justincox’ (you should know him by now) turned up only his Twitter account and some stuff which he claims isn’t him.  And not a sign of his site in sight on the first page of the results, either.  At least Rachelskirts can’t complain about her placement.  Searching for myself by name was a complete bust, as it turned up more results from other users’ Twitter pages than it did anything remotely relevant to me.  (Though there are a few underlaying things I noticed that I’m not willing to discuss just yet.)  Searching for ‘two slashes’ was also an exercise in patience, though removing the space found this site instantly (along with another random image alongside the TechCentric crew page).

One idea I liked, though it wasn’t exactly useful to me in its current state, was the category box on the right side, which suggests people and things relevant to what you might be searching for.  TechCentric comes up with some IPTV-related stuff, as it should, and some of my other searches were categorized correctly, but the suggested additions to your query might not be as helpful.  For example, searching for Darren Kitchen (from Hak.5) offered the expected categories for podcasting and vidcasts, but some of the suggested keywords (like Leo Laporte) just turned what could have been a helpful search into a useless waste of Intertubes, combined by the fact that they’re mashed with your original query.  (I think I finally stopped myself after ‘Darren Kitchen Leo Laporte Patrick Norton FLOSS Weekly‘ turned up as much whitespace as it did content.)

Cuil also seems to be having a problem with staying usable at the moment, partially thanks to repeated waves of news flooding Twitter, and its placement on Digg’s front page at the moment.  Considering Google’s tried-and-true methods and the fact that they handle plenty more traffic in any given hour than Cuil will probably see in the next day or two, perhaps the Google-alum masterminds behind the site could have brought a little more to the table in terms of reliability.  (Though I guess a similar suggestion could be made to Twitter about now.  Failwhale anyone?)

The concept of a competitor to Google with the brains to suggest relevant content is hard to believe, considering Google does a decent job of filtering out the garbage already (in my experience), and it’s even easier to limit the junk when you search for something with at least a respectable idea of what you’re aiming for.  But as long as the results turn up to be this jumbled and unrelated, I see no reason to deviate from my zealous (over)use of Google.

To start, I’d just like to point out that it’s almost guaranteed that I’m not alone in writing an opinionated piece on the new Plurk service, but I figured it was at least worth commenting about, especially when you take into account the contents of my previous post on Twitter.  Even more interesting is that a great majority of the discussion on Twitter in the past day or so is “Plurk is good/bad/in need of help/”.

I decided to give Plurk a try for myself and see what, if anything, set it apart from my now-established Twitter account, or similar alternatives like Pownce or Jaiku.  And to be frank, I don’t think there’s too much going for it; just about everything Plurk has developed concept-wise can be replicated with the Twitter API and a few lines of code.

Your “home” page is taken up mostly by a large horizontal timeline showing recent ‘plurks’ (even more obnoxious than ‘tweets,’ I realize) made by anyone you’re following updates from.  Unlike Twitter, there are two stages of followers, fans and friends.  Fans get the updates posted by that other person, but without the harassment of a ‘Can I be your friend?’ e-mail.  Friends, of course, is self-explanatory.  The timeline is supposed to be ‘realtime’ in that you can click a plurk and see all of the responses…but for all that effort, Plurk pops up a small notification box that there are new replies and plurks for you to look at rather than just adding them.  (Why not just add them and color-code them according to freshness from the last page reload?)  The timeline is also poorly-responsive; it takes a few seconds to scroll over on my machine, and no doubt it will be even slower as people and plurks add up.

One of Plurk’s minor benefits is that they follow the unwritten “microblogger” rule - that is, 140 words maximum - but you can use one of their ‘predefined’ verbs to save a few characters and make sure the verb gets a colorful highlight.  Of course, this only helps if you find yourself constantly nearing the edge and looking for any way to get your character count down, or if you can be bothered to navigate the menu with your mouse.  Plurk’s commenting system threads the responses together, at least, to make for some slight semblance of organization without all the click-throughs (Twitterers, meet Quotably), which makes it a tiny bit more organized.  But this also means you fall out of the conversation entirely if you aren’t following the initial poster.

Plurk also finds a major shortcoming in the way some of the site features (well, not even features, just extra smiley faces and the like) are locked until you establish your presence on Plurk by way of the Plurk Karma system.  Essentially, Plurk will analyze your participation once a day, and assign you a value from 0 to 100 based upon your interactions with the site and other users.  Making new friends or posts, or even uploading a profile picture all affect your Karma score.  Now, it’s an interesting way of getting people involved, but when it requires you to post nearly constantly to change the Plurk logo (yes, logo), I think it’s safe to say that there’s too little thought put into it.  Emoticons aren’t a big reason people are going to stick around…

Plurk also lacks an API and any semblance of SMS support (for the moment, at least), which means that you have to keep the page open or sign up your IM account (thankfully, they at least offer more than Google Talk).  And speaking of IMs, any updates to the timeline also get IMed to you, including responses from people you’ve never met, so if you’re following anyone who gets a lot of attention, your IM client will be getting a bit of attention too.  You can turn them off with off and on commands, post plurks, and respond to the nine or ten most recent comments on other plurks, but there’s really no use otherwise.

I’m sorry, but a headless dog does not a microblogging site make.  Plurk, it’s a great shot…but you’re going to need to offer something that can’t be replicated in thirty seconds on Twitter.  Oh, and lose the comment about emo-ness on your homepage.  Emos never share their emoness.

In the meantime, you’re welcome to befriend me on Plurk, but don’t expect any activity until (updated as of June 3) as Plurk has joined Twitter and Pownce at Ping.fm or some other multi-updater.

Alright, the emo joke might be a bit over the top, but I’m not the only one.  There are plenty of tweets about it, if only I hadn’t lost the URLs.

I’ve been a longtime user and fan of GrandCentral.  Being me, the ability to make sure that one phone number means near-constant contact is a very enticing one.  And the way Grand Central’s set up, it also works well as a privacy-protection number - you can let people reach you if you want, or forward them somewhere else if you don’t.

However, GrandCentral has one inherent flaw that I’m consistently running into when I hand the number out to people I know:  It only handles phone communication.  For a number that you’re supposed to hand out instead of your cell phone number (or any other number), it’s rather difficult to use that number for anything that isn’t strictly voice-based communications.  In other words…you can’t send or receive text messages with it.  In this day and age of people text-messaging and e-mailing each other from mobile devices left and right, it really kills the whole point of a forwarding number if it doesn’t forward everything with it - therefore leaving people like myself having to hand out the numbers we are “wrapping” with the GrandCentral number out to the people who need to get in touch with other ways.

GrandCentral has also been stagnant over the past few months following their acquisition by Google.  There are no invitations, so the only way to get an account is to reserve a number and pray that they admit you at some point.  Again, this is a bit of a deal-killer; for someone attempting to promote an open and free service, it’s really difficult for me to believe that without seeing any form of action taken.

I hate to be so negative, because from the inside, the service has been great (other than that “completeness” thing).  But if they really hope to get users, they need to start moving, open up to new users, and bring something new to the table.  Otherwise, they’ll get swallowed up in the vast sea of web services waiting to help people keep in touch.

Since it’s a required part of my curriculum here at school, I’ve been taking a rhetoric class. Recently in this class, we were assigned a research paper on a category of problems in academia, something that we can observe and then propose solutions about. Considering the post topic and me in general, you can probably guess (at least partially) what problems I’m focusing on in my research. This assignment couldn’t come at a better time, as I’ve heard plenty of complaints in particular about password-related issues as of late. You see, the school I attend mandates yearly password cycling, and considering the timeframe at which they hand incoming freshmen their account information, it’s becoming the one-year mark for a lot of people. Mostly, every gripe I’ve heard centers around one of a few major issues:

• The passwords my university requires are much more complex compared to the passwords most people use in their daily lives.
• Most services don’t require password cycles every year, or…ever.
• Since most people keep the same password (or set of passwords) for everything, constantly forcing password changes forces people to forget their password more often since it’s not the same password as other things they use on a daily basis.

While these arguments are perfectly legitimate, the people attempting to use them as rationale against needing to change their passwords also are the same people you find in a typical setting, not groomed in any form of security beyond that of the idea that any password is a surefire protection. (Cue Morpheus’ voice…”Welcome…to the real world.”) Anyway, as part of my research paper, I decided to compare the three pages’ worth of requirements about our university passwords with the requirements used by what I thought to be popular web services. And, after a few hours’ worth of investigative work, I can sympathize with the people who think changing their password is a lot of work. In short, these services, which I thought probably had at least a slight pulse on the idea of security, are grooming their users to be lazy and very unprotective of their data and service access. I’ve put together a table that should at least give an overview of the services I selected (if you have suggestions for more, I can’t promise anything but would welcome the heads-up) and the security procedures they enforce:

The numbers in brackets above correspond to these quick side notes:

1. MySpace’s requirement is an in-between: at least one numeric and one alphabetic character must be included in the password; no requirement is made as to the case of this character, however.
2. Windows Live has two sets of requirements that depend on the services the user accesses. Typically, users only have a six-character requirement, but if necessary due to the requirements of an application they use, Windows Live will force all of upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and a unique symbol, and mandatory password changes every 72 days. These 72-day password changes are provided as an option to non-qualified users.
3. eBay refused to accept the password ‘aaaaaa’ because it is very poor in security. However, ‘ababab’ works, which means that eBay offers at least a slight security check at registration.

Frankly, I’m very concerned with all of that red, and especially concerned with sites like Amazon, which allow you to store important credit card information in your account for easy checkout, and then allow me to log in with a capital ‘A’. Microsoft even surprises me (though in a good way), if you consider their forced-security dependency to be a good idea. (For once, Microsoft, I like.) Not that these sites and services even compare to the requirements for our university credentials, but it gives you an idea of just how absurd it is. Especially when I throw in the fact that a lot of these places have posted “suggestions” for creating a good and secure password, and then brush them all away in favor of some six-character string. So I apologize if I’m re-iterating what you already know or have seen, but after all of that, I think it’s important that people actually understand what good security is.

• The best passwords are not found in any published or publicly available work, be it a dictionary, your favorite action novel, or some random screenshot you found on Flickr. Don’t use anything important either, like a social security number. And anything personally identifiable or that has a direct reference to your life is out too; that means quit using your aunt’s birthday as a PIN.As one demonstration of coming up with unique but memorable passphrases, try to think of memorable snippets from your favorite written work (you’re probably double-taking right now, but continue reading). Now, develop your own personal algorithm for going through the phrase to select characters (hey, don’t be afraid of punctuation or numbers, because they help too and add uniqueness). For example, try taking the Fibonacci sequence’s digits and pulling those letters out. It sounds tedious now, but if you use the password regularly, your muscle memory will take over and you won’t even realize you’re entering the password anymore. At least, if you use it that regularly.
• NEVER use the same password in more than one place. There IS a reason for this, aside from “the man” trying to confuse you and prevent you from checking your mail; it’s compartmentalized security. If an attacker can compromise one account, and holds a password you use everywhere, you haven’t just handed him one site or a credit card, you’ve handed him your entire life. If that password doesn’t work somewhere else, the attacker’s got to go back to work and start all over again on the new site (if they’re indeed targeting you). If you can’t keep all of your passwords straight, get a trusted and notable password manager, and store your passwords with it. Some suites also provide you the added benefit of randomly-generated passwords like ‘Bs4&nd*D’ - but at the expense that you probably won’t remember them unless you use the application.

Considering these password recommendations are nearly timeless, it only makes me wonder when people are actually going to pay more attention BEFORE something bad happens to them. So quit complaining that you’ve got to change your password. Make it memorable, make it unique, and consider it worthy of a national secret. And for christ sake, ignore the fact that Google isn’t going to check for varied-case characters; force yourself to check for them. And a note to the few, the proud, the WordPress users: WP2.5 RC1 is nice, but I don’t think it’s ready yet. It’s got a few bugs, and I miss my old blue administration panel. I actually think it made more sense doing “Blogroll > Add Link” than “Write > Link” to add things to my blogroll.

It seems that computer users today fall into an almost cookie-cutter fashion. Firefox for web browsing; Winamp, Windows Media Player, or (rarely, but common enough that I mention it) VLC for media playback; uTorrent for P2P, and some AIM client (any of the official client, Trillian, or Pidgin in that order). Of course, while this makes it a lot easier knowing that all of these have a relatively large userbase, this only covers the basic and common tasks people perform every day with their computers. Common being the key word here.

While I’ve seen one or two attempts, I don’t think anyone’s ever actually pulled off recommending some of the lesser-known software; however, niches need to be filled, and someone’s got to do it. The only caveat is that nobody ever actually does. When have you opened your favorite downloads site and actually trawled through hundreds of useless or irrelevant applications to find some backseat freebie nobody’s ever heard of, because it was useful to you? Chances are, you’re probably muttering “never” at your monitor right now.

Sure enough, there are sites like Giveaway of the Day that offer up this rare niche software with surprising regularity; the problem is that they require you to bring your product to them, rather than searching for it and indexing it themselves. (Understandably, this makes more sense given their business model for shareware software, but all the same this means that they don’t actually dig.) Where are those hidden freebies, those things that could be useful to someone, but are never found because they’re the last result on Google, or nobody’s ever thought to go searching for it in the first place?

Given the sheer number of people on the planet at this point (let’s limit that to people ‘with access to a computer’ for the purposes of my example), there’s no problem that hasn’t been encountered at some point that a piece of software couldn’t aid in overcoming. Whether it’s some meaningless, trivial, repetitive task that needed to be done over and over, or some specialized project, chances are someone out there has experienced the same thing, and perhaps they or someone they know was savvy enough to come up with a solution. So it only follows that there are solutions for everything out there; the problem is that these solutions are often buried too deep to be found by more than a select few people.

Forgive me for saying this, but someone needs to get off their backside and come up with a site that shines the spotlight on some of these hidden gems…

I just found and spent the past few hours taking apart a little bugger that seems to turn up a few hits on Google.  Read about “pci32b.exe” here.

You know, there’s something to be said about the feeling when you know you’re going to be handed a pretty big job.  Sure, there’s a lot of work involved, but you also have that big payout at the end to expect too.

Such is the case with an organization that had an idea of where they were going and what they wanted when they contacted me to do some work for them.  After a face-to-face with one of the higher-ups who would be making decisions, I agreed and took on the job.  I put in the work, and even took time out of my day to go to their meetings to present what I had done as progress.  I got feedback and regular communication, and overall things went along more smoothly than I could ever have hoped for; I still don’t think I’ve taken on a job that went together as easily as this one since. (continue reading…)

So it’s been a while since I last posted.  Things happen.  People have other things to do.  And I’m in the middle of my finals right now, so I’m in even more of a time crunch than usual.

A friend in my dorm had a problem had a problem playing his copy of Command & Conquer 3 earlier, and asked me to help.

The system he was attempting to run it on was a Compaq laptop, preloaded with Microsoft Windows Vista, and overall it was a decent machine, with specs that should have been more than enough to play the game, albeit with a trip to the settings to turn down the graphics settings (as the machine had Intel graphics).  Indeed, this was something that he had already realized, and had proceeded to turn them down when he first installed the game.

He claimed to have tried numerous solutions, including trying several versions of his graphics drivers and game patches and setting all his graphics options to “Low”, to fix the problem, which was (in summary) that every time he tried to build one of a few particular types of building, the building would be animated as it was spawned…but the moment it finished, the game would be closed by Vista, which would proudly proclaim that the game had had a problem and needed to be closed.  However, the game would play fine and run great until those buildings were created, which made for some rather challenging gameplay when you realize that they were somewhat necessary for gameplay.

My first instinct (which still seems plausible) was that one or more files (and probably those responsible for containing the afflicted building animations) had been copied incorrectly or corrupted during installation, so my initial suggestions were to try to reinstall the game (again), and see if anything changed between installations.

Naturally, this did absolutely nothing but waste time.  At a loss, I decided to run a few searches on Google to look for anything that might be an indication of the problem.  Of course, I had plenty of posts of people with various problems between the game and Vista, even with the same error message, but nothing that quite seemed to match the problems I had been observing with the laptop in terms of recreating them.

After a bit of query manipulation, I came across a post on some far-off forums (I wish I could give credit and a link, but alas my history trail is so long that it would probably take me a month to find it.) that mentioned something somewhat similar, in that the same message occured when they tried to play the game (i.e. it would load, but immediately issue the message when it was ready for the user to play).  Curious, I read on, and found that his solution was to (and this is the awkward part) change the shader settings from their lowest settings up to Medium.

Curious, but doubting that this could be a possible answer, I had him try it, and it worked.  Now, I’m posting this not only to provide another source for people to find answers to the issue, but because I’m curious as to what would make someone think that this is the solution, and why it would work.  The only solution I can come up with after a few hours is that there’s an as-of-yet-unfixed bug in the shader code that causes it to have issues (at least with Vista), but only in the “low” quality settings.  Considering the numerous versions of patches released (and the fact that there were at least four in the first week of the game’s release), it leads me to believe that either EA doesn’t particularly care about their Vista userbase, or that they have yet to realize there’s a problem, even though I found several mentions of the same problem in different areas of the game.

Nevertheless, it still seems like a bit of a hacked solution.  It doesn’t really matter which of either C&C3 or Vista is to blame; for the most part, something like that probably would have been picked up if someone had done a little Q&A on a similar hardware setup.  (After all, the world doesn’t revolve around JUST ATi and nVidia cards.)

It’s a shame people just don’t make things like they used to.