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| What Has Four Wheels and Flies? |
| A Prescription for Health |
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| A Whole Pop of Confusion |
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BREAKING SURF
Domain Name Registration Breaking under Load and Spam Assault
Network Solutions is apparently experiencing serious problems processing domain name requests - problems beyond the long-standing inefficiencies we're so used to. According to press reports and buzz on Usenet, problems include failure to acknowledge domain name requests, inconsistent domain name databases, and a large number of system-clogging bogus domain name requests. Users report that it sometimes takes several requests to get an acknowledgement from Network Solutions, that e-mails requesting domain name services sometimes bounce back with server errors, and that several people have lost domain names to others despite requesting them first. CNet summarizes the problems.http://www.news.com/News/Item/0,4,31049,00.html
Student Discovers New Public Crypto Algorithm
What was once buried in obscure corners of mathematical journals is today making international headlines. Sarah Flannery, a 16-year-old Irish student working in a student placement program at Baltimore-Zergo, an information security firm, discovered what looks like a new version of a public key encryption algorithm. The media, as is their habit, are going overboard, calling Sarah a genius and elevating her to international stardom. Somewhat more circumspect crypto professionals note that the algorithm is not yet well tested, though they find it intriguing because it's much more efficient than the current RSA public key standard. Technical details about Sarah's technique, called the Cayley-Purser algorithm, are hard to find at this point. Baltimore-Zergo offers some information in a press release, but the more interesting discussion is going on in the sci.crypt newsgroup - ask there for further references.http://www.zergo.com/americas/press/mn_PR916320887.html
Acme City Offers Free Web Space to TV and Movie Fans
Warner Brothers has come up with an interesting new wrinkle in online promotion. The studio will give away free Web space to fans of its various TV shows and films. It will even donate official artwork for use on the pages. The deal includes 20 MB of Web space, free e-mail, chat spaces and message boards. As an added bonus, the various program pages can include good compilations of links to existing fan pages. We think it's a neat idea. Until now - well, until South Park, studios and production companies tried to keep a tight rein on sites that covered their products, but this may turn into a prototype of a new model for online promotion. Warner Brothers deserves a lot of credit for allowing fans to control the content. Even if they can pull the plug at any time....http://www.acmecity.com/
BugNet Cancels Awards in Disgust
Every year since 1994, BugNet has given out awards for the best bug fix performance of the year. This year, for the first time, BugNet has decided not to give out any awards. Noting that "frankly, the PC software industry's performance has been abysmal," BugNet editor/publisher Bruce Brown cited problems such as the falling bug fix rate in every release of Windows from 3.1 to 98, the lack of willingness by large vendors to take responsibility for problems, and the lack of concern over software that does not perform as advertised. Bruce's pithy editorial expresses perfectly the frustration we all feel when we have to deal with buggy software and broken hardware.http://www.bugnet.com/analysis/no_award.html
We proudly announce the latest iteration of the NSD search engine. The resounding endorsements include "Now I can find things!" by NSD editor Lawrence Nyveen. It's not for nothing that our new search engine motto is "Hey, this thing actually works?!"
http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/search.html
If you've seen the Gap's TV commercial, in which swing dancers freeze while the camera pans around them, then you haven't experienced Dayton Taylor's Timetrack camera system - but it's the same idea. Taylor's striking video technique has begun to invade the advertising spectrum. Taylor has deployed surprisingly conventional technology to create the dazzling effect, which produces the illusion of camera rotation around seemingly stopped or slow-motion images. Despite the preponderance of technical jargon, this site's high "cool quotient", comes from the numerous QuickTime samples. We particularly enjoyed the ads for Coberco Dairy Products and Blockbuster Video (UK). The samples demand substantial bandwidth but are worth the wait. The Gap's spot, by the way, used two motion picture cameras and software to achieve the same effect.
http://www.virtualcamera.com/
Bjorn Fogelberg makes drum and bass inspired electronic music that, like his site, sorta resemble the feeling one gets from floating around in a warm ocean. Soft and dreamy, the site's clean and simple design relies upon relaxing blue tones. Bjorn offers plenty of music tracks along with a complete explanation on how to make an independent CD. In Swedish. He says he's working on a translation. This site proves again how the Net empowers individual and independent distribution.
http://www.fogelberg.com/
Ellen's Art, Photography, Biography, History Place
In the overview to her sumptuous site, J. Ellen Cotton, photographer and former graphic artist, admits that "Ellen's Place is whatever strikes my fancy." What a receptive fancy she has! Her useful collections of links to graphic and photography resources themselves merit bookmarks. Cotton has a raft of small but elegant personal media galleries, each with its own look and feel. Her "High Country" gallery, for example, consists of interlinked sets of 30 years worth of her Colorado photos as well as an archive of Colorado lore and fact. Other sections of Ellen's Place are devoted to Amelia Earhart, Will Rogers, and Marilyn Monroe. We admire the powers of recollection that produced "Rafting the Grand Canyon of the Colorado" 25 years after the adventure. Big as Ellen's Place is, you never get the "cookie-cutter" feeling conveyed by some other large sites. To the contrary, every wing of her collection is enticingly exemplary.http://www.ionet.net/~jellenc/
You can wander for hours around Web sites that contain much rich content. An excellent example of this is the Venezuelan art gallery La Estancia. The site adopts that most civilised habit of using thumbnails, so the visitor can browse until one work catches the eye, and then investigate that piece in more detail. All kinds of art are here - from chairs to photography, from industrial design to graphic art. Colorful and interesting, if somewhat slow to load.
http://www.estancia-pdv.com.ve/
BOOKS & E-ZINES
In the second issue of our new e-zine, the gems we cover include books on survival from the SAS, a biography of David Lee Roth, a history of the Playboy Mansion, syphilis in the Renaissance, and the implications of trying to live forever. If you haven't subscribed yet, give it a go. It's free, and you might find some books you might not otherwise know about.NSB 01.02: http://www.netsurf.com/nsb/nsb.01.02.html
Subscribe: http://www.netsurf.com/nsb/subscribe.html
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Items our staff likes and you might too. Click on the image or title to order at a hefty discount from Amazon.com and send a few pennies our way as well.
Web Performance Tuning
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The Demonic Comedy: Some Detours in the Baghdad of Saddam Husseinhttp://www.cybereditions.com/aldaily/
Adbusters: Sustainable Ecology vs. Compulsive Consumerism
Warning: this site is so radically anti-American, it makes terrorism look like the status quo. Adbusters advocates something much more threatening: a conscious, collective change in the American social and economic ethic from consumerism to sustainable ecology. Maybe that's why the major TV networks refuse to air Adbusters' commercial for Buy Nothing Day. Read about their campaign to encourage a one-day fast from buying, or a one-week TV tune out. Even if this is just so much pointy-headed-professor-social-engineering-balderdash to you, read the fabulous essay, "The Zen TV Experiment", which teaches how to watch TV actively. Adbusters may have a slightly callow voice, but consider that compulsive consumerism cuts to the root of even our most debilitating health problems: drug addiction and overeating. Take a look at the paper Adbusters too, if you can find it.http://adbusters.org/
Quite the Angry Yet Entertaining E-Zine
This alternative newspaper-like e-zine, with articles on everything from the first live Internet execution to coping with high school reunions (and high school in general), makes a great read, even though it appears to be dead. Our fave picks include a hilarious account of finding crap corporate sites and the WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) phenomenon. "Jesus probably missed his life's calling; instead of being a carpenter he should have been a caterer: between the water into wine and the fish and loaves of bread he could have worked pretty cheap." You'll never realize you were interested in such stuff until you find your bottom's as asleep as the site yet you're still reading.http://www.concentric.net/~chocker/
Newspapers used to be printed with lead castings of letters arranged into sentences, slathered with ink, then squished onto paper. Modern digital layout and typography are simply extenuated versions of the old messy, time-consuming hot lead process. In terms of font design, layout, and readability issues, we really haven't strayed far from the basics. In Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, The Reviewer still uses hot lead composition and a hand-fed 1898 Two-Revolution Miehle Flatbed cylinder printing press. If you don't know what that is, drop on by the Web site for some small-town politics and an absorbing explanation of how newspapers used to be made, complete with pictures, diagrams, and a Web cam in the press room.
http://www3.sk.sympatico.ca/picapre/index.html
"Logic is the only essential element of sanity, but logic alone will rot a man until it doesn't matter whether he lives or dies." Yikes! Take that, postmodernity. The quote comes from from K. Ungeheuer (1908-88). Who, you may ask? Exactly. This site is dedicated to preserving the works of K. Ungeheuer, author and surrealist. The site's editors have snippets of poems and fragments of his theory of numerolinguistics but the bulk of his writing remains lost. Regardless, they remain determined to collect and preserve.
http://www.cockroach.org/
SURFING SCIENCE
One Hundred Years Ago in Alaska
This site focuses on the journal Louis Agassiz Fuertes kept during an 1899 scientific working vacation called the Harriman Alaska Expedition. While the image map version works fine, if your browser can handle it, opt instead for the frames version. The journal itself is scanned in, and a typed-in version provides links to the wonderful sketches and paintings Fuertes made during the trip. It's hard to believe someone could be so prolific, and harder still to believe someone had the patience to scan it all in and let the world behold his marvelous work.http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/Alaska/Default.html
Galloping through the Galapagos
Scientific American Frontiers took a trip to the Galapagos in December and produced this online field trip for students and teachers. The coolest feature has to be the journals with streaming RealPlayer clips. You'll find expository meat and potatoes in On the Islands, a background section on history, wildlife, and environment, with plenty of links to the Galapagos Glossary. For quick insight, read the answers to the Science Scavenger Hunt. The For Students section contains experiments and activities which foster learning, such as step-by-step analysis of water samples, synthesis of DNA, backyard science, and an interactive map of the islands. Students can also participate in surveys. We wish we'd had neat stuff like this when we were kids!http://www.pbs.org/saf/galapagos.html
What Has Four Wheels and Flies?
No, not a garbage truck. The answer is the 1903 Wright Flyer, which can be viewed in all its QuickTime glory at the To Fly Is Everything virtual aviation museum. Heck, you can even load a Java simulation and fly the kite. (Try to beat our unassisted record of 53.1 feet) If names like Cayley, Lilienthal, and Chanute send you soaring, you're bound to get a kick out of the site. If the names Hartmann and Yeager seem more familiar to you, perhaps you need to visit these pages and brush up on aviation's pioneers. If you know none of these guys, well, there's just no hope for you.http://hawaii.cogsci.uiuc.edu/invent/airplanes.html
RxTV wants to be your "online prescription for good health". To achieve that goal, the site offers medical news, health-related links, and RealVideo clips about medical topics. The links change weekly. Recently, the site featured links for your four-legged and other pet friends, information on blindness, and a site on autism. New infirmities every day.
http://www.rxtv.com/
One should probably be suspicious of a medically oriented site that includes photos of the spouse and dogs of the writer, but this page, dedicated to helping those infected with Hepatitis C virus (HCV), pulls together enough diverse resources to become useful. HCV sufferers will find links to a vast number of resources, and perhaps some comfort from the knowledge that they are not alone. HCV has only been identified in the last ten years. It spreads through direct blood-to-blood contact, usually through the sharing of contaminated needles. Its chronic forms take decades to progress, and sometimes go undiagnosed for years. As such, it is one of those modern diseases that seem almost to take the form of a personal definition. What better for a Web page?
http://www.texoma.net/~moreland/
By and large, the Web promises a library, and gives you television. Itty Bitty Blackboard may not be the classroom it promises, but it is a packed digest of current science news, pitched at a level particularly useful for middle-school students. But let's not be patronizing. It could easily serve as a quick intro to any scientific subject the reader is not already familiar with. A few quick briefings on Earth and space science, complete with quick-loading animations, round out its collection of bite-sized pieces of information. The site also has a commercial side, as a genteel purveyor of science books, with a link to Amazon.com. The Web as an austere purveyor of useful knowledge? Stranger things have come to pass.
http://www.ittybittyblackboard.com/
CORRECTIONS
Of the Whole Pop Magazine Online, in NSD 4.35 we wrote that it tells tales of everyday stuff that bobs to the surface of mainstream culture. But we called it the Whole Pop Catalog. While Jack Mingo edits both the Magazine Online and the Catalog, the distinction between them matters legally, if not philosophically.http://www.wholepop.com/