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| All Your Base Camp Are Belong to Us |
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BREAKING SURF
Scientists continue to troll the heavens for signs of extrasolar planets, deploying bright new detectors to unearth planets around other suns - exoplanets. Early this month, a multi-national team announced it had found 11 new exoplanets by observing changes in radial velocities, i.e. wobble, of the target stars. Some of the observations are strange, including one planet whose highly skewed orbital radius ranges from 5 million to 127 million kilometres. One gas giant sits smack dab in its system's habitable zone, raising speculation it might have life-bearing satellites. The fairly technical press release reveals the fascinating patient sleuthing and observational precision needed to make these discoveries. Note as well that the La Silla Observatory the team used is a relatively small facility; in the world of astrophysics, not only the big rigs battle at the edges of knowledge. All planets astronomers have discovered to date are huge, but a new high-resolution spectrograph should next year allow researchers to find smaller planets (that are still much larger than Earth).Discoveries: http://www.eso.org/outreach/press-rel/pr-2001/pr-07-01.html
Details: http://obswww.unige.ch/~udry/planet/new_planet.html
"We heard vibrations and metallic sounds, and then smelled a bit of hot insulation. Ground called that the fan was off." So it goes in William "Shep" Shepherd's intriguing crew logs, written during his 136 days on the International Space Station as commander of the shakedown crew, and provided here in PDF format. NASA has removed some of the material to protect crew privacy, but what's left will shatter any notion you may have of glamor and excitement in space. You need ingenuity to deal with frequent failures and design snafus when the nearest Home Depot is a long way down. The incessant rounds of fix-it and treadmill workouts seem to be relieved only by movies and ham radio conversations with schools. With the next shuttle delayed and no video store next door, Shep comments, "We will have to start the shipboard routine where we turn the sound down and everyone mouths the words, cause we know them so well." If you really want to serve in space, come with lots of electrical tape, pliers, a knife, a Leatherman, and an engineering degree. Apparently, a video library wouldn't hurt, either.
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/station/crew/exp1/ex1logs.html
We read 'em all. At the Moscow Times.com, we found an article on "Russia's New Space Age" which includes a story about life and pranks on the former space station, Mir. The article makes apparent that the Mir crews were a bunch of fun-loving Yuris. They found that tapping on a viewport sent space-dust drifting off into space and with no size reference with which to compare the sunlit motes, newcomers could be tricked into believing they were seeing UFOs. Perhaps the following best sums up the approach of our Russian friends to spacefare: "When the Mir crew ran out of alcohol reserves, they would often go on 'treasure-seeking' expeditions for more, tearing down interior panels to find bottles hidden by previous crews, said Alexander Poleshchuk, who spent six months on board Mir in 1993." Find this treasure at the following URL.
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2001/03/23/012.html
NASA Feels the Heat at Latest Mars Launch
After a nearly perfect launch, 2001 Mars Odyssey is on its 400-million-mile, six-month journey to the red planet. The spacecraft will primarily search for water on Mars but it will also seek 19 other chemical elements and measure radiation. NASA, just barely holding the budget-cutters at bay, needs to recover from two previous Mars failures: the Mars Polar Lander and the Mars Climate Orbiter. If everything works, Mars Odyssey will spend two years circling the planet while taking measurements and readings. The mission was already providing remarkably sharp and dramatic views before and during lift-off with two cameras attached to the Delta 2 rocket, one facing up and one down.NASA: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/odyssey/
Space.com: http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/missions/mars_odyssey_sr.html
Future Electronic Access to Scientific Literature
The scientific journal Nature is hosting an online debate on the future of the dissemination of scientific literature. This deep and somewhat contentious issue in scientific circles may threaten the well established and well financed system of publishing in prestigious print journals. Typically, a scientist's reputation is based on papers published in such refereed journals, which allegedly maintain the quality of scientific results with a peer review process. Electronic publishing has led to freely available and generally unreviewed claims, the advent of which has thrown both the scientific journal industry and the peer review culture into turmoil. Many voices contribute to this multifaceted and complex debate and the Nature forum aims to "debate the implications for the future dissemination of scientific information" and bring the issue to the attention of a broader audience.http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/
The Danger of Self-Upgrading Appliances
This is not a security story, nor even a computer risk story. This is a story of commercial rights. What would happen if you bought a fancy refrigerator that could make ice cubes, and then one day the manufacturer downloaded an upgrade which removed that functionality? You'd be pretty pissed. This is exactly the position in which users of ReplayTV have found themselves. The company upgraded the software on the digital video recorder removing a feature that at least one user liked. What's more, they replaced the feature - frame pause - with commercials. This issue is as ugly as it is serious since many software businesses are moving towards a subscription or rental model in which your software gets automatically paid for and upgraded on an ongoing basis. Read Bruce Tognazzini's account of his experience with ReplayTV and think carefully before you buy subscription-based services and goods. Incidentally, Bruce is a bigwig in the world of interface design and is going on a world seminar tour with Jakob Nielsen, Brenda Laurel, and Donald Norman. His site is well worth browsing for anyone into computer interface design.Bruce: http://www.asktog.com:80/limit.html
Tour: http://www.nngroup.com/worldtour/index.html
Intel's Philanthropic Peer-to-Peer Project
The media have widely reported that Intel is teaming up with the American Cancer Society National Foundation for Cancer Research and the University of Oxford to apply the power of distributed computing to solving some difficult molecular interaction problems. The results should help with research towards a cure for a variety of life-threatening illnesses. The first client program now available for download evaluates the interaction of four proteins and results could be used to fight leukemia. Amid the media hoopla over personal contributions to a cure for cancer, it's worth noting that the company which wrote the software, United Devices, is not only getting computing power to work on drug technology but is also getting a fee for administering the peer-to-peer network. That's not necessarily bad, but be an informed consumer. Ultimately, the results will become the intellectual property of the not-for-profit University of Oxford, which will make them public at no cost. For more on United Devices, see "United Devices' Generic Distributed Computing" in NSD 7.07.Intel: http://www.intel.com/cure/
NSD 7.07: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/nsd.07.07.html#SW1#SW1
Napster it ain't, but Microsoft's latest bid to rule the universe piece by piece involves a whole range of music stations covering just about every musical style and taste you could imagine. You need a Passport account to listen and it works - surprise, surprise - only with Internet Explorer and Windows. Musically, the experience offers reasonable stereo separation and only occasional dropouts and freezes - even with a dial-up connection. Although some tunes may be downloaded, most cannot be, so you're pretty much at the mercy of whatever is playing at the moment, just like real radio. The site offers to build a station for you based on the music selections you place in your favorites folder, but we're not sure just how that works or whether this is anything more than a ploy to gather marketing information. Overall, it's not a bad way to sample music without having to visit your nearest store and fight for the headphones.
http://music.windowsmedia.msn.com/
Virgin Records, always a bit of a maverick, has added a recording feature to its media player. Virgin streams about 40 online channels of music on its Web site. Listeners to the service, called Radio Free Virgin (RFV), can record the feeds and save them to disk in a proprietary format that can only be played back by the Virgin player. If this proves popular, the format will be broken eventually, but meanwhile the experiment is likely to be looked on with interest and maybe a bit of apprehension by the other major player and streaming software manufacturers. The big difference between RFV and, say, Napster is that RFV actually owns the rights to the music you can get from it. This is not the only way to record online streams - check out for example RadioActive's Bitbop Tuner - but it is the first which is overtly supported by a major record company. As an aside, one NSD reader pointed out to us that as long as you can insert a recording device between player and speaker, there is no such thing as secure music.
RFV: http://www.radiofreevirgin.com/
RadioActive: http://www.radioactive.com/
Yes, you too can fire up your microphone and assault the world with your blather (if you use WIndows and Internet Explorer). Lycos Talk Radio works with a little piece of software downloaded from Wonderhorse. When we checked the place out, there were only about half a dozen shows on the air, none of which, frankly - we do so hate to be discouraging - worth listening to for very long, and most were beset with technical difficulties associated with people calling in. Still, we expect some polished performers to emerge and the range of offerings to expand as the lure of being able to MC your own show attracts some talent. Is this Lycos's bid for filling the universe with babble and endless yakkity-yak? Perhaps, and it could become huge or it could sink without a trace - we're not prescient enough to predict which, although Lycos says it hopes to "add stickiness to all of our products". Hmmm. Tune in for yourself and see what you think, and read CNet's take on it. Anyone for Netsurfer Radio?
TalkRadio: http://talkradio.lycos.com/talkradio/lycos/home/home.asp
CNet: http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-5249908.html
FCC Guidelines on Broadcast Indecency
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has just released a report which is supposed to clarify for US broadcasters what is and is not indecent. The lengthy report, full of legal analysis, basically says that explicit sexual or excretory material, in context, is forbidden. It also notes that the famous US legal standard of being "patently offensive by contemporary community standards" does not apply to the community being broadcast to, but rather the mythical "average broadcast viewer". Of course, the report with its numerous examples is itself quite obscene, in many senses of the word. It's also worth noting that at least one FCC commissioner (Tristiani) notes in a dissent that the report is "nothing more than a remedy in search of a problem" and warns that "it likely may lead to responses to future enforcement actions that cite the Statement as establishing false safe harbors."Press release: http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Enforcement/News_Releases/2001/nren0109.html
Report: http://www.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Enforcement/Orders/2001/fcc01090.txt
It's been a long, hard road for Gary Kremen in his attempt to regain control of the coveted Sex.com domain. Kremen lost the domain after Stephen Cohen submitted fraudulent papers to Network Solutions, which then effectively transferred the domain to his control. Kremen spent five years and $1.9 million to recover the domain, during which time Cohen earned $43 million with the Sex.com Web site. A judge has awarded Kremen $65 million in damages but Cohen, who has numerous offshore bank accounts and who left the US after skipping bail, is unlikely to pay. Kremen's plans for the Sex.com site call for a toned-down image and a transformation from a collection of hard-core links and banner ads into a sex community.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/554253.asp
Everything Breaks, Including the Internet
The majority of Internet users are unconcerned about the reliability of Internet service providers, their proximity to quake zones, or security issues in Web site hosting. Unconcerned, that is, until they can't get to the site they want. The Internet is so interlinked, the chances of the whole thing becoming unavailable are slim, but with rampant growth come maintenance headaches. Some experts believe Internet availability and speed are suffering, mostly because of infrastructure-related issues. ZDNet has a detailed overview of why the Internet isn't all it could be.http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2701517,00.html
MSN Implements Port 25 Blocking to Fight Spam
Microsoft's MSN has implemented a technical solution for dealing with spam which may cause problems for certain users of that Internet service provider (ISP). Like some other major ISPs, MSN will no longer allow customers' software to talk on TCP port 25 to any other machines. Port 25 is the Internet standard port used to communicate with mail servers. The policy can be effective in preventing spammers from abusing an ISP, but it can also be a hassle for sophisticated users and may require non-technical users to change settings in their e-mail clients. That seems to be a decent trade-off but, according to ZDNet, MSN is not offering technical support to do so. You don't get to be an economy-driving company by actually helping out your customers, we guess. The short article also has a good overview of various opinions on whether port 25 blocking is a good or bad thing.http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,5080821,00.html
ICANN Proposes That VeriSign Keep .Com Control
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has proposed extending VeriSign's lucrative control over .com top-level domain (TLD) registration in exchange for relinquishing control of the .org TLD five years early. ICANN, no stranger to criticism, says the move will put VeriSign on the same level as other registry operators in an attempt to level the playing field in the competitive and controversial domain management business. Other registry operators, however, disagree and cite concern over VeriSign's inside track on .com TLD management.http://www.siliconvalley.com/docs/news/reuters_wire/1038767l.htm
Yahoo just launched a real-time financial information portal. The company's Real-Time Finance subscription costs $10/month and provides real-time stock market quotes, live media coverage of business news, and all sorts of whizzy notification options for cell phones and PDAs. The services is integrated with various MyYahoo services. Look at the bottom of the page for a tour that gives a taste of what your money buys you.
http://billing.finance.yahoo.com/ym/f/FinanceReal1
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In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made
Learning XML
The Octagonal RavenONLINE CULTURE
Psycho-Hoax at Psychoexgirlfriend?
The story goes that Mark met this older woman a while back. They dated for eight months but had "some communication issues" and broke up. That's when the girl supposedly left over 50 psychotic voicemails. Mark decided to post the voicemails on the Net. The media picked up the story and it took on a life of its own - understandable since it was tabloid-sexy to the max. Many electrons were spilled in online forums as some posters sided with the guy - and gleefully pointed out their own psycho girlfriends - while others empathized with the pain and suffering of the woman. A few expressed skepticism over the story's basis in fact. Newstrolls did some digging and came up with some fairly compelling evidence that, popular though it may be, the story is probably a hoax. Nevertheless, the idea obviously hit a nerve. Read the evidence before you visit the site, and watch out for the endless stream of pop-up windows. The message board is packed and good for hours of entertainment.Hoax Evidence: http://www.newstrolls.com/news/dev/downes/column010329.htm
Psycho: http://www.psychoexgirlfriend.com/
One Man vs. Domain Name Monopolies
The Village Voice chronicles the struggle of one man, Paul Garrin, against VeriSign's effective monopoly over the administration of root domain name servers (DNS). Paul is not the only person who has worked to create an alternative DNS; several other alternative DNS spaces exist, but they are not widely used by ISPs for cultural and business reasons. The article covers the issue and looks at where the domain name industry is headed. In particular, it talks about how some large ISPs, such as Earthlink, Excite, NetZero, and MP3.com, are banding together to create an alternative to VeriSign's monopoly. It's an intelligent discussion of the state and evolution of a critical part of Net infrastructure.http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0114/ferguson.shtml
All Your Base Are Still Belong to Us
OK, so we used the phrase in this issue, you may have heard it somewhere - maybe NSD 07.05? But why does it keep cropping up? By now the phrase are belong to Net cult status, and if you want to know the whole history of how it got that way you need to visit the All Your Base Official Video Homepage. Weird net culture conveniently spread out for your dissection.http://www.planettribes.com/allyourbase/
We're asking because somebody set us up the bomb, and we've been trying to figure out who. That's right. Two great fads that taste great together, "All Your Base" and "Hot or Not?", have come together in an unholy union for "Am I All Your Base or Not?" (AIAYBON). If you don't have the patience to flip through hundreds of potential All Your Base images, check out the AIAYBON Top 10 for the crowd pleasers.
http://www.amiallyourbaseornot.com/
SURFING SITES
Stalingrad: The Movie and the Reality
The latest historical event to get the full Hollywood treatment is the Battle of Stalingrad, the massive 1942 struggle between the Germans and the Russians. It was the biggest battle ever between land forces. The fighting went on for months, millions were killed and wounded, and the city was reduced to rubble. The Russians won. This battle, more than any other single factor, doomed the Third Reich. The movie gets it all down: two males stalk each other in the rubble, each seeking only to kill the other. Naturally, it's all for the affections of a female. Yeah, right. Salon takes a mercifully brief look at the film and then, in a group of brilliant articles tells the real story, puts the battle into historical context, and manages to evoke a bit of the incredible horror the participants went through.http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2001/03/28/stalingrad/index.html
Sgt. David Rubitsky served in the US Army in World War II. The night of December 1-2, 1942, he was in New Guinea, then the scene of vicious fighting between American and Japanese forces. Over the course of 13 hours, Rubitsky single-handedly beat back a Japanese surprise attack, killing between 500 and 600 enemy soldiers. That's hard to believe, but the evidence on this Web site is totally convincing. He was recommended for the Congressional Medal of Honor, but an officer several levels up his chain of command rejected the application. His reasoning was simple. In his opinion, the US Army didn't give that award to Jews. Rubitsky and his supporters have been trying to rectify the situation ever since. Although the US Army doesn't dispute the facts, Rubitsky, who is still alive, has never received an Army award for his bravery.
http://www.rubitsky.com/
Histories of the Small and Overlooked
Explorers and pirates know maps can mislead, but did geography teachers ever tell you that "the patchwork of nations we're used to seeing on the evening news are often convenient fictions"? Footnotes to History, by James L. Erwin, is an encyclopedia of micro-nations, forgotten territories and islands, obscure republics, sovereign states and peoples that never made it in a big way, or did make it but lost it, or are trying to hold onto it - whatever that "it" was or is. If your reading is or was voluminous, you're likely to find fascinating tidbits here even if you are no historian or researcher. Even Erwin's bibliography has intriguing links to sources in many cultures. It's pretty easy to find your way around.http://users.mcleodusa.net/j/jlerwin/index.htm
Payback is so sweet. It's particularly sweet to con the con man who tried to con you. The Buddy Weiserman.com site documents, in excruciating detail, how a common e-mail scam was transmuted into a scamming of the scammer, who in his greed managed to make a total fool of himself. All the details are here. Indeed, this was so good our reviewer though it might have been a hoax. Thorough searches convinced our reviewer that for once the spam/con jerk did indeed get his comeuppance. But read the last e-mails - the scammer doesnt ever give up. In tribute to Prince Jubril, the conned con man, use the handy "taunt prince" feature to send him an e-mail telling him how much you enjoyed his scam attempt.
http://www.buddyweiserman.com/
It took over a year, but the Park Wars movie is finally available online. What was originally intended to be a over an hour long has come out as 11 minutes in length, to take advantage of the fair use relief of copyright law in using a movie's audio track. A variety of video formats will let anyone download and watch the cross between South Park and "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace". Note, however, that 11 minutes still translates into more than 20 MB, even for the smaller video formats. Park Wars starts with the South Park cast filling the roles of various characters from the Star Wars film. About midway through it acquiesces to copyright law and shifts from being a mock remake of the Star Wars film to a mix of movie and music video. Keep your eyes out for the game of Doom appearing behind Terrence, Cartman's thespian talents as Yoda, and probably the only use of a word like "elusive" in a South Park sentence.
http://www.parkwars.com/
Confess Your Sins, or Read Others'
Dare we enter Not Proud Uncut? Even the cut ones were nerve-wracking. Not Proud accepts anonymous confessions, categorized into the Seven Deadly Sins, and then displays them to visitors. We found a lot of confessions abut overloading on pornography (Lust) and food and beer (Gluttony). We liked: "i have never had sex without paying. i lost my virginity to a hooker. im 20 years old" but our reviewer's favorite was "I am so lazy, I have a wheelchair in my house. I roll out of bed in the afternoon and slide into the wheelchair, sometimes i even use it to go down to the shops up the street, i think the guy at the 7-eleven has noticed that sometimes i walk in and sometimes i roll in." We also noticed that the Sloth extends to relentless ignorance of the shift key. Keep this and "Hot or Not" in your bookmarks for days you're feeling blue, and you'll be soaring within the hour.http://www.notproud.com/
The Nose Pilot - As Unique as it Sounds
If you've got the time to spare, and a broadband connection to the Net, this site offers up some amazing artistry. The combination of graphics and music here is unlike anything we've seen to date. Wait, there's a word for that - ahhh, er, yes, that would be "unique". We're not talking about neutered guys that stand around guarding harems, here. This is one of the coolest multimedia sites we've seen on the Net. You'll have to do some poking around to see and hear the stuff hosted there, but it's well worth the time it takes to explore. Heck, if you were a newbie, would you have found your way here? Likely not. Enjoy, while you can, as it seems it has had some issues with its ISP.http://www.nosepilot.com/
Macintosh aficionados explore Applefritter with a gleam in their eyes. Tom Owad packed together his old Powerbook 160 using a child's plastic building blocks and created his Compubrick 160. It catalyzed Applefritter's debut. Rummage through Applefritter's many serious hacks and play with your imagination: an iMac can gain a much larger screen by opening up a traditional 21" monitor and sticking the guts of the iMac inside the monitor's case. The original systems and their clones, detailed in a number of images, are complemented by prototypes for things that never actually made it onto the store shelf. Read through the site before you dig up your toolbox, or you might have to fend off your parents or spouse as you tear apart those old boxes.
http://applefritter.com/
In the past, we've informed you of strangely overhyped Web sites featuring Super Greg and Curry, the smooth-operatin', woman-attractin' race car driver. Somehow, we missed Roy, who was born to destroy. Oh well. The three are more than cretins - they are cretins who are fictitious creations of Lee Dungarees and who battle the Man Who Can't Be Busted, Buddy Lee. For a guy who's been around since 1923, that Buddy Lee is one spunky fella. Shockwave games of Buddy battling his foes are built around filmed sequences, and the Lee people are playing the kitsch-meets-Nintendo combination to the hilt. There's a driving game, a DJ "scratch-off", and chop-socky showdown... and here's a shocker, the site has a list of "featured jeans" and a store directory. You too can play like Buddy and dress like Buddy, which we of course plan on doing, since the games are pretty cool, and our favorite Battlebot is the late lamented "Buddy Lee Don't Play in the Street".
Buddy Lee: http://www.buddylee.com/default.asp
Super Greg: http://www.supergreg.com/
Curry: http://www.rubberburner.com/
Roy: http://www.borntodestroy.com/
If you want to waste lots of time but ultimately feel a whole lot better about yourself, start your "Hot or Not?" voting as soon as possible. To see the next "Hot or Not?" picture - and they're well worth the wait - you're forced to rate these sitting ducks on a scale from one to 10. Be reckless, be bitchy, be carefree. You can choose to view men only, women only, or both sexes, but it's all fun. We should know, we checked them all out while fending off the many tempting offers to submit our own photos for sacrifice. It might be useful if you have a hot date coming up and you're not sure whether your new look is quite up to scratch but otherwise the only reason you could possibly want to offer yourself for slaughter here is if Jerry Springer and Temptation Island have rejected you already.
http://www.hotornot.com/
Tiny print, puzzling illustration, technical errors, poor translation, or editorial blunders got you swearing at those danged foldout manuals for consumer goods? LiveManuals has the answer, or rather, a ton of answers. Once you're equipped with the free LivePlayer plug-in, you can view audio-visual simulations of appliances, electronics, office equipment, phones, printers, scanners, wireless devices and more. Thankfully, you can search by manufacturer or product. Our first search, out of perversity, was "typewriter". Amazingly, LiveManuals produced links to service and repair centers, Web sites, printer drivers, and warranty information, along with postal addresses and phone numbers. You can register to create your own product portfolio and store model numbers and warranty information onsite. It's easy to see that, if LiveManuals keeps it up, some manufacturers may omit paper manuals altogether.
http://www.livemanuals.com/
Cyberrebate's a Good Deal with a Long Wait
While other dotcoms are kissing their assets goodbye, CyberRebate.com is pulling in more and more visitors every day and giving money away. They've paid out over $85 million in rebates. There's no catch; you just have to be willing to jump through rebate hoops and wait 10 to 14 weeks for your check. You have to decide whether leaving your money in the bank or invested for that period would make you more money - in the recent economy, perhaps not. The products themselves, which tend to be name brands, always arrive within several days of ordering. Be forewarned that CyberRebate.com's popularity has driven its customer service down. You're less likely to get exactly what you ordered or get a response within a month to your request for a Gift Verification Voucher (how you avoid cutting the UPCs off items you intend as gifts) today than a year ago. If you're willing to put up with that, however, it's a fun and sometimes money-saving endeavor.http://www.cyberrebate.com/
The Condoboy seems just a bit too eager to share his wealth of knowledge with us. Like we really need to waste CPU cycles on an illustrated description of how to change a light bulb. We're not kidding; he's got that, along with similar content. This appears to be a work in progress, and that's a good thing. It's got some cool features, with hidden GIFs and animation and all. Modem users will need to be patient, as it takes time to load the interactive content. Is it worth it? We'll leave it to you to decide. The boy's got a killer living room; Martha Stewart would be sooo envious!
http://www.condoboy.com/
Not all dog breeds are alike. If you decide to get a dog, getting the right kind of dog is vital to the happiness and longevity of your new relationship. The PuppyFinder site is one of the finest breed selection sites online. An intelligently composed questionnaire quizzes you for details and then presents with a list of dog breeds that would fit your situation. The breed descriptions are superb. The site has excellent sections on all aspects of getting your new family member, from breed lists to lists of local vets. There are even lists of dog names (like you don't already have a name picked out) and dog-friendly hotels where you can stay while on the road. Some sections are still a bit empty, but are growing at a rapid clip.
http://www.puppyfinder.com/
ONLINE TRAVEL
Boris Kester has the essential characteristic for a successful travel site: he's a great guide. Aside from the very good photographs of exotic places, the well crafted short stories about hidden worlds in far-flung megalopoli, what it comes down to is you just want to see what Boris found last time he hopped a plane to Cairo, or Bahrain, or Hokkaido. This former computer programmer turned flight attendant has a knack for finding truly interesting tourist sites. Despite the hundreds of thousands of miles he's logged on and over every continent, his descriptions are as fresh as any wide-eyed college backpacker's.http://www.traveladventures.org/
Having visited the Tower of London - as tourists, of course - long ago, we agree that "This website however is no substitute for the real thing." Still, the official Tower of London site might impress those yet to shiver within the massive, legendary walls that imprisoned William Wallace, Henry VI, Rudolph Hess, and others out of royal favor. There are no images of torture rooms or dungeons (the FAQ states, "There is no display of any torture devices at the Tower itself so there is nothing for us to show you."), but what a collection it holds! A virtual tour, "Tales from the Tower", 360-degree QuickTime panoramas, bloody history, spy and ghost stories, an archery game ("Shoot for your life") in which you can easily lose your head, teasers about the Crown Jewels, interviews with guards, and quotes from ignorant tourists ("What the Warder Overheard"). Many pages have embedded music, and it's excellent. You need Shockwave to get the most out of this site.
http://www.tower-of-london.com/
All Your Base Camp Are Belong to Us
STEP (Student Teachers Employers Parents) Online is interested in providing drug prevention education without looking educational. Its new feature, Everyone Has an Everest, chronicles Nancy Feagin's and Ben Webster's journey up, yes, Mount Everest. What does this have to do with drug prevention? It's part of a program designed to teach that with hard work and healthy choices people can overcome life's obstacles. Although an admirable task, achieving Everest's summit seems like a chancy way to demonstrate this. The team has just reached the base camp and plans to begin its summit bid May 8, so be sure to check in on them then.http://www.steponline.com/everest/
Ramon Stoppelenburg is leaving his home in the Netherlands May 1 to freeload off whoever will offer him a corner of their sofa. We were astounded to note the hundreds of caring sharing potential hosts from around the world who have prepped their couch ready for Ramon and his backpack until we saw the travel pictures. Ramon is a babe, or whatever the male equivalent is.
http://www.letmestayforaday.com/
FLOTSAM & JETSAM
For quick, if temporary, relief from tax-return blues, check out this funny parody of Form 1040. It's a great takeoff on the demise of dotcom euphoria. Any American who has filed the real tax McCoy is likely to enjoy it. IT employees will love it.http://www.thoughtpolice.com/bayboyz/1040.html
If something really bothers you there's almost certainly a name for it. You have nothing to fear but fear itself? Phobophobia. There are 526 other phobias listed here, all concisely defined. If you cant find a phobia of your own, you know there's something wrong with you.
http://www.phobialist.com/
A little Javascript can do wondrous things. Then there's this. If you visit the page, you'll learn what it felt like during the Seattle earthquake - sort of lke four or five cafe lattes with two shots of espresso. Try a click.
http://www.memail.com/fotos/Shaker.html
If the words "station wagon" make you hear Dinah Shore singing "See the USA in your Chevrolet", remember the car fashion wheel spins and you never know where it's going to stop. Maybe the new wagons will catch on as the SUV runs out of gas. Stationwagon.com takes you from post-WWII to the present.
http://www.stationwagon.com/
SOFTWARE
Go ahead and give us a swift kick for the headline, but if we didn't use it, we'd get booted out of the tabloid union. It's a goofy game called "PortaBush" for the Palm Pilot where a likeness of President Bush fights with Al Gore, blows things up, vetoes bills, and dances a jig. The objective is to avoid impeachment and win another four years in office. Funny stuff, and how could we not report it given the headline potential? A free demo is available for download, the full game is $5.http://www.eruptor.com/
Two views on the future direction of major pieces of open source infrastructure software were recently posted. First, Larry Wall discussed the next major release - and rewrite - of the Perl programming language. As usual, Larry writes with great dollops of wit and philosophy in the first installment of a series of articles on the design of Perl as it evolves towards the "Apocalypse". A must read for all Perl hackers. Meanwhile over in Linux land, leading kernel hackers attended a summit meeting in Silicon Valley. Over 65 people showed up and in a series of forums discussed what should be in the next major revision of the kernel. LWN.net has a summary of the summit and some of the decisions - or rather consensus points - that emerged from the meeting. A must read for all Linux fans.
Larry: http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/04/02/wall.html
LWN.net: http://lwn.net/2001/features/KernelSummit/
This is the first beta of the next generation Apache Web server. As we've reported before, this new generation server has many enhancements, including the new Apache Portable Run-time, the new multi-processing modules, and I/O filtering. Give it a try.
http://www.apache.org/