|
Home Paid Subscription Trial Sub/Unsub Netsurfer Science E-Zine Netsurfer Education E-Zine Netsurfer Books E-Zine Netsurfer Library E-Zine Netsurfer Robotics E-Zine Netsurfer Focus E-Zine |
| Blog War over War Blogs |
| Blogs Aren't Just for the Underground Anymore |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| Spelunking |
| America's Public Lands |
| Canada Travel Planning Guide |
| Waiting For Godot: The Interactive Adventure |
| Tongue Twisters |
| We Had our Suspicions about Strawberry Shortcake |
| Discussing a Classic Movie |
| Horseshoes - the Sport |
| Apple QuickTime 6 Beta Released |
| Perl Apocalypse 5: Pattern Matching and Regular Expressions |
| Dead Man's Switch Software |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
BREAKING SURF
Scientific American's 2002 SciTech Web Awards
Scientific American (SciAm) presents the second annual SciTech Web Awards, and it has come up with an impressive 50 sites - five in each of ten categories. The first listed site, in the Archaeology and Paleontology category, is Becoming Human, which presents an incredible documentary, if somewhat cursory, look at human evolution as well as an armload of other resources. You ought to have broadband access to get to the content, however, and this illustrates a problem with the selection process: most of us don't have broadband. SciAm's next selection, Neanderthals and Modern Humans, is better suited to the majority of surfers and provides outstanding content within the constraints of low bandwidth. The Nine Planets, a choice in Astronomy, is an excellent express tour of the solar system with cool information at each stop. Pro and con abortion rights activists and everyone in between will find something to ponder in SA's lead entry in Biology, Embryo Images. In the Computer Science section, you can explore the ALICE project and mollify yourself - clearly, AI has a long way to go. Plan on spending a lot of time here. Heck, you didn't really want to paint the house this summer, did you?Awards: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=000E2B4F-3BAD-1CF5-93F6809EC5880000
Becoming Human: http://www.becominghuman.org/
Neanderthals: http://www.neanderthal-modern.com/index.html
Nine Planets: http://www.seds.org/nineplanets/nineplanets/nineplanets.html Embryo Embryo
Images: http://www.med.unc.edu/embryo_images/
ALICE: http://alicebot.org/
Hubble's Infrared Camera Back Online
The Hubble Space Telescope's rejuvenated infrared camera is back probing the final frontier after a lengthy outage. Infrared astronomy can reveal details and phenomena not visible in the - well, visible region of the electromagnetic spectrum, and can peer deeper into the hubs of galaxies and dust-shrouded regions of star formation. Hubble's Near Infrared Camera and Multi Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) hadn't operated since 1999 because of the premature evaporation of its frozen nitrogen coolant. In March, astronauts installed a mechanical cooler that uses gaseous neon to cool the NICMOS to 77 Kelvin and it has been working dandily since then. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STSI) has released four test pictures that show the power of this important instrument. One shows the collision of four galaxies and another peers deep into the Cone Nebula, recently photographed with Hubble's optical telescope. Space.com peers at Hubble.STSI: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/nicmos_first_020605.html
Space.com: http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pr/2002/13/pr.html
Who's Faking Music Files on P2P Networks?
Music sharing via peer-to-peer (P2P) networks such as Kazaa and Gnutella is not without its frustrations. Frequently, song files are incomplete, damaged, or altered in some way. Sometimes, the alteration is deliberate, and it may have what seems at first to be an unlikely origin. The recent release of Eminem's new album - pirated songs of which showed up on P2P networks ahead of its official release - coincided with the appearance of numerous bogus files which looked legit and were labeled as Eminem tracks. When played, those bogus files were revealed to actually be long, repeating loops of bits of music. Who was responsible? Circumstantial evidence points at Interscope, Eminem's record label. The label has incentive to seed the pool of P2P songs with numerous bogus copies. In theory, doing so makes music sharing a much more frustrating experience for users, which presumably drives them to buy the actual CD. Salon has a story, which stays mostly on topic.http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/06/10/eminem_mp3/
An Experiment in Tracking Students
What happens if you give students technology that can pinpoint their location, to within a specific room on campus, at any time? That's the question being asked at the University of California at San Diego, where a large group of students have been equipped with Hewlett-Packard's Jordana personal digital assistants having just that kind of pinpointing capability. The system works by triangulating a Jordana's location according to the strength of its wireless Wi-Fi signals. The tracking software does have reasonable privacy provisions - both tracker and trackee must provide consent - but it's possible the software could be altered or hacked to work without them and that raises some vague privacy questions. The point of the experiment is to see if the students develop any interesting innovations, social or technical, for the devices or the tracking system. The university is providing the devices for free, courtesy of Hewlett-Packard, which hopes to mine any developments for features the students and others might spend money on when they graduate.http://salon.com/tech/feature/2002/06/11/stalker_tech/index.html
Follow the Clues to Find that M-Party
M-parties, in which the M stands for "mobile", are the rage in the UK. Party organizers use the text-messaging capacity of mobile phones to send party invitations - but the twist is that these invitations are clues that hint at where a party will be held. Invitees follow the clues to find the party, often joining up with others in search of the same event. It's a treasure hunt and a party rolled together and made possible by the popularity of wireless in the UK, as well as that most basic desire to meet other people and possibly laugh at those who failed to make it. A few firms now specialize in setting up the events and registering mobile phone numbers. When will it make it to the US? And will anybody invite us when it does? Wired has more.http://www.wired.com/news/wireless/0,1382,52893,00.html
Norwegian Database Password Mystery Easily Solved
By now, you may have heard the story about the Ivar Aasen Center for Norwegian Language and Literature's call for hacking help. Then again, if you rely on offline newsmedia for online news, this story may be new to you. The center two years ago acquired an archive of some 11,000 books and manuscripts and an encrypted database that catalogued them, but the database's creator had died several years previously and left no record of the password that would open the database to view. Recreating the database would take a year's work, so the center asked hackers to help find the password. As those in the know about such things might expect, the password mystery could have been solved even by four meddlesome kids and a sort-of-talking dog - it was just the name of the owner of the catalogued collection written backwards. The Ivar Aasen Center has a few of its own newsbriefs on the challenge and over half a dozen links to articles elsewhere. CNET has a short update.Aasen Center: http://www.aasentunet.no/
CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1001-934060.html
The People Strike Back against Hollywood
Well, some of them anyway, in a lawsuit against 27 studios and networks that claim the use of digital recording devices such as Replay TV and TiVo constitutes copyright infringement. Craig Newmark, founder of the San Francisco community Web site Craigslist, is lead plaintiff in the lawsuit organized by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and filed on behalf of five Replay TV users. Newmark is particularly upset about a recent court order, since overturned, that forced Sonicblue, maker of Replay TV, to collect and provide detailed customer viewing data. Newmark says the courts have no business allowing such violations of privacy. The EFF wants to establish some case law that recognizes fair-use rights for us, the people. Sometimes we can't help wondering why the public doesn't boycott these guys for six months - no movies, no CDs, bring them to their knees financially and when they beg for mercy demand generous fair-use guarantees. In the end, if the courts and the politicians won't allow reasonable people to do what they think is reasonable, it may come down to people power. Meanwhile, there's something in this court case for all of us. Wired has a look.EFF: http://www.eff.org/IP/Video/Newmark_v_Turner/20020606_eff_pr.html
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,53032,00.html
Hollywood Rolls Credits on Film88 (Again)
It was a brave attempt, but Film88, like its predecessor Movie88 (see NSD 8.07), has been shut down thanks to the no-refuge vigilance of the lawyers of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). Film88 offered streaming movies like "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" and "The Mummy Returns" for $1 or $1.50, but it survived only one day. It had supposedly been operating from Iran and some thought that would put it beyond the grasping copyright clutches of the movie folk, but they cleverly discovered that Film88's servers were actually in the Netherlands and the authorities there soon turned on the house lights. Film88 claimed it was no pirate outfit and said it would pay about 30% of its take to the studios, but the fact is it had no licensing arrangement in place. Now the site only has a brief description of what it was trying to do and the bold lament "We have no plans at the moment but the innovation must go on...." Alas, innovation and movie studios seem to be a bad fit. The San Francisco Chronicle and CNET tell the tale.Film88: http://www.film88.com/
NSD 8.07: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v08/nsd.08.07.html#BS13#BS13
Chronicle: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/06/06/BU154153.DTL
CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-933558.html
Hunter S. Thompson on Hunter S. Thompson and the New Vegas
Apparently, Las Vegas stands for all that is good and all that is bad in America. Perhaps it does, but to our non-US reviewer, the notion seems preposterous. Maybe that alleged standing is why this interview with Hunter S. Thompson, the famous author of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", is carried by Las Vegas City Life. It all seems rather prissily self-important, as do the interviewer and Thompson, who admits Vegas isn't what it was. Few things are, Hunter, few things are! The interview is, well, weird. At times, Matt O'Brien, the interviewer, sounds as if he knows more about Thompson than Thompson himself, much to the great man's amusement. Thompson puts on a show of being important, with busy conversations proceeding in the background and a publicity agent admonishing him to watch his tongue. O'Brien is often almost fawning in his evident adulation of the famous journalist, ascribing claims to greatness for him that are embarrassing. Greatness is best left to time to decide, not the public relations guys. An amusing if somewhat pointless exercise in nattering with an author over the telephone, with brief flashes of insight.http://www.lasvegascitylife.com/display/inn_cover_story/cover.txt
Most Cable Modem Users Can Easily Pirate Cable TV
A story in CNET documents what appears to be bungling on the part of cable companies that provide cable modem service. Since the Net service is delivered over the same lines as cable TV, customers who just pay for a cable modem connection can simply pipe the same cable line into a standard TV receiver for free cable TV. The cable companies consider this piracy - and technically and legally they're right - since customers are supposed to pay a separate fee for TV service. However, the companies are caught on the horns of a cost-benefit dilemma. They can easily block the TV signal from cable modem lines by placing filters on them, but in general they have not done so - probably because of the cost of blocking every individual feed. CNET adds that the firms are selectively putting on the filters if they detect such TV siphoning set-ups. The story has more details about how it's done and cable piracy in general.http://news.com.com/2100-1023-930356.html
Deregulating Broadband: The Good, the Bad, and the Maybe Very Ugly
Americans are about to get a new lesson in media concentration, this time in broadband Internet access. In March, the FCC decided that cable operators don't have to open their networks to other ISPs, and FCC chairman Michael Powell wants to do the same for DSL carriers. If this happens, a handful of large corporations, the cable companies and the Baby Bells, are going to control US broadband. No one knows whether this would reduce consumer choice, turn broadband access of the Internet into proprietary services like AOL, or foster competition among a variety of broadband technologies. Deregulating broadband is an experiment, as this well written Salon article points out; the author wisely notes that two other examples of deregulation - the decision to lift the regulations on savings and loans investments and the SEC's decision to allow auditors to sell consulting services to their clients - ended up generating unforeseen disasters. Whether the FCC is about to follow in those fine footsteps is something we will live through.http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/06/07/broadband/index.html
Kazaa Users Share Personal Data along with Files
Lots of people are using Kazaa, the capitalization-challenged peer-to-peer (P2P) file-trading service, but few seem to know exactly what they are trading, beyond music, video, and pirated software. Many Kazaa users are also sharing a great deal of personal information as they trade files. This article is a must-read for those interested in maintaining their privacy in the age of P2P networks.http://www.hpl.hp.com/shl/papers/kazaa/KazaaUsability.pdf
Yahoo Redesign May Focus on Ads
Yahoo isn't commenting, but CNET claims that we can look forward to a more ad-friendly Yahoo homepage in the not-too-distant future. Fewer links and less clutter should help accentuate the ads, which the portal could use to help offset recent revenue declines. Look for more interactive ads in the redesign. CNET has the story.http://news.com.com/2100-1023-934089.html
Over the past couple of months, Web standards body W3C has released several documents that outline guidelines for designing Web services. Web services is a term that describes a generic framework for transferring information and designing interfaces between programs connected to the Net. The W3C has three documents available that fill out the concept. Usage Scenarios gives examples of how Web services can be used, Architecture Requirements provides the standardized architecture for building Web services, and the Description Requirements gives a list of things Web services must and must not do. Fairly technical, but of interest to the growing web services development community.
Usage Scenarios: http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-ws-desc-usecases-20020604
Architecture Requirements: http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-wsa-reqs-20020429/
Description Requirements: http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-ws-desc-reqs-20020429/
ONLINE CULTURE
Following Sept. 11, the blog phenomenon experienced an explosion of diversity as numerous new bloggers took to the wires with their reactions to the tragedy. These musings soon acquired the name of war blogs, and diversified the blogging community which until that time was mostly composed of Web-hip bloggers steeped in Net technology and lifestyle. The war bloggers got a lot of media exposure and all of a sudden blogging was on the media map. On the whole, the two communities, the inward-looking traditional bloggers and the outward-looking war bloggers, have pretty much ignored each other, but a recent book project focusing on blogger reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks has revealed heretofore hidden tension. Several war bloggers want to produce an ideologically slanted book, and that desire provoked a call for more diversity from representatives of the old guard. The New York Times makes a bit more of the controversy than it deserves, but it still illustrates this cultural split in the blogging community. Blogspot has the book related blog.Book project: http://blogbook.blogspot.com/
Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/10/technology/10BLOG.html
Blogs Aren't Just for the Underground Anymore
Blogs were the anti-journalism, sites where individuals developed and promoted voices separate from mainstream media. That's about to change. The University of California-Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism is going to offer a class on blogging next fall. From reactions in the blogger community, you might think it's the second coming of the French Revolution, without all the French. Whether this means the blog is acquiring legitimacy as a record or as a source, or whether the medium is simply being co-opted by the established media, this Wired News article is a good introduction to the topic.http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,52992,00.html
|
Items our staff likes and you might too. Click on the image or title to order at a hefty discount from our affiliate Amazon.com, and send a few pennies our way as well.
 For more selections, check out the Netsurfer Library at http://www.netsurf.com/nsl/ |
The Sexual Life of Catherine M.
21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com
Cocaine
Starting an eBay Business for DummiesSURFING SITES
A Digital Library of Cuneiform Tablets
One of the oldest known forms of recording information meets the newest. Cuneiform is the stylus-in-clay writing the ancient Assyrians adopted, and it was the written lingua franca 3,500 years ago. Very little is known about the exact meanings of its pictographic characters. Indeed, many careers have been built on deciphering and creating cuneiform glossaries and lexicographies. The Digital Library of Cuneiform Tablets is a serious academic project that will eventually bring to the Internet images of many cuneiform tablets and the research about what they actually mean and contain. The first examples are now available. If the subject is of interest, this site is pure heaven. It's also a great look into the world of academia. Lay folk can see how research starts and proceeds. Fascinating.http://www.cdli.ucla.edu/
Matthias loves to explore and tinker, and his site reflects that. Join him in late-night rovings through the University of Waterloo service tunnels, or just check out some of his projects. And does he ever have projects! You have to admire the ingenuity of a guy who really wants a digital camera but can't afford one - and so builds one using an old flatbed scanner. He got into music for a bit, as well. Same story. He couldn't really justify owning a musical instrument unless he built it. So he built a pipe organ. A really pretty-looking piece, by the way. He's got an ABS potato-launching cannon in here, and even instructions on how to take photos with blueprint paper. He works as a coder, nowadays, but Matthias has been a pretty busy boy. You may want to check out his brother's page as well; he thoughtfully provides a link.
http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/index.html
Only 550-Odd Days to the Wright Flight Centennial
In the wake of Sept. 11, some may consider it inappropriate to celebrate the centennial of human flight. The Wright brothers' December 1903 flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C., however, was a milestone of aspiration and creativity. In 2003, industry and government leaders will honor these pioneers, their achievements, and the achievements of other figures in aviation. One might say there's a celebratory bandwagon. The main site, seemingly more official than most, seems to belong to the US Centennial of Flight Commission, which Congress created in 1999 to promote awareness of the centennial. This growing site has multimedia and a history of aviation along with much documentation. Inventing Flight is run by the city of Dayton, Ohio, where the brothers Wright lived and worked. Dayton will celebrate July 3-20 next year with help from NASA and the Air Force, and various corporate participants will host theme pavilions. The First Flight Centennial Foundation (FFCF), based in North Carolina, will have a pavilion of its own. All three sites list real-world events associated with the centennial, which promises to be big. The EAA - the Oshkosh airshow folks - also has a site worth visiting.Centennial of Flight: http://www.centennialofflight.gov/
Inventing Flight: http://www.inventingflight.com/
FFCF: http://www.firstflightcentennial.org/
EAA: http://www.countdowntokittyhawk.com/
Search Strings of the Less Enlightened
If you've ever felt embarrassed entering a query at FastSearch or Ask Jeeves, anxious someone might discover your ignorance or weirdness, you had good reason. Dumb Net searches are listed, with comments, at the Webcrawler Search Hall of Fame. Search at Webcrawler, a metasearch engine, and, apparently, agents record your search terms. It'll make you think twice before searching for "Where can I find France?" One can only imagine the state of mind of the person who asked "what color shud i paint my barn" (sic) or the wit who wanted to know "what is the wind doing when it's not blowing?" Our reviewer's favorites are "fun -fun" and "what do I look like". Its link to Webcrawler Search Ticker (which supposedly shows queries in realtime) is redirected; maybe Webcrawler was embarrassed by "dicsunary" and "bikini fish".http://www.sb.net/ksimpson/webcrawler.html
Simply the anticipation of Band-Aids used to be a visceral experience. When you were hurt, you could wrap your hands around that cool, metal box and you'd feel better instantly without even fixing up your cut or scrape. You can hear how it sounded when the lid popped open, can't you? It's just not the same with these new-fangled cardboard boxes. Kevin Savetz, formerly known as AOL's AnswerMan, bought a house that came with all the old Band-Aid boxes the previous owners used for small-item storage. He's scanned in the front and back of vintage boxes to help you identify which one you grew up with. You'll also see something else you don't see often any more - Mercurochrome.
http://savetz.com/bandaid/
What do students, faculty and staff at Harvard University do in their spare time? Lecture? Split atoms? Write novels? Some, apparently, play online miniature golf at Mini-Putt, a cool Flash site hosted on a Harvard webserver. The instructions are brief but won't help you much. Practice is everything. Drop your ball on the teeing box with an eye to angles. Think billiards. Be conservative. Go easy, or your ball may carom into disaster. This addictive game will likely frustrate you at first, but the better you become the more fun it is, as golf is supposed to be.... Mini-Putt may have been a class project designed to help anxious parents amuse themselves while they wait to find out whether their children have been admitted to Harvard. In any case, free is cheaper than Microsoft Golf and the Ivy League. Thank goodness, Mini-Putt has no theme music to catch your boss's ear.
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/%7epyang/flash/miniputt.swf
Let Things Happen and Be the Lego
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to get Junkbot to all the trash cans and recycling bins while you still can in... (cue theme music) Junkbot Undercover. Speaking of cuing the theme music, it's too bad you can't turn it off on this site, which is home to a Shockwave game offered by Lego. If you're an adult who's been separated from your toy box for a while, you might consider having someone younger help you out because in order to get your Junkbot through the levels, you have to understand Lego physics. Things stick to each other in this virtual world the same way they do in the Lego one, which is not necessarily the same way blocks would in the real world. The basis of the game is a set of logic mazes you have to solve in a limited number of steps. https://club.lego.com/build/junkbot2.aspIf you're a teenage male, there's nothing new here. Wedgies are a male rite of passage and most males have experience with them. What they may not know is the technical lexicon of wedgies. It's not clear that such a lexicon is actually needed, but if the ordinary wedgie is getting boring, there's a wealth of inspiration at this site - no illustrations though, and that's a shame. The various forms of wedgie are nicely categorized and explained. Anyone can follow the descriptions. This kind of site is just what the world needs - well, that and a wedgie cladistic analysis.
http://members.fortunecity.com/cyberwulfe/wedgie.htm
Vivisimo's Powerful Organizational Search Engine
Vivisimo is a new way to search the Net. The Vivisimo Clustering Engine works with any search engine or combination of engines to create an excellent information retrieval system. Output is a hierarchy of folders that can be expanded or collapsed as needed, essentially a customized directory. The user defines the completeness and complexity of searches. The Vivisimo site offers a few demos and samples, and lets users try out their own searches on Web sites of their choice. To effectively use Vivisimo requires some practice, and it isn't the right solution in all cases. Once mastered, though, many complex searches are simplified and the results are much easier to use than those of traditional search toolshttp://www.vivisimo.com/
The Coffee Break/Procrastination Online Arcade
Coffee Break Arcade is a great place to confront aliens or critters while you kill time. Of course, you'll want to have Flash, Shockwave, and Java on your system, and you may want to turn your monitor away from the cubicle walkway before your boss strolls by.... We counted 101 classic, 39 shooting, and 47 sports games here. There are also many "cool", racing, and casino games in this directory, which notes in its Terms of Use that it links to, but does not control, the sites that actually host these games. Don't blame Coffee Break Arcade for making a lot of stress relievers available for free. We like the Featured Game and Game of the Week call-outs, and there's What's New in case your friends or enemies become masters of the universe.http://www.coffeebreakarcade.com/index.html
ONLINE TRAVEL
Spelunk, spelunk, spelunk. It's fun to say, and do, according to the Caving Pages. Some caves are for exploring, others have had significant historical finds inside (the Dead Sea Scrolls for one), and others have been made into houses (presenting a lesser risk of burglary). For years, people have been willing to explore caves. This Web site lists what beginning cavers need to have on hand to safely start their spelunking fun, like hard hats, lights, and water. There are links to lists of caves near you, the history of some caves, and a postcard gallery, which shows turn-of-the-century postcards with caves, lava tubes, and the ever-popular mine cave-ins. Any cave-graphing software you might need is listed as well. The message board is more like a guest book, but some of the comments are interesting, including the real estate agent who is trying to sell a house in Pennsylvania with a cave in the backyard.http://www.rainierpubs.com/metro/caves/
America's government-owned public lands total nearly 600 million acres - about a third of the total US land mass. Who would know more about these lands, and have the ability to show them and make them virtually accessible, than National Geographic? The Geography Action! portion of the National Geographic Web site supposedly aims at kids, with a plethora of interactive features and games. nevertheless, this feature article is far more than an amusement and visitors of all ages will enjoy the site and most likely gain quite a bit of knowledge. Even curmudgeons will enjoy the superb (you expected less?) photos.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/geographyaction/backyard/
Available in print and CD formats, this resource is also conveniently online as a PDF document, and appears to harbor identical content. This guide to all things Canadian features contact listings for accommodations, events, shopping, and parks - all conveniently grouped according to province. You want to see what attractions and events are happening in Quebec? Not a problem: plunk your mouse onto Quebec under the Attractions heading and up pops a box. The site also provides a convenient link to Acrobat Reader, which you'll need to read the PDF. The only downside is the format, which is somewhat less friendly than a standard hyperlinked approach.
http://www.destinationscanada.info/
FLOTSAM & JETSAM
Waiting For Godot: The Interactive Adventure
We don't know what it is with this site, which objectively really stinks - if there is something at the end, we don't have the patience to wait for it. On the other hand, the wit in this nihilist pun just seems to make us giggle.http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Lot/6200/waitingforgodot.html
Tongue twisters benefit people with speech impediments, but most of us just find them fun. Here's a page with more than 150 twisters ranging in size from one word (sixish) to 12 intertwined lines. You'll also find them in Dutch, Hebrew, French, Japanese, and Pinoy. We like "Can you imagine an imaginary menagerie manager imagining managing an imaginary menagerie?"
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/8136/tonguetwisters.html
We Had our Suspicions about Strawberry Shortcake
Remember My Pretty Pony, that plastic equine rage from the '80s? Now, can you guess whether Cherry Treats was the name of one of the ponies - or of a porn star? You either have to be an excellent guesser, an expert on porn, or a My Pretty Pony aficionado to pass this quiz. Which of the latter two is more embarrassing?http://www.brunching.com/toys/toy-pornorpony.html
The premise is simple: submit your review of a classic movie, and read the reviews of other film lovers. One movie a month is up for review. Upcoming celluloid wonders include "High Noon" and "Doctor Zhivago". The idea is sound, and hopefully more people will check it out.
http://www.classicmoviedrivein.com/
Horseshoes, the sport in which almost counts, is gaining popularity nationwide. The National Horseshoe Pitchers Association not only has the official rules, but also lists clubs and events for everyone from beginner to pro (to whom almost is a disaster). Find out what a ringer really is.
http://www.horseshoepitching.com/start.html
SOFTWARE
Apple QuickTime 6 Beta Released
Apple has released a preview of the next version of its QuickTime multimedia player. The new software supports MPEG-4, the next-generation big-corporation video standard. It also supports AAC Audio, a professional-quality audio standard notable for its variable-bit-rate technology, which provides better compression for audio files and streams. Other features include instant-on media streaming, skip protection, an updated user interface, and a bunch of advanced features for developers. Worth a look, certainly for multimedia developers.http://apple.com/quicktime/preview/quicktime6/
Perl Apocalypse 5: Pattern Matching and Regular Expressions
Larry Wall continues with his series of explanatory articles on the architecture for the next version of Perl. The series is quite technical and, since this is Larry, often quite philosophical as well. This installment is all about pattern matching and regular expressions. Perl's regular expression handling is the de facto standard for matching text in modern programs. Larry takes the somewhat brave step of suggesting some deep changes for the next version of Perl. Heresy surely, but if anybody can pull it off, it's the anointed Mr. Wall.http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2002/06/04/apo5.html
The story about the encrypted Norwegian database rendered inaccessible after its password-keeper died (see above) immediately brought the app called Dead Man's Switch to public attention. The program has the ability to send e-mail and post messages to several popular online forums if it does not receive a reset signal from its owner, and someone dead or missing has a pretty tough time sending such signals. When prompted by the lack of response, the program can post news of your disappearance or death to online forums and notify your friends or co-workers - and send them certain files with passwords and such. Dead Man's Switch can also encrypt files on your machine - for example, to hide your secrets from your grieving spouse. The program only works on Windows and there does not appear to be any source code available. Look for more open and capable clones of this program to pop up in short order.
http://daisyman.arsware.org/dms/