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| The Crush Server |
| Corsica |
| Biking around the Mediterranean |
| Calgary's Weaselhead Park |
| The Decline of Magazine Cover Art |
| Art of the Really Real Looking |
| Ozone's Nifty Web Design |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| (Very) Briefs at Iraq Daily |
| Word Oddities and Trivia |
| Alas, Entropy! |
| Mom and Dad Will Have Big Brother Keep an Eye on the Car |
| Asteroid Movie |
| Web Sites Slow to Adopt Apache 2.x |
| Larry Wall on Slashdot |
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| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
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| Credits |
BREAKING SURF
PBS's "Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero"
Amid a frenzy of Sept. 11 commemoration, "Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero" is without a doubt one of the most worthy and interesting of the places vying for your time and attention, a fortress of insight breaking the media onslaught. With the sort of high quality we've grown to expect from PBS, this Web companion to the Frontline documentary delves into the deep questions about the attacks and how we have responded to them, mainly through interviews with religious leaders, witnesses, families of victims, writers, and agnostics and atheists. How do the attacks affect faith? What do they suggest about good and evil? How can we recover our nerve and balance in the face of such ferocity and horror? This documentary, and Web site, provide insight into, if not final answers to, questions like these. The project nicely balances religious and non-religious viewpoints and features an unusual level of candor among some religious leaders about the dark side of religion. This is a magnificent documentary, with excellent video excerpts, sharing of ideas, notions, thoughts, and feelings that are wonderfully expressive, realistic and helpful. When we watched, Rabbi Irwin Kula's hebraic chant of the final words of Sept. 11 victims sent chills down our spines. You can watch that clip on the Web site.http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/faith/
Getting Google through the Great Firewall of China
At the beginning of September, the Great Firewall of China began blocking access to the Google and AltaVista search engines. Why is not clear, although some speculate that the Chinese blocked Google because its cache of old sites let Chinese websurfers view copies of banned Web sites, something which Chinese authorities may not want in the runup to the upcoming elections there. However, as with much on the Net, blocking a site is never quite that simple. An article in New Scientist notes that one simple way to get around the block is to use a clever Google mirror site - literally a mirror site, in this case. It's elgooG, which displays Google's pages and search results in type that's written right to left. Fun, yes, but with the Google Web APIs and some simple programming, there are less annoying ways with which Google can be accessed in China. In any case, the question appears moot since the latest reports indicate that China has unblocked Google again, though nobody knows how long that will last.New Scientist: http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992768
elgooG: http://www.alltooflat.com/geeky/elgoog/
Google APIs: http://www.google.com/apis/
Burning Man, a geek fest that gathers as many as 25,000 people in the Nevada desert each year, is really steamed. The Burning Man organizers are suing Voyeur Video for selling video of some of the more naked goings-on. Burning Man is an open, hedonistic community - and we don't mean that in a sexual sense - and it expressly forbids commercial use of images. CNN notes that this self-expression thing takes form in art, dance, and nudity. Why is it so surprising that the cameras would focus on the nudity? Burning Man claims Voyeur Video violated its policy, but it looks a lot like it all boils down to loot. It'd be comedic, if it weren't in the courts. Hey, it's funny anyway. For a non-controversial gallery of Burning Man 2002 images, check out Patrick Roddie's gallery.
Burning Man: http://www.burningman.com/
Voyeur Video: http://www.voyeur-video.com/
CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2002/LAW/08/26/ctv.burning.man/index.html
Roddie: http://www.webbery.com/galleries/burningman/bm02/index.html
Do you have a cause and need some money? Karyn Bosnak wants to get out from under her credit card bills (see NSD 8.33). Penny wants to gain financial independence so she can chuck her husband. Jennifer Glasser wants to help fight Lyme disease. What all these women have in common is that they have discovered the power of using the Web to tell their story and to ask for money. Thanks to the ease and convenience of services like PayPal, visitors to Save Karyn have donated more than $10,000 towards her $20,000 debt. As for Penny - whose husband isn't a bad guy, she points out, just not someone she sees eye-to-eye with much these days - she, too, is beginning to get contributions so she can take training to land a job. Meanwhile, Jennifer recently received a $3,500 donation from someone in Tennessee. Plenty of visitors find the attempt to raise cash this way objectionable, and say so, but either the appeal of the sites or the lure of the causes seem to stimulate quite a few visitors to cough up some dough. Wired looks at the phenomenon - which isn't new, but seems to have gained currency with a spate of woman beggars.
NSD 8.33: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v08/nsd.08.33.html#SS2#SS2
Wired: http://wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,54929,00.html
We are going back to the moon, but "we" probably doesn't mean what you think it does. A private firm called TransOrbital has received permission from the US State Department and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration to put a satellite in orbit around the moon and crash it into the lunar surface. Believing that lunar commercialization is going to happen in the near future, the company spent two years trying to get approval for a satellite that will photograph and map the lunar surface in detail. At the conclusion of the mission, the satellite will crash on the moon. TransOrbital plans future missions with softer landings. There's still no word on when you can buy your ticket on the PanAm shuttle or where that monolith is hiding.
http://www.transorbital.net/
Mapping Toronto's Unsecure Wireless Access
The incidence of unencrypted wireless networks is widespread and certainly not limited to Canada, but NakedWireless.ca makes an explicit example out of Toronto - that the sheer number of such networks poses serious security concerns. The folks at the site surveyed Toronto and produced an eye-opening map that shows both wide-open unsecure wireless network nodes and a smaller number of properly secured ones. The Web site points out that an unsecured network can be infiltrated, the node owner's identity can be assumed and used to commit cybercrimes, and the node's data can be destroyed, sold to competitors, or used to embarrass the owners of the node. The other way to look at it is that Toronto is a pretty good place to get free wireless Net service on the fly. We suspect that's true of most large cities these days.http://www.nakedwireless.ca/
The Fall and Death Rattle of Arthur Andersen
Arthur Andersen, judged accountable, will account no more. Convicted of destroying documents related to the investigation of Enron, the accountancy firm moved from being a respected name in the accounting industry to a commercial non-entity in less than a year. This excellent series from the Chicago Tribune makes it clear that Andersen's corporate culture grew corrupt over time, beginning in the early 1990s with a decision to maximize profits at the expense of ethics. The famous 1998 Waste Management restatement was simply the first public display of the new Andersen, one that found profits more attractive than an accurate auditing of its clients' accounts. David Duncan's shredding of Enron documents in Houston wasn't the anomaly Andersen wanted the public to believe; it was a chilling recognition that the fates of the two firms had become inextricably intertwined.http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/showcase/chi-andersen.special
Mozilla Gaining at Netscape's Expense?
Most people agree that user statistics indicate that the Netscape browser is not at all well, and a recent Salon article assessing the state of the browser wars contends that the rise of Mozilla has pushed Netscape into even worse shape. AOL Time Warner's Netscape always lags one version behind Mozilla because it's built on Mozilla technology. A large number of projects is based on and designed to plug into Mozilla, making Mozilla not just a browser but a development platform. Salon fails to note that the number of Web users who use Netscape will grow dramatically when AOL finally adopts Netscape technology as the foundation of its AOL client, which is now based on Internet Explorer. In addition to a look at the browser market, the Salon article also covers and links to some interesting Mozilla projects.http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/09/10/browser_wars/index.html
Will eBay Have to License an Online Auction Patent?
The fast-paced online world has run smack into the wall of US patent law. Intellectual property issues take years to be resolved, and - as companies such as Amazon, Priceline, and other big players have found in the past four years - litigating these claims is costly and time-consuming. Often, patent disputes occur over "inventions" like patented approaches to business, which some observers suggest are in many cases obvious and intuitive, and therefore not deserving of patent protection in the first place. Claims continue, however, egged on as most companies just pay up to settle. Lost in the noise of the greedy and meritless, however, some claimants may have just cause. Tom Woolston, an inventor and patent attorney, has sued EBay for refusing to purchase his online auction patents. He filed a few relevant ones before there was an eBay, so there's no prior art argument at hand. CNET has a solid look at the mess. This won't be important to you - unless you buy stuff at Amazon, eBay, or dozens of other companies. Settlements and litigation translate into three things: higher prices, lawyer income, and a bit of pocket change for the plaintiff.CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1017-956638.html
Connecting People Online Pays Off
The Web, that great disintermediation machine, has become the perfect intermediary mechanism for helping people get in touch. Whether you use it to regain touch with people from your past or to meet new people you think are worth knowing, the Web is proving effective, and profitable, in making connections, CNET tells us. Sites such as Classmates.com, Ancestry.com, and Match.com succeed financially partly because the subscription fees they charge are affordable and partly because they offer a uniquely effective way of finding long lost relatives, friends, classmates, or that special someone to spend time with. Online content generated fees of a healthy $675 million last year - not exactly a huge number, but certainly respectable - and a substantial part of it was due to sites such as these that put people in touch.http://news.com.com/2009-1023-956371.html
So, what happened to the whiz kids who made fast fortunes in the dotcom heyday? Fortune tracked down 30 icons of the dotcom boom and asked them what they're doing now. Yes, yes, one of them is awaiting extradition after an inditement, but you could probably say the same for any random group of 30 people. The rest of the former dotcommers are doing a variety of things: raising kids, enjoying retirement, working as a prep cook, and moving "to the dark side" and running venture capital funds. Most have just gotten on with their lives and new careers. The piece gives short NSD-style capsules on each of the 30 and their current lives.
http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?channel=artcol.jhtml&doc_id=209303
Web Shells and the Presentation of News
A Web shell is a set of links off to the side of a Web page, often on a news site. The links in a Web shell point to content relevant to the story they accompany like archived stories, further data, background, etc. - it is a hypertext replacement for a sidebar. What makes Web shells interesting is their proliferation on news web sites, especially after Sept. 11, 2001. This stimulating story from Online Journalism Review argues that Web shells allow for great reader participation in the shaping of news coverage. As readers demand more specific stories, sites are going to create shells to address these issues. We will have to wait to see if this comes to pass but whether or not it does, the article indicates one way the Web may change the gathering of news.http://www.ojr.org/ojr/business/1030665107.php
ONLINE CULTURE
By the time you read this, it will all be over. The anonymous server at IP address 195.195.81.5 will have committed public suicide by crushing itself to death in an industrial crushing machine. We only recently got word of this self-compactification, and the server's demise will occur before this NSD issue hits the webwaves - it's a frustrating drawback of doing a weekly e-zine. On the server's Web site you could watch a live webcam of the server and the seconds counting down to its demise. The Web site will obviously disappear on crushing, but you can follow the art-project/cyber-stunt at Fragnetics, which has a blog history of the project and which will host the video of the server's final moments. Naturally, we predict a rush of self-destruction Web sites, until the day some poor misguided human will repeat the stunt - at which point the RIAA will blame it on file-sharing.Crush Server: http://195.195.81.5/
Fragnetics: http://www.fragnetics.com/
ONLINE TRAVEL
Rousseau claimed that "One day this little island will astonish Europe." He was talking about the French Mediterranean island of Corsica. It's hard to imagine any site about Corsica surpassing this one. William Keyser, who clearly loves the place, regularly updates the site. It covers all aspects of the island - travel, climate, geography, festivals, food, music, tradition, language, and business - in impressive detail and with plenty of cross-referencing, e-mail details, links, and images. You can find out where to go hill-walking with your luggage on a donkey, how to find a Corsican cheese fair, and that one of the 11 symbols of the island is the conch shell, which was used by fishermen to communicate at sea and to warn of impending invasion by the Saracens. Visit this site and prepare to do some invading of your own.http://www.corsica-isula.com/
Biking around the Mediterranean
In 1998, BikeAbout organized the first wired bicycle circumnavigation of the Mediterranean. A team of five riders, with computers and lots of bike-panniers, bicycled 10,000 miles around the Mediterranean basin over nine months. The aim of the non-profit journey was to promote peace and cooperative understanding in the often turbulent region by using and teaching about globally-linked computers during school visits, online chats, lectures, and bike safety talks. Students were encouraged to contribute details of their daily life and passions for the cyclists' Web and video diaries on the basis that the more people know about each other, the less inclined they will be to fight. The Web site itself is somewhat swamped with detailed text but the riders' daily logs are a worthy record of their efforts to interact with the local communities. The count of flat tires is particularly revealing of the rigors of the road.http://www.bikeabout.org/
They call this park Weaselhead, but the first image that pops up on its Web site is a great blue heron head. Go figure. Although aspects of the site struck us as counterintuitive sometimes, the site does have a bunch of great stuff. We enjoyed the RealVideos, heavy on bird identification and other birdstuff (which might explain that great blue heron shot). If you're a birder, and either live in or plan to visit Calgary, Alta., this is a good place to brush up before you make the trip. A fair number of the links weren't working when we passed through, but all the ones on birds and butterflies were operative. The map worked, too - which could be really helpful. We never found a picture of a weasel, nor even a weaselhead or even weaselsnot, sorry to say. Presumably, the webmasters are looking for a really cute one. (Actually, the area is named after a Chief Weaselhead of the Tsuu T'ina).
http://www.weaselhead.org/
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
The Decline of Magazine Cover Art
Stroll the magazine aisles at a large bookstore, say, and what do you see? Movie stars. TV stars. Sports stars. Back at the office, check out PopCult's subsite "The Decline of Western Magazine Art". You'll soon agree with Coury Turczyn, who decries simple-minded mimicry and the overall lack of imagination in contemporary magazine cover art. In the good old days (roughly 1920-1965), "even the most mainstream of magazines," Turczyn states, "tried to lure in readers with distinctive design, original typography, and striking artwork.... Today, the art of the magazine cover has been vanquished by celebrity worship and bad taste." The comparisons between old covers and new sure show that truth. The text by the Vogue comparison states: "Yes, it was once fashionable to use surrealist art by Miguel Covarrubias on the cover of the world's leading fashion magazine. Now, of course, fashion demands bra-less babes 'roughing it' in the outback. But her hair still looks great, and that's what counts." We agree with the spirit of this criticism, but let's face it: "bra-less babes" also count. For some shoppers, alas, these are the glory days.http://popcultmag.com/criticalmass/culture/magazines/magazines0.html
Art of the Really Real Looking
Traditional Fine Arts Online presents Resource Library Magazine, an e-zine devoted exclusively to American representational art - very representational art. Not only won't you find any abstraction or expressionism here, you won't find any impressionism either. Just good ol' wholesome, traditional representational art - quite a lot of it. There are hundreds of articles on artists, museums, and artistic themes, sorted by geography and century. There are also links to museums, resources, columnists, and a necessary search engine. A retired real estate magnate and his family host the site in Orange, Calif., and one can't help but feel there's some sort of agenda at work here. Never mind that, though, just drop by for the great art and articles.http://www.tfaoi.com/
Doc Thaddeus Ozone is a designer who rocks Photoshop, Javascript, and DHTML. He has HTML dreams. He's Swedish. What else is there to add?. If you're designing an interface and need some inspiration, check his site out. There are hundreds of cool designs here. Looking for a stupid Web trick? No problem - he has dozens. Need some desktop wallpaper? There's pages of them. The fun part, to some, is that the site isn't organized to help you easily find things. Rather, it's a strange mixture of sites within sites with hidden treasures. The heart of the site is its index of images, which will keep you coming back. Wonder how he does it? Check out the hands-on tutorials. And if you want to talk to someone about what you've seen, there's an active message board.
http://www.bugtown.com/
BOOKS & E-ZINES
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Middlesex
Fraud: Essays
Beyond the Deep: The Deadly Descent Into the World's Most Treacherous Cave
Upgrading and Repairing PCs (14th Edition)http://www.uruklink.net/iraqdaily/
Filled with tidbits and mouthfuls of words, words, words, this site is indeed a Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia. Ever wonder what the longest word in the English language is? Despite popular belief, it isn't antidisestablishmentarianism. At a whopping 45 letters long, try saying this five times fast, or try saying it at all: pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. Not only will you discover some of the longest words here, you'll discover palindromes, pangrams, names of people which became words, beautiful words, and misspelled words, just to name a few. Jeff Miller, a teacher in New Port Richey, Fla., has created this virtual library of the unusual, the absurd, and the little known in the world of words. Be sure to visit before that next game of Scrabble. A word such as "oxazepam" can score you 392 points in just one play. With a resource like this, you're sure to become a champion.
http://members.aol.com/gulfhigh2/words.html
SURFING SCIENCE
British writer and physicist C.P. Snow's 1959 lecture, "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution", bemoaned the widening knowledge gap between otherwise well-educated people and the scientific community. In his lecture, Snow compared a lack of understanding about such important physical concepts as the second law of thermodynamics as akin to never having read a line of Shakespeare - his point being, of course, that no one can lay claim to being truly educated without first having a thorough understanding of fundamental ideas in science. Frank Lambert, in his Shakespeare and the Second Law page, has taken it upon himself to help enlighten the teeming masses of the scientifically illiterate with a clear, readable explication of the second law for non-scientists, followed by an account of just why such ostensibly dull ideas like this one are so vitally important to us in our everyday lives. It's a fascinating read, and proof of what Snow knew: that the worlds of human emotion and science are more closely linked than we realize.http://www.shakespeare2ndlaw.com/
Mom and Dad Will Have Big Brother Keep an Eye on the Car
Parents will cheer, and teens will gulp, when they read "A Parental Black Box for Young Drivers", a recent article in the New York Times. Rebecca Fairley Raney describes the technological infancy of a wired Big Brother for Mom and Dad. Larry Selditz, president of Road Safety International, sells electronic devices for installation in vehicles, which monitor how the driver drives. To date, his customers are mostly ambulance companies and police and fire departments, which remove a memory card from the black box and download data to analyze vehicular speed, hard turns, braking distance, and - oh, yes - noise levels inside the passenger compartment. This fall, Selditz will start selling a scaled-down version of the device for $280 to parents, who can do the installation themselves in cars made in 1996 or later. Eight teenaged drivers have already tested the system. One teen driver interviewed for the article found that the black box considerably improved her driving. Speeding and abrupt braking cause the box to beep, as does loud music from the dashboard radio. If infractions recur, beeps get louder and louder. That's the Pavlovian aspect. It gets better - or bitter, depending on your habits. Road Safety International "plans to introduce a product next year with Global Positioning System technology that will allow parents to check a Web site to find out where the car is." Apparently, cops will have backup from fellow curfew enforcers soon as they perform surveillance on Lovers' Lane and beyond. Ready to rumble, kids?http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/22/technology/circuits/22DRIV.html
We sit here, typing our fingers to the bone, and some fly-by-night asteroid has its own movie. There is no justice. Ah well, it probably received even less compensation than we do. A pair of Yale students used Kitt Peak National Observatory to take a series of still shots of this near-earth asteroid as it approached our planet in the middle of August. The shots were converted into a brief digital movie that not only shows how fast the thing was moving, but also provides some decent scientific information in regard to the object's rotation. That means something to astronomers, but you might enjoy the QuickTime movie anyway. It's really short. The asteroid sped up to some 20 times faster two nights after the photos were taken, when it shot past us. Imagine the effects had it actually hit the planet. This thing was only discovered July 14, and a month later, it was whizzing past our windows. Think things like snails and slugs move slowly? Guess what? In the great scheme of things, we aren't exactly fleet of foot either.
http://www.noao.edu/outreach/press/pr02/pr0207.html
SOFTWARE
Web Sites Slow to Adopt Apache 2.x
Apache 2.x is the recently released next generation of the popular open-source webserver software. Apache 2.x is a complete redesign of the server from the 1.3.x series, focusing mostly on greater resource efficiency by using a threaded architecture. While it is normal for generally conservative IT managers to hesitate to run new software, the adoption of the Apache 2.x seems slower than it should be. This Computing article cites the lack of support in third-party modules as the reason. Many popular third-party modules need to be rewritten to work with the new Apache architecture and in many cases that hasn't happened yet. The article notes that some in the Apache developer community have suggested a freeze on development of the server software until the modules catch up. Security Space has a good breakdown on the popularity of various modules in Apache Web sites. Security Space:Computing: http://www.computing.vnunet.com/News/1134850
http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/man.200208/apachemods.html
Apache: httpd.apache.org/
Larry Wall, the creator of the Perl language and a good-natured philosopher, answers questions from the Slashdot crowd. Larry answers many questions about the practice and philosophy of the next-generation Perl 6. He compares Perl to other programming languages, talks about Perl and Microsoft's .Net programming framework, what's not being put into Perl 6, and other more obscure programming issues. The questions also take Larry on an interesting digression into religious issues. He responds to a question about reconciling his technical/analytical bent with his deeply held religious beliefs. Not surprisingly, his beliefs do play a role in his programming work. It's good stuff for Perl and programming issue junkies.
http://interviews.slashdot.org/interviews/02/09/06/1343222.shtml