BREAKING SURF
| Googlism |
| Mob-Cracking the New TiVo Backdoor Code |
| Portrait of a Blogger as an Estate |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| Just Say No to Book-Sniffing |
| Paper Airplanes |
| When I Grow Up... |
| Court TV's Stupid Crimes and Misdemeanors |
| DSpace: The Electronic Library Project and Software |
| OpenBSD 3.2 Released |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
BREAKING SURF
Just as we were going to press word reached us that the United Nations Security Council unanimously passed a resolution calling on Iraq to admit weapons inspectors. This represents a diplomatic victory for President Bush who has been putting pressure on other members of the Council to approve tougher terms and sanctions against Iraq. Lot's of worldwide press coverage can be found at Yahoo. Much of it assumes that it is only a matter of time before the United States invades Iraq.Resolution Text: http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/11/08/resolution.text/index.html
Yahoo Full Coverage: http://story.news.yahoo.com/fc?cid=34&tmpl=fc&in=World&cat=Iraq
Online Job Listing Scam Leads to Identity Theft
A clever identity theft scam you ought to be aware of starts with a job listing, in this specific case on the Monster.com job megasite. After a potential employee replies to what looks like a job listing from a reputable company, the scammer asks him to fill out a background check form with detailed personal information such as age, height, weight, Social Security number, bank account numbers, and even mother's maiden name. In the current weak job market, people don't hesitate to provide such information, especially if the scammer injects a note of urgency into the request by saying that it's a sensitive job, it starts shortly, and the background checks needs to be done as soon as possible. MSNBC has the specific story of one person who was fooled by a fake posting for a job at the very real firm of Arthur Gallagher. The FBI is investigating. The article has the complete text of the scam listing which in retrospect had some clues that it was not legitimate. Be wary.http://www.msnbc.com/news/830411.asp
Panama Orders Blocking of Internet Telephony Ports
The Panamanian government has decreed that local ISPs have to block certain ports which are widely used for internet telephony. The move is apparently in response to complaints from the local telecom monopoly, Cable & Wireless Panama, that it is losing money because people are using the Internet to make cheap international phone calls. We're shocked, absolutely shocked, that consumers are choosing a cheaper way to communicate. The Panamanian government response is a clueless typical reaction, since the specific ports are irrelevant. Software can be easily reconfigured to use different ports and proxy servers can be set up - and apparently are being set up - to get around this ban. Meanwhile, the banned ports also happen to have legit non-telecom computing applications which will be disrupted by the order. Linux and Main has the story, and here's a link to the decree itself, in Spanish.LinuxAdmin: http://www.linuxandmain.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=277
Decree: http://www.ersp.gob.pa/busqueda/show_resol.asp?id=JD-3576&idsector=1
If your ISP thinks you owe it money, it can block you from accessing your e-mail. Usually, however, it won't close the e-mail address to the outside world, so e-mail can accumulate on the ISP's mailservers while e-mail senders never learn you can't get at what they've sent. Nancy Carter found this out the hard way when the Canadian subsidiary of Inter.net suspended her e-mail account over a billing dispute. With difficulty, she did finally manage to gain access to all the stored e-mail, but far too late to respond to an attractive job offer among them. She complained to the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, who concluded that her ISP had violated the terms of the recently enacted Canadian Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act. Now, Carter's suing Inter.net for $110,000 in damages. More importantly, she wants to force ISPs to change how they suspend accounts. Rather than just blocking customer access, ISPs should bounce messages back to the sender advising them that the account has been terminated. Both CNET's story and Carter's own account are worth a look.
CNET: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-963631.html
Carter: http://cryptome.org/isp-hijack.htm
The California Coastline Photo Project
It's amazing what you can do with a digital camera, a Powerbook, and a helicopter. In this case, it involves taking photos of the entire California coast, roughly 7,000 of them, and making them available online. The California Coastal Records Project is the brainchild of software entrepreneur Ken Adelman, who also happens to be an ardent environmentalist. His aim is to create a tool that environmentalists and scientists can use to fight development, seawalls, and other coastal threats. The photos are already being used in legal disputes. The project is about 60% complete, and Adelman hopes to re-shoot the whole coast every couple of years. The San Jose Mercury News has more details about Adelman and the project itself.Story: http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/4401100.htm
California Coastal Records Project: http://www.californiacoastline.org/
Bloggers write interesting and opinionated stuff, or at least the best of them do. If you need proof of that or you just want to catch up with some of the best, head on over to the Guardian, which recently announced the winners of its best British blog competition, which we told you about in NSD 8.29. Walking off with the £1,000 prize was Alistair Coleman, whose entry, Scary Duck, the Guardian selected ahead of 300 others. His site features entertaining, addictive writing with real personality and a sexual edge. The Guardian article links to not only the winner but the top 30, which illustrate the healthy state of British blogging. The wide-ranging blogs generally avoid mainstream sentimentality - a key reason as to why they are often so interesting, and pretty much what you'd expect.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,798749,00.html
Referrer Log Spam Hits Bloggers
Many blogs these days make a practice of posting referrer logs. As you visit Web pages, your browser tells sites the identity of the Web page you just came from. This information, logged by the webserver, is called the referrer log and is a record of which pages sent hits to your site. Bloggers are now discovering the joys of referrer log spam. Spammers visit blogs from their own Web pages, which are usually porn sites. The referrer log records the URLs of the spammer sites, and visitors who see the blog's visitors click on the spammers' links. The spammers' theory is that not only will this generate visits directly, but that Google's spiders will see all those log links and increase the search ranking of the spammer site. The phenomenon of referrer log spam is not new - Kuro5hin has a piece from last year about the practice - but it's becoming a more frequent thorn in the sides of bloggers. They now have to filter their referrer logs before they display the information on their visitors. Wired has the story.Kuro5hin: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/5/30/22341/3757
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,56017,00.html
Google Compute Wants Your Computing Cycles
Google would like your help with Google Compute, a new feature for the Google Toolbar. The Toolbar is an Internet Explorer browser plug-in that adds some extra search functionality to your Google searches. That's neat in itself, but now the toolbar software can use your idle computer cycles - something the average computer has large amounts of - to do useful work on distributed computing projects. The first beneficiary of this effort is Folding@Home, a non-profit research project at Stanford University aimed at understanding how proteins assume their shape, which ultimately determines what they do in your body. Users of the latest version of the Google Toolbar can easily control when Google Compute is on or off and the effort has minimal impact on the performance of their machine. The project FAQ has all the details.Google Compute: http://toolbar.google.com/dc/faq_dc.html
Google Toolbar: http://toolbar.google.com/
Folding@Home: http://folding.stanford.edu/
Google Too Successful for Our Own Good?
Is Google the new Microsoft? When it comes to search engines, Google towers over its competition and even powers some of its competitors, such as Yahoo. Some folks believe that the Web and Google's indexes are synonymous. If your business isn't listed high in Google's search results, your business will suffer. This CNET article explains Google's dominance as well as the consequences of its near monopoly. Does it pay to advertise on Google or can other techniques assure you a good position? Is it time for search engines to become public utilities? Well maybe not, but still the search engine has an alarming amount of influence.http://news.com.com/2009-1023-963618.html
The Sweaty Work of a Porn Merchant
Although it can be done, it's a grind to make money from pornography. Read the tale of an ex-dotcommer who spent almost a year developing sites that featured thumbnail porn images and links to porn sites. The porn sites pay site owners a finder's fee when a surfer clicks on a link and decides to subscribe. The money-making strategy sounds easy but is difficult to do well. Finding the right images (all have to be purchased), and the right ISP (probably not your current provider) can be a challenge. The thumbnail page webmaster aims for a high clickthrough rate and a good conversion fraction. If you can make it work, the money is great, but you spend your days hunched in front of a computer screen looking for erotic images that will entice. Since the images have absolutely nothing to do with the site you link to, except in sharing a prurient nature, it's a bit of a come-on and for some the drudgery eventually takes its toll. This article at Kuro5hin isn't exactly a detailed how-to, but it's probably enough to persuade most to look at Plan C.http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/10/29/9314/1484
What to Do With Discredit Science Papers?
Physicist Hendrik Schon was recently busted for scientific fraud. The scientific journal Science has retracted eight of his published papers, and that's unprecedented. The question of what to do with his online stuff remains. Some argue for yanking all of his material, while others believe that the best approach is to leave up the work of the discredited former Bell Labs employee, with links to additional information. The best spin put on this sorry tale, to date, is that the scientific process worked, eventually, but science delayed is science denied. Schon's nanotech research is largely irreproducible, and thereby discredited. This seemingly isolated ripple affects us all, as potentially fruitful approaches to nanotech may have been jettisoned in light of Schon's reported "successes". Wired has a story touching on the question of what to do with the papers, with good links to other related material. Lucent Technologies, which runs Bell Labs, provides more, specifically a lengthy paper documenting the results of their investigation into Schon's fraud.Wired: http://wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,56137,00.html
Lucent: http://www.lucent.com/news_events/researchreview.html
Cassini-Huygens Snaps Picture of Saturn
As part of the Cassini-Huygens mission's preparation for its planned orbital rendezvous with Saturn some 20 months from now, mission controllers recently turned on the main camera and aimed it at the space probe's target, still 177 million miles away. In the resulting composite image the ringed planet floats serenely, looking mysterious and beckoning. The camera test was so successful and the images so striking that mission controllers got all misty-eyed over it. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Cassini-Huygens site has the story and a link to high-resolution images in a number of formats. We've listed the press release, the image and the Cassini site.Cassini-Huygens: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm
Images: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA02884
Imagine a catalogue of all species on Earth. That is the goal of the Tree of Life project, an attempt to create a Web-based catalog of life both past and present on Earth. It's an ambitious dream, one made even more difficult than it originally appears by the task of making various databases communicate with one another. This fascinating Salon article presents the promise that we might one day have a Tree of Life for each evolutionary perspective in recognition that understanding only comes from debate and discussion.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/10/28/tree_of_life/index.html
SETI@Home Cheats Threaten Project's Accuracy
SETI@Home, a distributed computing project that examines space noise for evidence of intelligence, has some conflict to deal with. The project allows teams of participants to compete in the distributed effort, and some participants claim that the project administrators are ignoring blatant cheaters. It may seem frivolous to complain about a race for pride, but cheating with false data input undermines the accuracy of the project, and that's really the critical issue. Flawed data yields flawed results. Has SETI@Home devolved into distributed garbage-in-garbage-out? Available evidence seems to point in that direction. ZDnet has a compelling introduction. SETI isn't talking.ZDNet: http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstech/security/story/0,2000024985,20269509,00.htm
SETI@Home: http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/
If you think the realism, look, and feel of today's computer games were unthinkable some 20 years ago, you'd be right. Undoubtedly, today's state of the art will appear equally primitive when compared with what is soon to be unleashed. GameSpy gives a heads-up - the online gaming worlds won't be based on polygons alone much longer. New video tech will render polygons, assuredly, but with the addition of light mapping and textures. Lighting is one of the main features that makes human sight accept a sense of realism, and the new tech will be hitting that hard in an effort to bring ever more realistic imagery to the screen. As we noted last week in NSD 8.43, a sense of touch is now in the mix as well. Imagine a game where the images and sound come together to form a realistic gestalt, and then augment it with the texture-feeling capability recently demonstrated. That's immersive.
GameSpy: http://www.gamespy.com/futureofgaming/engines/
NSD 8.43: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v08/nsd.08.43.html#BS2
Advanced Copy of Doom III Leaked, Doom I Ported to Phones
A copy of an alpha build for Doom III, a highly anticipated next-generation first-person shooter, has been leaked online. Nobody quite knows where the leak came from, but Id Software frontman John Carmack stated that it was not leaked on purpose. The game pushes the state of the art in realistic visual effects and art design, features which along with the best-selling cult status of its predecessors guarantee interest in the gaming community. Slashdot had links to sites with the pirated software but the game has been removed by now at the request of publisher Activision. CNN has the story. As long as we're talking about Doom, the original Doom I code has been ported to run on - are you ready for this? - a cell phone. You can download it for free and play it on your Nokia 7650. The Doom I code on which this port is based was made freely available to the public in 1997.Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/articles/02/11/03/1520240.shtml
CNN: http://money.cnn.com/2002/11/05/commentary/game_over/column_gaming/index.htm
Nokia Doom: http://www.wildpalm.co.uk/Doom7650.html
ICANN Finally Drops Elected Board Reps
Those who thought the Internet was a bastion of democracy should look at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which is in charge of top-level domain (.com, .org, etc.) registration. At a recent meeting in Shanghai, ICANN's governing board decided to eliminate the popular election of five of the 18 board members. Instead, a nominating committee will oversee the election of the board. Critics warn that ICANN can use this procedure to eliminate dissent and to distance itself even further from the Net's users. ICANN claims the changes will make the group more efficient. Time will tell, but didn't anyone in ICANN notice that they were eliminating election while in China, an autocratic nation that filters the Internet for its citizens? Salon and the San Jose Mercury News have more.Salon: http://salon.com/tech/wire/2002/10/31/ICANN/index.html
Mercury News: http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/living/4384835.htm
Cartoonbank, a database of the famous New Yorker magazine cartoons, is running a clever cartoon caption contest. The prize is fleeting glory and a framed copy of the cartoon, but it's a good excuse to visit the site. The New Yorker cartoons are well known for their droll and sophisticated humor and this Web site has plenty of them on display. The famous "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" cartoon originally appeared in the New Yorker. Cartoonbank is mainly an e-commerce portal and a great example of how to make money from artsy intellectual property. You can buy everything from framed prints to licenses for using the cartoons in your presentations. Deadline for the caption contest entry is Nov. 20.
Contest: http://www.cartoonbank.com/caption.asp
Dog: http://www.unc.edu/courses/jomc050/idog.html
ONLINE CULTURE
It seems like every day, somebody comes up with a quirky new use for the world's favorite search engine. This time it's Googlism, which "will find out what Google.com thinks of you, your friends or anything!". Google doesn't think, of course, but it does find references to various topics. Enter a word into the search box at Googlism and you get a list of sentences that Google dredges out of the great sea of cyberspace. Whereas Google returns links and a bit of context, Googlism returns only a single-line summary of the content where your phrase was found. It's a lot clearer when you see it in action. The site allows you to see what Google "thinks" about phrases which ask who, what, where and when, and even provides an entertaining listing of the top queries it gets. Since we know you're wondering: "netsurfer digest is a great guide to interesting news", and "netsurfer digest is compiled by a bunch of editors who literally live on the web". Ain't that the truth.http://www.googlism.com/
Mob-Cracking the New TiVo Backdoor Code
Have you ever wondered exactly how some clever hack comes into existence? How does a group of smart crackers manage to figure out a way around a complex technological roadblock? Well, here's an opportunity to see how a disparate group of individuals is going about the task of cracking the latest hidden backdoor code for controlling the TiVo digital video recorder (DVR). TiVo changed the code in its latest recorders, and the hackers want to find out what it is so they can play around with the undocumented features of the box. What ensues is a highly technical discussion in which the hackers - a loose collection of tech-savvy individuals - discuss strategy, design new approaches to the problem, and create cracking tools which rapidly evolve into a sophisticated distributed effort to find the new code. It's a perfect, almost textbook example of a self-organizing smart mob coalescing around a common interest. When visiting the site, note that the TiVo Community discussion site is in no way affiliated with TiVo the DVR manufacturer.http://www.tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?threadid=80657
Portrait of a Blogger as an Estate
It's easy to make fun of bloggers. That's it, that's all we wanted to say. Did you maybe expect some portentous comment to follow? Maybe something to the effect of "bloggers serve a useful social purpose as the Fifth Estate keeping an eye on the Fourth Estate." Nope. It's just easy to make fun of bloggers. As evidence we present this Portrait of a Blogger piece at Kuro5hin. It's funny, of course, providing some much needed ribbing for a segment of the cybercommunity that takes itself way too seriously at times. As for the Fourth Estate, no, we're not part of it. Think of us as the mosquito, sucking blood from the exposed flesh of that dubious institution and occasionally injecting it with a horribly infectious meme. So far we haven't been squashed.Kuro5hin: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/10/28/211050/43
Fourth Estate: http://www.geocities.com/athens/delphi/1979/trivia/fourthestate.html
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Journals
A Down & Dirty Guide to Building Adult Web Sites
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
Virtual Vintage: The Insider's Guide to Buying and Selling Fashion Online
Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference (2nd Edition)SURFING SITES
NPR's Engines of Our Ingenuity
National Public Radio listeners may have been catching "Engines of Our Ingenuity" for some time now, as it's been airing five days a week since 1988. However, even the most die-hard of listeners have likely missed an episode or two - after all, as of Oct. 30, 2002, 1,744 episodes have aired. The good news is that the audio and transcript of each show is posted here, along with background information and other good stuff. You even get a nice little search component and extras such as teaching aids. If you have a long flight in your future, download the free 760-page PDF book on heat transfer. The Talks and Papers remind us of the late Stephen Jay Gould. The site sells CDs as well, and as CDs go, they're expensive - but the online transcripts are free. Eye candy's pretty much absent here but the material is so wide-ranging and well presented that you won't miss Flash.http://www.uh.edu/engines/
James Randi, magician and skeptic, always had a comprehensive site devoted to the lack of the paranormal, but it looks a lot better than it used to. If you have any interest in such phenomena - and face it, you do - you have to bookmark his place. Maybe you're among those who believe that you possess supernatural powers. If so, visit to learn the details of the cool $1 million that awaits anyone who can prove the claim. You could get rich quick! Of course, if you're like the rest of us, you'll just have to settle for reading the other stuff. Chances are good that you'll find it well worth your time. If you lacked an inquisitive mind, you wouldn't be into tech. If you weren't into tech, you'd never find this article. And if you'd never found this article, chances are that you'd miss out completely on Randi's take on the Cottingley Fairies and dowsing. Either that or you're psychic.
http://www.randi.org/jr/110102.html
Many terrorists have at least one obvious thing in common with kamikazes of World War II: a desire to kill themselves. The BBC recently posted a retrospective titled "When death came before dishonour", sparked by a recent visit to London by one of the few surviving Japanese pilots of the one-way special-attack planes flown in the Pacific theater. Mass suicide from the air was a new tactic. Albert Axell, author of a recent book on kamikazes, states that four of every five kamikazes got hit by anti-aircraft flak and fell short of their targets; none sank a large aircraft carrier. But the "divine wind" had enormous psychological impact on Allied sailors. Axell's co-author discovered a manual for kamikaze pilots, whose shocking mentality may have arisen from "the ancient samurai code of bushido, which expected warriors to sacrifice their lives for their emperor or their nation." Most of the approximately 7,000 kamikazes who died in battle were Japanese, but some were Korean or Taiwanese. The BBC article includes a RealAudio translation in English of a reminiscence by one of the few surviving kamikaze pilots. This stream also has an interview with a British veteran, who points out that in his day most people considered kamikazes lunatics. There are also links to wartime photographs, current news, and features on other sites (such as the Imperial War Museum) that may provide background on the state of mind of people who rode a bomb with intent to do more than get attention.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/2266173.stm
Many consider medieval Britain a long, stupefying fog of ignorance and deprivation where the main pastimes were hunting, marriage, and murder. TimeRef's medieval timeline makes it easy to see that a lot of other things took place, even if the pace of life was slow and mead was never lite. Talk about a wealth of links! From the home page, you can jump right into a century for an overview of action. Every event is linked to more information. You have other ways to explore the years, which run from 800 to 1499: by People, Places, and Maps, for example. A to Z of Medieval Buildings (the Places link) provides photos and short histories of castles, abbeys, and cathedrals. You can follow timelines with themes of religion, military, and architecture, or study four Episodes (major events) with a promise of more to come. Bored? Get a load of the military timeline. Danish invasion (937), First Viking attacks (980), Massacre of St. Brice's Day (1002) and on and on - this litany of war appears impressively, if appallingly, comprehensive. The map section links to Multimap views of contemporary Britain. You don't have to be historian, librarian, or Hollywood producer to appreciate the tidy design of this site, the anonymous creator of which lives in Birmingham, England and states that "the site is constantly being updated and I hope to cover other areas." Teachers, take note.
http://www.timeref.org/
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History is a relatively recent (1994) institution dedicated to collecting, preserving, interpreting, and promoting interest in American history. Its advisory board includes stellar luminaries of the field. Its site reflects its various missions, which include lecture series, publications, educator support, and academic prizes. The site itself is one of the institute's most notable accomplishments, especially the resource guides for particular historical periods. Guides include online textbook chapters, readings, primary sources, and other materials. Much of the material is resident to the site, although some information comes from external sites. The historical timeline organization for the resource guides is easy to follow, and you can also look at pan-historical topics such as labor history, legal history, women, Native Americans, and more. Reference materials are also available directly. Our favorite part is the collection of atomic bomb songs in the 1929-1950: Atomic Era section.
http://www.gliah.uh.edu/index.cfm
Most of us are used to the idea of information as a commodity, but a commodity to be traded? That's the idea behind NewsFutures. Register and get a wad of virtual cash to trade on the outcomes of current events. Reckon that the US will invade Iraq before the year is out? Put your make-believe-money where your mouth is. Invest shrewdly in these news markets, and your dollars can be converted into nifty electronic goods or redeemable gift certificates (how like real life is that?). The Pope is 82 and looking frail and tired, the site points out, but will he remain Pope until 2003? Where's your money going on this awkward financial speculation? It's all good fun, and it wasn't just Montgomery Co., Md. residents who welcomed news of the Beltway Sniper arrests on Oct. 24 - some lucky people made out like bandits on the market NewsFutures opened on when someone would get nabbed.
http://us.newsfutures.com/
This Web site focuses on the impact upon advertising of the changing views of medicine, disease, and health. The visitor can view promotional material for medical advertising from the early 1900s thru to the 1960s. A user-friendly searchable database lets visitors search for ads in six different categories including household products, personal and oral hygiene, and over-the-counter drugs. In addition, visitors can obtain an overview of medicinal and advertising events in an online timeline. Most advertisements listed provide an image and brief profile of the promoted product. You'll find yourself getting a taste of not only medical advertising, but also of American society in times of war, economic downturn, and social reform. The site is sure to be an invaluable resource for any student or adorer of the history of advertising.
http://odyssey.lib.duke.edu/mma/
Europe's Lesson to Humanity: Hate!
What is Europe's lesson to humanity? What example has the continent set for the rest of us? So asks this light-hearted article, which employs a straightforward research methodology - pouring beer into the throats of selected Europeans and letting them rant - to find the answers. The evidence seems to suggest that the bigotry and hatred that have scarred Europe from time immemorial are alive and kicking (and biting and scratching) to this day. There is a regional historical overview of Europe's blood drenched past, and the carnage of the 20th century is charted decade by decade. For Europeans who take solace in the fact that most of the continent's 70 million war casualties died in the first half of the 20th century, the Balkans - where the motto is "Have village, will burn" - provide a late reminder that European bloodlust is not yet a thing of the past. Additionally, one Dan Higgins provides some intellectual rigor in a sidebar. He concludes that Europe is just a shittier version of America, and is full of fags and frigid women whining enviously about the New World success story.http://exile.ru/151/1510101113.html
What do you want my man? We got links to Java visuals of uppers and downers. We got interactive 3-D representations of X trips. We got coke or acid simulations. The front page of Interdope, whose mission it is to fight against the war on drugs and spread its version of the truth about drugs, is not quite the dealer's spiel we suggest, but the invitation is there to tune in, turn on, and drop into some of their virtual drug fixes. We at Netsurfer won't comment on the authenticity of the experiences on offer, but these visuals sure are fun with their weird shapes, bright colors - sort of like a crappy screensaver. Visitors can also read trip reports from users of various drugs, which lead us to believe that no computer simulation can ever recreate the feeling of having hermaphroditic sex with the whole universe, though if any readers can supply a link to one, please deal us in.
http://www.interdope.com/
Home Repair Hints for the Handy
Nothing ever breaks when you rent, at least not so you notice. Own your own home, however, and the door handles fall off in your hands, the roof starts to disintegrate, and the plumbing backs up. If you don't start out handy, you soon either learn or hand over your paycheck to a steady stream of repairmen. DoItYourself.com is a fine place to start on your personal voyage to handyhood. There are six general areas: Build/Remodel, Decorate, Home Ownership, Living, Outdoors, and Repair/Fix-It. Each contains a good selection of typical tasks, broken out into materials lists, tools, and procedures, accompanied by helpful illustrations. There are also articles on materials and aspects of home ownership such as refinancing and insurance. If you're still feeling a bit tentative about doing your own repairs, you can peruse the advice on dealing with contractors. The site stays general and doesn't cover everything (we couldn't find info on do-it-yourself concrete floors), but does provide an excellent place to start.http://doityourself.com/
You know how sometimes you watch a foreign film and even though you may not speak the language or bother to read the subtitles, it's just so beautiful that it doesn't matter? That's ImageDive for you. The site is Flash to the nth degree. It's what Flash wants to be when it grows up. This site is what happens when true artists who happen to know the Web team up to produce a poetic masterpiece in binary. Have we raved enough yet? Go see it. And don't miss the hamster tooshies.
http://www.imagedive.com/
The home page pretty much spills the beans: "Taliban Reunited is the simple way to find out what your old terrorist chums and captives are doing now." Yes, this is a great little parody site, with links to all of the important stuff: Your Camps, Your Bases, Success Stories, even a Memory Board. Oddly, we couldn't get to the Success Stories, but the Memory Board has some great laughs. If you have a few extra minutes in your schedule, you may want to visit. Stop into the shop and buy a Taliban stick-on beard! Or groove to the disco sounds on the CD, featuring such hits as "Cleaning out My Cave" by Ossie and Eminem, and "Who Let the Goats out" by Fatah Men. You'll find it time wasted, but worth wasting.
http://www.talibanreunited.com/index.html
FLOTSAM & JETSAM
You know something about recreational drugs, but book-sniffing? It's a British thing, and this curious little place is a good visit. When your little one starts acting oddly, consider whether the twerp has been book-sniffing. If you tear through the room and find a straw in "Green Eggs and Ham"....http://www.rdearnley.supanet.com/
Workman Publishing has a line of paper airplane books, and has put together a site that includes a number of paper airplane tools and toys. The centerpiece is a flight simulator that models angle, thrust, and pitch. It's fun and, if you're serious about your folded airships, useful as well. Our best score was 88 feet.
http://www.workmanweb.com/fliersclub/simulator2.html
We all had childhood dreams of what we wanted to be when we grew up. So you didn't become that fireman or movie star you always thought you'd be. Then again, maybe you weren't so far off the mark and did become what you had aspired to be. Maybe it all depends on how you look at it.
http://www.gecko9.com/whenigrowup.html
Court TV's Stupid Crimes and Misdemeanors
Court TV has a page of dumb crime. The Netsurfer favorite is the bank robber in Miami Beach whose gun accidentally went off in his pocket during a hold-up. He escaped injury from the gunshot but was then run over by a van as he fled the scene.http://www.courttv.com/people/scm/
SOFTWARE
DSpace: The Electronic Library Project and Software
The impetus behind DSpace is that MIT researchers are producing tons of digital material but have a hard time keeping track of it. You can search Google for a research paper or data set, but that is an ad hoc solution. MIT needed a better way to keep track of this material so, in collaboration with Hewlett-Packard, it developed DSpace. The heart of DSpace is free Java-based software that manages the check-in, retrieval, and archiving of digital content. It enables all the electronic products - text, audio, video, images, databases - of an institution to be accessed through one consistent interface. At the moment, the software is still being worked on - for example, data search facilities are not yet sophisticated - but it is freely downloadable. MIT is already using it and can handle up to a couple of terabytes of data. Note that this is a complex, sophisticated software suite which will require time to master.DSpace: http://dspace.org/
Software: http://sourceforge.net/projects/dspace
OpenBSD, widely considered the most secure of the various open source Unix variants, has released a new version. Given the focus on security, it should come as no surprise that most of the new features aim at making it even more secure. For example, it is less susceptible to buffer overflow exploits, Apache is made more secure by running in a more restricted environment, and fewer programs have to run with root permissions. The software can be freely downloaded from the OpenBSD site or purchased as an inexpensive three-CD set.
http://www.openbsd.org/32.html