BREAKING SURF
| There's a Spammer in My Internet Cafe! |
| Investigating a Computer Fraud |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| Action Comics #1 |
| Lay That Track |
| Strong Bad's Real 100th E-Mail |
| Paris in the Night |
| New Picture of Saturn |
| Gates Does Feiss |
| Babes against Bush |
| Take a Quiz |
| Textpattern: A Content Publishing System |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
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| Credits |
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BREAKING SURF
The 2004 Pulitzer Prize Winners
The Pulitzer Prize committee has announced this year's journalistic and literary winners. The journalism winners come largely from the usual suspects - the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal shared the bulk of the nominations and awards. There were a couple of surprises this year. The committee awarded no prize for Feature Writing. Also, some journalists have grumbled about the award of the Criticism prize to Dan Neil of the Los Angeles Times for his automobile reviews. Typically, this category goes to movie or literature critics. On the literary front, Edward P. Jones won the Fiction prize for his book "The Known World", Anne Applebaum won the General Nonfiction prize for her excellent "Gulag: A History". The full list of prizes is online.Pulitzer Prizes: http://www.pulitzer.org/2004/2004.html
"The Known World": http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060557540/netsurferdigest
"Gulag: A History": http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1400034094/netsurferdigest
Ten years after Hutu extremists systematically butchered almost a million Tutsis, many of us still know relatively little about the killings in Rwanda. This Frontline special lets us glimpse that hell. The heroes of that wretched time were but a few men on the ground, many acting well outside their defined orders. Two unarmed UN peacekeepers denied armed killers entry to a church harboring refugees. Another, Senegal's Captain Mbaye Diagne, risked his life as he single-handedly ferried people to safety without authorization, until finally his luck ran out in a way that charm and audacity could not help. There were villains, too, and plenty more of them. The UN commander, General Romeo Dallaire, lacked the soldiers to enforce his will and was compelled to negotiate with thugs to secure the safety of endangered Tutsis. Dallaire says he felt he was talking with evil, not humans. And then there were the rest of us, who mostly sat on our hands. The UN intervened but ineffectively, with no significant support for staff in the field, a cruelly limited mandate, and far too few soldiers. At the time, politicians scrambled desperately to avoid calling it genocide, although that's what it was. These powerful, heartrending words and videos leave us with a huge moral question: how can we ensure we won't fail again?
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ghosts/
Abdul Rahman Makdad, like Yassir Arafat, was born in Egypt of Palestinian descent. Also like Yassir Arafat, he has spent a good part of his youth trying to kill Israelis. Makdad is in Israeli hands, awaiting a prison sentence for his terrorist activities. The Independent was part of a group to secure an interview with Makdad, who has planned two suicide bombings of buses and who once sniped at Israelis with a rifle. He was also a policeman in the Palestinian Security Services. The resultant article provides an inside look at how the terrorists operate and why. One surprising revelation is that freelance cells of terrorists mount attacks, then sell the credit for them to richer, better known organizations. When you earn $750 for blowing up a bus, and you don't have to share that cash with the dismembered bomber, there's not much incentive to stop.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=508887
Debate about Access to Scientific Literature
Nature has a special collection of articles and comments about the future of scientific publication. Attempts to use the Internet to make scientific papers more widely available and less expensive for readers are provoking vigorous debate among librarians, publishers, and scientists. Maintaining a peer-review publication process is inherently expensive. Institutional subscribers have borne most of that cost, with some contribution from page charges paid by authors. With the price of subscriptions sky-rocketing and library funding tight, however, access to the full range of scientific information increasingly may be only available to an elite made of staff of large, rich organizations. Almost everyone agrees that barring ready access to relevant scientific information is no way to encourage innovation and creativity, but the proposed solutions vary immensely, and are on display here, engagingly and vigorously defended. The dream of online access to everything scientific and technical has long driven science thinkers and planners. First technology and now economics, however, have interfered with realizing that vision. Adding urgency to the debate is the emerging view that, in many fields, progress will indeed depend on the ability to sift huge amounts of information. Incomplete collections, incompatible formats, overzealous copyright protection, and expensive access charges all interfere with that ability. Nature provides a fascinating look at an important debate with some helpful clues as to where we might be heading - and it's all free.http://www.nature.com/nature/focus/accessdebate/
Charred Bodies in Iraq: To Show or Not to Show?
News coverage featuring photos of charred bodies hanging from a bridge or being beaten with shoes in Iraq, or the lack thereof, has garnered considerable criticism in the US. This has sent newspaper editors scrambling to explain their positions, a situation that most folks around the world would find laughable. American news is routinely sanitized. The only way to deal with reality is to see reality, but many newspaper editors preferred to avoid reality and kept what were undoubtedly the most powerful news photos of the day off their front pages. Now, editors from the left coast to the right are heading into ombudsman columns to defend putting the photo in black-and-white on an inside page or cropping the photos for the front page. Newsdesigner.com looks at how the newspaper industry handled the issue. We wonder why so much outrage is directed at those who published the photos, while little to none is directed toward those who did the deeds in open defiance of Islamic tenets. Romanesko has links to related articles.Newsdesigner.com: http://www.newsdesigner.com/archives/2004_04.php
Romanesko: http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=45&aid=63560
Boing Boinging Through the Roof
Cory Doctorow has run his popular and entertaining Boing Boing blog for some time now. It won Weblog of the Year at the recent Weblog Awards. Add to that the recent publication of a couple of his well publicized books - and their release under the Creative Commons license - and Doctorow and his blog have become rather well known. With popularity come netsurfers; Doctorow's bandwidth usage has exploded and his servers are straining under the load. He is going through what so many suddenly popular sites have gone through, and is wondering how he can pay for this sudden fame. His musings spawned a massive Boing Boing thread (click the Discuss link) in which his many fans provided equally many suggestions. They range from making his server more efficient to selling T-shirts to running a pledge drive, and who knows what else by now. It's a long thread but eminently worth skimming.http://www.boingboing.net/2004/04/05/boing_boings_explosi.html
On Mar. 19, the Witty worm hit the Internet. Several things distinguished this worm from the usual run of viruses and worms making their way around the Net. It was one of the few widely propagated worms that was actually destructive and it showed up only a day after the vulnerability it targeted was publicized. It was set loose in an organized manner on a large number of hosts and spread through hosts that actively tried to protect themselves. The Witty worm was clearly something new let loose in the wilds of the Net. This CAIDA paper analyses how the Witty worm spread, and contains a great deal about the timing and extent of the infection. Many graphs and even animations illustrate the spread of the worm.
http://www.caida.org/analysis/security/witty/
Free Speech, Bad Conduct, and One Heck of a Legal Mess
A court case that mashes together freedom of speech, harassment, and contempt of court like atoms in an A-bomb - with similarly spectacular results - is coming to a head. Paul Trummel, a resident in a retirement home and a member of two press associations, had grown notorious for his online rants against the home and other targets. In 2002, Judge James Doerty sent Trummel to jail for 111 days for contempt of court, calling Trummel a "mean old man who becomes angry and vicious when he doesn't get his own way." Trummel said he was pursuing a journalistic investigation of abuses at the home, but Doerty rejected that claim as he decided Trummel was not a journalist because he was not employed by anyone but himself. Although the judge later backed away from that assessment, he had effectively labeled as bogus all freelance journalists. Enter the ACLU and a number of press associations. They may not agree with what he says, they say, but they support his right to say it. The state Supreme Court in Washington heard arguments in November 2003, but has yet to issue an opinion. Both sides plan to appeal to the US Supreme Court if they lose. Online Journalism Review has a link-laden take on the case.http://www.ojr.org/ojr/law/1080766844.php
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is sponsoring a social experiment - group blogs on topics of interest to its members. Group blogs aren't news, but the EFF's provide a great deal of bang for a quick read. The EFF is offering two blog pages. Deep Links is a traditional blog, with links and comments. miniLinks is in the same vein, only with a sentence fragment instead of a full-fledged comment. If you have any interest in any of the issues EFF cares about, bookmark these sites and check them out regularly. You won't be disappointed.
Deep Links: http://blogs.eff.org/deeplinks/
miniLinks: http://blogs.eff.org/minilinks/
The iTunes Music Store and Your Rights
Harvard's Digital Media Project takes a look at Apple's iTunes Music Store (iTMS) from the legal and business perspectives. The model has succeeded in the US, but what does it really mean for the consumer? Following a brief discussion of the half-million potential downloads iTMS offers and how it does so, the project's recent paper delves into the nitty-gritty of rights. The iTMS sells songs encoded as AAC files rather than MP3s, and incorporates digital rights management (DRM) that allows buyers to download a purchased track only once and to use that track on no more than three computers (although tracks can be moved to an iPod player on an unlimited basis). Buyers may burn unlimited copies of a song to CDs, but any iTunes playlist is restricted to ten burns. More importantly for Apple, the proprietary nature of the DRM necessarily drives traffic toward the iPod player, as no other portable player on the market supports this DRM approach. It's good for Apple's business, because iPods generate profit. The paper notes that Apple employs a two-pronged legal approach to the nasty issue of fair use, which is central to copyright. In essence, Apple can (and does) employ contract law provisions to override copyright law in many cases, which lets it legally restrict rights that consumers might otherwise hold under standard American copyright law. Worm your way through the PDF file for the full story.http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/media/uploads/53/GreenPaperiTunes03.04.pdf
Plagiarism-Busting Hounds Sniff New Trails
Although university students must increasingly run their papers through plagiarism-detection services such as Turnitin, some academic institutions refuse to use them, including many universities in Canada. To some minds, the practice is intrinsically an insult and an indication of mistrust. But that's no block to lawyers eager to put the software to work to spot copyright violators who help themselves to the words of others or to publishers such as USA Today, which used such software to investigate a reporter alleged to have cribbed material from other sources. To help broaden its market beyond the academic sphere, iParadigms, creator of Turnitin, has launched a service called iThenticate, designed to check if a work has been plagiarized. The New York Police Department uses this to track the origin of documents involved in investigations. Despite the understandable enthusiasm of software companies, experts caution that detecting parallelism in texts is only a first step in determining plagiarism. Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer Wendy Seltzer warns that there are many legitimate reasons why such software might provide false positives. Wired has more details.http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,62906,00.html
Some people have more money than sense. That's our view of FunHi, the latest in social networking that seems to have been designed by a devilish Thorstein Veblen. At FunHi you can do the usual social networking stuff with a hip-hop flavor, but you can also buy bling-bling to show respect and affection for other members, especially young ladies. Unlike Amazon wish-list gifts, FunHi delivers no actual material goods. Instead, FunHi's merchandise is entirely virtual - yet members seem to compete to give to the objects of their affection the most expensive goods. This virtual bling-bling, however, costs real money, which the FunHi folks harvest - while slack-jawed in amazement. The virtual gifts cannot be regifted. Veblen's theory of the leisure class has reached cyberspace, where keeping up with the Joneses has taken on a whole new meaning. Who can show off the most depleted credit balance? The networking may be about respect and affection, but FunHi sure seems to be pulling a fast one on its playas. According to Wired, the site's backers have cleared $10,000 in sales of virtual goods, something they have found nearly incomprehensible. It all sounds like a joke gone horribly successful.
FunHi: http://www.funhi.com/
Thorstein Veblen: http://www.mnc.net/norway/veblen.html
Wired: http://www.wired.com/news/games/0,2101,62826,00.html
Ever have trouble remembering what something looks like? In industry, especially manufacturing, this is a significant and costly problem. Purdue University researchers are developing a search engine for shapes. A user sketches part of an object and the search engine finds things that look like it. The system isn't perfect, but it is still quite impressive. Purdue News has images and a good discussion of the problem. The research group doing the work, PRECISE, offers several papers online.
Purdue News: http://news.uns.purdue.edu/UNS/html4ever/2004/040330.Ramani.shape.html
PRECISE: http://tools.ecn.purdue.edu/~cise/dess.html
These days, any idiot can install Linux, on everything from a Palm PDA to a mythical Norse hero (that would be a Beowulf cluster). But it takes a real geek to install Linux on a dead badger. Yes, you read that right - a dead badger. Don't forget the rubber gloves. This piece at Strange Horizons is one of the funniest things to cross our geeky radar screen in some time. After the convulsions have passed, don't forget to check out the catchy music.
http://www.strangehorizons.com/index.pl?Contents=/2004/20040405/badger.shtml
Pocket PC Can Now Double as WiFi Phone
Skype is one of the better known new Internet telephone companies. Its well marketed peer-to-peer-based online voice over IP (VoIP) phone service is being keenly watched by competitors and by traditional phone companies because it may just revolutionize the phone business. This week, Skype again made waves in the industry, with the introduction of telephone software that can run on Microsoft Pocket PC-based handheld devices. PocketSkype, still a beta product, uses WiFi to connect to the Net and route phone calls. If you have a Pocket PC PDA and are anywhere near a wireless access point, you now have an Internet phone. It was only a matter of time before VoIP phones took advantage of WiFi networks, and this appears to be the first serious effort to capture that market.http://www.skype.com/download_pda.html
From Windows to Linux, the IBM Way
There is little doubt that Linux is well on its way to success in business settings. There can be no better illustration of this than the enthusiasm with which IBM, the quintessential big business company, has embraced the open-source operating system. IBM was actually one of the earliest boosters of Linux and contributed quite a bit of code to the operating system. Now, the company is taking the next step, telling businesses how to switch from Windows to Linux. This series of articles by Chris Walden, one of IBM's Developer Relations folks, is a practical guide to making the switch. He provides a crash course in how to install, administer, and operate Linux in nine easy lessons. It's an excellent capsule course in Linux, aimed mostly at tech-savvy Windows administrators, and is worth visiting not least for the great list of resource links.http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-roadmap.html
Open Source Vulnerability Database
The goal of this new Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) site is to offer an unbiased, vendor-neutral database of security vulnerabilities in open-source software. As such, OSVDB is starting life in the considerable shadow cast by the better known BugTraq mailing list, which tracks the same thing. Indeed, OSVDB's FAQ admits that "the primary way entries are entered into the database is from numerous security mailing lists." Can OSVDB become a relevant source of information for the security community? The idea of an open, vendor-neutral source of information is certainly a good one, but it remains to be seen whether OSVDB can live up to its promise.http://www.osvdb.org/
ONLINE CULTURE
There's a Spammer in My Internet Cafe!
Steffen Higel has a part-time gig as a sysadmin for a popular Irish Internet cafe. One day late last month, he got a call from a colleague who told him his cafe was on a spam blacklist because large volumes of spam had been sent from the cafe's IP address. Higel's entertaining account tells how he managed to catch the spammer in the act of sending out his wares - infamous Nigerian 419 scam e-mail. After gathering enough evidence, Higel managed to get the local police (the "gardi") to come out and arrest the guy, but not without a serious scuffle. Follow the threads for feedback from people who read his account and have some good points to make about spammers and privacy in open Internet cafes.http://www.linux.ie/pipermail/ilug/2004-April/013049.html
Investigating a Computer Fraud
Sometimes, computer fraud isn't a fraud enabled by computers but is instead a use of computers to enable a fraud by humans. People who would never buy a product based on too-good-to-be-true claims at a brick-and-mortar store apparently will easily abandon their wits and money when confronted with outrageous claims at a Web site. Tom's Hardware Guide has an excellent investigative report - featuring real legwork! - on Michael's Computers, an outfit that claims to sell the fastest desktop computers in the world. While the report certainly has its technical aspects, anyone can follow it. It leaves all conclusions to the reader, who would have to be very unusual to not be able to follow the facts and logic presented. The scary thought is that Michael's is but one of many hucksters waiting to take your money.http://www.tomshardware.com/column/20040317/index.html
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The Road to McCarthy: Around the World in Search of Ireland
Dancing Barefoot
Frek and the Elixir
Security WarriorSURFING SITES
In World War II, the German secret service thought they had an absolutely unbreakable coded communication system. It used a mechanical device called the Enigma machine. They first used it in 1925, and it was still state of the art when war broke out in 1939 and beyond. The Enigma was a brilliant device and produced perfectly secure coded messages - until the Brits, led by Alan Turing and Alfred Knox, broke the code with the aid of a captured Enigma. (The movie "U-571" tells a nice story, but the Brits already had broken Enigma when the event depicted happened.) For those who like hands-on history, the Enigma-E site offers an electronic kit version of an Enigma that is fully compatible with the authentic originals. It even looks pretty much like an original (on the outside). If you suspect any reprobate Nazis in your area are using war surplus Enigmas for communicating, you can tap right in with your own Enigma-E.http://www.xat.nl/enigma-e/desc/index.htm
The US once had, for all purposes, a telephone monopoly. Americans had excellent and expensive telephone service, and the telephone company - The Bell System, affectionately called "Ma Bell" - was an important part of every community. This was considered bad, or evil, or an opportunity waiting for others to make huge profits. The US government broke up the monopoly and the phone service business deregulated into the current chaos. The Bell System Memorial site honors that which isn't any more. There are sections for students, historians, hobbyists and collectors (a surprisingly large group), and former employees. There are resources areas, bulletin board areas, and tons of nostalgic art, photos, and documents. Maybe big wasn't baddest.
http://www.bellsystemmemorial.com/index.html
So who did Shakespeare really leave his best bed to? See for yourself on DocumentsOnline, the British National Archives' collection of digitized public records. Searching the index is free, but it costs 3.50 GBP to download the digital image of a document. Fortunately, the site offers a bunch of famous wills at no charge. The list of freebies includes the aforementioned William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Christopher Wren. Image quality varies and if the will isn't in English (or an understandable dialect of English), translation is up to you. Keep in mind that Old English and English are not one and the same.
http://www.documentsonline.pro.gov.uk/
We alerted you in NSD 10.11 to the impending arrival of "I, Robot" with a link to the movie Web site. Here's another site linked to the movie, elaborately done. The NS-5 is a robot model made by US Robot and Mechanical Men, the industrial giant of Isaac Asimov's robot culture. The I Robot Now site purports to advertise the NS-5 fully automated domestic assistants, slated to arrive July 16. The NS-5 has a positronic brain (yes, Star Trek borrowed the term) and incorporates Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. The site is incredible, and the claims are outlandishly futuristic - a fact that is amusingly set off by the The Who theme music.
NSD 10.11: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v10/nsd.10.11.html#BS12
I Robot Now: http://www.ns-5.com/index.php
With cell phones, handhelds, and other electronic devices becoming more and more a part of our lives, with manufacturers bringing out upgrades and new models seemingly weekly, it's hard to keep track of developments in the complex world of gadgets. Engadget is just the thing to help you keep up to date. It's a blog devoted to devices on your belt, on your wrist, in your ear. The common thread here is portability, although some of the reports cover desktops, home entertainment, and transportation - including, at our most recent visit, tech toys such as a robotic speedboat and a flying drone. Every page has something to pique a constant craving for novelty. Sample headlines include "The Automower" and "Qatar to use robots as camel jockeys rather than kidnapped children". This site takes gadgets seriously, with one eye on the social and cultural implications of unusual situations and another on your next shopping expedition.
http://www.engadget.com/
It was about time that stupidity and ignorance were officially recognized and rewarded, and so the 2003 Montreal Comedy Festival hosted the inaugural World Stupidity Awards. The uncoveted prize of World's Stupidest Man went to Iraqi Information Minister Saeed al-Sahaf, but this year, with nominations now open for the 2004 event, the competition will be fiercer. The awards have their own Web site where you can check out last year's winners and nominate your own choices for this year. There are ten different categories of award including Stupidest Act, Stupidest Statement, and Stupidest Trend of the Year, and there's even a Lifetime Achievement Award for Stupidity. These awards run counter to the mythical Darwin Awards, in that they are an established entity and that winners do not have to have removed themselves from the gene pool.
http://www.stupidityawards.com/
e-Seek Seeking Stuff Site Seeks Stuff Seekers
John Ankers is not Hercule Poirot. He is not Miss Marple. He is not Inspector Rebus. He is 22 years old and he has begun an Internet service called e-Seek that offers to track down items large and small for people around the world. He has already concluded a variety of cases of which even Sherlock Holmes would have been proud. He has located a foot-operated dog-grooming table, a stuffed lion (from the British Natural History Museum), a 1969 Porsche 911, and even a fully functional 1920s fridge. e-Seek works on a no-find no-fee basis and includes a personal haggling service you can use to get your object for the lowest price. Ankers's casebook is bulging with requests to track down memorabilia, antiques, and - most frequently - running shoes, so he's even looking for assistant hunters. This guy has big plans. Watch out eBay.http://www.e-seek-online.com/
A Genuine, Bona Fide, Electrified, Two-Car Monorail
If you've got a lenient homeowner's association, perhaps you should look into what Kim Pedersen did in his backyard. Sure, he built the typical basketball hoop, hot tub, and pool, but he took exterior architecture one step farther and added a monorail. The five years it took to construct the train are chronicled on the site, and the photo tour provides different angles and details. In the history, we find out where the motor for the original train came from. "Carol's father owned this Amigo walker and Erika, Carol's mom, donated it to the Niles Monorail project." For some unknown reason, Carol's father couldn't make it to the opening ceremony.http://www.monorails.org/tMspages/Niles.html
What with Bowlingual and other recent pet-nological developments, it only seems natural that someone would come up with MailPets.com. When you sign your pets up there, they get their own e-mail addresses and can respond automatically in their own language (which you can customize if you have a pet that makes a particular noise a lot). It's a clever little idea. Here's what our reviewer's cat had to say about a section of President George Bush's State of the Union Address regarding terrorism: "Meow meow meow mao mao pur mew mew pur dogs!! Tsk tsk tsk mew mew mew mew? Raawwr raawwr." That, we think, just about sums it up.
http://www.mailpets.com/
Poker in the Star Trek Universe
The ultimate poker player would be ferociously aggressive, fearless, logical, brilliant, and able to control emotions. The player would scheme constantly, value money enough to not throw away bets on the end, read body language ably, and constantly seek to improve their game by studying opponents. Where could we find such a player? Among the alien races of the Star Trek franchise, writes Poker.Net's poker pundit, Andrew Glazer, in this entertaining article. He doesn't speculate who would win in the Star Trek fantasy poker school, but you can bet that James Kirk, as he does in so many episodes, would end up losing his shirt.http://www.poker.net/headlines/articles/perfectpoker.htm
The Renaissance Connection is an interactive Flash tour of life in the Renaissance, put together by the Allentown (Pa.) Art Museum (presumably because "Pennsylvania" has many of the same letters as "Renaissance"). It's intended to keep teenagers amused, and with its Monty-Pythonesque animation sequences and the Patron of the Arts game, it's likely to hold their attention longer than most sites - perhaps even long enough for them to learn something. Corresponding PDF lesson plans that coordinate with the look and theme of the site are provided for teachers.
http://www.renaissanceconnection.org/
Blythe, the Hydroencephalic Barbie Counterpart
At just 12" tall, Blythe proves that dolls with disproportionate body parts have a larger fan base - just ask her ever-popular Mattel counter-part, Barbie. Blythe is a multi-faceted and multi-accessorized doll, perhaps set apart from the typical Barbie-esque type by the grotesque size of her head and the ability to customize her look. Blythe comes with wigs and the ability to change eye color with the simple pull of a string at the back of her head. Oh, the drag queens must be jealous. Having debuted in the 1970s, Blythe is certainly not a new addition to the toy marketplace, but she has flown under the radar and seems to have survived the Barbie hype with the aid of devoted loyalists such as the purveyor of this Web site. A quick tour through This Is Blythe proves that some people have way too much head on their necks.http://www.thisisblythe.com/
"Trek Wars: The Furry Conflict" Matures
Back in NSD 7.12, we covered Marc Xavier's Trek Wars: The Furry Conflict, which is a hybrid of Star Trek, Star Wars, and a furry fetish. Marc Xavier, the mixmastermind behind the project, contacted us to say that chapter one of that project is finished, expanding in the process from an audio clip of a few minutes to a 16-minute full-blown radio drama.NSD 7.12: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v07/nsd.07.12.html#SS1
Furry Conflict: http://www.furryconflict.com/
FLOTSAM & JETSAM
The most expensive collectable comic book in the world - the one which introduces Superman - has been scanned and can be read online. Check it out fast, before whoever owns the copyright orders it offline.http://xroads.virginia.edu/~UG02/yeung/actioncomics/cover.html
How fast can you build the railroad before the train arrives? Bombs remove obstacles if you need to replace connecting tracks for the oncoming train. Time runs out when the train reaches the end of the line, by either pulling into the station or crashing. Simple graphics and game play mimic those old pipe-laying games (no, not those).
http://www.railroadtycoon3.com/rt3/us/downloads/game.html
Strong Bad's Real 100th E-Mail
Fans of HomestarRunner.com's Strong Bad and his responses to e-mail eagerly anticipated Strong Bad's 100th installment. Some may have tried to parse the URL before the clip was released. They got a dressing down for their efforts.Fake 100th: http://homestarrunner.com/sbemail100.html
Real 100th: http://homestarrunner.com/sbemailahundred.html
This stunning view of Paris is a panorama of the city aglow at night. It's a big image, but worth the time. Don't forget to scroll right.
http://dura.cell.free.fr/home/images/parisbynight.jpg
This spectacular photo of the most luxuriantly ringed planet in our system comes from the Cassini probe. The full-res versions would make great desktop backgrounds. The probe enters Saturn orbit July 1.
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA05385
This QuickTime piece is worth a look, as the author took Ellen Feiss's mouth and pasted it onto Bill Gates's face, resulting in a completely different take on the popular "Switch" commercial that Apple ran a while back. It's very nice work, humorous, and well worth a quick hit.
http://www.robotcombat.com/video_ellenfeiss.html
They have a calendar and they exhort us to "Lick Bush in '04". They're emphatically against Bush. Oh, the cruel irony.
http://www.babesagainstbush.com/main.html
To take a quiz, whizz in here. It's a humorous sort of reality check. It's only good for one run, though, so it gets a spot in our Flotsam section.
http://www.dr-joe.net/quiz.html
SOFTWARE
Textpattern: A Content Publishing System
Textpattern is a Web application designed to simplify the production of well structured, standards-compliant Web pages. The centerpiece of the system is the ability to take some minimally formatted text and turn it into nicely formatted XHTML. Textpattern also makes it easy to maintain lists of links, has a built-in search engine, manages time stamps and publication time of articles, and allows you to password-protect any section of your content. All in all, it sounds like a capable content-management system geared toward blog-like publications. The system is still under development, so don't expect to create production sites with it just yet, but there's a lot of potential here and you can help to make it better.http://textpattern.com/