BREAKING SURF
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| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| Cheney vs. Leahy: New Details |
| Blogger: The Amazing Web-Site Machine |
| Most Popular US Names through Time |
| Google, Circa 1960 |
| Firefox Browser Extension: Google Search Preview Images |
| GD Library Now Supports GIFs |
| Password-Protecting Your Web Site with htAccess Generator |
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BREAKING SURF
Army Inspector General Reports on Prisoner Abuses
Lost in the flurry of media coverage of the 9/11 Commission report and the Democratic National Convention is the fact that the Department of the Army Inspector General (DAIG) has released its assessment of detainee operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The DAIG has determined that the US Army is accomplishing its mission, and that the overwhelming majority of personnel adhere to requirements for proper treatment of detainees. You can download the DAIG PDF report, but we'll give you the short version. After you excise all of the bureaucratic lingo and military protocol, the report boils down to one succinct thought: if abuse did occur, it is not endemic to the structure as a whole. To put it another way, there might be a bad apple or two in there, but not enough to spoil the whole barrel. The New York Times takes due note, reporting as well on the partisan clash the report generated on Capitol Hill. Dems call it a whitewash, while the GOP leaps to defend the honor of the US armed forces. Unlike the Times, Washington Post notes that at least one GOP senator, John McCain, expressed dissatisfaction with the report.DAIG: http://www4.army.mil/ocpa/reports/ArmyIGDetaineeAbuse/index.html
Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/23/politics/23abus.html
Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7124-2004Jul22.html
Francis Crick's DNA No Longer Replicating at 88
You probably already know that Francis Crick, along with James Watson, built on the work of oft-forgotten Rosalind Franklin to discover the double helical structure of DNA, and if you don't, see the original Nature paper in the link below. Crick and Watson won a Nobel Prize for their discovery and went on to distinguished careers in biology. In recent years, Crick had been studying the biology of the brain and how neurochemistry gives raise to consciousness, a topic he talks about in a 1989 interview at Access Excellence. Wikipedia has a brief bio cum obituary.Nature: http://www.nature.com/genomics/human/watson-crick/
Access Excellence: http://www.accessexcellence.org/AE/AEC/CC/crick.html
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Crick
They're out there somewhere, rearing ten stories high - massive waves surging far from land, monsters ready to bear down unexpectedly and smash anything in their paths. Oceanologists once dismissed ship-killing waves as maritime myth, but enough sailors provided eyewitness accounts of rogue waves that unexpectedly roared down on them out of nowhere to force scientists to figure the waves were rare freak events. New radar evidence points to a much higher frequency of such waves and the people who study them suspect such big waves may pose a significant threat to ships and offshore oil rigs. The waves may be responsible for the surprisingly frequent sudden disappearance of big ships. Because the cause and origin of the big waves remain unknown, scientists are keen to learn more about them. The European Commission's Max Wave research project has two main objectives: to learn more about how and where the big waves form, with a view to predicting and hence avoiding them; and to learn how to design ships to be less susceptible to sinking by monster waves. Research to date shows that the rogue waves usually occur near major ocean currents, but they can also appear near storm fronts. The European Space Agency (ESA) has an article on the research and plans to have its WaveAtlas produce radar maps of wave data and examine the involvement of extreme wave events in actual ship sinkings.
Max Wave: http://w3g.gkss.de/projects/maxwave/
ESA: http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMOKQL26WD_index_0.html
WaveAtlas: http://esamultimedia.esa.int/docs/linkWaveAtlas.htm
The Democratic National Convention Speeches
If you missed any of the speeches at the Democratic National Convention, this site has videos of every single speaker. If you don't have the time for all, at least, for entertainment value, try to watch the speeches by Bill Clinton, Al Sharpton, Barack Obama, and, of course, John Kerry.http://www.dems2004.org/site/apps/nl/newsletter3.asp?c=luI2LaPYG&b=130840
Democratic Convention's Bloggers
With the Tour de France over and the Olympics yet to get underway, we can switch our attention from sports to politics. The Democratic National Convention is on as we write this in Boston, ostensibly to choose a party candidate for the presidential election. We already know there'll be precious little time devoted to issues or debate - hoopla and spin will triumph in an attempt to present the Kerry/Edwards team in the best possible light, ready to win the final tussle for the Oval Office in November. If the probable triumph of hot air over substance, or the way the conventional media arrange things neatly but not always accurately bothers you, you might want to see how blogs and bloggers are trying to transform this convention into something a little more meaningful than usual. The Democratic Party has accredited a bunch of bloggers, and Feedster, Cyberjournalist.net, and Convention Bloggers provide links to all of them.Feedster: http://politics.feedster.com/
Cyberjournalist.net: http://www.cyberjournalist.net/news/001461.php
Convention Bloggers: http://www.conventionbloggers.com/
Blogging the Convention: Early Post Mortem
One of the big deals with this year's Democratic National Convention, at least from an online standpoint, has been the presence of accredited webloggers in the midst of the festivities. Dan Bricklin was not one of them, but he has been following the blog coverage, and even before the convention ended he wrote a good critique of the bloggers and their work. He notes several phenomena. For example, event blogging is different from regular blog activity because of the condensed time and dense concentration of information. Another factor is that the bloggers were news themselves, and wound up being covered by the traditional media. Bricklin also noticed the bloggers' differing levels of emotional investment, in contrast to how dispassionately the standard media covered the convention. Even though this is an early analysis, Bricklin raises good points about this kind of blogging activity, points which may improve the experience in the future.http://www.bricklin.com/conventionblogging.htm
Hollywood Fails at Intelligent SF, Maybe
Want to join a debate on Plastic that will never end? Check out this one on the current state of SF films. The original poster claims that Hollywood isn't interested in intelligent SF and that the best SF was on early television shows such as "The Twilight Zone" and "Outer Limits". You can imagine the response this gets, including a great tangent on whether or not Macbeth qualifies as SF. Also hilarious is the great mini-thread on spaceship design and the question of the value of a streamlined design in a vacuum.http://www.plastic.com/article.html;sid=04/07/21/05574518;sid=04/07/21/05574518
Ever wonder why someone can be so passionate about their iPod or where they buy their morning latte? It's all about branding - specifically, creating cult brands. As a BusinessWeek article makes clear, brands are essentially social communities that allow consumers, like club members, to interact with each other as well as with the firm. What is truly staggering in the article is just how much some consumers know about their favorite companies and products. One young Chinese consumer, who runs a Web site devoted to Ikea, even critiques the ice cream Ikea sells in the store's cafeteria. He believes that Ikea knows him better than any other furniture company, further evidence of how identification between customer and company makes for a cult brand. As this article makes clear, cult branding is not something that can be engineered overnight.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_31/b3894094.htm
The Attention Bond Mechanism: Yet Another Doomed Spam Solution
It's not that we think the Attention Bond Mechanism (ABM) has a snowball's chance in Hell of working, but it is representative of the kind of desperate proposals with which people try to overcome the spam problem. The basic idea behind ABM is that before you can send any e-mail to anybody, you post a cash bond. If the person accepts the mail, you get your money back. If the intended recipient does not accept the e-mail, the person gets to keep your cash. It's a lovely idea, and there is an impressive amount of economic theory and infrastructure behind it, none of which has anything to do with the complexities of the real world. For example, except in the most superficial terms ("always seizing the bond is not in your best interest"), the authors have not bothered to address the myriad ways in which this scheme can be exploited by hackers. OK, if all this is a theoretical and nonsensical exercise, why waste your time reading it? Well, as we said, it does have some real economic theory behind it, theory worth acknowledging. It's just the application we have a problem with here.http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~tloder/abm_faq_extended.html
Newspaper Circulation and Web Site Updates
Newspaper Web pages should be updated throughout the day, right? Such an approach takes advantage of the Web's immediacy and reach. Some papers, however, take the easy way out. Online Journalism Review has found that among the Web sites of the 30 largest newspapers by circulation, five don't bother to update their front pages during the course of a day. The 12 most popular papers do constantly update their pages. The frequency of updates relates to circulation, the article notes - the larger the circulation a paper has, the more likely it is to update their Web site after the initial daily release of content. Those papers that don't update their pages are simply carrying the standard newspaper model into cyberspace, and the approach can't possibly serve to expand their readership.http://ojr.org/ojr/workplace/1090395903.php
Google, DoubleClick Victims of Worms and Hackers
This wasn't a good week for large Net companies. Google was apparently a temporary victim of a new variant of the MyDoom worm. After infecting computers, the worm would go online and search for e-mail addresses at Google, forcing the company to block queries from certain domains - including some media and press sites which then, as a result of their limited perspective, reported that Google's entire service was affected. The Register reports that Google was more or less fine and only users of infected sites were seeing search error messages. Meanwhile, DoubleClick was the target of a classic distributed denial-of-service attack, which caused many sites that display its ads to load slowly in browsers. Both episodes point out that even a small hacking effort can have a disproportionate effect on even the largest and most robust online operations. The Washington Times has that story.Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/07/26/google_mydoom_infection/
Times: http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20040728-020846-8483r.htm
Moveable Type Announces Plug-in Winners
Moveable Type held a plug-in contest for developers, and got a bundle of cool entries. They gave out some cool prizes as well: the first-place entrant got a G5 dual-processor system with a 23" LCD display and loaded with excellent software. Serious bloggers benefit as well, as the plug-ins will be freely distributed as MT 3.1 is closer to issue. We were not surprised to learn that the winner designed a plug-in to eliminate comment spam.http://www.sixapart.com/log/2004/07/plug_in_to_mova.shtml
We try not to bug you with this kind of thing very often, but if you have not already done so we would really appreciate it if you would fill out our reader survey. We want to update our collective demographic data and get some idea of the kinds of things you are interested in. It's all quite anonymous and takes hardly any time at all. Thanks much in advance.
http://www.netsurf.com/nspoll.html
ONLINE CULTURE
The Microsoft Internet Explorer team has started a blog about the browser everyone loves to hate. So far, the posts mostly cover the rules and procedures for IEBlog, which don't amount to much more than requests to keep comments enjoyable, positive, and relevant. The bloggers hope to publicly discuss topics such as technical issues, tips and tricks, and security, once they get the housekeeping chores over with. It should be no surprise that this communication effort has already drawn many comments. Many cynics out there think the blog is just another marketing or public-relations ploy. Some visitors don't like the rules and argue that control is not part of blogging tradition. Others appreciate the effort to provide some decorum and to ensure a clear focus on improving the browser. One popular comment the kids at Microsoft should take to heart, though, is to fix what's broken - chiefly security issues - before adding new features. That's not exactly standard operating procedure at the company. The blog is probably a good idea, but with Business Week tech commentator Stephen Wildstrom, among others, advising people to shun IE until it straightens out its security problems, these folks have their work cut out for them.http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/
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The Bloody Crucible of Courage: Fighting Methods and Combat Experience of the Civil War
How Dogs Think: Understanding the Canine Mind
The Spam Letters
CamouflageSURFING SITES
A Child's Introduction to Critical Thinking
Interactive stories that require kids (or, for that matter, adults) to think hard are rare, but you can find a set of them at the Fin, Fur, and Feather Bureau of Investigation (FFFBI). The site presents kids with missions that typically involve solving math problems, clue-seeking, and solving visual puzzles. Other nifty bits include research into rainforest species, cryptography, and much more - there's even a Hencoder that allows kids to e-mail Hencoded messages to their friends. The site teaches kids to question, investigate, and use the Web as a source of information and it does so well. Built by the powerhouse PBS station WGBH, the FFFBI site is snappily written and employs an engaging approach. Number one on Time's list of top-ten learning sites, this place also boasts selection as the 2004 Parent' Choice Gold Award recipient.http://www.fffbi.com/
Brown Skin Plus Camera Equals Terrorist
For people who believe it only happens to the other guy, Ian Spiers, a photography student with something other than creamy white skin and blond hair, offers a scary tale on his Web site. He was photographing some canal locks smack in the middle of Seattle recently for a class assignment and his apparently suspicious activity attracted the unwelcome attention not only of the Seattle police, but also of agents of the Department of Homeland Security. The authorities detained him, confiscated his pictures, and harassed him, as he tells it. When questioned by Spiers and local reporters, the authorities explained that they had power to act as they did because they were acting on a complaint. Spiers's site documents a terrifying and dangerous use of the new anti-terrorism laws. Just recall what Timothy McVeigh looked like. An editorial in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer sheds only a bit more light.Spiers: http://www.brownequalsterrorist.com/
Post-Intelligencer: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/jamieson/181978_robert14.html
The Atomic Veterans History Project pays homage to and tells the stories of those who served as human guinea pigs, in essence, during American atmospheric atom and hydrogen bomb tests. The site presents more than 600 personal descriptions of the test experience, together with declassified images and other photos - the number of files had exceeded 2,500 at last count. Some of the radiation effects the witnesses describe are horrific, and the stories are made worse when you learn that the US Government passed torte legislation that effectively rendered it immune from legal remedy. Some of the facts presented seem from today's perspective almost unbelievable: in 1958 alone, the USA detonated 62 atomic weapons in the atmosphere while the USSR contributed 34 and the Brits added another five. That's an amazing amount of radioactive material. During US tests, ships were present while B-52 and B-57 aircraft took cloud samples. Oddly, a series of four tests in 1951 took place under the name "Operation Greenhouse". For anybody with an interest in the reality of atmospheric testing of nukes, this site will absorb a lot of time. Also present are pre-and post-attack aerial mosaic photos of Hiroshima, which together are sobering.
http://www.aracnet.com/~pdxavets/index.shtml
More and more of us, it seems, are feeling undervalued and unfulfilled at work. There are a variety of reasons for this, but none of the numerous studies on the issue addresses the possibility that part of the reason for this is the idiots we find ourselves working with. iWorkWithFools.com plugs that gap, though perhaps without the scholarship of other research, being, as it is, a forum where frustrated workers can air their grievances anonymously and find solace in the workaday misery of others. Each day, the site posts a fresh rant - a control-freak sexist boss, a co-worker who revels in sharing her unsavory sexual exploits with all who will listen, a company that promotes the lazy and incompetent - and surfers can post comments sympathizing, offering advice, or telling the disgruntled worker to quit whining. Why not submit a grievance of your own? Make sure you do it on company time, though.
http://www.iworkwithfools.com/
Presidential Campaign Commercials of the TV Era
"The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal is the ultimate indignity to the democratic process." So said presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson in 1956, which may partly explain his lack of success. As the American election season kicks into high gear, American TV screens are becoming crowded with the political propaganda. If you're not completely overwhelmed, the American Museum of the Moving Image has an exhibit that studies Presidential TV spots aired in all Presidential campaigns of the TV era. You can view commercials of every candidate, including third-party candidates, from every election. The museum classifies the commercials by type and by issue. While this wonderful collection focuses on the use and effects of television, it does not ignore more modern technology. Check out the Desktop Candidate section for the lowdown on Internet-based campaigning.http://livingroomcandidate.movingimage.us/index.php
Now that we're in the stretch run of the seemingly interminable American electoral season in which you can't flip a channel without being smacked by a political attack, it's nice to have some idea of what's true and what isn't in the ads. One of the more amazing truths of American life is that while you can't lie in a chicken soup ad, you can - with few exceptions - lie your head off in a political ad. And you can bet that's what frequently and precisely happens, more and more. FactCheck.org is a reasonably non-partisan project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. The small staff looks at many ads, checks them for honesty and truthfulness, and reports its take on the most egregious offenders. That FactCheck.org takes no sides means it will displease most, but it'll educate even more. Be sure to check out the Special Report by Brooks Jackson.
http://www.factcheck.org/
Political Contributions of the Rich and Famous
Newsmeat is a run-of-the-mill news site that picks and chooses an eclectic variety of the day's news. That alone would not make it worth a visit by your humble servants here at NSD. What very much makes Newsmeat a valuable destination for political junkies of all flavors is its brilliant interface to the Federal Election Commission donation database. This database records all donations over $200 over the last 20 years. The donations of many well known people can be viewed at a click, and searches by zip code are possible. You'll uncover lots of surprises - you can almost palpably feel Arnold Schwarzenegger's loyalty division between political belief and family. As for Presidential suck-ups, compare Monica Lewinsky and Kenneth Lay. No wonder President Bush has so much more to play with than John Kerry.http://www.newsmeat.com/
The History of Sanitary Sewers rolls into the gutter to explore the history of civic sanitation. It pores over the evolution of local collection facilities (which we laypeople call "toilets") from holes in the wall many centuries ago and delves into large-scale waste collection and disposal systems. Such systems date back to the earliest civilizations. This is an academic site and tends toward a stuffy dryness not often matched by its subject matter. Navigation is sometimes less straightforward than the old axiom about sewage flowing downhill. Still, the subject is important and the site does treat it well.
http://www.sewerhistory.org/
A Century and a Half of Selling Soap
These days, cosmetics ads tend to blur into each other: a stunningly beautiful girl here, a specious claim about the properties of one or another extract there, and the stuff practically sells itself. Ads were not always like this, as the Ivory Project, a collection of Ivory and other soap ads from 1838 to 1998, demonstrates. The ludicrous claims we hear today were also made a hundred years ago - an ad from 1900 proudly proclaims that "no other soap imparts such luster and finish to the natural whiteness of ostrich feathers" - and the babes have always been there, but at least there used to be variety. Our favorite was a 1907 advert that gives detailed instructions on how to shower after a football game: "First turn on the warm water. Then cover your body with the Ivory Soap lather. Rub it in thoroughly - again and again and AGAIN." Just don't attract too much attention from your teammates.http://www.americanhistory.si.edu/archives/Ivory/index.asp
Cultural markers can be found in the form of clothing, jewelry, architecture, art, and religion. The importance of food as a cultural marker is often undervalued. The Weird Foods from around the World site aims to rectify that as it appreciates food as a modern cultural symbol. What one society deems fine cuisine, another society considers barbaric or eccentric. While many North Americans may balk at the notion of devouring insects as a meal, insects are common fare in many other parts of the globe. Conversely, those living in parts of Asia tend to view cheese, and particularly blue cheese, as repulsive. This site is a fascinating culinary romp around the world, chock full of weird food facts with a smattering of peculiar recipes to tantalize the taste buds.
http://www.weird-food.com/
AlternaTime may save you an hour or two if you're researching a span of history covered by one of its many timelines. Librarian George Emery of Canisius College has collected timeline URLs for over a decade and with them has produced this vastly engaging gateway to background on cultural figures and movements, science and technology, art and literature, and more. This is a wonderful resource for teachers and writers. The list of links include Age of Exploration Timeline, Thomas Edison Timeline, and Romantic Chronology. Librarians are great name-droppers, and Emery drops plenty: James Joyce; Jackie Robinson; Steve Jobs; and others. You'll likely find timelines for subjects you didn't know had timelines, such as food, the Dust Bowl and minority events in Los Angeles. Hey, kids! This site can help you write reports on King Arthur, Christopher Columbus, and US Presidents. You'll find many classroom favorites here - for example, the Spanish Inquisition, Alcatraz Island, and witch trials in Salem. Need a quick history of atomic structure? Of Hypertext? Of Elvis? In spite of the occasional broken link, you'll make discoveries among these intellectual treasures.
http://www.canisius.edu/~emeryg/time.html
Benjamin Disraeli is the man attributed with the immortal quote on statistical untruths: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics." Finding reliable statistical information online is as much an art as a science; even after finding a source, one must still hope that the results haven't been reinterpreted or politicized beyond practical use. While there are those who may turn up their noses at all stats published by governments, at least those published by the Americans have usually been free and easy to find. The US government's FedStats site makes it even easier. Anyone seeking statistical info needs to visit. FedStats offers statistics from over 100 federal agencies. You can browse for information by topic, by state, or by region - using an interactive map - or by keyword, of course. Less direct netsurfers may explore the various governmental statistical resources as they desire in a random walk through an alphabetical list. For the skeptical, there are links to the guidelines ensuring the quality, objectivity, and integrity of the information collected.
http://www.fedstats.gov/
Logging, Computing, and Trucks
Columbia County, Ore., is just a shade west from the Portland metropolitan area, but it's a completely different world - as you'll see when you visit the VanNatta Forestry and Logging site, built by a member of a family that has been logging the area for five generations. The opening photo alone is certain to enrage certain environmentalists, depicting as it does a felled fir whose girth exceeds the height of the logger. This, however, is a virtual museum, providing wonderful photos and descriptions of Northwest logging from the late 1800s to the present. Among other tidbits, you'll learn here that the widely employed phrase "greasing the skids" is derived from 19th-century logging procedures. The site discusses the environmental management of forests as well, with several links to sources. Robert VanNatta, the maintainer, also offers a suite of pages that are completely unrelated to logging. The VanNatta Computer History page reflects the experiences of many who adopted computing platforms a quarter of a century ago. Talk about having something for everyone....http://www.vannattabros.com/
Cool Flame Game Helps Sell BMWs
If you're looking for an online distraction from a hectic day, then BMW's continuous saga, Cool Flame, is just the ticket. Cool Flame is a game that features animated characters Harvey Flame and Gina Lopez and a groovy ride with a "shaken, not stirred" appeal. So far, the Cool Flame series consists of five chapters. To advance past the first, you'll need to register and agree to receive news and updates from BMW. Ultimately, Cool Flame is a glorified promotional stunt designed to get your e-mail address. While the story is interesting, fun, and well designed, we found the registration process and obtaining a password for further play somewhat frustrating. If you've got the time and patience, it's worth a look.http://www.be-the-first-one.com/bethefirstone/index_home.html
"Seinfeld" fans, rejoice! An anonymous gatherer has managed to - ahem - acquire transcripts of the 1989 pilot and every episode that followed. You can read these things and visualize the entire episode in your mind. These aren't teleplays - they are not formatted as such and contain grievous spelling errors - but they are downloadable as text. Worth it just for the opening monologues! We're not sure how long this site will remain active, though, so you might want to move fast on this.
http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/
FLOTSAM & JETSAM
During a recent Senate gathering, Vice-President Dick Cheney and Senator Patrick Leahy exchanged some colorful obscenities. The New Yorker takes the incident and runs with it, making for a funny read even if you don't know or care about American politics.http://www.newyorker.com/shouts/content/?040726sh_shouts
Blogger: The Amazing Web-Site Machine
Biz Stone over at Blogger.com has written a take on the old late-night infomercial spiel to explain exactly what Google's Blogger.com is all about. It's a good guide for the uninitiated, if they act now.http://blogger.com/knowledge/2004/07/amazing-web-site-machine.pyra
Most Popular US Names through Time
The next time you're trying to name your child or puppy, you might want to swing by here. The US Social Security Administration has a database of names that goes back to 1880. You can search the most popular by year of birth. When are those classic 1880s names, Minnie and Bertha, going to make a comeback?http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/
How would you search Google 40 years ago? The query and response would come from and at you at the speed of snail mail. Nice font, isn't it?
http://www.fury.com/images/weblog/google_circa_1960.jpg
SOFTWARE
Firefox Browser Extension: Google Search Preview Images
This idea is simplicity itself. Whenever you perform a Google search, the GooglePreview plug-in inserts thumbnail images of the Web sites, Amazon.com products, and stock charts in the results. The plug-in is designed for Firefox, and the thumbnail previews come from a service called Thumbshots.org, which allows any Web site to incorporate their images in Web pages. Thumbshots.org is of most use to search engines or other sites that point to other Web sites, Amazon.com products, or stocks.GooglePreview: http://ackroyd.de/googlepreview/
Thumbshots: http://www.thumbshots.org/
With the expiration of the GIF compression patent, Tom Boutell's popular GD image-manipulating library and Perl toolkit now again supports the creation of GIF images. Boutell removed GIF support when the company that owned the GIF patent began to make noises about enforcing it a few years back. His action made many Web developers unhappy because at the time most browsers supported the PNG format, the open source replacement for GIF, either poorly or not at all. Now GIF support is back in the GD toolkit, and the news is a good excuse to point you toward it, one of the most useful C libraries and Perl modules for Web designers who have to create graphics on the fly.
http://www.boutell.com/gd/
Password-Protecting Your Web Site with htAccess Generator
If you're a Web designer, one of your most common tasks is to integrate some sort of access control in a site. Apache has a flexible mechanism for dealing with this problem which you can easily use. You stick a file called ".htaccess" in the directory you want to protect. The file has directives for Apache that detail what you want to protect and in what way. With flexibility comes complexity, however, and while it's easy to establish simple access control with a .htaccess file, things can get complicated when you try to be more sophisticated about who has access to what on your site. That's where htAccess Generator comes in. You fill in a few forms, hit a button, and out pops a .htaccess file suitable for placing on your Web directory. It's convenient but you still need to know what all the options do, so while it's not a tool for novices, knowledgeable webmasters will appreciate the time savings.http://www.bitesizeinc.net/demo.htaccesser.html