BREAKING SURF
| The Smoking Gun's PhotoStamps Experiment |
| Gmail Is Too Creepy |
| Aerial Photography |
| Blogging by Geography |
| Dupont Castle |
| The Art and Design of Zen Gardens |
| Towering Ambitions |
| Superhero Trailer Without a Movie |
| The Windows Sound Symphony |
| Netsurfer Recommendations |
| Helping the Blind See, One Photo at a Time |
| Amazing Mars Rover Animation |
| Suck, Squeeze, Bang, Blow |
| Assassinations Foretold in "Moby Dick" |
| GmailFS: Use Your Gmail Account as a Linux File System |
| Coral: A Solution for the Slashdot Effect |
| Those House Pictures |
| BOOK REVIEWS |
| LETTERS TO THE EDITOR |
| Contact and Subscription Information |
| Credits |
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BREAKING SURF
Microsoft Launches Online Music Store...
Microsoft's MSN Music store boasts a million songs and its official opening is timed to coincide with the release of Windows Media Player 10, which has built-in features for browsing and downloading the music. The prices are typical: $0.99 per song and $9.90 for most albums. This is clearly Microsoft's shot at emulating and emasculating Apple's iTunes Music Store; MSN Music downloads even come with similar digital-rights-management restrictions. You can play your purchased music on up to five Windows PCs, burn playlists to CD up to seven times, and transfer music to an unlimited number of portable audio devices. MSN Music's site features links to five portable music players that can autosync with the new Windows Media Player. Beyond music files, the store also allows you to browse online radio stations and video content, and provides access to stories and services from MSN. Paul Thurrott has an early review of Windows Media Player 10.MSN Music: http://beta.music.msn.com/
Windows Player 10: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/mp10/
Thurrott: http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/wmp10.asp
...And Then Whines about Apple
Above, we tell you about MSN Music. One page of the site warns iPod users that "Unfortunately Apple refuses to support the popular Windows Media (WMV) format on the iPod, choosing to only support their own proprietary DRM (digital-rights-management) format." True enough - Apple opts for AAC files and ignores WMV files. In a hilariously ironic twist, however, anyone wanting to buy music at MSN Music will need to use Microsoft Internet Explorer to buy and download the songs because the store is built with Microsoft's ActiveX technology which is not supported by any other browser on the planet (well, there is an ActiveX plug-in for Mozilla). Furthermore, any Mac users who want to listen to Windows Media-formatted music will have to continue to use the amazingly crappy Windows Media Player 9, since there is no version 10 for Mac OS X. With Microsoft's muscle behind them, worse products have won over their markets, and MSN Music may prove no exception. If that happens, at least Mac users get this little chuckle out of it.MSN Music and iPods: http://beta.music.msn.com/help/ipod
Mozilla ActiveX plug-in: http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/plugin.htm
During the Apple Expo Paris, Apple introduced the next generation of iMacs, powered by G5 processors. The design is unusually conservative for a company known for its odd and attractive machine packaging. The guts of the new iMacs are basically grafted on the back of 17" and 20" LCDs and mounted on a fragile-looking stand. This kind of flat configuration has been tried in PCs but never really caught on. In terms of specs and price point, Apple seems to have done rather well, with prices from $1,300 to $1,900 for three basic configurations (plus a less expensive version for the educational market). As usual with iMacs, the new machines come with minimal default memory (256 MB) and a wimpy video card - don't expect to play Doom 3 at high resolution on these boxes - but for home or office use, they will do fine. Apple offers this year's Apple Expo Paris keynote speech by Philip Schiller, its senior vice-president of marketing (Steve Jobs is recovering from recent surgery), in streaming video. It's worth watching specifically for some cool demos of the upcoming OS X Tiger release.
iMacs: http://www.apple.com/imac/
Keynote: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/expo04/
Apple Launches iTunes Affiliates Program
Apple is offering to cut you in on 5% of any sales it makes through your links to its iTunes Music Store. The affiliate program is fairly typical. You link to songs or albums, and get paid 45 days after the end of any month in which you earn at least $25 in commissions. Do the math - you have to sell 500 songs or 50 albums before you get paid, so this will work best for heavily traveled sites. On the other hand, if you sign up before Sept. 15, you can win an iPod mini. The iTunes Affiliates site also mentions that you'll be able to apply for the Apple Store affiliate program. The whole thing is run in partnership with Linkshare, a well known online-affiliate-program management outfit.http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/
Political Songs of the 2004 Presidential Campaign
What happens when a radio show appeals for politically satirical songs during this year's Presidential election campaign? "What we got were earnest and passionate songs that mostly bashed the incumbent president," says NPR. NPR is a public radio network much detested by many conservatives in the US, so it's not too surprising that the feelings were returned in the lead-up to this particular episode of "All Songs Considered". The episode and the songs it featured - from well known artists and unknown contributors - is available online. The episode also features a short report on what songs the political campaigns themselves choose to play at rallies. Aside from its entertaining political relevance, the "All Songs Considered" site is worth visiting to find out about all sorts of neat non-mainstream music. Check the Archives link for previous episodes.http://www.npr.org/programs/asc/current/index.html
In 1948, a sports competition for veterans with spinal injuries took place in England. Four years later, Danish competitors joined in. From those humble beginnings has grown a worldwide movement to involve the disabled in sports. The Paralympic Games are now held in the same venue as the Olympics and, for the first time this year, under a unified organizing committee. Involving thousands of athletes in six disability groups from 122 countries, the games include 15 sports shared with the Olympics and four unique sports: boccia; goalball; powerlifting; and wheelchair rugby. Contrary to what you might think, not all world records belong to the able-bodied. This year's Paralympics begin Sept. 17 and run 12 days. A torch relay will start the games and a fancy ceremony will close the competitions, but probably without the same crowds or quite as much concern about security as for the Olympics. Some sports invite athletes from all disability groups while others are restricted. For example, the fencing competition is limited to athletes with locomotor disabilities, and offers an interesting example of what's involved in adapting a sport to suit these competitors. With wheelchair secured to the ground - but able to swivel - the sport doesn't allow leaps and fancy pirouettes, but it makes up for that in nimble foil work. En garde.
http://www.athens2004.com/en/ParalympicGames/paralympic/
US Government Raids Hub Owners on Direct Connect P2P Network
The FBI, the US Department of Justice (DOJ), and the US District Attorney for the District of Columbia put together a little thing they called Operation Digital Gridlock. Search warrants in hand, the operation went after hub operators on the Direct Connect peer-to-peer network. Hubs are nodes to which file-sharers can connect, and most hubs require file-sharers to offer at least 1 GB of files of their own to fellow hub users. That's the key: "of their own". Hubs themselves don't offer any files; they host forums and FAQs and other administrative info. Users can share free software or their own photos or other files as easily as pirated files. The onus of not sharing copyrighted materials is on the hub users, not the hub, as one of the alleged targets of the operation posted at P2PNet.com in an essay designed to counter news reports, such as that at MSNBC. American courts have already ruled that infrastructure that enables file-sharing is not liable for what is shared, so Operation Digital Gridlock appears to have struck a dry well, legally. So why did it target five of the 13,000 or so Direct Connect hubs? We figure it's either intimidation or a way to discover who is using the hubs, and if those users have shared pirated media, they have cause for concern.DOJ: http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2004/August/04_ag_578.htm
Direct Connect: http://www.neo-modus.com/
P2PNet.com: http://p2pnet.net/index.php?page=comment&story=2259&comment=4762
MSNBC: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5819437/
ACLU Shows Government Uses Patriot Act for Censorship
One of the provisions of the US Patriot Act is a prohibition on disclosing information about what information the FBI is seeking in its inquiries. As is typical, the government has carried this power to absurd lengths, in one instance prohibiting the ACLU from quoting a Supreme Court decision. The ACLU is challenging this provision of the Patriot Act and on this Web page describes some of the non-secret things the US government has tried to suppress in the case. The items include the above-mentioned Supreme Court quote, a mention that one of ACLU's clients in the case provides access to the Internet, and the text of a government demand to remove mentions of the censorship from the ACLU Web site - censorship of censorship as it were.http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=16275&c=262
Most Frequently Challenged Books of the '90s
If you're looking for a good book to read, you could do a lot worse than browsing this list of the 100 most frequently challenged books of 1990-2000. Compiled by the American Library Association (ALA), the list bristles with classics and just plain darn good reads. The ALA defines a challenge as a complaint about a library book or an attempt to ban one. While we understand why some books raise hackles - although that's never a good reason to ban something - others leave us baffled. Why ban Roald Dahl's "James and the Giant Peach"? "A Wrinkle in Time"? "Where's Waldo"? Someone's pulling our leg, right? Unfortunately not, according to the ALA. Book targeters object mostly to material in schools and are mostly parents. The most frequent complaint is sexual content, followed by offensive language and occultism. Besides its lists of challenged books, the ALA has a page on Banned Books Week, which begins Sept. 25 this year. From the first printing press, someone has always considered books dangerous and damaging, and book-burnings, bannings, and heavy-handed censorship blot history. Pay attention to the persistent threat to intellectual freedom that those who would ban books represent.http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/bannedbooksweek/bbwlinks/100mostfrequently.htm
E-books aren't MP3s, and publishers have been working for years to figure out a workable electronic distribution scheme. Music is relatively easy to use, once the pesky issue of digital-rights management is swept aside. You can skate, ride a bike, or drive while tunes pound merrily into your head. E-books, like plain ol' books, require the user to be a bit more sedentary, and there's the nagging issue of display media as well. Ham-handed and bewildering approaches to digital-rights management haven't exactly helped the format along. Some of these problems have melted away with the demise of proprietary schemes, and e-books seem to appear more and more frequently on computers, PDAs, and even cell phones. CNET has a little article on the technology.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-5326015.html
Richard Schaut has spent 14 years working on Microsoft Word for the Mac, and he claims he still enjoys the challenge. You'd think that kind of narrows your career horizons, although debugging Microsoft software might be a sure path to lifetime employment. Anatomy of a Software Bug, a post on his Buggin' My Life Away blog, talks about what it's like to debug such a big heap o' code. Using the "disk full on save" error in Word as an example, Schaut shows how difficult it can be to track down what is going on and, then, to fix it. (We had something similar happen to us in Word on XP recently - a single and so far unique occurrence - which made us pay particular attention to this story.) A critical element in fixing a bug is being able to reproduce the problem reliably. That squeak-that-disappears-when-the-mechanic-lifts-the-hood syndrome happens to software, too. The intricate details Schaut relates are meat and potatoes to programmers, but the rest of us will find the story an absorbing tale that shows vividly how software engineers go about their business.
http://blogs.msdn.com/rick_schaut/archive/2004/05/19/135315.aspx
Google Makes It Harder to Build Gmail Notifiers
One of the first things hackers did when Google's Gmail came online was create small applications to periodically poll Gmail and notify you when you'd get e-mail. This was such a good idea that Google itself produced an official notifier, but that official notifier only works in Windows and does not have the same breadth of functionality as many of the third-party applications. In recent weeks, Google has made life hard for such third-party notifiers by messing around with Gmail's login script. Google's actual goal is unclear; the methods Google uses can be equally well employed to prevent general abuse of Gmail. Slashdot has its typically vigorous and technical discussion of the sitution. The obvious solution is for Google to provide a Gmail programming interface, much like it does for its search engine. We suspect that's exactly what will happen.Gmail: http://www.gmail.com/
Google notifier: http://toolbar.google.com/gmail-helper/
Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/articles/04/08/28/1853234.shtml
New Planet Roughly the Size of Uranus
What's 50 light years away and roughly the size of Uranus? (Hey, you in the corner - pipe down!) It's the smallest extrasolar planet discovered to date. Said planet orbits mu Arae, a star in the southern constellation Altar, every 9.5 Earth days. The planet's probably quite a bit different from Uranus (stop that!), given how close it is to its star. Mind you, it is still 14 times the mass of the Earth, making it also the lightest extrasolar planet discovered to date. Get all the details from the European Southern Observatory site.http://www.eso.org/outreach/press-rel/pr-2004/pr-22-04.html
Place Your Bets on the Universe's Mysteries
Now you can bet on scientific discoveries. British bookmaker Ladbrokes will now entertain bets on whether or not ten different discoveries will be made by 2010. The bets range from finding intelligent life on Titan to whether or not the Higgs boson will be found. New Scientist has an article online on Ladbroke's decision, and appears to have played a role in getting the bookmaker to offer the odds in the first place. Still, it is fun, and you can make some money, maybe. Certainly your excuse - I lost all money on gravity waves - will undoubtedly sound cooler to collection agents than losing it on the ponies.New Scientist: http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996331
Ladbrokes: http://tinyurl.com/44x8k
Astroturf Invades Letters to Editors
Astroturfing is old hat by now, and we mean it in the sense of creating a fake grass-roots campaign. Both sides in the 2004 US Presidential election are posting scripted letters to the editor on their Web sites that supporters can copy and send to local newspapers. The Republicans have been most effective at this, getting their press releases treated as genuine letters to the editor in USA Today. The problem for editors, as Online Journalism review makes clear, is how to sort letters actually written by individuals from those ghostwritten by campaigning political parties and third parties such as Moveon.org. Imagine, now the letters to the editor aren't even legit.http://ojr.org/ojr/workplace/1093396596.php
Top SF Films of All Time up to Now
Don't you just love polls? The Guardian brought together an expert panel - of scientists - to determine the top-ten science fiction films. With proper British attention to semantics, the Guardian doesn't go so far (as do all too many such surveys) as to claim that these are the ten top SF films of all time. That would be a gaffe, inasmuch as, so far as we can tell, time has not yet stopped. "Blade Runner" came out atop the heap. The 1982 film starring Harrison Ford just beat out "2001: A Space Odyssey" for the honor. Arnold "The Governator" Schwarzenegger's "Terminator" (and its sequel) comes in sixth, hardly a shabby showing.http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/news/page/0,12983,1290764,00.html
Crackerjack programmers have until Sept. 14 to register for this year's annual Google Code Jam, whose winner can snag a cool $10,000 and a trip to Google HQ. The Google Code Jam is an intense online competition in which coders compete in real time against peers to solve fiendish coding problems, after which opponents try to break each other's code. It's not for the fainthearted.
http://www.topcoder.com/googlecodejam
Spam Wars: Apache Rejects Sender ID
One of the leading technical proposals for controlling spam is called Sender ID, which lets e-mail recipients verify that the source of an e-mail is really the mailserver authorized by that domain. It's a reasonably good technical solution to one facet of the spam problem, that of sender identity. One of the big backers of Sender ID is Microsoft, and therein lies the problem. Microsoft, being Microsoft and having legions of lawyers, has the Sender ID algorithm under license, but unfortunately that license is wildly incompatible with open-source practices and licenses. As a result, the open-source Apache Software Foundation has rejected the method. Why should you care? Well, Apache administers several prominent e-mail-related projects, most significantly SpamAssassin, the widely used spam filter. If Apache doesn't back Sender ID, the sysadmin community probably won't accept it either. The issue comes down to a fight over open standards in core Net protocols, as Apache notes in a letter explaining the issue. It's worth reading if you're interested in how intellectual property clashes with open source in setting Net standards.Sender ID: http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-marid-core-03.txt
Apache: http://apache.org/foundation/docs/sender-id-position.html
Comparison of Corporate IM-Blocking Software
Depending on who you ask, the use of instant messaging (IM) at work is either a vital productivity tool or a horrible time-sucker and security hole. Almost since IM first became available, businesses have looked to control its use in the workplace. Today, many sophisticated products let a business exercise such control and filtering. InfoWorld does a somewhat cursory comparison of three such products, from Akonix, FaceTime Communications, and IMLogic. The prices range from $9,000 for 50 users to $25/user, with the most expensive option not necessarily functioning best. This is worth knowing about if you run a business - or if business runs you.http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/08/20/34FEsecureimmain_1.html
ONLINE CULTURE
The Smoking Gun's PhotoStamps Experiment
As we reported recently, the US Postal Service's (USPS) PhotoStamps pilot program lets you put your own images on postage stamps. Of course, certain images are prohibited. All images are subject to the approval of Stamps.com, which administers the program on behalf of the USPS, and that outfit forbids pornographic or 16 other objectionable-adjective subjects on the stamps. "Objectionable", however, is a subjective term. The folks behind the Smoking Gun Web site decided to test the boundaries. They made stamps of a number of creative images, among them Monica Lewinsky's Presidentially-baptized blue dress, New Jersey Governor James McGreevey and alleged gay lover Golan Cipel, and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, executed for spying in 1953. Of all their submissions, Stamps.com only vetoed mug shots of Lee Harvey Oswald, Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, and Ted "Unabomber" Kaczynski. The results of the test are on a Web page, and the program just begs for further experimentation.The Smoking Gun: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0831041_photostamps_1.html
PhotoStamps: http://photo.stamps.com/
Google has been testing its Gmail e-mail service for some time, and while many people love it, some don't. Some of the latter group have built a site, Gmail Is Too Creepy, dedicated to explaining just why Gmail is evil. Argument one is that "Gmail is nearly immortal." That could be a problem for some folks, but many like some degree of immortality. When Woody Allen was asked if he hoped to live on in his movies, he replied that he actually hoped to live on in his apartment. Immortality isn't necessarily a bad thing. In any case, many of the folks behind the site won't reply to a Gmail missive because they don't believe that Google protects their privacy - which is their second point. The third point raised considers the potential of massive abuse by the fiends at Google. Read all about it.
http://gmail-is-too-creepy.com/
ONLINE TRAVEL
Take a bird's eye journey above the clouds and over mountain tops as you explore Earth from Above, an online gallery of the aerial photography of Yann Arthus-Bertrand. The stunning imagery he captures from above is breathtaking. Each photograph is presented with a detailed description that includes historical and geographical tidbits. All site content is presented in English, French, and Spanish. The gallery arranges photographs by country and navigation of the site is virtually seamless. Although there are countless sites and photographers dedicated to aerial photography, we doubt you'll find a better example of both anywhere on the Web. The combination of stellar photography and trilingual mini-essays puts this site well above the rest.http://www.yannarthusbertrand.com/yann2/affichage.php
Most blogs are notoriously egocentric. The more popular ones are written by people who have interesting things to say or about interesting events. Sean Bonner and Jason DeFillippo have freed us from the tyranny of the interesting and brought us metroblogging, which is blogging about the goings-on in interesting cities - ten right now, with more to come. It's US-centric so far, although London and Vienna both make a strong showing. Dublin, Istanbul, Melbourne, Paris, Tokyo, and Toronto (Toronto?!) are on the short list of cities to round out the list a bit. Oddly, so is the Caribbean.
http://www.metroblogging.com/
An old bromide states that a man's home is his castle. Some folks take that really seriously, as you'll find when you visit Dupont Castle, a home in the making. Loaded with photos, the site crawls on a dial-up connection, but you have to look at the bigger picture: where else are you going to find so much information about building a castle that meets current building codes? If you lack broadband, we suggest visiting a library or school that offers high-speed connections not only to view this effort, but also to compare the work to some of the roughly 300 other castles this site conveniently lists for us.
http://www.dupontcastle.com/
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT
The Art and Design of Zen Gardens
The Japanese art of gardening is rightly famous for both its aesthetic qualities and the spiritual basis of the design philosophy. This superior site from Bowdoin College explores the design of 24 famous Japanese gardens through multi-page illustrated presentations. Interactive plans with multiple views let you locate the exact perspective origin of the pictures, and in-depth histories and descriptions fill you in on what you can't see. The results are staggeringly beautiful: a virtual tour of some of the loveliest man-made landscapes on the planet. The site examines various schools of thought and styles of the art and also features an illustrated guide to the various elements of Japanese Zen gardens like bridges, islands, and stone. You'll also find an essay on the origins of Zen gardens and their archeological remains, a links list, and a bibliography.http://academic.bowdoin.edu/zen/index.shtml
Skyscrapers may be ho-hum to residents of New York City and Chicago, but many in Beijing and other cities new to the tall-building craze find these social and financial monuments awesome. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has a cool exhibition called Tall Buildings devoted to the likes of the World Trade Center, Kowloon Station Tower (under construction in Hong Kong), and 7 South Dearborn (still a pipedream). MoMA's criteria for inclusion include "technology, urbanism, and program" conceived or developed in the past decade. Just past the splash page, click on a building in the imaginary skyline and you get an architectural profile with artist's conception and/or photos. One Flash function arranges all 25 buildings by height, with familiar landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower and Empire State Building for comparison, but many other arrangements are possible. Navigating the site, you may at first feel lost. Exploration rewards, however. In the Main Menu, we discovered a section on design issues such as aerodynamics and public space. Each issue is illustrated with photos, diagrams, or both. If you're looking for something strange up front, check out the Turning Torso Apartment and Office Tower in Malmo, Sweden (projected completion, 2005). MoMA has put up an outstanding Web site
http://moma.org/exhibitions/2004/tallbuildings/index_f.html
Superhero Trailer Without a Movie
Whether you call it a showcase of film talent, a grand imitation of a cinematic staple, or a form of reverential pop art, "World's Finest" is worth a watch. The clip is a trailer - and a terrific one at that - in search of a movie. Director and superhero fan Sandy Collora wrote, produced, and directed a three-and-a-half-minute trailer of an imaginary blockbuster that many fans of its two comic-book protagonists, Superman and Batman, would love to see. The production values are slick, with ominous dialogue, sexual innuendo, and action sequences - just like a real trailer! This teaser may have been used to pitch a proposal or maybe just as a display of technical skill. In any case, Collora seems to be moving on to bigger and better productions. The movie is available in low and high resolution. You may want to download "World's Finest" instead of streaming it, so you can watch it, repeatedly, at your leisure.http://www.capedwonder.com/Collora.htm
Flash can be used in many ways; some ways are even productive. In this case, an experiment called Windows Noises demonstrates how to combine Flash with typical Windows soundscripts to produce orchestral compositions. (Ignore the boring Ball on String animation.) Windows Noises is a work of near genius. Using the built-in Sound Recorder feature of Windows, the author sampled and distorted clips of four common Windows sounds. The resultant files were then imported into Macromedia Flash for animating, with great results. Rather than taking notes, just take a look at the FAQ to see how it was put together.
http://www.geocities.com/clownstaples/index.html
BOOKS & E-ZINES
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Items our staff likes and you might too. Click on the image or title to order at a hefty discount from our affiliate Amazon.com, and send a few pennies our way as well.
For more selections, check out: Netsurfer Books: http://www.netsurf.com/nsb/ Netsurfer Library: http://www.netsurf.com/nsl/ |
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell: A Novel
The Tale of the Scale: An Odyssey of Invention
The Poetry of Donald Rumsfeld and Other Fresh American Art Songs
CSS CookbookHelping the Blind See, One Photo at a Time
Geoff Oliver Bugbee's Web site is an engaging combination of personal portfolio, photojournalism, and low-key advocacy for afflicted poor in the Third World. It's somber, authoritative, empathetic. Bugbee, a superb photojournalist, has traveled across Central Asia to study curable blindness. Many Asians with cataracts, glaucoma, or xerophthalmia (a result of vitamin A deficiency) can't afford treatment. For many, blindness leads to death within a few years. Bugbee's lead photo essay, "Opening Eyes: Saving Sight in Asia", has been ten years in the making. Many of his photographs take place in medical clinics that many of us would consider primitive. Bugbee also visited Aravind Eye Hospital in Madurai, India, which, he states, has "the largest eye care program in the world, performing over 200,000 operations each year." Other essays here include "In the Streets: Protest in America", "Musicians" (with David Crosby and members of the Grateful Dead), and "Churchill Downs." The site's Events section has photos of Andre Agassi and Sting, among others.http://www.geoffbugbee.com/
SURFING SCIENCE
This beautiful and meticulously accurate animated portrayal of a Mars Exploration Rover - Spirit, we think - is the work of Dan Maas, and what a super job he's done! Follow the voyage of this technological masterpiece from launch and multi-stage surge into space to its dramatic and complicated entry into the Martian atmosphere and final, bouncy touchdown. Enjoy the rover's first tentative journey onto the surface and its sampling of a Martian rock. Mundane, you say? Not at all. Accompanied by a suitably moving soundtrack, this short film is a modern day "2001: A Space Odyssey". Be forewarned that the seven-minute QuickTime animation is a bit of a slow loader; click on the rover image on the homepage, go make yourself a cup of coffee, then come back to enjoy. The site also has a gallery of Mars Rover desktop images and screensavers and a page on just how much work goes into making such a film. We give it five stars.http://www.maasdigital.com/gallery.html
Over the years, many unlucky birds have become distressingly familiar with jet engines. Rolls-Royce provides the netsurfer with safe, clean passage through a jet engine with a slick Flash tour called - what else? - Journey Through a Jet Engine. The tour only lasts about a minute, but that still beats any bird. Along the way, you learn factoids that might impress friends. For example, each Rolls-Royce Trent 800 engine has 912 high-pressure turbine blades. Each blade produces 800 horsepower, the equivalent of a Formula 1 racecar. Imagine 800 racecars in the space of one jet engine! You also learn about the cooling system, which is the only safety feature of note. A temperature gauge and four other gauges synchronize with the animation, but you'll likely ignore them as you watch the main visual. Sound effects are muted, so you can probably view the presentation in an office without disturbing anyone. This site won't cure anyone of fear of flying but may draw in many with an interest in the guts of aviation and less interest in the guts of a seagull.
http://www.rolls-royce.com/education/schools/journey/flash.html
Assassinations Foretold in "Moby Dick"
Some people are still devoted to the alleged prophecies found in word and letter patterns in the Bible, best popularized by Michael Drosnin's bestseller, "The Bible Code". Not to be outdone, Brendan McKay sought an equally impressive collection of words in which he could discover other codes. He found "Moby Dick", an impressive collection of words in anybody's book, and he did discover prophecies that Herman Melville must have - must have! - encoded in his opus. "Moby Dick" predicts assassinations and other deaths. It disparages Drosnin and Bible codes. It even predicts the demise of Drosnin himself! Of course, all these patterns happen randomly. These "predictions" can be found almost anywhere - after the fact. We link to McKay's main Torah Codes page; scroll down to the paragraph headed "Michael Drosnin's books" for the "Moby Dick" goodies.http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/torah.html
SOFTWARE
GmailFS: Use Your Gmail Account as a Linux File System
One gigabyte of storage space is nothing to sneeze at. That's how much storage Google's Gmail gives you to play with, and it was inevitable that some hacker would want to make that storage as easy to use as a file system. That hacker is Richard Jones, who took about two days to hack up a Python script that creates a Gmail file system, called GmailFS. Please note that this was Richard's first foray into Python, and the two days of programming include the time to learn a new coding language. Impressive. GmailFS looks just like any Linux file system. You can mount it, copy files to it, list files on it, and run other typical file commands on it. The system is somewhat limited, really just a plaything, and users need to beware of bugs (read the docs), but we think it's fair to say that this is the best hack of the year so far.http://richard.jones.name/google-hacks/gmail-filesystem/gmail-filesystem.html
Coral: A Solution for the Slashdot Effect
The Slashdot Effect is when a generally obscure Web site is swarmed by netsurfers who visit as the result of an article at, for example, Slashdot. Millions of netsurfers descend, the hapless site's webserver explodes, and the site becomes unreachable. It's literally an inadvertent denial-of-service attack. A project called Coral at New York University is trying to solve the problem. Coral is a transparent, distributed caching system. Sites that volunteer to run Coral automatically replicate Web content when users access the content. The system's algorithms minimize traffic spikes in order not to dissuade low-bandwidth sites from participating. Using the system is simple; you just append a few characters to the URL of the Web page you want to fetch from the cache. There's even a Mozilla plug-in to make it darn near foolproof. About 100 servers already run Coral and in practice, the system seems well conceived and executed. The project offers a great deal of documentation and usage statistics on its Web site where, of course, you can download the code to run your own Coral node.http://www.scs.cs.nyu.edu/coral/
CORRECTIONS
We were very, very sure that whoever was responsible for the iHomefinder photos we discussed last issue was going to delete the humorous photo very, very quickly. They did. The first time, after we'd written our article, they blurred the objects of humor in the single photo at the site. Before publication, however, the page returned to a multi-photo layout that again contained the unaltered original. We then went to press. Soon after, the photo of interest was removed from the real-estate page and all it was left with was a photo cropped to remove the view outside the window (last photo at the original page we sent you to) - but not, however, before eBaum's World archived the pics. Allow us to send you there.... Woof!iHomefinder: http://tinyurl.com/6fep8
eBaum's World: http://www.ebaumsworld.com/real-estate-oops.html