More Signal, Less Noise
Saturday, January 22, 2005
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NETSURFER DIGEST
More Signal, Less Noise |
Volume 11, Issue 03 Saturday, January 22, 2005
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NETSURFER LINKS
 BREAKING SURF
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BREAKING SURF The CIA has released 71 newly declassified National Intelligence Estimates on China, which date from 1948 to 1976. Originally secret or top secret documents, the intelligence reports make fascinating reading, as they range over many critical periods in Chinese history, including the final stages of the Chinese civil war, the Korean War, the Great Leap Forward and the disastrous Cultural Revolution. The CIA went to considerable trouble to select, declassify, and organize the documents, and has made them available for purchase in print and on CD. Even better, the agency has put 37 of them online at the National Intelligence Council site, where a link takes you to the Freedom of Information Act Web site which has the full texts of all 71. The briefings will obviously be of interest to scholars but they are equally fascinating to ordinary folk who lived through some of the periods covered. Fascinating as these documents are, what we'd really like to get our hands on are equivalent reports about pre-invasion Iraq - but we're not counting on that any time soon.http://www.cia.gov/nic/NIC_foia_china.html For years, Boeing's 747 has been the jumbo of passenger jet supremacy, but that may not last much longer. This week, Airbus unveiled the next champion, the A380, a double-decked giant that will be the largest passenger plane in the world. Weighing 350 tons and with a 261-foot wing span (and a huge wing chord), the A380 has 50% more floor space than a 747 and can carry 555 passengers in a three-class configuration or 800 in one cattle class. The freighter version of the monster jet has three decks and a payload of 167 tons. The unveiling was a proud moment for Airbus, which has been in a fierce struggle with Boeing for years. It was also a chance for Europe's political leaders to brag about "old" Europe's cutting-edge technology. So far, 14 companies have ordered 149 of the new planes, well shy of the number needed to make the 12 billion Euro bet a commercial success. Singapore Airlines will be the first to put the new superjumbo into service, beginning in 2006. National Geographic (NG) has nifty coverage and images. So do Airbus's A380 reveal and Backgrounder pages, of course. NG: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/01/0118_050118_airbus.html A380 Reveal: http://www.airbus.com/events/a380_reveal/event/index.asp Backgrounder: http://www.airbus.com/product/a380_backgrounder.asp Google Introduces HTML Attribute to Combat Comment Spam Comment spam has become a major problem, and it threatens to do to online discussion forums and blogs what it's done to e-mail and Usenet. Spammers have discovered that posting links to their Web sites in comments submitted to blogs or message boards tends to increase their sites' ranking in search engines, specifically in Google. As a result, spammers have deluged such forums with useless content, which threatens to drown out any useful discussion, at least non-moderated discussion. Google is leading a movement to establish a new HTML tag attribute that can be added to fora and commentary pages. The "nofollow" attribute tells search-engine spiders to neither follow such links nor use them to evaluate the page rank of the target page. The makers of the major blogging packages have rushed to support the attribute. This tactic immediately prevents comment-spammers from showing up at the top of search listings and it removes the impetus for placing most comment spam, but it can't dissuade spammers from targeting human readers with attempts to lure them to click on links. Google Blog has details.http://www.google.com/googleblog/2005/01/preventing-comment-spam.html Future Net Will Tempt Terrorists The Pew Project on the Internet and American life is at it again with a report on predictions about the Internet's future. Pew asked movers and shakers online and off and received 1,286 responses. There was a broad distribution of opinion across many topics, ranging from laments that the Internet has not had a greater effect upon education to predictions that it will greatly benefit medicine over the next decade. Strikingly, the one thing most experts agreed upon was that the Internet will become so embedded in daily life that attempts to cripple the infrastructure are bound to take place in the next ten years. Richard Clarke, the former US terrorism czar, makes exactly the same prediction in a recent piece in the Atlantic, and even the Fox TV hit "24" explores an evil Internet plot this season.Pew: http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/145/report_display.asp Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200501/clarke "24": http://www.fox.com/24/ Biggest Web-Design Mistakes of 2004 Vincent Flanders is the author of the catchily titled, popular book on Web design, "Web Pages That Suck". His advice is mostly of the negative kind as he presents real-life examples of bad design and says, in effect, "don't do that." Flanders has released his end-of-the-year list of what he calls the biggest Web-design mistakes of 2004, although this can just as easily be a list of the worst Web-design mistakes of any year. It's a pretty generic list that includes such non-design issues as assuming that anybody gives a damn about your Web site in the first place and having your Web site be your only marketing strategy. He doesn't mention anything too controversial, but he does supply links to sites that illustrate his notions of Web pages that suck. We'd only add one item to his list of design mistakes - showing Flanders half-naked, even if it is to make an indelible point.http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/biggest-web-design-mistakes-in-2004.html Neil Gaiman Channels Teresa Nielsen Hayden on Agents With the horrors of the unsolicited manuscript slush pile widely known, what would-be authors always want to know is how to get an agent. Neil Gaiman, graphic and standard novelist, has been asked that question often. Although he doesn't consider himself an expert on the subject, he's provided space for some pithy advice from Teresa Nielsen Hayden, an editor at Tor Books, who compresses a ton of useful ideas into a few salient points. As well, she provides a huge and well organized list of links to additional material by organizations and folks she knows and trusts. It's useful both to existing authors and those trying to break into print. As anyone who has tried knows, it can be hard for an unknown to get a reputable and effective agent. Would-be writers desperate to become authors can be easy marks for unprincipled and incompetent "preditors" - and there are lots of them out there. Knowing the ins and outs of the business and heeding the advice of those who know should help neophytes avoid the pitfalls and pointless approaches that might stand in the way of getting published.http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2005/01/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about.asp The Great LiveJournal Outage of Ought-Five LiveJournal is one of the largest blog-hosting services on the Net, boasting some 5.8 million users. Last week, the service's hosting provider experienced a major power outage, which led to endless anguish from legions of teenagers deprived of their diaries. The outage was no picnic for the LiveJournal technical team either as it scrambled for many hours to bring back servers and restore from back-ups. Brad Fitzpatrick, a LiveJournal techie, wrote a post mortem of the event on his LiveJournal blog that blamed the fiasco on somebody at the hosting center who pressed a big, red Emergency Power Off button (shades of the History Eraser Button, here). Such buttons are required by fire codes to enable firefighters to drop power in an emergency. This is apparently the second time this has happened to LiveJournal. The episode ended with lots of lessons learned by IT people and an illustration of how complex it is to run a huge, database-intensive service like LiveJournal for everybody else.LiveJournal: http://www.livejournal.com/community/lj_dev/670215.html History Eraser Button: http://members.fortunecity.com/chippy3/other/erase.html Pepsi Running Another iTunes Promotion As happened last January, Pepsi is again teaming up with Apple to give away iTunes songs. Winning codes on bottles of Pepsi and other beverages will be redeemable for one song each, and one in three bottles is a winner. Pepsi will register each winner for a drawing to win an iPod mini, one of which it'll hand out every hour. Pepsi plans to distribute 200 million songs this year, though you can take that number with a grain of salt; last year, Pepsi promised to give away 100 million songs, but winners only redeemed about 5 million last year. The promotion begins Jan. 31 and songs must be redeemed by May 23. There are limits: you can enter only 10 times per day and 200 times total, and - sorry, world - you must be a legal US resident to win.http://www.apple.com/itunes/pepsi/ How to Build and Run a Massively Multiplayer Game Are you planning on developing a massively multiplayer online game? If so, you should read this exhaustive white paper from the International Game Developers Association. The best thing about the report is that it walks prospective developers through all the necessary phases of game development, from building the game engines to error-reporting technology to designing the billing. Even if you don't plan on building a game, the report makes it clear that this is a growing market that demands a sophisticated form of management to master.http://www.igda.org/online/IGDA_PSW_Whitepaper_2004.pdf ONLINE CULTURE Spyware, trojans, viruses - most PC users have had them. Sysadmin Chris Spencer, a Linux guru with a degree in computer science, remained blissfully unaware of the problem at a personal level until he had to clean his wife's Windows computer. It took him five hours to eradicate all infections. That ticked him off so much that he wrote "Linux Opinion: An Open Letter to a Digital World", a call to Windows users to switch to Linux, for LinuxWorld. Here's the gist: "The Windows platform is not just insecure - it's patently, blatantly, and unashamedly insecure by design and for all the lip service to security it's really not going to get better, ever. To make matters worse, it's more expensive and gives you fewer necessary applications right out of the box than Linux." Spencer reports his research into quality of code and bug-fixing schemas and makes a case for the superiority of open-source development. Many sysadmins, and even some Windows fanatics, are fed up with constant patches and security holes that seem to be features of the operating system. Slashdot has some predictable and amusing reactions.LinuxWorld: http://www.linuxworld.com/story/47536.htm Slashdot: http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/04/12/18/2234259.shtml Teri Polo is a minor starlet currently getting some exposure in the comedy "Meet the Fockers". She's also getting some exposure in a recent Playboy spread, which displays her thin frame in tediously tasteful nude poses. Polo's bony body inspired Michelle, author of the popular "A Small Victory" blog, to ask guys "Do you really, truly find this sexy? Do rib cages and bony knees turn you on?" The question has touched some kind of a nerve, resulting in more than 350 comments from guys and a few girls who feel obligated to discuss their preferences in female fleshiness. A casual browse through this wealth of biologically motivated expression reveals that guys mostly prefer girls with a bit more flesh on their bones than Polo has, and that they think her boobs were retouched in some way for the Playboy shoot. This is clearly vital workday reading material, particularly for the seeming legions of women who still have not figured out what guys really like. http://asmallvictory.net/archives/008006.html Developer Pressures Online Thief into Submission Say you have a nice software product and a nice Web site where you sell it like hotcakes. It's the Internet, man. Say someone copies your software, rips off your site, and starts stealing from you on both ends. The perps are overseas somewhere, so even if you could get the law involved, you'll have little hope of success. The crooks are pretty good at hiding - so good, they're comfortable taunting you in e-mail. This is not a rare story, unfortunately. What is rare, and heartwarming, is the tale of how Xequte went from victim to victor. There's more than enough detail to help others in same position fight back and win. The happy ending won't make you weep. Although the good guys won, we can't help feeling that the bad guys didn't lose enough.http://www.xequte.com/fraud/ ONLINE TRAVEL The Kidd of Speed Tours Battlefields of Kyiv Kyiv (the preferred way to spell Kyiv these days), the capital of Ukraine, has been in the news lately concerning the country's contested election. Less known is that Kyiv has the melancholy distinction of being the site of some of the 20th century's largest battles. The campaigns of conquest of the city by Germany and allies in 1941 and the subsequent liberation by the Red Army in 1943 involved millions of soldiers and thousands of tanks and other heavy weapons. The city and environs were heavily fortified by both armies. For an amateur military archeologist like Elena, the Kidd of Speed who was in NSD 10.13 for her motorcycle tour of Chernobyl, Kyiv is a treasure trove of artifacts of a violent history. Equipped with a new metal detector, the charmingly non-fluent Elena takes us on a virtual tour of Kyiv's battlefields and displays her many finds. She does not neglect Mongol-era fortifications and has a page on Baby Yar, the ravine outside the city where some 300,000 Jews were murdered after the Germans arrived. The site isn't slick but it is heartfelt and poignant. It's nice to see a young person take history so seriously.NSD 10.13: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v10/nsd.10.13.html#OT1 http://www.kiddofspeed.com/serpents-wall/ It doesn't really matter whether or not you're a science geek by nature. The photos available at the Exploratorium's NASA-sponsored Ancient Observatories project are things you just don't see anywhere else. Welcome to Chaco Canyon, in northwestern New Mexico. People lived in this inhospitable high desert as much as 5,000 years ago. Why? Astronomy. One warning: the video presentations are generally funky - apparently designed for a second-grade level and incorporating long, dramatic pauses, the purpose of which we can only speculate about. Avoid them, and treat yourself to the rest of the site's offerings. http://www.exploratorium.edu/chaco/ ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT The Virtual Train Wreck of "The Polar Express" The movie "The Polar Express" made waves in the animation community this past holiday season. Aside from the fact that it had genuine Hollywood star power behind it (Tom Hanks in several roles and Robert Zemeckis directing), it was the first feature film made with new state-of-the-art motion-capture and computer-animation technology. Nevertheless, many people in the animation community and among the audience felt that the human characters in this fairy tale just looked wrong, and even looked creepy. What went wrong? That's the question addressed by animator Ward Jenkins in his two-part essay on how the movie botched character design. Jenkins doesn't stop at just telling you about the problems, he demonstrates his points, and his artistic skills, with movie stills before and after he touched them up to make the characters look more appropriate. His work drives home the subtlety of the art of character animation, and shows just how much attention animators must pay to nuance. The discussion also touches on the Uncanny Valley, which dictates that anthropomorphs in animation or robotics can't resemble humans too closely lest they cause revulsion in an audience. Dave Bryant explains the Uncanny Valley; the Beat applies it to "The Polar Express".Jenkins 1: http://wardomatic.blogspot.com/2004/12/polar-express-virtual-train-wreck.html Jenkins 2: http://wardomatic.blogspot.com/2004/12/polar-express-virtual-train-wreck_18.html Bryant: http://www.arclight.net/~pdb/glimpses/valley.html Beat: http://www.comicon.com/thebeat/archives/2004/11/the_uncanny_val.html There are songs for every occasion, and if you can't think of one appropriate to your circumstances, you can visit Tiny Mix Tapes and request a playlist. The site is run by music enthusiasts who are all self-confessed "geniuses who deserve jobs at Rolling Stone and/or Hustler." The site provides both up-to-date and dated news, reviews, interviews, and articles on an eclectic range of music, but the jewel in all this is the Automatic Mix Tapes Generator. Just outline your musical needs in the form, press Submit, and, if you're lucky, one of the site's contributors will come up with an appropriate playlist. Don't forget to browse the archive of past requests - they're a scream. "Songs for my boyfriend to listen to before he meets my ballbreaking parents" features "Grin and Bear" by Lali Puna and Lemonjelly's "Nervous Tension", and "Songs to console you after you discover that you are a male who has grown breasts" has Deerhoof's "Milk Man" and the Beatles' "Help!" http://www.tinymixtapes.com/ The best thing about the New Year is that it means you don't have to listen to Christmas music until about October, when once again the same old seasonal dreck that gets pumped round the malls every year will assault your ears. Ten of those wearyingly familiar Yuletide classics receive a genuinely innovative and hugely entertaining klezmer twist on "Oy to the World", by the Klezmonauts. You can hear audio clips of all the songs on this Web site and order the album if you like what you hear. We thought it was the best Jewish crossover music since Dick Dale and the Del-Tones gave "Hava Nagila" the surf-guitar treatment. Don't miss the "Kudos and Kvetches" section of the site for reviews and customer comments - one satisfied customer writes "I am an Episcopal Priest and I think I'll convert to Judaism, if I can find more music like this Russian, Jewish, Spanish, Spike Jones, etc., music you have mastered together in this splendid CD." High praise indeed. http://www.oytotheworld.com/samples.html If clothes make the man, does hair make the woman? We'd say no, usually, but we can't deny that Hollywood and American culture in general has a thing about hair. Hence the great demand for the creative talents of Chris March, actor and hair designer extraordinaire, who took his first step when he won the costume contest at the 1985 Exotic-Erotic Ball. He has since become known for his outrageous wigs, costumes, and props. Disney, Universal Studios, and Warner Brothers are clients. The main feature of his site is, of course, his portfolio. Check out the photos - great big hair, indeed. The peak of his extravagance is perhaps SF Finale Hat, pictured on his Beach Blanket Babylon page (in his Portfolio): the hat appears to be about twice as wide as the dress and as tall as the wearer. Entertainment critics love his work, as evidenced on his Review page. We strongly suspect that he does, too. http://www.gr8bighair.com/ Ever sit in the library and stare at the ceiling instead of studying for an exam? Well, we've found the absolute best place to do that. The McKim Building of the Boston Public Library is covered in a series of religious murals by John Singer Sargent, and it took the world-famous artist 30 years to complete them. The art covers subjects as varied as pagan gods from the Old Testament right up to more traditional Christian scenes of angels, mysteries of the rosary, and Hell. Experts are currently restoring the murals for conservation and as the work progresses, art historians are examining and interpreting them. Scholars have studied the paintings in the context of when they were completed and can observe Sargent's skills progressing during his career. The excellent use of still and moving images at this Boston Public Library site of both damaged and restored murals helps the viewer imagine they are right there, avoiding their own studies. http://www.sargentmurals.bpl.org/ Who Is the Master of the Embroidered Foliage? If you didn't have time to pop over to the Berkshires during your holiday to catch "Medieval Mystery: Who Is the Master of the Embroidered Foliage?" at the Clark Art Institute, that's OK. They've put the exhibit and some of the basic accompanying research online for you. To give yourself the full art-gallery feel, you should probably switch to a less comfortable seat and see if you can get a security guard to hover over your computer while you click through the exhibit. Ready? Good. The exhibit uses modern technology to compare four late-15th-centry paintings, thought to be all painted by the same artist, and you can view the findings for yourself online. We won't spoil the surprise.http://www.clarkart.edu/mystery/content/home.cfm Collaborative Digital Patchwork Quilts iCE is a community of digital artists, some of whom get together to create collaborative online art. They call the completed projects quilts, the pieces of which, called tiles, each creator works on individually. Anyone can jump in, but certain quilts have certain skill levels attached, so you have to prove you're handy with your implement of choice before you go at someone else's quilt. Even if you're all thumbs, just browsing to see what the finished products look like is worthwhile. If you're looking for something that doesn't look like it belongs on the wall of your local headshop, check out "A Van Gogh Fall/Winter Landscape", which has no spaceships in sight (although there may be one lurking over the horizon).http://tiles.ice.org/index_completed.php BOOKS & E-ZINES
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/ SURFING SCIENCE In 2002, London's Natural History Museum launched the Darwin Centre, designed to open to the public the museum's 60 million plant, animal, fossil, and mineral specimens. The collection represents some 400 years of scientific endeavor and includes even fish and lizards collected by Charles Darwin himself. The exhibition takes its name from the Victorian naturalist in recognition not only of his advances in natural science, but of his desire to communicate his understanding to the public at large beyond the scientific community. The Web site lets those who cannot make it to central London experience the unparalleled collection and learn about the Darwin Centre and its work. The site is vast, though broken down into three sections: In-Site teaches about the collection, such as how specimens are preserved, stored, and accessed by researchers; Phase 2 details the center's ambitious expansion project; and Live lets netsurfers access live webcasts and archives of almost 180 video presentations.http://www.nhm.ac.uk/darwincentre/ The British Medical Journal last month published "A precious case from Middle Earth", a medical analysis of the condition of Smeagol/Gollum by six medical students and a lecturer. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=535969 Your first reaction upon arriving here will be "What the...?". It's OK; that's normal. The Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image (SCETI) recognizes the need for change. It hopes to gain a better look and feel as a result - and it definitely needs it. At the same time, once you get past interface issues, SCETI is like a trip to one of the world's great libraries. We've put it in our Surfing Science section because of its Edgar Fahs Smith Collection of historical science images. You can view portraits of scientists famous and obscure and images of equipment and labs, sometimes equally obscure. We just point you to the Smith collection, but there's much more to peruse. http://dewey.library.upenn.edu/sceti/smith/index.cfm SOFTWARE While BitTorrent is an efficient peer-to-peer (P2P) file-distribution network, recent legal assaults have proven that one of its problems is its reliance on central servers called trackers. The trackers keep track of the bits and pieces of a file scattered across many machines on the Internet. This leaves BitTorrent trackers vulnerable to the entertainment industries, who allege that tracker operators are aiding and abetting copyright infringement (see NSD 11.01). To close that loophole, the folks behind SuprNova, a popular former tracker that shut down in December after legal threats, wrote eXeem, a P2P file-trading application that does away with the need for central trackers. It's out, as beta software and only for Windows at the moment, but if it works as advertised expect it to rapidly find its way to other operating systems. Already, there are instructions for running eXeem under Linux using the Wine emulator. Note that eXeem allegedly contains spyware, and another web site is advertising an eXeem Lite with the spyware stripped away. Google Releases Picasa 2.0 Photo-Management Software Google is far more than a search engine these days, and Picasa helps prove that. Picasa is a photo-management application for Windows that is often compared to the Mac's iPhoto, and comparable to it with respect to included features. In fact, that's a good way to consider this versatile application - as Google's attempt to copy Apple's user-friendly software in pursuit of the goal of organizing all the data on the Net. Version 2.0 of Picasa has all the usual photo-management features you can use to organize your snapshots in various ways, to retouch them, and to export them. It's tightly integrated with other Google properties - it lets you send photos to your Blogger weblog and e-mail them via Gmail, and also lets you order photo-print supplies through Froogle. Picasa is free and has received very good reviews, making it worth a download. Google has a short announcement.NSD 11.01: http://www.netsurf.com/nsd/sub/v11/nsd.11.01.html#BS8 eXeem: http://www.exeem.com/ eXeem under Linux: http://exeem-linux.solaris.name/index.php eXeem Lite: http://thefreehost.org/exlite/ Google: http://www.google.com/googleblog/2005/01/smile-and-say-cheese.html Picase 2.0: http://www.picasa.com/ Guide to Installing X11 on Mac OS X One of the great things about the Mac is that you can run a huge number of Linux applications under OS X. Many command-line tools are easily installed and work practically out of the box, but it does take some reasonable effort to get graphical applications to work. Most Linux applications these days use the X11 graphical display system to render things on screen. OS X does not come with X11 installed, but Apple has released a detailed set of instructions for how to install and configure it in OS X. In many cases, this is as simple as clicking a button on the OS X installer CD, but advanced configurations for developers can be more complex. Anyone who wants to run Linux graphical applications on a Mac - and there are many reasons to do so - should read through this.http://developer.apple.com/darwin/runningx11.html |
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