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In fact, the ICANN country codes are based on ISO 3166. It was the maintainers of ISO 3166 that gave Palestine a country code but not, for example, the Basque country or Chechnya.

I understand that MythTV is being demonstrated at CeBIT by Axel Thimm (the AT-RPMS guy). Good to see these projects getting some publicity.

Well, if it's just for the sake of the argument :-)

http://freshrpms.net/
http://apt-rpm.tuxfamily.org/
http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/apt/
http://atrpms.physik.fu-berlin.de/
http://www.aucs.org/rpmcenter/rpms.html
http://www.niemueller.de/projects/extrpms/

Those were just the ones I have bookmarked. You could find more with a web search.

Try using: ATrpms or NewRPMs or FreshRPMs or Dag's

All friendly with apt and yum. It's rare that I don't find a package in one of these repositories..

Yum (included in Fedora) and apt with RPMs make an excellent combination. I find apt to be about the same as this combination, but less intuitive for me.

From the Yum page: Yum is an automatic updater and package installer/remover for rpm systems. It automatically computes dependencies and figures out what things should occur to install packages. It makes it easier to maintain groups of machines without having to manually update each one using rpm.

Try it in ferdora - it's delicious

Combined with such repositories as ATrpms and FreshRPMS and I can find and install about any software title I'm looking for and have the dependencies installed easily.

Since nobody has (yet) taken the pains of posting the mirror list (yea, yea, I know, this is /.) -- here it is:

Hmm .. I wonder if the /. lameness filter was designed so that people couldn't post whole mirror lists themselves. Telling me that I don't have enough characters per line. I think I'll just ask the KDE people to create a static fast-serving no-css page full of mirrors for KDE whenever a release happens. That way, at least some amount of trouble would be saved. Goes off to mail KDE team ...

(pulled from KDE Mirror List)

WARNING: VERY BAD FORMATTING to get around the lame lameness filter.

mirrors.isc.org. . .ibiblio.org. . .ibiblio.org. . .ftp.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu. . .ftp.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu. . .
mirrors.midco.net. . .mirrors.midco.net. . .ftp.oregonstate.edu. . .kde.oregonstate.edu. . .download.uk.kde.org. . .
download.at.kde.org. . .download.at.kde.org. . .ftp.eu.uu.net. . .ftp.tiscali.nl. . .ftp.du.se. . .
ftp.solnet.ch. . .ftp.rutgers.edu. . .ftp.rutgers.edu. . .kde.uk.themoes.org. . .kde.us.themoes.org. . .
ftp.de.kde.org. . .ftp.de.kde.org. . .ftp.gwdg.de. . .ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de. . .ftp-stud.fht-esslingen.de. . .
ftp.uni-kl.de. . .download.au.kde.org. . .ftp.roedu.net. . .ftp.fi.muni.cz. . .ftp.fu-berlin.de. . .
ftp.tu-chemnitz.de. . .sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de. . .filepile.tiscali.de. . .ftp.tuniv.szczecin.pl. . .ftp.tuniv.szczecin.pl. . .
sunsite.icm.edu.pl. . .sunsite.cnlab-switch.ch. . .ftp.se.kde.org. .

What makes PPTP a tempting VPN protocol is it's availibility among different plattforms. Although some plattforms offer built-in IPSec support, these implementations often differ in certain details which harms interoperability a lot. We have extensions like XAUTH, L2TP, DHCP-over-IPSec, not to mention the many different options to be configured, and even the new Mac OS X Panther release does strange things with it's IPSec-L2TP implementation. Yes, you get beer-free VPN IPSec clients in case you buy expensive iron, Cisco for example, but for many this is too much money...

PPTP is for poor man's VPN only, but if this is enough security for your setting (and you can increase this through tight password policies), you will have instant VPN access from all kinds of common plattforms, free and not free ones...

IPSec is great, but seldomly available and/or not trivially deployable. PPTP is less secure, but it's out there... Life isn't always that simple.

Ooops. The second to last sentence should read: "The centripital force of cornering left the fuel level sensor high and dry." There's still too much tryptophan in my system from turkey during my American Thanksgiving day feast. I think it's time to break out the Mountain Dew before I do any more proofreading of my own writing.

Please use one of the mirror sites below to download your copy of TheOpenCD (note: not all have v1.2 updates). The ISO and source tar are also available on BitTorrent. For more info on Bittorrent, click here, or click here for a BitTorrent client.

Australia World Wide Web | FTP | Mirror courtesy of Jason Andrade and PlanetMirror.

Austria World Wide Web | FTP | Rsync | Mirror courtesy of Antonin Sprinzl and the Vienna University of Technology.

Belgium World Wide Web | FTP | Mirror courtesy of Cedric Gavage and Skynet Belgacom.

Brazil World Wide Web | Mirror courtesy of Aleck Zander and Universidade Estadual Paulista.

Canada FTP | Mirror courtesy of Thomas Cort and Bishop's University.

Finland FTP | Mirror courtesy of Harri Salminen and Funet.

Germany 1 World Wide Web | FTP | Rsync | Mirror courtesy of Daniel Lang and Informatik der Technischen Universitt Mnchen.

Germany 2 FTP | Mirror courtesy of Tom Rueger and the Universitt Bayreuth.

Germany 3 FTP | Mirror courtesy of Thomas List and SunSite Aachen.

Germany 4 FTP | Mirror courtesy of Holger Weiss and Freie Universitt Berlin.

UK World Wide Web | FTP | Mirror courtesy of Yang He and UK Mirror Service.

USA 1 World Wide Web | FTP | Mirror courtesy of A. J. Wright and the The University of Tennessee.

USA 2 World Wide Web | FTP | Rsync | Mirror courtesy of Sam Chessman and Tux.org

USA 3 World Wide Web | FTP | Rsync | Mirror courtesy of Jason Holmes and the Pennsylvania State University.

USA 4 World Wide

I am using it right now. It has huge performance improvements over Redhat 9 because of NPTL. The desktop is far more responsive. No more latency issues! It was easy to install, and it is easy to maintain too if you use apt for rpm with some 3rd party repositories.

If you guys are so up in your panties about this move, go elsewhere for support. You can get updates elsewhere. I've successfully been maintaining servers in the 30 or 40 just using apt-get and kickstart -- for free.

Get started here:

Freshrpms.net
DAG RPMS
ATrpms
newrpms
KDE For Redhat/Fedora
JPackage
CCRMA (Karma)
Gstreamer
Kernel 2.6.0-test

And if you want up2date style GUI, get synaptic from ATrpms.

read a manual for Word!!!!

yes. The manual, help menu, paperclip, anything. How did you learn kate? Judging from your reaction, you think your a very intuitive guy, so probably from trial and error. But what happens when you need to do something in kate that you dont know how to do? You look up the answer somewhere. Unfortunately, if you are writing a perl script for your firewall (say on a cheapo 486...so cheap you wont even waste using a monitor on) and the only access you have is through a tty or ssh connection, your pretty kate is not gonna fly.

>anything that requires a manual to know how to exit IS poorly designed.
If you dont know how to exit, and dont want to spend 3 seconds learning how, just dont use it. Simple. Obviously, the software wasnt designed for people who do not RTFM.

>it took me several attempts to get it to work since the Z's have to be freaking capitals!!!
OK, I see where your coming from. A lot of users don't really use capital-Z often, so they have trouble locating it. I have often reccomended using brightly colored tape on that key for these users. The developers, OTOH, probably chose 'ZZ' because 'Z' was the last letter in the alphabet and this key sequence would be the last thing you'd be doing with the file in VI. The reason you press [ESCAPE] is because you are escaping that text-mode clearly written on the bottom: INSERT, and entering command mode. All this w/out a mouse. It makes perfect sense.

>if vi were invented today and not a relic of the past, they would be declared illegal for health reasons.
Well, thats your perception. Maybe you should try reading this. If its such a relic, then why are there so many resaerch articles published on the topic of "vi vs [sometexteditor]" wars? Why should anyone purchase a mouse and color monitor for a firewall that will not have any GUI interface installed? How about linux on a floppy, say Trinux. Can you tell me a better editor (statically compiled) that wont bloat up all that "1.44mb" of space and still have lots of room for lots of kernel modules and other booting necessities?

The point is that you may live in a GUI world, but lots of people have to work on a budget. And knowing how to do stuff without a GUI can save you $1000s. Relic, eh.

As someone who is currently wrestling with Redhat 9.0 in an effort to wean himself off of Windows... I'd say MS will have an effective monopoly for some time to come.

I'm going to burn a bit of my karma on an OT post just to help out a RH9 brutha. Do yourself a favor and download the atrpm's kickstart of Apt. Then get Synaptic to go with it. It'll change your whole outlook on RH9 and Linux in general. Seriously, unless you're a real techie who wants to get his hands dirty, there's no need to really ever deal with the command line again, and no need to mess with dependencies either. I just did a dist-upgrade last night and what would have taken hours a year ago took me literally five minutes. The importance of these two applications together has really been understated by a lot of people in the Linux community; for desktop users I think they're pretty essential. Should be default packages in every desktop distro.

As someone who is currently wrestling with Redhat 9.0 in an effort to wean himself off of Windows... I'd say MS will have an effective monopoly for some time to come.

I'm going to burn a bit of my karma on an OT post just to help out a RH9 brutha. Do yourself a favor and download the atrpm's kickstart of Apt. Then get Synaptic to go with it. It'll change your whole outlook on RH9 and Linux in general. Seriously, unless you're a real techie who wants to get his hands dirty, there's no need to really ever deal with the command line again, and no need to mess with dependencies either. I just did a dist-upgrade last night and what would have taken hours a year ago took me literally five minutes. The importance of these two applications together has really been understated by a lot of people in the Linux community; for desktop users I think they're pretty essential. Should be default packages in every desktop distro.

Well, the clipboard is a property of the environment, rather than the OS. But there's certainly at least one environment that allows this: GNU screen.

Screen has a concept of a buffer file that can be used to store or load the clipboard. The name of this file is defined in your screenrc, so it can vary from system to system, but it's often called /tmp/screen-xchg or (better for multi-user systems) ~/.screen_exchange. The keystroke ^A< reads this file and ^A> writes it; ^A> will also flash up a message telling you what the name of the file is (for example, Copybuffer written to "/tmp/screen-xchg" ).

So what you do is:

$ some-command > ~/.screen_exchange
^A< (copybuf)
screen responds "Slurped 2323 characters into buffer"
^A] (paste)

And there you have it.

But, I'd hesitate to call it easy to use. The standard C++ language bindings in particular are astonishingly bad:

• they were originally designed long before C++ had standard string and container types and so use char * (with invisible attributes like the const-ness of a pointer controlling vital behaviour like who is responsible for freeing the object) along with their own unique way of dealing with arrays and iterators
• early CORBA implementors supported either fast-but-dumb pointers or slower-but-safe reference-counted smart pointers, so when the standard finally caught up it standardized both (typename_ptr and typename_var), with predictably disastrous results (crashes or memory leaks if you mix-n-match them, which may be unavoidable if you use third-party libraries)

The situation is reported to look better from other languages, and I can personally confirm that the Java bindings are a delight to work with by comparison (of course in Java it's even easier to just use RMI).

As for the wire-level protocol, I have no complaints about IIOP now that it has readable corbaloc: URLs (the CDR marshalling details are still messy but unless you are writing your own ORB they are taken care of for you). I'm actually a bit surprised that IIOP isn't more widely used on the Internet and in the open source world (outside of GNOME of course) -- it's the distributed computing open standard, it interoperates across languages and OSes, it has numerous open-source implementations, and It Just Works(tm).

Instead we are getting stuff like web services and SOAP, whose wire format is just as incomprehensible to humans (don't kid yourself that XML is easy to read -- have a look at a fully-decked-out SOAP message some day) while using many times as much bandwidth and memory and taking at least ten times as long to parse. (And I say this even though I currently write SOAP gateways for a living.)

Please don't do what again?

Do yourself a favor and pick up the Apt installer from ATrpms. Download the Synaptic graphical interface for it once you've got it all set up and configured properly. That should be the last annoying install of almost any package I could imagine you running. These two applications together have solved the dependency/installation issue for me completely, and it was my biggest Linux annoyance too.

This is only the main page, all links point to NASA.

And for all you idiots who keep ripping on CmdrTaco for not being a "journalist"... get a fucking clue. Slashdot has NOTHING to do with journalism.

Yeah, except these retards consider THEMSELVES journalists, when they don't even understand simple concepts like 'spell-checking', 'fact-checking' or 'integrity'.

Rob Malda even sees Slashdot as "a superset of journalism"

What we really have is a couple of guys who thought to themselves "Boy, I'd like to be called a journalist, but I don't want to do any actual work and English was too damn hard in the first grade, so lets start our own version of 'journalism' without any of that pesky 'ethics' or 'intelligence' crap".

Well I'd assume because it's a completely different solution. VNC, PCAnywhere, etc. are all remote control packages. That really doesn't help you run a number of terminals from a central server now does it?

Well, it depends. Certainly on linux (possibly on windows with cygwin) you *can* get remote desktops using vnc - you can even spawn new sessions from xinetd as required. Just type "vncserver from a command prompt".

In fact, if you're doing remote X stuff and are running an app that you do not want to die, running it in a vnc session is a good thing[TM], as even if your X connection goes, the apps will still run and you can connect up later to see progress or results. It's a bit like screen for X.

After a few months doing coding on old big iron I accidently balanced my checkbook in octal.

Yeah, I know what you mean, bro'. If you can believe it, I once got so immersed in geek culture that I started confusing Jargon File anecdotes and real life!

But mailing list software - there are dozens for unix. Pretty poor example. Mailman, ListProc, Smartlist, Sympa, ...

I'm surprised this one isn't ASCI Mauve, after all, we all know that mauve has the most RAM!

http://www.math.fu-berlin.de/~guckes/dilbert/

Have you gotten that to work though? Just pointing the AIM client at localhost and tunneling port 5190 sure doesn't seem to work... I'll have to give it another shot with the proxy settings. Currently I'm quite happy running naim on a remote system with screen installed. Always on, always encrypted, and to my immediate upstream all they see is the same ssh connection thats already carrying my mail tunnels. If you tweak the colors it's almost usable in Terminal.app, but I usually run it in Eterm.

Email is unreliable? The email system in general is desgigned NOT to lose email.

Note that recent advances in spam fighting/filtering have greatly reduced the inherent reliability of the email system. It used to be that every box would happily relay your mail if it accidently ended up in the wrong place, for example. And nobody filtered their mail to /dev/null because it wasn't needed. And certainly people didn't hit `d' two hundred times in a row deleting spam.

And return-receipt-to is generally sent by the mail client.. not the daemon.

Certainly, my mail client (mutt) doesn't send them out. And I don't want them sent out, certainly not without my knowledge. This would be great for spammers to verify addresses ...

sendmail used to send them out, but there were security issues with that, and so it's been disabled by default. For many years now, it appears. But there was a time that they were sent out as soon as your message was received by the destination sendmail.

Here's a reference for you. Return-Receipt-To: was a sendmail thing, not in any RFC, except for RFC-1865 (which only mentions it in passing.)

We shalt bow down to the almighty Google (unless we're a stupid company with a suit against it)...

The Google search, and some of the Google results Like this, and this one.

Although I'm still trying to find the actual strip image... DOH!, I underestimated the almighty Google and it's 'images' search!! Here is the image.

In the days when the internet was expensive and not everyone was on it it probably wouldn't be possible to send stuff directly from server A to server B, you'd have to go through servers C-F to do it. As the internet became cheaper and more and more people got onto it, it became more and more common for stuff to go directly from A to B. A bang path encoded the route that would be taken to go from A to B via C-F. However, most of the time they wouldn't be calculated by the user, you'd send all your mail to a smart host, which would use a program like pathalias which would work out the best way to route stuff based upon a huge database of links.

Because of this, it wasn't unusual to see bang paths with dotted names in them, and it wasn't ususual to use non-dotted names without bang paths.

Elvis is reserved for the vi clone.

Thanks in advance

Here'sa good summary of the Milgram experiment and the ethical implications. This one's good too.

If you read German, this page is quite informative.

I don't doubt that you've lived places that grow their own food and transport it by "electrified train" -- but you say your electricity comes from coal! Do you have any idea how the coal gets to the power plant? I'll give you a hint: it doesn't walk...
Now as to your statement that most of the population of the world is not dependent on gasoline -- you're actually quite wrong. Nigeria, Russia, Saudi Arabia , and Germany (look towards the middle of the page under industry) all have petroleum or petroleum refining as one of their major industries. I'm sure there are many more -- these are just the ones I came up with links for in about five minutes of googling. I listed some smaller countries to show that just about everyone is dependant to some extent -- obviously the entire middle eastern region, as well as many south american countries and other African countries would be included as well.
In fact, According to Stuard Baird, M.Eng.,M.A., writing for the Energy Educators of Ontario in 1993:

"At the present time, oil provides the energy for over 95% of the world's transportation needs."

I find your lack of knowledge about the world you live in disturbing!

(Note: I'm sitting in a RoboCup lab right now, so IMNSHO:)

I don't think the favorite is going to be Iran this year, but more likely the Phillips professional team, which won the German Open this year. That said, I wish people would realize there are 4 leagues, not just the middle size league, with different robots and different favorites in each. In the Sony Legged league, UNSW has dominated, though we came in second :) There are a lot of strong teams in the league though so we'll have to see...

In the small size, I'd say the favorites are last year's winner LuckyStar II from Singapore, and Big Red from Cornell University. FU-Fighters is also a pretty strong team. Our team (CMU) hopes to do a lot better this year in the small size league. We won in '97 and '98, but haven't done too well since then.

I don't know to much about the simulation league so I won't bother to comment. Finally, a personal plug: See a video from the vision system of a Sony legged robot here. It'll give you more respect for how hard a problem this is :) It sure did that for me, even though I've been programming them for several years.

Here's the link to Nethack:
Nethack.org

A great tool for switching between games and work on the Unix shell is screen. It comes installed since at least Redhat 6.2, but can also be downloaded and compiled from here

You use 'ctrl-a a' to shift between screens, and can have as many screens as you want. Also, if a net connection goes dead between you and your host, or your machine crashes, type screen -r to return you to your vi, nethack or irc session without missing a beat.

..that glycine, alanine and serine, the amino acids formed, are three of the smallest and structurally less energy-consuming amino acids?

There is a native Zsh port for win32 that works very nicely

You can read more about it here. You can get it by FTP from ftp://ftp.blarg.net/users/amol/zsh But you will need a gzip decompressor.

Yet Another /adj./
[From Unix's yacc(1), `Yet Another Compiler-Compiler', a LALR parser generator] 1. Of your own work: A humorous allusion often used in titles to acknowledge that the topic is not original, though the content is. As in `Yet Another AI Group' or `Yet Another Simulated Annealing Algorithm'. 2. Of others' work: Describes something of which there are already far too many. See also YA-, YABA, YAUN.

Damn, that was a good post. I'm keeping a copy of it.

Thanks, that's nice to hear. :) I'm keeping a copy too, and maybe one day I'll make a website from it. It's good to know that people actually find it interesting. These are all important things, but unfortunately most of web designers don't care about them. When my Lynx or Galeon can't render a website which I absolutely have to see (and it's the only place with the information I need), I can always use Netscape and everything is fine (except for microsoft.com which usually crash my Netscape for some reason). But there are people who can't use Netscape or Internet Explorer on their Braille terminal or speech synthesiser and they are effectively unable to use most of the Web. That's very sad. We have 21st century, all the informations they need are there on-line, but they can't reach them because of web designers ignorance. There are no borders for them other than ignorance of web designers.

Web Pages That Suck is a great site for learning about good design through bad design.

Very good one, I didn't know it before. It reminded me ESR's HTML Hell Page: How not to design junk Web pages. I see it has changed a lot in the last few years since I last saw it. Now there are many things from my post (or maybe in my post there are many things from HTML Hell), but I'll still tell you about it even if it makes my comment less insightful. ;) So, the HTML Hell Page is surely worth reading, there are also links to other similar websites:

Here's a list of gripes similar to this one. And there's a fine rant about web page design by C. J. Silverio. Horrible Examples of bad technique are listed at Web Pages That Suck. Jakob Nielsen's column Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design is very good. The Yale Style Guide is worth reading.

I haven't seen all of the above links yet, but I'm sure they're interesting.

Regarding disabled access, try Bobbie as your automatic checker.

Thanks. I knew about it, but I forgot the name. It's a great tool. But there's one thing I don't like about Bobby, it's the license:

"No Reverse Engineering. Licensee shall not modify, adapt, translate, prepare derivative works from, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble or otherwise attempt to derive source code from the Licensed Software or documentation therefor, except and only to the extent that such activity is expressly permitted by applicable law notwithstanding this limitation. Licensee shall not remove, obscure, or alter any copyright notices, trademark notices, or other proprietary rights notices affixed to or contained within the Licensed Software or documentation."

"License Fee. Licensee shall pay CAST or its designee a license fee for each simultaneous user of the Licensed Software ("Single User License Fee") or each server on which it shall install the Licensed Software ("Server License Fee") as set forth at http://www.cast.org/bobby/DownloadBobby316.cfm."

They say on the main page:

"Bobby was created by CAST to help Web page authors identify and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities."

"Center for Applied Special Technology, CAST is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to expand opportunities for people with disabilities through innovative uses of computer technology."

"Above, you can test a Web page using our server version of Bobby Worldwide. This server version gives you a preview of the downloadable version of Bobby Worldwide."

But the downloadable version costs:

Single User copy: $99.00
Site License of server version: $3,000.00 per server
Multiple server site license: $2,000.00 per server for 5 or more servers

I think it's exactly the kind of software which should be released as a free software. Yes, I'm a free software freak, so in my opinion every software is exactly the kind of software which should be released as a free software...

But this is software made by "a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to expand opportunities for people with disabilities through innovative uses of computer technology".

I could tell my employer:
-- Hey, maybe we could install Bobby on the servers?
-- What's that?
-- It's a program to expand opportunities for people with disabilities.
-- Does it cost anything?
-- It's free-as-in-beer.
-- Sure, why not.
but when I tell him that it'll cost him $3k per server... You know what the answer would be even if we only need a single user copy for 100 bucks.

Bobby would serve its purpose much better if it was released as a free software. I'd be proud to contribute patches to Bobby, as I'm sure would lots of other people, and best of all, much more people would use Bobby. If there is any place for proprietary software, it's not software which "was created [...] to help [...] identify and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities."

In other words: great idea, fatal license.

Keep graphics content (hence download time) low, and always compress images using Gifbot or something similar.

Good point, it's a very important thing which I didn't say about at all. I noticed that I wait the same time for the average website to load today on 768kb/s DSL, as I waited few years ago on 28.8kb/s modem.

I didn't know Gifbot. It's great, because people who don't understand the image compression techniques (i.e. most of people making personal webpages) can improve ther graphics and save time and bandwidth. It only lacks PNG output which is important to me, not only because of the GIF problems, but because it's a great format, even recommended by The World Wide Web Consortium and it has Adam7 interlacing feature for great progressive loading on slow connections, very good for the WWW (see this image or this one if your connection is to fast to notice the effect), read more about Adam7 interlacing on stl.caltech.edu Introduction to PNG.

What I would add about the graphics is to first of all, always use JPEG for photographs, and always use PNG for computer generated graphics (logos, headers, text, screenshots). Of course there are sitiations when it's better to use PNG for photo or JPEG for something generated (like rendered landscapes), but for most of situations (especially for usual homepages) this rule works great: JPEG for photos, PNG for logos.

People sometimes use JPEG for flat few-color logos, which looks terrible on the hard edges and solid color areas. People also (however not so often) use PNG or GIF to save photos, and they are ten times larger than JPEG of the same quality.

My personal choice for editing web graphics is The Gimp, it's a great tool especially for web designing purposes. It has a great JPEG saving dialog, where you can set different quality values and see the real-time preview, so you can save at the lowest quality (highest compression) when you don't see the difference, You can also set subsampling type or DCT method and restart markers for more advanced users.

I almost forgot! See the Cooltext.com:

"Cooltext.com is an online graphics generator for web pages and anywhere else you might need an impressive logo without a lot of work. We provides real-time generation of graphics customized exactly the way you want them.

Simply choose what kind of image you would like to create. Then, fill out a form and you'll have your own images created on the fly.

Cooltext.com will always be available for use free of charge."

They use Gimp as the backend so it's a great introduction to Gimp power as a web graphics authoring tool. Everyone should check out Cooltext, you can make great logos in few seconds. Great for lazy webmasters who want to have nice websites with no effort. Great preview of Gimp.

Speaking about the software, another great tool I use daily is ImageMagick. The best set of programs I've seen for conversion, optimizing and compression of lots of pictures at the same time. Once I used it to automatically scale, stretch contrast, add logos, compress and save over 10,000 pictures. It took over two days to my PC back then, but it was two days of rest for me. It would've taken me weeks if I'd had to do it manually.

Important links: PNG home, PNG at W3C, JPEG home, JPEG at W3C, The Gimp, Cooltext, ImageMagick.

Great, I wrote another comment for ten screens, while I should work instead... But what can I do, when I have a subject which is one of the main areas of my interest? Actually I didn't realize that I have so much to say about web design, maybe I should write a book, teach or something... It reminds me a funny situation I had few months ago:

A friend of mine phoned me once and asked:
-- Tell me, how do you make websites?
I saw all of my life scrolling before my eyes. I was trying to figure out where to start my answer, and after ten seconds of my silence, he said:
-- But hurry up, I'm using a cell phone.
Here I started to laugh like a mad man, and I couldn't explain him why I laughed when he kept asking me, because I couldn't stop laughing.

He really thought that I could explain everything to him in few minutes... Later I told him, that I had been learning how to make websites for many years, and now he's proud that he's the man who asked me to summarize many years of my life in few minutes. I tried to give him few books but he thought it'd be faster and even when I suggested Netscape Composer, it wasn't worth the effort for him... :) Great story, I always laugh when I remember it.

That's about it. I say again, Damn that was a good post. 5++ (Moderators please mod original post up).

Thanks once again. It's good to know that there's someone who likes it more than the moderators. :)

From the last minute: I just found The greatest WWW page ever!

Damn, that was a good post. I'm keeping a copy of it.

Thanks, that's nice to hear. :) I'm keeping a copy too, and maybe one day I'll make a website from it. It's good to know that people actually find it interesting. These are all important things, but unfortunately most of web designers don't care about them. When my Lynx or Galeon can't render a website which I absolutely have to see (and it's the only place with the information I need), I can always use Netscape and everything is fine (except for microsoft.com which usually crash my Netscape for some reason). But there are people who can't use Netscape or Internet Explorer on their Braille terminal or speech synthesiser and they are effectively unable to use most of the Web. That's very sad. We have 21st century, all the informations they need are there on-line, but they can't reach them because of web designers ignorance. There are no borders for them other than ignorance of web designers.

Web Pages That Suck is a great site for learning about good design through bad design.

Very good one, I didn't know it before. It reminded me ESR's HTML Hell Page: How not to design junk Web pages. I see it has changed a lot in the last few years since I last saw it. Now there are many things from my post (or maybe in my post there are many things from HTML Hell), but I'll still tell you about it even if it makes my comment less insightful. ;) So, the HTML Hell Page is surely worth reading, there are also links to other similar websites:

Here's a list of gripes similar to this one. And there's a fine rant about web page design by C. J. Silverio. Horrible Examples of bad technique are listed at Web Pages That Suck. Jakob Nielsen's column Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design is very good. The Yale Style Guide is worth reading.

I haven't seen all of the above links yet, but I'm sure they're interesting.

Regarding disabled access, try Bobbie as your automatic checker.

Thanks. I knew about it, but I forgot the name. It's a great tool. But there's one thing I don't like about Bobby, it's the license:

"No Reverse Engineering. Licensee shall not modify, adapt, translate, prepare derivative works from, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble or otherwise attempt to derive source code from the Licensed Software or documentation therefor, except and only to the extent that such activity is expressly permitted by applicable law notwithstanding this limitation. Licensee shall not remove, obscure, or alter any copyright notices, trademark notices, or other proprietary rights notices affixed to or contained within the Licensed Software or documentation."

"License Fee. Licensee shall pay CAST or its designee a license fee for each simultaneous user of the Licensed Software ("Single User License Fee") or each server on which it shall install the Licensed Software ("Server License Fee") as set forth at http://www.cast.org/bobby/DownloadBobby316.cfm."

They say on the main page:

"Bobby was created by CAST to help Web page authors identify and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities."

"Center for Applied Special Technology, CAST is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to expand opportunities for people with disabilities through innovative uses of computer technology."

"Above, you can test a Web page using our server version of Bobby Worldwide. This server version gives you a preview of the downloadable version of Bobby Worldwide."

But the downloadable version costs:

Single User copy: $99.00
Site License of server version: $3,000.00 per server
Multiple server site license: $2,000.00 per server for 5 or more servers

I think it's exactly the kind of software which should be released as a free software. Yes, I'm a free software freak, so in my opinion every software is exactly the kind of software which should be released as a free software...

But this is software made by "a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to expand opportunities for people with disabilities through innovative uses of computer technology".

I could tell my employer:
-- Hey, maybe we could install Bobby on the servers?
-- What's that?
-- It's a program to expand opportunities for people with disabilities.
-- Does it cost anything?
-- It's free-as-in-beer.
-- Sure, why not.
but when I tell him that it'll cost him $3k per server... You know what the answer would be even if we only need a single user copy for 100 bucks.

Bobby would serve its purpose much better if it was released as a free software. I'd be proud to contribute patches to Bobby, as I'm sure would lots of other people, and best of all, much more people would use Bobby. If there is any place for proprietary software, it's not software which "was created [...] to help [...] identify and repair significant barriers to access by individuals with disabilities."

In other words: great idea, fatal license.

Keep graphics content (hence download time) low, and always compress images using Gifbot or something similar.

Good point, it's a very important thing which I didn't say about at all. I noticed that I wait the same time for the average website to load today on 768kb/s DSL, as I waited few years ago on 28.8kb/s modem.

I didn't know Gifbot. It's great, because people who don't understand the image compression techniques (i.e. most of people making personal webpages) can improve ther graphics and save time and bandwidth. It only lacks PNG output which is important to me, not only because of the GIF problems, but because it's a great format, even recommended by The World Wide Web Consortium and it has Adam7 interlacing feature for great progressive loading on slow connections, very good for the WWW (see this image or this one if your connection is to fast to notice the effect), read more about Adam7 interlacing on stl.caltech.edu Introduction to PNG.

What I would add about the graphics is to first of all, always use JPEG for photographs, and always use PNG for computer generated graphics (logos, headers, text, screenshots). Of course there are sitiations when it's better to use PNG for photo or JPEG for something generated (like rendered landscapes), but for most of situations (especially for usual homepages) this rule works great: JPEG for photos, PNG for logos.

People sometimes use JPEG for flat few-color logos, which looks terrible on the hard edges and solid color areas. People also (however not so often) use PNG or GIF to save photos, and they are ten times larger than JPEG of the same quality.

My personal choice for editing web graphics is The Gimp, it's a great tool especially for web designing purposes. It has a great JPEG saving dialog, where you can set different quality values and see the real-time preview, so you can save at the lowest quality (highest compression) when you don't see the difference, You can also set subsampling type or DCT method and restart markers for more advanced users.

I almost forgot! See the Cooltext.com:

"Cooltext.com is an online graphics generator for web pages and anywhere else you might need an impressive logo without a lot of work. We provides real-time generation of graphics customized exactly the way you want them.

Simply choose what kind of image you would like to create. Then, fill out a form and you'll have your own images created on the fly.

Cooltext.com will always be available for use free of charge."

They use Gimp as the backend so it's a great introduction to Gimp power as a web graphics authoring tool. Everyone should check out Cooltext, you can make great logos in few seconds. Great for lazy webmasters who want to have nice websites with no effort. Great preview of Gimp.

Speaking about the software, another great tool I use daily is ImageMagick. The best set of programs I've seen for conversion, optimizing and compression of lots of pictures at the same time. Once I used it to automatically scale, stretch contrast, add logos, compress and save over 10,000 pictures. It took over two days to my PC back then, but it was two days of rest for me. It would've taken me weeks if I'd had to do it manually.

Important links: PNG home, PNG at W3C, JPEG home, JPEG at W3C, The Gimp, Cooltext, ImageMagick.

Great, I wrote another comment for ten screens, while I should work instead... But what can I do, when I have a subject which is one of the main areas of my interest? Actually I didn't realize that I have so much to say about web design, maybe I should write a book, teach or something... It reminds me a funny situation I had few months ago:

A friend of mine phoned me once and asked:
-- Tell me, how do you make websites?
I saw all of my life scrolling before my eyes. I was trying to figure out where to start my answer, and after ten seconds of my silence, he said:
-- But hurry up, I'm using a cell phone.
Here I started to laugh like a mad man, and I couldn't explain him why I laughed when he kept asking me, because I couldn't stop laughing.

He really thought that I could explain everything to him in few minutes... Later I told him, that I had been learning how to make websites for many years, and now he's proud that he's the man who asked me to summarize many years of my life in few minutes. I tried to give him few books but he thought it'd be faster and even when I suggested Netscape Composer, it wasn't worth the effort for him... :) Great story, I always laugh when I remember it.

That's about it. I say again, Damn that was a good post. 5++ (Moderators please mod original post up).

Thanks once again. It's good to know that there's someone who likes it more than the moderators. :)

From the last minute: I just found The greatest WWW page ever!

Actually it's still September '91

Perhaps she uses a non-point-and-click mail reader?

> Mauve has more RAM!

Ahhh...

A reference to one of the best ever Dilbert strips! "What color do you want that database"

Boss: I think we should build an SQL database.
Dilbert (thinking): Uh-oh.
==
Dilbert (thinking): Does he understand what he said or is it something he saw in a trade magazine ad?
==
Dilbert: What color do you want that database?
Boss: I think mauve has the most RAM.

"User Friendly" can only aspire to these heights...

In related News: Elsevier recently cut all online access to their journals for the three Universities of Berlin, Germany (Free University, Technical University and Humboldt University) although the existing contract runs until end of 2001. See press release here (in German).

Well, not exactly. It is a little bit more complicated than that (I am not a law student and was also puzzled by the wording): However, here is what I understand after looking it up at the Free University Berlin's law department (in case you are fluent in German legal babble; I guess it will not survive the Babel fish :-( ):

1. The wording "moral code" in the English translation is a literal translation of "Sittengesetz" and does not refer to extra-legal moral beliefs. Generally accepted extra-legal moral beliefs are believed to be rare in a pluralistic society. "Sittengesetz" in fact is viewed in relation to the Civil Rights Law's (BGB) definition of decency ( 138 BGB) for example.

2. "These rights may only be encroached upon pursuant to a law." The meaning of this is hard to get (legal babble), I give you that, but it only means that a person's freedom can be limited if in violation of a law, where not otherwise in conflict with the Basic Law. If this article wouldn't have this provision, it would be impossible to sentence anyone to prison.

This is -as all legal systems are- rather complex and I suggest further studies before making statements like "So any law can be passed and it is automatically constitutional. They might as well have not even bothered."

In case you are interested in the philosophical concept of Sittengesetz, try this link .

Cheers

Here's a nickel kid. Get yourself a better computer.

The summary is that "content" is not something that people are willing to pay for (eg. see TV and Radio), but people spent a lot more money on things that let them communicate with each other (eg. phones, cell-phones etc).

Read the papers by Andrew Odlyzko that are referenced from this page for some historical background.

...richie

P.S. I got this link from a discussion on micro-payments on kuros5in.

So: If anybody has detailed hardware/instruction set/IO specs, i'd love to see them.

Right off the bat, I'd like to state that I think whoever moded this down was clueless. ("flamebait"? As if the 604 User Group is going to respond in outrage? Get real.)

Second, in answer to your direct question, I don't have an documenation on it--at least, a quick search of my bookshelf didn't turn up anything older than the 1602--but I'll let you know if I come across anything.

Finally, you may be interested in a simulation of EDSAC, "the world first stored program computer to operate a regular service." I also enjoyed reading "The First Computers" (by Rojas & Hashagen, MIT press), which goes into a number of the claiments for "first" in the field.

-- MarkusQ

If you're going to be pedantic, be complete.

BdosError

800 Gallons of Ethanol/acre

US & Canada = 18.8 million square miles

1 acre = 0.0015625 square mile

800 * 18,800,000 / 0.0015625 = 9,625,600,000,000 gallons

Now of course, ethanol isn't as dense as crude oil.

Crude Oil has 6 million BTUs/barrel, ethanol has 3.7 (From the same source, the US uses 1 million BTU every 1.1 days per capita.)

1 barrel = 42 gallons

So converting from gallons of ethanol to the equivalent barrels of oil:

9,625,600,000,000 * 3.7 / 6 / 42 = 141,328,253,968.254

the maximum average oil imports from February 1999 to February 2001 was 10,000 barrels / day.

This is 3,650,000 barrels per year. Or 0.002% of the theoretical maximum energy production of North America.

Of course, this doesn't allow any room for food, factories, homes, or people. Or account for mountains, lakes, and poor soil. But it is reassuring. Because if we were using more energy than we could ever produce in our wildest dreams, we would hit that wall extremely hard when the oil runs out.

An additional reason (according to some) why the M-Mark I qualifies as a computer, while earlier machines do not, is that it stored program code in memory. The Zuse machines, in contrast, used memory to store data, but read instructions directly from punched tape (so there was no `software, as we know it).