So we didn't get any snow here (Denver was unseasonably warm)...so I didn't get any techno-toys under the tree...I still thought it was a wonderful holiday.
Merry Christmas to Rob, Jeff, the crews at Slashdot, BSI, and Andover.net (obviously they got something nice in their stocking!), and everyone that contributes to making Slashdot great. And, for those that don't celebrate Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy Ramadan, Happy Midwinter's Day, or whatever you choose to celebrate at this time of year.
And let's all do what we can to ensure that 2000 will be The Year of The Penguin!
Eric (and Pamela) -- "Free your code...and the rest will follow."
For the past couple of years (at least), I've been working on a Web-based online community system that is very BBS-like in some respects. It's called CommunityWare (or, in its latest incarnation, CommunityWare/XML) and it features conferencing, online presence, instant messaging, chat, Web hosting, email, and so forth. It allows people to create their own "communities" online, so I guess it'd be more of a "meta-BBS" system than a BBS proper. You can get into it here.
One of the best-known communities hosted on CommunityWare is the Electric Minds community, which is full of interesting and fun people. You can get to it through its own URL, which is referenced in my.sig.
Eric -- "Free your code...and the rest will follow."
It's true. I believe you can find the reference in Cecil Adams' first book, The Straight Dope: A Compendium of Human Knowledge. Someone actually located the place where Disney's ashes were laid to rest (at Forest Lawn mortuary, in the L.A. area).
More bizarre versions of this urban legend held that, not only was Walt frozen, his body was being kept on ice under the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride at Disneyland. In reality, there is a room under the "Pirates" ride, according to a former coworker of mine who used to work there, but it's just an old storage room.
Eric -- "Free your code...and the rest will follow."
Re:Pronunciation: Depends on your mother tongue.
on
Linux on Jeopardy
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· Score: 1
Well, if you've ever heard the famous "Linus speaks" sample (on my Mandrake 6 system, it's in/usr/share/sndconfig/sample.au), it sure sounds like Linus himself is using the "LIN-nucks" pronunciation. He does pronounce his own name as "LEE-noos" though. And, admittedly, the sample is very scratchy and hard to hear...
I've heard another theory as to why it should be pronounced "LIN-nucks": As you may recal, Linus started writing the Linux kernel as a "quasi-port" of Minix to the 386 architecture (I say "quasi-port" because he wanted an OS like Minix, but one that would take advantage of the 386 hardware, and he didn't start off with any of the Minix code himself). The name "Linux" can be though of as a contraction of "Linus' Minix," and "Minix" is of course pronounced "MIN-nicks," so "Linux" is pronounced to kind of rhyme with "Minix"...
Of course, all this ignores the fact that Linus wasn't the one that bestowed the name on his kernel; it was the manager of the archive site where he uploaded the first kernel sources. Linus had originally wanted to call it "Freax," which would have been pronounced "freaks." (Sounds like a gathering of Marillion fans to me:-). )
Eric -- "Free your code...and the rest will follow."
My mother, a longtime contact lens wearer, had LASIK surgery done a couple of months ago, and she's been very pleased with the results. She's been urging me to have it done, but I have two issues:
Cost. It costs about $5,000, and I don't have that kind of money. (And my company has no vision plan, or anything else that will cover it.)
Squeamishness. I don't know if I really like the idea of someone shooting laser beams into my eyes...
I myself had a visit with the eye doctor a couple of days ago...my contact lenses have really banged the hell out of my corneas, but it's nothing that newer, more gas-permeable lenses can't fix. (And the parts that can't be fixed, well, they won't affect my vision anyway.) The doctor did say that, if I was planning to have LASIK surgery, I should wait about 6 months for my eyes to heal. I assured him that it would take longer than that for my bank account to heal:-). He also said that, in about a year, some new technology would be introduced for laser eye surgery that would make it worth the wait. So that means it'll be at least two years before I would trust a surgeon to perform that technique properly...
Eric -- "Free your code...and the rest will follow."
None of these systems can be used for speed enforcement purposes; in fact the only ticket you can get from a toll collection system is one for blowing through the toll with an expired account (or no account at all)...
It would be so easy for the authorities to use it for speed enforcement purposes, though. Put two gates on the road, a known distance apart. When any given car passes through both of them, you get two timestamps. Subtract the first from the second to get an elapsed-time figure. Divide by the distance between the gates (known) to get an average velocity. If this velocity is greater than the speed limit for the road (plus a little "slop" to guard against computational errors, say, 5 mph), issue the driver a ticket.
They do this now on turnpikes with multiple toll booths at different points on the road. Automated toll collection just makes it much easier.
Eric -- "Free your code...and the rest will follow."
Now I know where I want to go on a vacation...of course, Essen isn't exactly one of the major German tourist destinations. (I seem to recall it's primarily an industrial city...someone correct me if I'm wrong.)
Not to mention, I'd probably have to spend a few weeks with some Berlitz tapes beforehand to get my German back up to speed...and then spend more time reading c't or some other German computer news site so my technical vocabulary would be up to par. (I had three years of German in high school...I could read some of that page, but not all of it.)
(Erbo turns away from the computer for a moment and calls out to his fiancee) Sweetie? Wanna go to Germany for a honeymoon?:-)
Eric -- "Free your code...and the rest will follow."
They left out one of my favorite penguins...the one opening a big ol'can of whoop-ass on one of our least-favorite billionaires, at the KMFMS (Kein Mitleid fuer Microsoft) site.
Eric -- "Free your code...and the rest will follow."
I suppose now all the current projects out there that are derived from the original Doom source code, such as DOOM Legacy, will change over to the GPL as well. This would be a good thing, as the Legacy engine is much improved over the original, and includes a number of Quake-like features as well. When I looked at it in comparison with the original engine, it blew me away (no pun intended).
And, of course, I echo the kudos that John Carmack is getting for his decision to change the license of the Doom source code...he's one of the guys I think of first in the Pantheon of Programming Gods...
Eric -- "Free your code...and the rest will follow."
I recall playing Illuminati and Car Wars in college, and I thought that Steve Jackson Games made great stuff. The whole episode with the Secret Service coming after them because of GURPS Cyberpunk just pissed me off. (I think it was that incident that led to the founding of EFF.)
I think Spider Robinson said it best, in the afterword to The Callahan Touch:"...every dollar given to Steve [Jackson] is a droplet of urine on the shoes of the federal bureaucracy, and a blow for the right of Americans to be free from arbitrary search or seizure even if they do happen to own a computer."
Eric -- "Free your code...and the rest will follow."
The company I work for, Webb Interactive Services (NASDAQ:WEBB), is getting heavily into Open Source. We're now officially sponsoring the Jabber Open Source, XML-based instant messaging system. We hired Jeremie Miller, the founder and lead designer of Jabber, to keep designing Jabber, and we're committing development resources to the project as well. (I'm working on it, in fact.)
Our press release is here, and we have an additional page of background information here.
Eric -- "Free your code...and the rest will follow."
I don't know if it is or was actually true, but the automated baggage handling systems at Denver International Airport were reported to be running under OS/2. Now, I know they had some problems when the airport first opened, but I've flown to and from Denver three times in the last six months, and my luggage has always come through properly and promptly. Try that with NT:-).
In a previous job, I used to design cross-platform code that ran under OS/2 as well as 16-bit and 32-bit windows. OS/2's API was, overall, the best designed of the three, IMHO, and I spent a lot of time trying to work around the shortcomings in the other two. Oh well...
Eric -- "Free your code...and the rest will follow."
When I recently had to design a Web-based email service as part of my company's "portal" site, I chose Qmail as the "back end" of the service. I set it up to use a virtual password service (I took one called "vchkpw" and modified it) and set up hashed mail directories to keep the directory structure balanced. I also created a miniature HTTP/CGI server in Perl (it didn't have to be fancy, and it uses the UCSPI-TCP "tcpserver" program for its network front end) and employed some Perl scripts and C programs to allow mailboxes to be created and deleted via an HTTP operation. On our public site, this runs under Solaris; for development purposes, I used Linux.
On the Web server side, sadly, it's Windows NT and IIS/ASP, with some ASP components including a custom-written client-side mail store. We use the commercial AspHTTP component from ServerObjects to send requests to the mini CGI server on the Unix box when we need to create accounts. We also use AspMail and AspPOP3 to handle sending and receiving messages. (The mail server is firewalled, so you can't connect to it from the outside with POP3.)
Qmail is definitely industrial strength and free, two qualities that we appreciated. It's also easy to configure and fairly easy to customize. Recommended. Oh, and you can find the end result at www.webb.net.
I think the RFCs are very important, not just for the technical history they provide, but for highlighting the very nature of the Internet standards process and what made it unique.
Up until then, pretty much every other "standards" process was the result of endless debates on highly politicized committees (e.g. OSI) or was imposed ba a single powerful entity, most likely a vendor (in the old days it would have been IBM or DEC, nowadays it's more likely to be Microsoft), on everyone else. The Internet standardization process changed all that; standards were now created as part of a consensus by people who built things that worked well.
The very name of the documents--"Request for Comment"--implies this consensus-building process, that even the most fundamental standards are not "set in stone," but are subject to revision whenever deemed necessary. It's this kind of approach--maintaining consensus, keeping it simple, and staying flexible enough to deal with technological change--that made Internet protocol implementations as widespread as they are, and in turn made the Internet as popular as it is. This kind of "open standards" practice also forms one of the firm underpinnings of the entire Open Source movement.
I'm glad to see that there are efforts underway to collect and preserve the entire RFC series. These documents are vital to understanding, not only the history of the Net, but some of the reasons why it has become so widespread.
It's more than that, it's 128-bit. But not all the addresses will be "usable" right away; a vast portion of the address space (about 85% of it) is "reserved for future expansion." RFC 2373 details the addressing architecture, which they seem to have done a pretty good job of "future-proofing."
Yes...but the computer animation is made to look like it's being animated with construction paper. The original "Spirit of Christmas" short film was animated with construction paper, so they had to maintain this distinctive visual style for the series.
Side benefit: it probably made it really easy to convert portions of the episodes into Shockwave files and post them on ShockRave...
Certainly! An icon of Saint Dogbert(*) rests atop my monitor even as I type this, protecting my computer...
With his right paw, he heals broken technology, and, with the scepter in his left paw, he drives out the Demons of Stupidity. He also has a cute little hat (which is actually modeled after a fancy folded napkin).
Eric
(*) OK, so it's just the little punch-out thing from a Dilbert calendar. Deal with it. --
Now I'm offended...as a person who is engaged to be married to a woman named Pamela, I deplore this kind of simple-minded thinking.
My fiancee's friend in Australia would be unable to read her poetry, because the page is called "Pamela's Book of Poetry" and each one of the pages has her name on it, in the copyright statement.
Incidentally, we once had her picture up on our page in an image file called "pamela.jpg". We started getting tons of hits on that one image file, probably from people looking for images of Ms. Anderson-Lee. I solved this problem by renaming the image file...
Agreed! I started out as a ST fan who sneered at B5, but then I started watching a few episodes (in the second season) and got hooked. The plots were so much better done, and the characters were more compelling, than anything Trek was doing at the time. By the time the show moved to TNT for the fifth season, I was a bigger B5 fan than I was a Trek fan:-).
In fairness, Trek hasn't been doing all that much exciting recently, so I liked having the alternative around. Voyager hasn't been covering a lot of new ground recently, and, as I watch DS9 winding down towards its big cataclysmic finish, I can't help but think that B5 did it better...
Of course, all of this is open to debate. Now I'm looking forward to the big Crusade kickoff, even if we only get to see 16 episodes of it...
Ah yes...I've entertained quite a few people at parties with dramatic recitations of "The Smoke-Off," which I learned from his recording of it that was played on "The Dr. Demento Show."
My fiancee Pamela has many of his books, and she was extremely saddened to learn of his death. Well, so was I, for that matter.
And to anyone complaining about this item appearing on Slashdot...well, I think it matters, and apparently so did Rob. And surely a lot of nerds read and/or listened to his poems while growing up? I know I did.
I agree...sigh.
Eric "Beware of bein' the roller when there's nothin' left to roll..." --
Slashdot Mirror
Eric
--
"Free your code...and the rest will follow."
Eric
--
"Free your code...and the rest will follow."
Merry Christmas to Rob, Jeff, the crews at Slashdot, BSI, and Andover.net (obviously they got something nice in their stocking!), and everyone that contributes to making Slashdot great. And, for those that don't celebrate Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, Happy Ramadan, Happy Midwinter's Day, or whatever you choose to celebrate at this time of year.
And let's all do what we can to ensure that 2000 will be The Year of The Penguin!
Eric (and Pamela)
--
"Free your code...and the rest will follow."
For the past couple of years (at least), I've been working on a Web-based online community system that is very BBS-like in some respects. It's called CommunityWare (or, in its latest incarnation, CommunityWare/XML) and it features conferencing, online presence, instant messaging, chat, Web hosting, email, and so forth. It allows people to create their own "communities" online, so I guess it'd be more of a "meta-BBS" system than a BBS proper. You can get into it here.
One of the best-known communities hosted on CommunityWare is the Electric Minds community, which is full of interesting and fun people. You can get to it through its own URL, which is referenced in my .sig.
Eric
--
"Free your code...and the rest will follow."
More bizarre versions of this urban legend held that, not only was Walt frozen, his body was being kept on ice under the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride at Disneyland. In reality, there is a room under the "Pirates" ride, according to a former coworker of mine who used to work there, but it's just an old storage room.
Eric
--
"Free your code...and the rest will follow."
I've heard another theory as to why it should be pronounced "LIN-nucks": As you may recal, Linus started writing the Linux kernel as a "quasi-port" of Minix to the 386 architecture (I say "quasi-port" because he wanted an OS like Minix, but one that would take advantage of the 386 hardware, and he didn't start off with any of the Minix code himself). The name "Linux" can be though of as a contraction of "Linus' Minix," and "Minix" is of course pronounced "MIN-nicks," so "Linux" is pronounced to kind of rhyme with "Minix"...
Of course, all this ignores the fact that Linus wasn't the one that bestowed the name on his kernel; it was the manager of the archive site where he uploaded the first kernel sources. Linus had originally wanted to call it "Freax," which would have been pronounced "freaks." (Sounds like a gathering of Marillion fans to me :-). )
Eric
--
"Free your code...and the rest will follow."
I myself had a visit with the eye doctor a couple of days ago...my contact lenses have really banged the hell out of my corneas, but it's nothing that newer, more gas-permeable lenses can't fix. (And the parts that can't be fixed, well, they won't affect my vision anyway.) The doctor did say that, if I was planning to have LASIK surgery, I should wait about 6 months for my eyes to heal. I assured him that it would take longer than that for my bank account to heal :-). He also said that, in about a year, some new technology would be introduced for laser eye surgery that would make it worth the wait. So that means it'll be at least two years before I would trust a surgeon to perform that technique properly...
Eric
--
"Free your code...and the rest will follow."
It would be so easy for the authorities to use it for speed enforcement purposes, though. Put two gates on the road, a known distance apart. When any given car passes through both of them, you get two timestamps. Subtract the first from the second to get an elapsed-time figure. Divide by the distance between the gates (known) to get an average velocity. If this velocity is greater than the speed limit for the road (plus a little "slop" to guard against computational errors, say, 5 mph), issue the driver a ticket.
They do this now on turnpikes with multiple toll booths at different points on the road. Automated toll collection just makes it much easier.
Eric
--
"Free your code...and the rest will follow."
Not to mention, I'd probably have to spend a few weeks with some Berlitz tapes beforehand to get my German back up to speed...and then spend more time reading c't or some other German computer news site so my technical vocabulary would be up to par. (I had three years of German in high school...I could read some of that page, but not all of it.)
(Erbo turns away from the computer for a moment and calls out to his fiancee) Sweetie? Wanna go to Germany for a honeymoon? :-)
Eric
--
"Free your code...and the rest will follow."
Eric
--
"Free your code...and the rest will follow."
And, of course, I echo the kudos that John Carmack is getting for his decision to change the license of the Doom source code...he's one of the guys I think of first in the Pantheon of Programming Gods...
Eric
--
"Free your code...and the rest will follow."
I recall playing Illuminati and Car Wars in college, and I thought that Steve Jackson Games made great stuff. The whole episode with the Secret Service coming after them because of GURPS Cyberpunk just pissed me off. (I think it was that incident that led to the founding of EFF.)
I think Spider Robinson said it best, in the afterword to The Callahan Touch: "...every dollar given to Steve [Jackson] is a droplet of urine on the shoes of the federal bureaucracy, and a blow for the right of Americans to be free from arbitrary search or seizure even if they do happen to own a computer."
Eric
--
"Free your code...and the rest will follow."
Our press release is here, and we have an additional page of background information here.
Eric
--
"Free your code...and the rest will follow."
In a previous job, I used to design cross-platform code that ran under OS/2 as well as 16-bit and 32-bit windows. OS/2's API was, overall, the best designed of the three, IMHO, and I spent a lot of time trying to work around the shortcomings in the other two. Oh well...
Eric
--
"Free your code...and the rest will follow."
Since starting AY2K, how many marriage proposals, or proposals of a...ahem...not quite so formal nature, have you recieved from geeks out there?
(No, I'm not about to send you one! My fiancee would skin me alive and rub salt into my flayed flesh... :-) )
I'm guessing that, like Douglas Adams, you aren't married, have no children, and don't want to hear from any more Beverly Hills real estate agents.
Anyway, love your comic...keep 'em coming!
Eric
--
"Free your code...and the rest will follow."
On the Web server side, sadly, it's Windows NT and IIS/ASP, with some ASP components including a custom-written client-side mail store. We use the commercial AspHTTP component from ServerObjects to send requests to the mini CGI server on the Unix box when we need to create accounts. We also use AspMail and AspPOP3 to handle sending and receiving messages. (The mail server is firewalled, so you can't connect to it from the outside with POP3.)
Qmail is definitely industrial strength and free, two qualities that we appreciated. It's also easy to configure and fairly easy to customize. Recommended. Oh, and you can find the end result at www.webb.net.
Eric
--
Up until then, pretty much every other "standards" process was the result of endless debates on highly politicized committees (e.g. OSI) or was imposed ba a single powerful entity, most likely a vendor (in the old days it would have been IBM or DEC, nowadays it's more likely to be Microsoft), on everyone else. The Internet standardization process changed all that; standards were now created as part of a consensus by people who built things that worked well.
The very name of the documents--"Request for Comment"--implies this consensus-building process, that even the most fundamental standards are not "set in stone," but are subject to revision whenever deemed necessary. It's this kind of approach--maintaining consensus, keeping it simple, and staying flexible enough to deal with technological change--that made Internet protocol implementations as widespread as they are, and in turn made the Internet as popular as it is. This kind of "open standards" practice also forms one of the firm underpinnings of the entire Open Source movement.
I'm glad to see that there are efforts underway to collect and preserve the entire RFC series. These documents are vital to understanding, not only the history of the Net, but some of the reasons why it has become so widespread.
Eric
--
Eric
--
Side benefit: it probably made it really easy to convert portions of the episodes into Shockwave files and post them on ShockRave...
Eric
--
With his right paw, he heals broken technology, and, with the scepter in his left paw, he drives out the Demons of Stupidity. He also has a cute little hat (which is actually modeled after a fancy folded napkin).
Eric
(*) OK, so it's just the little punch-out thing from a Dilbert calendar. Deal with it.
--
Oh, sure, they claim it's Japanese for "hope," but we know better...
Eric
--
My fiancee's friend in Australia would be unable to read her poetry, because the page is called "Pamela's Book of Poetry" and each one of the pages has her name on it, in the copyright statement.
Incidentally, we once had her picture up on our page in an image file called "pamela.jpg". We started getting tons of hits on that one image file, probably from people looking for images of Ms. Anderson-Lee. I solved this problem by renaming the image file...
Eric
--
- Ethan Hawke - if you saw him in Gattaca, you know he's pretty good. He would be believable.
- Matt Damon - definitely believable. My fiancee loved his performance in Good Will Hunting.
Other suggestions?Eric
--
In fairness, Trek hasn't been doing all that much exciting recently, so I liked having the alternative around. Voyager hasn't been covering a lot of new ground recently, and, as I watch DS9 winding down towards its big cataclysmic finish, I can't help but think that B5 did it better...
Of course, all of this is open to debate. Now I'm looking forward to the big Crusade kickoff, even if we only get to see 16 episodes of it...
Eric
--
My fiancee Pamela has many of his books, and she was extremely saddened to learn of his death. Well, so was I, for that matter.
And to anyone complaining about this item appearing on Slashdot...well, I think it matters, and apparently so did Rob. And surely a lot of nerds read and/or listened to his poems while growing up? I know I did.
I agree...sigh.
Eric
"Beware of bein' the roller when there's nothin' left to roll..."
--