Dewpoint is an internet index organized by Dewey decimal system. Also useful as a reference for cataloging.
One of the problems with Un*x tools is that the learning curve is sometimes steep. My recent foray into learning to use the Gnus Emacs package as my newsreader is a reminder of that. Genehack points to the very unofficial .emacs home , all about quick ways to customize your Emacs environment.
Got a late start this morning, but that had me listening to Forum on KQED , where they were talking with folks from the Mycological Society of San Francisco about fungii and mushrooms. Sounds like the web site might be worth a browse.
I went to the Friday Night Skate last night. A lot of fun, a nice route a little over twelve miles, and it was good to get back on skates. I've got some of my usual concerns about the ethics of large groups, if we're going to make inroads and replace the cars with something better we've got to be scrupulous about obeying traffic laws, but I'll be back to participate again. Bay Insider also has a map of the Friday Night Skate (link included here so that you don't have to turn on JavaScript).
Dime Novels and Penny Dreadfuls :
Stanford's Dime Novel and Story Paper Collection consists of over 8,000 individual items, and includes long runs of the major dime novel series ( Frank Leslie's Boys of America , Happy Days , Beadle's New York Dime Library , etc.) and equally strong holdings of story papers like the New York Ledger and Saturday Night .
Ya know, it isn't hard to grasp why some people don't immediately see that Landover Baptist is a parody when we have the ChildCare Action Project - Christian Analysis of American Culture pages. I pointed to the CAP South Park review ages ago for humor value, but reading the CAP Dogma review scares me.
Gasp. I may be in love: Perlmacs is an Emacs editor with the Perl embedded interpreter linked in.
On Monday Mark and Phil brought in telescopes and a CCD camera so we could watch and record the transit of Mercury across the sun .
Snow Flakes , the hows and whys and whats and such.
Aaack! So I screwed it up twice! Honestly, now, unless some bizarre forces are conspiring against me, the link to Kiki's diary of her experiences with the big firefall at Burning Man .
CallTheShots does some of what I've been playing with in bots and reapers, but it raises some interesting ethical issues because it is, in a way, republishing the information it scrapes. It's also an indication of how foresightful Ted Nelson was by insisting that accounting be at the basis of any hypertext system.
On the Userland Discussion Forum Dennis Peterson points out the Street Performer Protocol :
Using this protocol, people would place donations in escrow, to be released to an author in the event that the promised work be put in the public domain. This protocol has the potential to fund alternative or "marginal" works.
WODA "is a Perl program that manages web-oriented, semi-relational, multimedia databases. It allows them to be defined, maintained, added-to, modified, and queried entirely through the WWW and without programming."
Today's Calendar and Clock Page .
The American Secular Holidays Calendar . Sometime when I've got a few free hours I'd love to automate a function for Flutterby to put up holidays and such automagically, maybe give dates in a few other calendars. I'd love to calculate astronomical events too, the information should all be in Astronomical Algorithms (ISBN: 0943396638 ), it's just a matter of time to implement it.
So Burning Ideas isn't officially up yet, but Kiki's Firefall has a new home there, including Kiki's diary of her experiences with the big firefall at Burning Man . Someone who thinks rationally enough in an emergency to slap her hand over the top of a burning can of gasoline. Gulp. She's mentioned that if I'm helpful she just might have the big firefall running this weekend, anyone wanna come to that party and "ooh" and "aah"? I think she'd love an appreciative audience.
A web log that's new to me: Backup Brain .
Frequently Asked Questions about Calendars .
The actual Atlantic Monthly archive of As We May Think .
Aaack. The whole point of that Bovine Inversus update was to change the glossary entry, and I screwed it up. Oh well, fixed now.
Bovine Inversus (www.bovineinversus.com) has moved to its own domain.
I haven't had a chance to explore http://lauranet.com/ but it looks interesting in a lots of animated GIFs and nude Latvian bungee jumpers sort of way...
Back in August I ran across a note on what happens when a human gets exposed to vacuum . Larry passes along this article from AVweb (registration required to read, but it's free) on the physiology of humans at high altitudes that's interesting even to us non-pilots who just spend a bit of time up in the mountains:
"We spend many hours in our carefully conditioned cockpits, only inches from an environment that is incompatible with life. We sit in shirtsleeves, comfortably oblivious to the frigid and rare atmosphere through which our fragile shell moves. Rarely do we think about the temperature outside or the time available to react should our carefully maintained environment fail."
I don't know if I should rejoice or grieve: Macromedia Flash players for Linux and Irix . I hope that people use this for good and not for evil. I fear that we're in for a lot more bad flying logos and fade-ins, but hopefully there'll be some more really good and imaginative uses of it as a true multimedia tool, rather than just another way to throw text and ad brochures at a user.
To go along with that link to buy Ted Nelson's Literary Machines it also occurs to me that nobody who pretends to do any information architecting could possibly be ignorant of that or Vannevar Bush's As We May Think .
The Delatsoft Group: When simulators aren't a game anymore . Beyond what I find on the web pages, it looks like these guys are building with an eye to being able to pop-in different seats and panels to be able to do F-15 and A-10 cockpits :
'The idea was to turn this nice looking 4 place Beechcraft into a single seat "winged machine of death".'
Via Medley comes a fantastic set of portraits: Century: Women from Birth through 100 Years of Age . Worth going through the whole thing and reading all of the text.
Catherine A. Hampton's Spam Bouncer is a set of procmail rules to help cut down on unsolicited commercial e-mail.
htnews is a program for maintaining web pages via e-mail that's very similar to my own newwwsboy . Thomas Linden, the author, also has a list of related web news administration programs .
Shortly after introducing the PDA version of Flutterby I got a message from the author of Sitescooper telling me that he was republishing Flutterby (and tons of other sites) in iSilo and DOC (ie: AportisDoc , TealDoc and assorted others) format for the PalmPilot . Now given the way this week has worked out for me I haven't gotten back to his original message, but now I run across his site in Need To Know and, sure enough, it looks awesome.
To go along with that simple interface to Deja I posted (accidentally) last Wednesday, here's a simple interface to AltaVista .
Archives of neat sites posted to Flutterby , notes to webmaster@flutterby.com
