Good Articles From The Web

• BeachComber.Org: Curtis Ebbesmeyer's oceanographic studies including the tracking of LEGO Flotsam on the high seas. 2003-07-08.
• How aircraft carriers work. A discussion on alt.computer folklore got into details, and someone pointed us here for pictures. (2003-10-01)
• NetGear Bug Causes 150 Mbps load on University of Wisconsin by Dave Plonka (2003-08-31)
• Examples of Malicious Computer Programs by Dr Ronald Standler, attorney and consultant. (2003-08-31)
• The amended complaint in the lawsuit by SCO against IBM.
• David Gelernter
• Ted Nelson's Xanadu
• Paul Lutus
• www.Kolodner.com Michael Kolodner is a very interesting person. I originally linked to his thesis from Amherst, but Amherst has taken it offline. However, his personal website is a gem!! (2003-06-03)
• The NoCat Nightlight - a wireless accesspoint in a light fixture - 2003-05-24
• A History of computing at Columbia University. You might be surprised at how many "firsts" and "biggests" and "fastests" happened here, especially in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.

  Includes "Computer: Bit Slices of a Life" by Dr. Herb Grosch, 600+ pages, a memoir covering the 1940s through about 1960, full text in HTML. including material on World War II, Watson Lab, the Manhattan Project, IBM and its early machines, GE, ACM, NBS, and a great deal more. This is the Third-Edition-In-Progress. New chapters might be added from time to time; so far it has 56 (the First [printed] Edition of 1991 had only 23).

  Also NORC, the supercomputer from 1954.

• Rand Review from Rand Corporation - a free archive of the public magazine from this think tank. Mostly 2-page summaries of books which they sell for $20 or so. These summaries are all the newspaper journalists ever read, anyway. (2003-05-11)
• Cows with Guns (2003-05-11)
• Submarine Collision off Murmansk: A Look from Afar by Eugene Miasnikov. An incident from 1992 discussed from the Russion perspective. (2003-05-09)
• Multics Virtual Memory by Paul Green - a lovely look into "the golden age of computing" - when it was still IBM, MIT, Digital and General Electric that built the hardware. (2003-03-15)
• The Power of Words - Fernando Flores was Chile's minister of finance -- and, later, a political prisoner. Now he teaches companies how to use assessments and commitments to transform the way they do business. The outcome: executives who speak and act with intention. By Harriet Rubin at Fast Company (2003-03-09)
• Gene Bellinger's Outsights - Essays about Organizational Behavior (2003-03-09)
• Near-Future outlook for Business Computing from Automation Access (2003-03-09)
• TIDES Middle East Report - a daily summary of Middle East viewpoints. (2003-02-18)
• World Press Review - clippings from the foreign press (also a monthly magazine) (2003-02-18)
• Why Nerds are Unpopular by Paul Graham (2003-02-18)
• "Son of USA PATRIOT Act" from Center for Public Integrity. Site includes a commentary and the full text as a 120 page/12 MB PDF file. (2003-02-13)
• Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. The complete text of this classic is online. (2003-02-11)
• Articles by Thomas Hazlett (Telecom econonomist):
  Digital Television Transition: Throwing the Negroponte Switch
  See also: Harry Potter and the Prisoners of the DTV Transition by Mike Goodwin of EFF etc.
• Unix Hater's Handbook - the full 350 pages from 1994 as a PDF file. For a bit of the flavor, here are two quotes from the foreword:

  The PDP-11 had 16,000 words of memory. That was a fantastic advance over my PDP-4 that had 8,000. The Macintosh on which I type this has 64MB: Unix was not designed for the Mac. What kind of challenge is there when you have that much RAM?
  ...
  As for me? I switched to the Mac. No more grep, no more piping, no more SED scripts. Just a simple, elegant life: "Your application has unexpectedly quit due to error number -1. OK?"

  (2003-02-05)
• Copyfight and Jack Valenti - In December 2002, MPAA president Jack Valenti was interviewed by Derek Slater for Harvard Politcal Review. Subsequently, Derek published these comments to the interview. Lots of links to relevant further reading. (2003-02-05)
• If You Want To Win An Election, Just Control The Voting Machines - When a senate race is surprisingly won by a candidate who is a major investor in the company that supplied the voting machines, do you see a conflict of interest? (2003-01-31)
• 5 .. 4 .. 3 .. 2 .. 1 .. Goodbye, Columbia - an article by Greg Easterbrook published in the Washington Monthly in April 1980. (Found 2003/02)
• Viking Kittens on the Attack!! (Found 2002/10)
• DVD FAQ - all the basics about DVD technology and HD-TV. Also: HD-DVD One-Format Campaign. (Found 2003/01)
• How to Sue Spammers - a step-by-step tutorial (Found 2003/01)
• The Scandal of U.S.-Saudi Relations by Daniel Pipes (Found 2003/01)
• 9-11 Timeline: Sept. 11, minute-by-minute - collated information for anyone researching conspiracies. (Found 2003/01).
• Identifying and Misidentifying the Brown Recluse Spider by Rick Vetter, Department of Entomology, University of California Riverside (in Dermatology Online Journal 5(2):7) - (found 2003/01).
  The brown recluse spider is much feared. It does not live in California.
• A Horrible Place With Good Food and Pretty Lamps - an immigrant's view of Denmark. - (found 2003/01)
• A Subjective Comparison of Germany and the United States - (found 2002/12).
• Temperature Sensor and Analog-to-Digital Controller - for USD 50, an assembled breadboard with two 10-bit A/D inputs, and logic to control a half-dozen temperature probes (located up to 100 feet away). Interface to your PC with an RS-232 cable (which also powers the unit).
• Unrestricted Warfare, Beijing, 1999 - Senior Chinese military officers write about the nature of warfare in the 21st century. (Seen on IP Oct-2002)
• Tops-20 in Memoriam - the world's fastest TOPS-20 machine is an Athlon based KLH.
• Peace is War, Bruce Sterling on Pax Americana (2002/04)
• The Measure of American Power, Paul Kennedy (2002/02)
• The Tale of the Pea Sea (Author unknown) - A fairy tale about small computer systems, apparently written anno 1995 or so.
• David P Reed at MIT is into "new thinking about RF spectrum". He points to Tim Shepard's PhD thesis - Decentralized Channel Management in Scalable Multihop Spread-Spectrum Packet Radio Networks (and the more concise paper based on it) - which "demonstrates that one can build a practical network whose capacity increases the more stations you add. The rate of increase is square root of N, for N stations." The key idea is to build a network of cooperative repeaters.
• John Ikerd is a visionary agricultural economist, who gives rousing speeches about sustainable agriculture. (May 2002) Here is one of those lectures recorded at UC Davis in March 2001 (42 minutes).
• WWW.ARCHIVE.ORG: The Internet Archives of Brewster Kahle. (May 2002) If I remember correctly, Brewster Kahle invented WAIS: The Wide Area Indexing System, which was a precursor to the search encgines that we know today. Eventually, he turned his work into a company called Alexa. The archives are in three sections:
  • The Wayback Machine shows websites as they looked a few years ago. I have used this to harvest information about companies that are now defunct.
  • The ARPAnet History Files contains documents and interview transcripts from the research that went into Katie Hafner's book "Where Wizards Stay Up Late". Most of it requires a browser plug-in called DjVu to read it. Some of the interviews are awesome, such as the one with Alex McKenzie of BBN.
  • The Moving Images Archive is a collection of almost 1000 movies, mostly documentary short films.
• Is IPv6 Necessary?
• Huygens' Clocks - a physics problem posed in 1665 and solved in 2001. The complete 18-page article (PDF link near the end) wonderfully illustrates mathematical treatment of a physical problem.
• History of the Atlantic Cable and Submarine Telegraphy
• Recipe Archives - 35,000 recipes for any taste
• Jacob Richman's Website in Israel includes Inspirational articles, articles about Life in Israel and other stuff.
• Apple Human Interface Guidelines - The big difference between Windows and Mac, is that at Apple, someone has actually given serious thought to how people and machines interact with each other.
• TelecomWriting.com's Telephone History Series by Tom Farley (also available as a single PDF file - 46 printed pages).
• The Story of "Nadine" - A Tale of Mailing Lists
• Building The Lo-Fat Linux Desktop - A Newbies Guide to a Less Lardy Linux (By John Murray)
• Geeks and Spooks by Bruce Sterling (a speech at Information Systems Security Conference.
• The Internet Under Siege by Lawrence Lessig, Foreign Policy Magazine, Nov/Dev 2001.
• The Roots of Muslim Rage by Bernard Lewis, the Atlantic, September 1990. My church friend John Fisher calls this "prophetic and interesting". I agree.
• Ethnologue: Languages of the World - lots of interesting facts. Identify the language spoken by only one person in the USA. How many people in the USA speak Danish? How many people in Denmark speak Urdu? And do you believe those numbers?